It made sense to band together to buy ebooks as a single region rather than purchasing as 22 small districts. Buying as a group helped, but our rural schools still didn’t have new money to spend on ebooks. For this project, a blended-funding solution meant starting with librarians, allocating a portion of their existing state library materials aid to the regional purchases while seeking additional resources from classroom or textbook funding.

The goal was twofold: pool money from individual libraries to leverage group purchasing, and increase the efficient use of existing funding. New York State provides $6.25 in state aid per student to each district for library materials. Asking librarians to give up even 10 percent or 20 percent of their limited book budgets was met with entirely reasonable resistance. For this plan to work, participating librarians had to retain control of their money throughout the selection process.

Working together with our librarians, we found inspiration in crowd-sourced funding sites like Kickstarter.com. On Kickstarter, people post projects to raise money from individual donors. For example, the Harvey Pekar Estate crowd-funded the creation of a memorial statue of the comic book author for the Cleveland Heights public library. Kickstarter’s site tracks pledges until the fundraising goal is reached. Then, people who pledged are charged and the project receives the money. We thought we could use a similar crowd-funding method to let librarians select books in a consortium.

The process we settled on is based on the regional price break point, when the number of individual libraries buying the ebook for their building meets the cost of buying the book for the whole region. For example, an ebook might cost one library $20 and the region $200. If 10 libraries plan on buying that book, we might as well pool the money and buy it for the region. Our selection tool is built around pledges; librarians indicate that they would allocate their money to buy the book individually. When the number of pledges reaches the set break point, the book is purchased for the region by pulling in the pledges, which will fund it.

This couldn’t have worked without three keys. First, our member librarians helped us find a delicate balance between a library giving up some limited funding and retaining control. We also credit the publishers that were willing to consider a new business model and provide regional pricing: ABC-CLIO, Britannica, Chelsea House, Lerner, and Rosen. The final key was Mackin, which worked with publishers on pricing to make this regional buying possible. Mackin’s VIA platform for digital content will give the kids in our region easy access to the collection on computers, iPads, and Android tablets.

Working through an aggregator was a deliberate choice. I might have been able to get lower prices directly from publishers and my amazing team could probably have developed a reading platform, but I wanted this project to be replicable and sustainable. I believe that this model can work for districts and consortia around the country.

Christopher Harris (infomancy@gmail.com) is coordinator of the school library system of the Genesee Valley (NY) Educational Partnership.

In the tablet market, the push to unseat the iPad had competitors slapping an HD tag on every supersize device they produced, while Apple went small, releasing its seven-inch iPad Mini in October.

Nothing small about ebook prices for libraries, with Random House tripling prices for that market, with $28 titles ratcheted to $84, and Hachette doubling prices on their backlisted titles. Amazon finally devised a school model—but using it as intended violates their terms of service.

So what’s in store for 2013? I see three key areas: changing ebook business models, access to more content, and affordable new hardware. The first two points are strongly linked. By exploring new business models, we could access collections of resources, which have been previously unavailable to schools. To make this work, we have to find ways to overcome the roadblocks to ebook lending experienced by public libraries.

School libraries, I believe, will be the coming focal point for ebook licensing. We have strong relationships with our K–12 publishing partners, but now we must reach out to the trade houses. As the print market weakens, the time is right for schools to present a new business proposal.

The fact is, the big trade houses aren’t very keen on “selling” ebooks to libraries. To justify its $84 ebooks, Random House implied that libraries owned the titles, but applied so many restrictions that ownership was effectively obviated by all the fine print.

So let’s give them another option. Rather than seeking to own ebooks, school libraries should instead seek more favorable deals in a short-term lease market. Support classroom instruction with two-month book rentals, or license titles for three-year terms to avoid locking the school into endless recycling of the same novels.

If publishers are concerned about the impact on consumer sales, we can point out that these ebooks are for instructional use and not pleasure reading. By writing licenses that restrict ebook use in classroom settings, we’re giving up some access but opening up a huge new world of content. Besides, we can always buy print books for independent reading.

Finally, 2013 should be an exciting year for hardware. By year’s end, I expect we’ll see sub-$100 tablets, not knock-off brands, but fully supported devices akin to the Kindle and Nook. We might also see color digital ink readers with better support for illustrated books. But the main hardware issue will be accessibility. Two high-profile lawsuits in 2012 established that schools and libraries purchasing ebook readers must buy accessible devices. Currently, none of the E-Ink based devices (Kindle Paperwhite or Nook Simple Touch, for example) are accessible, according to ADA definitions. Make sure your district considers accessibility if it’s planning to buy mobile computing and reading devices this year.

 Christopher Harris (infomancy@gmail.com) is coordinator of the school library system of the Genesee Valley (NY) Educational Partnership.

Arriving on the scene together—and even worse, on the tails of declining budgets for schools and libraries nationwide—these two factors present a real challenge. Fortunately, we also have some real opportunities ahead thanks to collaborative, solutions-focused thinking at the Summit. The gathering brings together school librarians, publishers, aggregators, and vendors to talk about vital issues and, more importantly, to discover the answers to today’s big questions.

A key question relating to the perfect storm of collection development is, of course, funding. Where will the money for new CC resources come from? How will we pay for new digital resources? Likely not from a new pot of money. But that doesn’t mean we can’t access funding that’s “new” to the library.

One approach is to look for existing funds within your school and district that can be redirected so that your library can purchase CC resources for the classroom. Eric Fitzgerald, Capstone Publishing’s vice president of direct sales, encouraged Summit attendees to seek out this kind of “blended funding.”

Blended funding means asking the English department to kick in some classroom or textbook money to help support that new literary criticism resource. Blended funding means pointing out to the elementary school principal that many of the new interactive ebook series are replacing science and social studies textbooks… so maybe they should be partially funded by the textbook budget. Blended funding isn’t a foolproof solution, but it’s a solid tactic. One challenge: it requires that you market your expertise in resource selection and collection development so that your value is obvious to others.

You also must, as they say, have skin in the game. Before you go asking for additional funds from departmental, textbook, or classroom budgets, make sure you’re ready to talk about the percentage of the cost that will be covered by the library budget. It’s a lot easier to sell someone on splitting the cost than it is to ask them to pay for the whole shebang.

When crafting your appeal for blended funding support, the other key component to address is efficiency. Remember, the library budget isn’t “our” budget; rather we’re centrally managing funds to enable more efficient purchases of resources to support classroom teaching and learning. Given the widespread need for new CC-aligned resources, libraries can work with publishers and aggregators to deliver wider access to content by going digital. One of our most powerful arguments is that we can save our organizations money by sharing resources and purchasing in larger consortia to reduce costs and increase access. The science teachers in a district or region aren’t set up to leverage group purchasing, but librarians are.

From my perspective as a school administrator, this is the perfect solution to a perfect storm. Everyone is desperate for content; now it’s our time to step up and deliver. We have the infrastructure, business relationships, and great publishers and aggregators to work with us. We just need to apply blended funding to make it happen for everyone.

Christopher Harris (infomancy@gmail.com) is coordinator of the school library system of the Genesee Valley (NY) Educational Partnership.

Over the past few months, the American Library Association (ALA) and its president, Maureen Sullivan, have taken a hard stance with major publishers on the issue of ebooks in libraries. ALA’s attention has been directed at the so-called “big six,” some of whom still refuse to sell ebooks to libraries. While there isn’t much call for a hardline approach with small, independent publishers of K–12 ebooks, there’s one issue I’d like to address.

Author Christopher Harris has created a PDF detailing the digital content pricing challenges faced by small, rural schools like the districts he serves in the Genesee Valley Educational Partnership in Western New York.

Under the building- or site-based pricing terms that many K–12 publishers use, the small, rural school districts that I serve are being overcharged for digital content. So these districts—with an average size of 1,100 students and less than half the budget of the average New York school district—are, in effect, subsidizing the state’s large, wealthy, suburban systems, which are purchasing the same content at the same cost per building.

We aren’t the only ones who are paying more than our fair share. According to the United States Census Bureau, about half of our nation’s school districts have fewer than 5,000 students; but our collective voice is small and our individual impact on the market is even smaller.

Publishers are being challenged as well. In the days before ebooks exploded onto the scene, publishers expected to sell lots of print books to lots of schools. Big schools and small ones, wealthy and poor, if they wanted the content, they bought the book. And it didn’t matter if the shelf the book sat on was faded plywood or gleaming mahogany; only one student at a time could read a print title. In the digital world, this has changed. Our publisher partners have been forward thinking enough to sell us content with unlimited, simultaneous access. This deserves a huge thank-you—and a second look at the economics of this model.

Digital content is being sold at the building level, but often without consideration for the size of that building. For example, my region has 22 small districts with a total of 54 schools. When content is priced by building, our region ends up being charged as much as neighboring systems with almost twice as many students, but a comparable number of buildings. We need a new way to look at pricing content that considers not buildings, but the student population therein.

One solution might be to consider the average school building size for each state. The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) publishes lists of average elementary and secondary school sizes that can easily be incorporated into a pricing formula. My region, for instance, has 27 elementary school buildings, but according to NCES, that’s equivalent to 19 elementary schools, according to the New York average. Under an average-school pricing model, we would be charged for 19 elementary schools when looking at a regional purchase.

In the print era, we probably would have bought 37 copies of a book, but they would have been limited to 37 users. With digital content, when the potential use is expanded to an entire school, it’s only fair that the population be considered in pricing. By using a formula based on average-school pricing, we can help ensure equity of access to schools and students in small, rural districts.

Podcasting was all the rage a few years ago, but these days, video reigns supreme. In New York’s recently released Common Core (CC) exemplar modules for English Language Arts, about half of the tasks required of students in grades three to five either expressly stipulate video or lend themselves perfectly to a video assignment. So under CC, students will be writing scripts, reviewing books, making public service announcements, and creating other content, all using video. For schools, this presents a technical challenge: Where to host all this video?

Luckily, I found a solution. Over the summer, we had to review our video streaming after our provider lost the rights to some critical content, and we were less than satisfied with the remaining options. So we decided to handle this ourselves, streaming content we already owned. With the thousands of dollars we would have spent on a subscription, we could acquire the material that best met our region’s instructional needs. Next, we had to host and stream all of this content without being overwhelmed by the resulting increase in workload.

While my team’s technical expertise is high on the geek end of the scale, we’re always concerned about taking on new tasks. Every system we have to maintain takes time away from real innovation. For our Digital Media Festival, we developed an open-source solution to convert, host, and stream video. With Drupal providing the base site, we turned to FFmpeg to convert the files into a Web-streaming format and JWPlayer for a combined Flash and HTML5 (for iPad) player. Still, we didn’t want that project to become a full-time mission. So we turned to the cloud.

Vimeo has been streaming video since late 2004; it actually launched four months before YouTube. The first video-sharing site to offer HD playback, it’s remained a favorite destination for commercial hosting. With Vimeo’s PRO hosting service option (vimeo.com/pro), there’s a flat rate for video streaming. For $199 a year, you get up to 50GB of storage and 250,000 video playbacks. Add another 50GB of storage for an additional $199 a year. Need more playbacks? Another 250,000 is, no surprises here, just an additional $199 for the year. From a budgetary perspective, knowing exactly how much this costs sure beats a flexible rate for storage and playbacks.

The up-front cost for the PRO service includes priority video uploads, the conversion of files to Vimeo’s format, and loads of security options. While uploading a large collection can be a bit of a pain—the Web uploader only takes five videos at a time—the process isn’t all that bad. The ability to drag and drop files onto the page in the browser speeds things up a lot. If you allow it, users can download your clips.

With PRO accounts, you can turn off the Community Pass, which means your content won’t show up in searches and can’t be played on Vimeo’s site. You can also specify which domains on which the videos can be embedded on. This level of security is what allows us to host our licensed content on Vimeo.

So go forth and create video without worrying about where to host and stream it. Vimeo PRO will have you covered on the technical side and it provides generous storage capacity and playbacks for $199 a year. This represents the best of the cloud. A basic service that we could do ourselves, but nowhere as easily or as cheaply as Vimeo PRO does.

Librarians are masters of information. Finding it, storing it, organizing it, retrieving it—you name it. We excel at a wide range of skills. And in today’s world, that’s the name of the game.

Case in point: my team and I were recently asked to choose passages of text for a regional K–8 English language-arts exam. We were charged with coming up with six pairs of high-quality, Lexile-leveled narrative/informational passages for each grade—108 selections in all—in a little over a week. Were it not for our information and technology skills—and our knowledge of copyright—we could never have pulled it off.

Just trying to organize 108 passages in folders on a drive wouldn’t have cut it; from the start, we needed an information management system. Enter Drupal. As I’ve noted in previous columns, the open-source framework has become essential to our library work, providing all the back-end tools necessary to create online forms and reports for gathering and presenting information.

For this project, I built a free quick-and-dirty website at drupalgardens.com. Using just the basic tools, I was able to create an organization system, with the required fields: the book’s title, author, Lexile level, genre, word count, and the text of the passage itself, plus a checkbox for whether or not the passage had been selected. Then I built two views, called “reports” in Drupal. The first view showed all of the books entered on the site’s front page, with a dropdown menu to select individual grade levels. The second, a sidebar, displayed the number of books that had been entered and the passages that had been selected for each grade, giving us a quick view on our progress toward thse 108 passages.

It just goes to show, when the going gets tough, librarians get organized. By taking a couple of hours up front to build a site, the four of us were able to keep track of our work. When we completed the project, we were able to provide hard copies of each passage formatted to display its title, author, Lexile level, the text itself, and word count. I’d highly recommend taking the time up front to build a similar system if you’re ever presented with a similar task or any scenario where you need to gather and organize books, articles, or other content.

The final tool in our arsenal: resources for determining quality books from which to select passages. Beyond a Lexile search, we turned to Junior Library Guild’s back lists, Mackin Compendium lists, and SLJ and Horn Book reviews. For us, this amounted to standard research procedure, but it sure looked like magic to those who had requested the materials.

The broader takeaway here is that, once again, librarians saved the day. By drawing upon our unique information skills, my team and I were able to complete an incredibly challenging task in a very short amount of time. The more often we can each come through like heroes (beyond shelving books) the better for our entire profession.

Two librarians take a crack at a new classification system, free to download

Miller invited me along for the reclassification of her elementary school library. This allowed me not only to help create the new system, but to bring back a firsthand report of the journey. And folks, it’s a wild ride.

We began by reclassifying animals. Our guiding principle throughout was to be as user friendly as possible. Animal books tend to be a large and very popular section with elementary kids, so it seemed like a good place to start.

But what’s the best way to shelve books about animals? We quickly decided that we’d bring all of them together in a single section. There would still be a split between wild and domesticated creatures, but at least the two groups could be shelved together. With that squared away, we sat and stared at each other, trying to decide what the heck to do with the actual animals. Shelve by scientific class? Biome? Name? Each method has a long list of pros and cons. As we soon learned, classification is really just a series of compromises that inevitably results in a less than perfect solution.

We settled on shelving wild animals by scientific classification. That way, similar creatures would be grouped together, for the most part, whereas shelving by biome would have split elephants into grassland (African) and jungle (Asian). While shelving by name may work for primary school collections, for upper elementary grades and beyond, the emphasis is on biological classes.

After some research—OK, a quick Wikipedia search—we decided to go with the following groupings: amphibians, birds, fish, mammals, reptiles, and invertebrates.

Within each section, wild animals are shelved alphabetically by family, using the common name and then by species, again by common names. For example, books about black, brown, grizzly, or polar bears are shelved in that order under “Bears,” given the common family “Ursidae.” Again, Wikipedia helps, but there are still decisions to make. There are 35 different scientific families of sharks spread across eight distinct and larger orders, but for the elementary library we just put them all under “Sharks.”

We also considered other areas of the elementary school library and devised eight top-level areas: the living world, STEM, healthy living, the arts, play, social studies, languages, and fiction.

Our primary goal was to be student-friendly, but we also recognized the importance of curriculum in the library. Grouping books by how subjects are taught will help students find them more easily. For example, mythologies have been moved into the “fiction for lack of a better word right now” section along with folktales, legends, and books on ghosts and aliens. We hope that placing these books in more heavily browsed sections will increase readership.

See below for our complete classification system (or download it as a separate document). Tell us what you think in the comments below.

By Kristie Miller and Christopher Harris