Such a great post! Our library just recently subscribed to Hoopla and there has been a minor uproar among the librarians. One of the chief issues is that our administration decided to feature new titles bought by Hoopla on our website. Most of them are fine but suddenly there is an uptick of explicitly Christian titles (some of dubious quality) and it has freaked some librarians out. Internal censorship is a thing!!
Thanks! Yeah, it can definitely be something people take issue with, the featuring of certain titles. I think the tricky thing here is that Hoopla is definitely inclined to feature titles that will be checked out by your patrons (they make money per checkout as opposed to per user), and I'd guess that they suspect through use of analytics that those titles might appeal to your service area or to libraries in similar areas. They might be right, they might be wrong. If they're right, I think it's okay to continue featuring titles like that. If they're wrong, I feel like it's reasonable to ask them to feature something else in that space, really just for the sake of making good use of the recommendation space. Either way, though, I'm mostly of the opinion that patron complaints/requests should probably be the driver on that sort of thing. If Christian titles do gangbusters, it'd be hard for me to advocate for no longer featuring them. I guess I can also say that Hoopla does a lot of different features, so it may seem biased to some because, having just gotten Hoopla, Christian titles are one of the first things featured. But given some time to see the different features over the months, I think Hoopla does a pretty decent job of mixing things up.
Such a great post! Our library just recently subscribed to Hoopla and there has been a minor uproar among the librarians. One of the chief issues is that our administration decided to feature new titles bought by Hoopla on our website. Most of them are fine but suddenly there is an uptick of explicitly Christian titles (some of dubious quality) and it has freaked some librarians out. Internal censorship is a thing!!
Thanks! Yeah, it can definitely be something people take issue with, the featuring of certain titles. I think the tricky thing here is that Hoopla is definitely inclined to feature titles that will be checked out by your patrons (they make money per checkout as opposed to per user), and I'd guess that they suspect through use of analytics that those titles might appeal to your service area or to libraries in similar areas. They might be right, they might be wrong. If they're right, I think it's okay to continue featuring titles like that. If they're wrong, I feel like it's reasonable to ask them to feature something else in that space, really just for the sake of making good use of the recommendation space. Either way, though, I'm mostly of the opinion that patron complaints/requests should probably be the driver on that sort of thing. If Christian titles do gangbusters, it'd be hard for me to advocate for no longer featuring them. I guess I can also say that Hoopla does a lot of different features, so it may seem biased to some because, having just gotten Hoopla, Christian titles are one of the first things featured. But given some time to see the different features over the months, I think Hoopla does a pretty decent job of mixing things up.