Action Items: Media Lending

Use these action items and brainstorm other tangible ways to further develop your knowledge of media lending or consider local adoption of the practice.

Conduct focus groups to understand local needs of streaming media resources

Engage with your user communities to better understand their needs and desires for streaming media within the context of your institution. Identify the specific use cases for these types of digital resources, how they prefer to access and interact with them to form user experience scenarios, and learn about perceived challenges to using these resources to meet personal informational or educational needs. 

Develop local guiding principles for streaming media acquisitions

Whether an individual library or consortium, create a set of guidelines to help direct and operationalize how you decide what streaming content you might acquire. Determine your ideal access parameters, accessibility requirements, licensing models, and broader user experience considerations based on your local needs. 

Review and compare streaming media licenses with other digital content

Review your existing licenses between different digital format collections and consider how these licenses are similar or dissimilar: Do certain clauses appear more frequently for one format? Do specific clauses for course reserves, interlibrary loan, or scholarly sharing greatly differ depending on the type of resource being licensed? Find commonalities amongst these licenses to help better understand which clauses have more standardized language versus what clauses may require more targeted attention to meet the needs of your user communities. 

Audit existing licenses to determine scope of lending rights

In reviewing your existing streaming media licenses, assess how generously you are able to share those digital resources in different contexts (e.g., course reserves, interlibrary loan, scholarly sharing, synchronous vs. asynchronous instruction). Where terms are less generous for your library, identify more ideal license language and develop a vendor outreach plan to negotiate for more liberal usage of streaming media resources to meet the instructional and educational needs of your library.  

Advocate for ILL rights with streaming media vendors

Though mechanisms for lending streaming media through interlibrary loan are still evolving, work with vendors to communicate the importance and value of including ILL rights in current and future licenses. Cite the collaborations in the SILLVR pilot as key examples to realize scalable options for libraries and consortia to lend more diverse digital formats.