WSWHE Wisdom

The option is available to purchase content credit for OverDrive Marketplace, to have on hand next year for purchasing Sora ebooks, audiobooks, and readalongs! In the Menu, CCs can "shop" and select "OverDrive Additional Content Credit". If you have any questions about content credit, you can contact SLS for more information.

• What does that do? It means you have content credit (like a gift card) sitting in your OverDrive account for whenever you need it. That way, if there are popular titles in Sora that your students want, or if students need something in particular, you can purchase and assign in a flash.
• Note that some titles are SUPER popular, and have many, many holds on them across our region. You may want to consider purchasing copies of your own, especially if they're available in the 100 MA Concurrent Checkout model. (Examples include DOAWK, Sunny, and Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales.) Here's an impromptu list of super popular titles available in that 100 checkout format that you can purchase relatively inexpensively for your students.

If you haven't noticed yet, some TLC updates rolled out over the weekend. (We're still learning what the changes mean.) Some updates you may or may not have noticed...

• LS2 PAC: Your school's PAC (the browsable catalog) now allows for some customizations of colors. You may have noticed that the color banner at the top of your PAC is a different color now. Karin went through and tweaked individual catalogs to reflect your district's official color scheme as much as possible. (Us too. Yes, BOCES has official colors!) If you have any questions or comments about that, just ask Karin.
• ILLs: the update should hopefully fix some bugs in how ILLs work, but we probably won't know for a week or so because of items that may currently be in transit. In the meantime, if in doubt, CHECK THE ITEM IN, every step, no matter if you are sending or receiving.
• LS2 Cat: This module now allows "title locking", which shouldn't affect you. If you have Fast Added new collection items, please make sure you are adding onto existing titles whenever possible (unless it's an ILL from outside our region that you plan to delete on check-in), and please do not edit title fields if you accidentally discover that you can.
• LS2 Staff: There have been changes to user settings with regards to email notifications, but we still have to learn how to make that work for everyone (it means tweaking other back end settings). Bear with us, and in the meantime, keep doing other methods for notifying students of overdues. (And hang in there.)
• Fun fact: some schools gamify the returning of overdue materials (such as a count down race by grade level, funny memes, etc), to make a chore a little more fun (and possibly improve the response rate). The winning class might have bragging rights, or perhaps a tasty treat.

You can book a Google Meet with me on Calendly anytime. (You don't have to ask first. Just click and go.) If the Calendly times don't work for you, then give me a holler.