Athens County Public Libraries introduced a new service this month that allows patrons to borrow audiobooks, music and videos by downloading them to their electronic devices.
The service, unveiled late last year, is provided by Ohio-based Midwest Tape Company, said James Hill, assistant director of the Athens County Public Libraries. The service is free to anyone with a library account and can be accessed by downloading an app off of the library’s website, MyACPL.org. Patrons are only allowed to borrow ten items a month through the service, Hill said.
This is not the first digital media service that the library has offered, but it will replace the former digital service and has the added benefit of being accessible from any device. Once the files have been downloaded, the user can access the files any time they want, even without access to the Internet. This is especially useful because not everyone has access to Internet in the county.
“We’re very excited about it,” Hill said. “The ability to bring a digital device to the library and download content and then go offline to watch it or listen to it while sitting next to pond or under a tree — that’s very exciting for people.”
One drawback to the program is that it is estimated to cost more than the library’s former digital media service. The library will set aside $12,000 each year for downloads from Hoopla compared to the $8,000 it spent each year for its last service, Hill said.
The service charges the library individually for each piece of digital media downloaded as opposed to a fixed-rate charge.
At each of its recent open houses, the library has provided a set of laptops and tablets on which visitors can test the service.
“So far we’ve spent a lot of time helping people open their accounts and maneuvering around their devices,” said Amy King, the Youth Services Coordinator at the library. “We’ve had a wide age-range.”
Library employees said that there has been a lot of positive feedback from the open-house visitors regarding the program. Each of the events has had approximately 15 attendees, King said.
The open houses are as much to teach the public about the service as they are to teach library employees about it.
“We’ve been brushing up on our skills and playing with all of the new devices and learning how to operate on platforms we’re not necessarily familiar with,” King said.
King said although books aren’t going away, this new service is a big step forward as it is becoming increasingly important for people to be able to access content in digital forms.
“Today we had a young boy who really had never had his hands on a tablet before… and we taught him how to use Hoopla,” said Luke Bentley, the children’s librarian. “He downloaded an album, put on headphones and walked around the library singing and flipping through screens and having a grand time.”
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This article appeared in print with the headline "Athens libraries adjust to digital readers"
