For many of our partners, January brings a parade of new device owners walking into library branches needing help getting started with eBooks. Feeling overwhelmed? Here are some tips:

The importance of staff training
If you have new hires or if any staff members need a refresher about OverDrive, our partners have 24/7 access to the Learning Center in the Partner Portal. In the Learning Center, you can watch webinar recordings that help to educate staff about the digital library website, the user experience, and behind-the-scenes tools like ordering in OverDrive Marketplace and running reports. Don’t have time to watch a webinar? Check out our recent blog post, OverDrive’s 10 most frequently asked questions, for a quick list of popular questions and answers that every public-facing staff member should know.

During the OverDrive Challenge in June, we found that some of the highest circulating libraries attributed their success to staff involvement. Athina Mavromataki from Monash Public Library Service in Australia said, “The campaign demonstrated what a difference staff awareness of (and confidence with) the collection makes to circulation figures.”

sdltips1“Ask me about eBooks”
Become a walking billboard and spark conversation about your digital collection with “Ask me about eBooks” and “You have devices, we have eBooks” buttons, t-shirts or signs. You can find templates for these designs in the Partner Portal and some recommended printing resources here.

Help us help you
For users who need help getting started, we encourage you to explore the following resources:

  • Help videos are easy to share and a wonderful way to visually show the process.
  • Help articles provide assistance for a wide scope of questions and issues. This is useful for staff members to reference and also as a site to share with users that need assistance.
  • Printable Getting Started Guides (including device-specific guides) are excellent to have on hand at the library.
  • Just the Basics Template is a PowerPoint slideshow that covers the basic how-to information and can easily be modified to suit your needs for training classes or demonstrations. (The Getting Started Guides and PowerPoint templates are found at the bottom of the page, in the Resources section of the Learning Center).

Additional support
If you need general technical or invoicing support, you can contact OverDrive Support using the support forms in OverDrive Marketplace. Worried about the influx of patron questions coming in to your library? You may want to sign up for Front Line Tech Support as a way to put your end users in direct contact with OverDrive Support.

 

Melissa Marin is a Marketing Specialist at OverDrive.