We are currently exploring the possibility of checking out our Follett ebooks.
If a classroom teacher checked out
The Biggest Snowball of All, he/she would be the only person who could access this title for whatever loan period we set (and we are considering 2 or 3 days). The teacher's checkout would "live in the cloud" which means that he/she could view the book from any computer with internet access. OR the teacher could download the new Follett app which is called Enlight onto his/her mobile device. At that point, the teacher could also have
The Biggest Snowball of All on his/her ipad or smartphone. At the end of the loan period, the ebook simply disappears. The teacher would also have the option to return the ebook early.
How do
you feel about this? For example, if a bunch of 4th grade students at Bonneville checked out the rock and mineral ebooks because they were doing a project in their classroom -- and then 4th grade students at Rose Park were doing rock and mineral and fossil research in the library, those ebooks would not be available for any librarian for research purposes.
How do you think the
classroom teachers in your school would feel about this? We have a concern about some of the popular ebook titles. For example, the Martin Luther King, Jr. ebooks (we have 4 of them) are very popular in January. If we DON'T check out ebooks, those 4 ebooks could conceivably be used by dozens and dozens of teachers over the course of the month. Since most teachers probably only use these ebooks for 20 minutes or so with their students, many many teachers could use these ebooks just in one day. But if we turn on the checkout feature, then those 4 titles could be tied up, and many fewer teachers would be able to use them.
How do you think your
students would respond to this? We have recently purchased a small beginning collection of novels (such as
Hunger Games) that could be checked out, and we also have a few free novels that are in the public domain (such as
Wuthering Heights) that could be checked out. Most of these ebooks are secondary titles. Do you think students would be interested in using the Enlight app on their personal mobile devices and checking out
Hunger Games or
The Book Thief or
The Maze Runner or
The Raven Boys or
Twilight? We would probably make the loan period 2 weeks for these ebooks. If we make ebooks checkout-able, the features in Shelf where students can take notes and highlight passages and save them would be functionable. We would probably allow students to check out 2-3 ebooks at a time. Students would continue to be able to check out their normal amounts of regular hard copy books as well.
The ebooks cannot check out from the external Shelf link listed on the district page. Students and teachers would check out their ebooks from within your Destiny catalog.
We would love to get your input about checking out ebooks!
As a side note -- we haven't heard yet if UEN has decided to purchase the MyOn ebooks and make them a permanent part of Pioneer Online Library. But IF they do decide to do this, then those ebooks will also be checkout-able through UEN.
We were able to obtain copies of a couple of the award honor books for 2014. 
