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Digital lending surge strains Beehive consortium budgets; Orem weighs hold limits and alternative models
Summary
Orem library staff told the Library Advisory Commission that digital checkouts within the Beehive Library Consortium have surged and that rising publisher costs are straining budgets.
Orem library staff reported that the Beehive Library Consortium is seeing exponential growth in digital checkouts and rising publisher costs that are straining collection budgets.
“We have grown another, we think, million checkouts, this calendar year,” a library staff member said, describing increasing demand for digital material in the consortium. The staff member said Orem is the fifth‑largest user of the consortium and that publisher prices have been increasing roughly 20% year over year for some titles.
Staff described several mitigation strategies under consideration by consortium directors. One new platform feature from OverDrive/Libby — suspended holds — pauses a patron’s place in the queue for a limited time so a title is not hoarded; staff said suspended holds initially give patrons about three days to claim a title before it returns to the queue.
Other options discussed include purchasing unlimited‑concurrent access from certain distributors, raising local collection budgets (Orem added about $150,000 to collections over the last two years, staff said), reducing individual hold and checkout limits (for example, lowering from 10/15 to smaller limits), and attempting to identify and limit patrons who use multiple library cards to increase concurrent access beyond intended limits.
Staff also raised the question of how much data consortium vendors can share to help identify repeated or multi‑account users; they said vendors might be able to provide anonymized signals about repeat device or account usage without disclosing patron identities. Staff reported that the consortium stayed a vote on specific policy changes until May to observe how OverDrive’s suspended‑holds feature performs and to collect more data.
Staff noted tradeoffs: throttling high‑volume users could reduce costs by an estimated one‑third but would likely upset heavy users; increasing budgets would relieve pressure temporarily but is not sustainable long term; and unlimited concurrent collections provide circulation capacity but do not always include the most in‑demand titles.
Commissioners and staff discussed impacts on reciprocal users and book‑club collections that cross library boundaries, and staff cautioned that changes could have ripple effects across libraries in the consortium.
