Digital Magazines & training videos: the other parts of the digital library

Last week I posted about our e-Books and e-Audio content & the loans that they're generating - now over 50,000 a month.  I also mentioned that I'd get the stats on our other e-services - digital magazines and training videos & publish some information about these parts of our service.

As a network we subscribe to over 400 digital magazine titles through a company that was called Zinio, but is now owned by, and has been rebadged as RB Digital.  Yes, I know it is confusing when you get used to one name & site, and then everything changes.  But the good news is that the RB Digital site is so much easier to use.  So if you were a previous Zinio user, but gave up because of the hassle to download, it is time to try the service again.

We have made records in the library catalogue for each digital magazine title, so you may come across them while browsing on a particular area of interest.  Below is a screen shot of three digital magazines as they appear in the library catalogue.  (I got this list up by searching for Zinio - which is in each title record). You can see a list of all digital magazines in the library catalogue this way, or you can go to the RB Digital page for SA public libraries here. 

Information about how to access digital magazines on a PC, other computer, tablet or mobile phone can be found here.



I think this resource is one of the library network's best kept secrets.  To date the service has almost 13,000 customers,with about 3,000 individual customers using the service each month.  Over the last 12 months an average of 25,000 magazines have been downloaded each month.



Combined with the e-Book and e-Audio loans I wrote about last month, this means that our digital library is generating approximately 75,000 loans a month or approximately 900,000 per year.

For a good friend of mine - Scott - you can find magazines on fitness, motorcycles and trailbike riding, while others may want to pursue gardening, craft or food.

We also provide access to one of the worlds most comprehensive online training video suits called Lynda.com which can be found here.  While there are too many courses to list or highlight in our library catalogue, we have listed several hundred that have been popular with our customers. You can find them by typing "lynda.com" in a search.  Records for these courses look like this in the catalogue:


While the example above are about ICT, it is interesting to note the 10 most popular courses (based on the number of unique logins to each course) are:

Course

WordPress Essential Training

Excel 2013 Essential Training

Programming Foundations: Fundamentals

Introduction to Graphic Design

HTML Essential Training

Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Fundamentals

Excel 2016 Essential Training

The Practicing Photographer

Word 2016 Essential Training

SharePoint Online Essential Training

While this list is still fairly IT-centric the range of courses - such as learning MYOB etc that are available is astounding & well worth a look. 

This product is a little more difficult to evaluate in terms of use, because there are no unique "checkouts".  However we can see that approximately 1,000 hours of online training video is watched each month.

So, our suite of digital products is generating 75,000 loans & 1,000 hours or viewing - with very little publicity and promotion. This is a serious part of our service offering & one that we will continue to expand to meet the anticipated growth over time.