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OverDrive school partners now have access to an even more powerful tool to track usage of their digital content, a crucial component to maximizing student engagement.

The upgraded Unique User Activity report went live in OverDrive Marketplace in June and allows schools to view the number of checkouts per student. If your Marketplace account is enabled to display barcode values (e.g. the student’s login ID) in reports (this setting is available from the Marketplace settings page under the Admin tab), you can also search by barcode to see the aggregated number of borrowed titles for a student or see the “Barcode” column within report results. This deeper insight provides significant benefits to funding allocation and purchasing, promoting the service and getting to know readers, said OverDrive Collection Development Specialist Renee Lienhard.

Lienhard said the Unique User Activity report would let a school see, for example, that 85 percent of fifth graders are borrowing an eBook on a monthly basis. This data could then help in the decision to allocate a $2,000 grant for digital content for these students to support their continued regular usage.

A school could also observe via the Unique User Activity report that the students in Mrs. Smith’s first grade class haven’t been borrowing eBooks as frequently recently, Lienhard said. Titles geared specifically toward these students could then be purchased and efforts to promote the service to this group could be enhanced.

Schools are already realizing the existing possibilities offered by the improved Unique User Activity report. Claire Houghton-Kiel, a media specialist at New Jersey’s Passaic County Technical Institute, said of getting to know her readers better, “Perfect! I’m getting exactly the information I was looking for. It’s intriguing to me to see users who have never come to the library who are huge eBook readers. I don’t recognize our number one eBook reader at all! I’m psyched to analyze this data and figure out who is using it and what we can do to encourage more usage.”

Contact your OverDrive Account Specialist today to learn more about the new Unique User Activity report in OverDrive Marketplace.