By Adam Sockel, OverDrive’s Social Media Specialist

OverDrive Marketplace offers numerous free resources to help you streamline purchasing and analyze your digital collection. These resources, found under the “OverDrive Insights” tab, include reports about your collection makeup and usage, automatic purchasing tools, and customized searches for popular titles missing from your collection.

Here are just a few examples of how you can use these Insights to save time during your collection development:

Shopping

  • Perform one-click gap analysis by searching for the most popular series, authors and titles missing from your collection.
  • Use Holds and Recommend to Library (RTL) Managers to automate orders based on title popularity and requests.
  • Use Smart Lists to quickly build carts based on criteria you specify including genre, price point, authors, titles in the news, language and more.

Reporting

  • Evaluate your digital library activity to make informed purchasing decisions, properly allocate funding, and find out where your users are discovering your digital collection.
  • Analyze new and unique patrons and compare them with your marketing efforts to see what campaigns are working and which ones need tweaking.
  • Share reports with your staff frequently to keep everyone on the same page, simplify purchasing and help the entire staff better understand the library’s digital strategy.

These are just some of the ways OverDrive Insights can save you time and help make your life easier. Looking for more ideas? Contact your OverDrive Collection Development Specialist who can help you set up your automated carts and offer lots of tips and tricks to master Marketplace!