Lucky Day Copies

OverDrive’s Lucky Day feature allows you to designate copies of titles as non-holdable and non-renewable in the digital collection. When used with popular, in-demand titles, this gives patrons a chance to get a copy sooner than they would if they just added their name to the end of a long waitlist.

Consortia members with OverDrive Advantage accounts will be able to designate their own Advantage-owned units as Lucky Day.  At least one copy of a title must be made available for patrons to place holds, so titles will only be eligible if the advantage account owns at least 2 copies of it.

 

In our current setup, the OverDrive landing page is curated by MHLS staff. There are several automated collections, as well as a featured collection at the top, which changes to a different theme several times a month.

 

Example:

 

 

Simple Lucky Day copies:

The Lucky Day option that will be the least time-consuming for member library staff is to simply designate Lucky Day copies from their Advantage Collections. The OverDrive landing page will continue to be updated as it is currently, but holds would not accumulate on the Lucky day copies, and they will likely be available more often. Patrons can then serendipitously discover that these titles are available, but there would be no display to draw attention to the Lucky Day copies for the patrons.

 

With Advantage Curation:

Alternatively, libraries can market their Lucky Day titles to their patrons in a featured collection, like this example:

This requires Advantage Curation, which requires library staff to maintain their own custom homepage. See the document OverDrive Advantage Curation for more information.

Note:

Lucky Day copies will be available to all patrons, not just patrons of the owning library. It would be possible to have your own patrons on a waiting list for a title, while allowing a checkout to another library’s patron.

 

Lending Policies:

Lending periods for Lucky Day copies are currently set to 7 days for ebooks and audiobooks, and 3 days for videos.

The lending policies are universal across the system and can’t be customized for each library. Other possible settings include 14 day loans, 21 day loans, or allow patrons to choose their lending period like they currently do with standard copies.

There are also options available to set a number of Lucky Day copies a user may have checked out at one time. This setting has not yet been enabled.  For now, users may borrow unlimited Lucky Day copies so long as they have not reached the maximum number of total checkouts, which is currently set to 10.

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