Reflections on ALA24

By Micah May, July 24, 2024.
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Last month, I joined friends and colleagues from around the country at the American Library Association’s 2024 Annual Conference. Yet again, DPLA helped co-host the day-long ALA Ebook Interest Group meeting, now affectionately known as “ALA Ebook Friday.”

My own day got off to a wild start. While surfing early that morning, I was stung in the foot by a stingray. After a quick trip to urgent care, I made it to the gathering just a few minutes late – and am grateful to my co-host, Readers First’s Michael Blackwell, for welcoming everyone and getting us started!

We had a packed and exciting agenda, through which a few critical themes emerged: 

  • The urgent and growing need for continued innovation regarding the terms on which libraries acquire digital content;
  • Challenges to the sustainability of maintaining robust collections, given problematic time-bound licenses;  
  • Promising messaging from publishers on their willingness to work with libraries to find solutions that work for all; and,
  • Excitement about the Palace Marketplace as a platform for innovation. 

The need for libraries to own their digital collections was prominently highlighted throughout the day, most notably in updates provided by the Internet Archive, Library Futures, and The BRIET Project. It was echoed and underscored by a number of librarians, including the New Jersey State Library‘s Michael Maziekien. Richard Williams from Independent Publishers Group (IPG) also previewed plans to make tens of thousands of IPG titles available for libraries to acquire and own through the Palace Marketplace. (More on that soon, so stay tuned!)

Throughout the conference, librarians talked about the struggles they face maintaining robust collections given the challenges presented by licenses that expire after a certain amount of time. These time-limited licenses were referred to as “Mission Impossible licenses,” since they expire after being read. Carmi Parker, a librarian and ILS administrator in the Whatcom County Library System and Robin Bradford, a collection development librarian with the Pierce County Library System, presented data about how time-limited licenses negatively impact their collections, resulting library patrons losing access to older titles. The high cost of licensing titles is restricting the breadth of titles available to library readers and lengthening hold times.

I was encouraged, however, by a number of conversations with a number of publishers who seemed increasingly willing to work with libraries to offer more reasonable and flexible licensing. For instance, many independent publishers, including, for example, Blackstone Publishing, Everest Media, Dreamscape Media, Saga Egmont, JMS Books, Thomas & Mercer, and many more, are charging lower prices and offering more flexible terms, including perpetual one-at-a-time options, bundles of loans that do not expire until all the lends have been exhausted, and simultaneous multi-user options. I heard from some larger publishers a willingness to consider a wider set of licensing options, including small bundles of simultaneous use lends. We are all ultimately on the same team: team reading, and I’m cautiously optimistic that together we can find options that get more books into the hands of more readers. 

Librarians just want to have fun! After the Ebook Friday sessions, we gathered at San Diego’s Fairweather Rooftop Bar for Happy Hour, co-sponsored by DPLA/The Palace Project, Ingram and Unlimited Listens. (Photos Courtesy of Micah May)

Lastly, it was gratifying to hear The Palace Project mentioned frequently as a platform that best enables libraries to innovate. Librarians talked about how Palace lets them bring disparate collections together and unify the user experience. Selectors discussed the importance of some of the alternative licensing options available through Palace, such as unlimited simultaneous multi-user access. Independent publishers, such as Anne Fonteneau from Blackstone Publishing and Elham Ali from ECW Press, shared their enthusiasm for the ways in which Palace, our collaboration with Lyrasis, has helped them bring new offerings to the library market.

I left San Diego confident that Palace is coming into its own as a flexible platform that allows library-driven innovation.