Transcript: The partnership effect: Libraries and publishers on collaborating and thriving - Tech Forum 2025

Transcript: The partnership effect: Libraries and publishers on collaborating and thriving - Tech Forum 2025

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  Kalpna Patel: Hello,everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's tech forum session. I'm Kalpna Patel, Product Coordinator at BookNet. Welcome to "The partnership effect: Libraries and publishers on collaborating and thriving." Before we get started, BookNet Canada acknowledges that its operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi'kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie, and the Métis, the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vaughan, and Windsor. We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose lands you're joining from today. Moreover, BookNet endorses the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry. The book industry has long been an industry of gatekeeping. Anyone who works at any stage of the book supply chain carries a responsibility to serve readers by publishing, promoting, and supplying works that represent the wide extent of human experiences and identities in all of that complicated intersectionality. We at BookNet are committed to working with our partners in the industry as we move towards a framework that supports spacemaking, which ensures that marginalised creators and professionals all have the opportunity to contribute, work, and lead. If during the presentation you have questions, please use the Q&A panel found in the bottom menu. And now let me introduce our speakers. Vicky Varga is the Executive Director of Collections and Technology at the Edmonton Public Library. She is responsible for the strategic and operational leadership of the technology services, planning, assessment and research, and collection management and access departments. Vicky has worked in a wide variety of roles during her 25-year career at EPL, including web developer, manager of IT customer service, and director of branch services. She has a strong interest in software and technology and how these systems support and enhance service delivery across the library. And next we've got Brendan Ouellette. Brendan is the Digital Project Manager at Annick Press, a publisher of books for toddlers to teens, where he oversees digital marketing and the production of ebooks, audiobooks, and metadata. Over to you, Vicky and Brendan. Vicky Varga: Thank you so much for that introduction, Kalpna. And as you heard, I'm Vicky from EPL, and today Brendan and I are going to talk about the blossoming relationship between EPL and Annick Press. And so we're going to do so through three different themes. So, we're first going to speak broadly about the relationship between libraries and publishers, then we're going to speak more specifically about our individual organisation's relationship to the broader publishing ecosystem. And then finally we're going to talk about the relationship between our two organisations, the EPL and Annick Press relationship.
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  Brendan Ouellette: Hi,everyone. I'll start off by talking a little bit about our organisation. I'm the Digital Project Manager at Annick Press. We're a publisher celebrating our 50th year in business, publishing books for young people. Our mandate is to foster a lifelong love of reading, and we strive to accomplish this by publishing books that represent the point of view of children authentically. We work with incredible authors and illustrators to achieve this at the editorial stage of the process. And equally we work with booksellers and libraries to get these stories in the hands of readers. Vicky: There we go. So, as I said, we're going to start off by talking about the intersection of libraries and publishers. And I think it is really important to start the conversation by acknowledging so much common ground between these two industries. And I know from looking at the early list of participants, people who had registered, we have folks from both sides of that divide. Divides may be the wrong word, but we certainly have a number of folks from the publishing industry directly and libraries within the call with us today. And so it's maybe so obvious, but I think that the biggest thing that we probably share is a love of reading. I think it's hard to imagine that any of us got into libraries or into publishing without really loving reading something about the literary world, books, and such. So, I think it's important to acknowledge that that is the foundation on which all of our careers in many ways really rest, and that I would be surprised if anybody in the audience today doesn't love reading in some form or fashion. And so libraries, of course, are about books. And for a number of years, libraries have been saying we are about more than just books. And you know at EPL, we have been working to reframe that, that that actually kind of diminishes this thing that is really core to our identity. It's what people think about most. When they think about the library, they think about books. It is our biggest brand, and it really is what's most central to our identity, what customers come to us for. So, we have many other services, but books are at the center of our identity, and I think that is really worth celebrating. And again, when we think about common ground, the idea of the book being something that connects libraries to publishers, pretty obvious, I think. So obvious that I think sometimes maybe we forget about that too. And I want to acknowledge as well, when we look at BookNet Canada's Canadian book consumer study, it continuously shows that borrowers are book buyers, so library borrowers are book buyers, and book buyers are also library borrowers for the most part. So, we have this shared customer base. The center of that Venn diagram between the two customer bases is pretty significant, and I think that that is something that is also important to acknowledge, that we share customers. And then we also have a shared economic relationship between libraries and publishers as well, because libraries are also customers of publishers. We collectively purchase a fair number of books each year. Brendan: And in our work, Annick is regularly in contact with our sales force, our wholesale partners, and the digital vendors that put libraries among our top priorities as a business. That work is extremely important to us, and we strive to increase our engagement with these initiatives, but it hardly makes us unique amongst publishers, and it doesn't
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  actually get usthat close to speaking with librarians and doing that work. For that, there are special conferences, even super conferences, that are very important events on our calendars, because we love speaking with librarians to learn about their work and to learn what their patrons, their readers, who are reading our books want and need. Vicky: And so just as we have some shared common ground, we also have some shared challenges. Brendan: We all care deeply about literacy and that young people have access to relevant materials that help them build an awareness of the world that they live in, helping them grow into lifelong readers and learners. There are numerous trends summarised on this slide that disrupt this purpose. A recently published U.S.-UK study shows a 20-year decline of a staggering 40% in reading for pleasure across all age groups, with alarmingly high rates amongst young people. We know that Canada isn't far behind and the efforts of libraries are central to countering these deeply troubling trends. Vicky: And I would say that this decline in reading should alarm us all, and not simply because we work in libraries, in the publishing industry, because we're writers. But I think that there's implications for society as a whole. And as I said earlier, a love of reading and an interest in the written word is almost certainly a shared characteristic amongst everybody on this call right now. But I wonder, and I think we all should be wondering, what does it mean not only for us, for libraries, for the publishing industry but for society as a whole, if reading dies a slow death? There is research that links empathy to a reduction in polarisation, for example. And so thinking about the way that we build empathy through inhabiting the lives of others through reading, I think that's a really important function that again sometimes we don't think about enough and think about the ways in which it can impact our own sense of identity and how we operate in the world. So, decline of reading is something that troubles me deeply, and I imagine many of you are troubled by this as well. There are other shared challenges too, such as economic instability. So, particularly in Canada right now, I mean, the world is facing all sorts of economic challenges, but the big T word, tariffs, uncertainty around tariffs, around inflation, and just the general geopolitical instability in the world really is something that impacts everybody right now. Libraries, the book industry, any industry really. And as the rhetoric surrounding yesterday's federal budget shows, Canada's economic future is really uncertain and we're all feeling that in our organisations and it's hard to predict where the world is going right now. And then political polarisation beyond the economic impacts of it, it's also impacting again publishers and libraries. So, libraries experience this through challenges to materials in our collections and the programs that we run, and publishers also experience pressure from interest groups around publishing and editorial decisions. And then of course there is economic change as well...technological change rather, and the ways that e-commerce and changing customer demands and interests have also impacted each of our business models. And so that leads into digital content pressures. And again this
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  is being feltby all sides. So, the digital content pressures, it is the collections issue that really keeps me up at night more so than anything else when I think about collections. So, the increasing costs for many digital titles... Again, this is variable between different publishers, and it's not across the board but certainly there are higher costs. The fact that the licencing models are more subscription-based in many ways now, the loss of perpetual use licences. So, this has created a really tricky terrain for libraries to navigate. And these higher costs, customer impatience with long waiting lists, and really there's ways in which digital collections offer a lower overall value to our communities. So, being responsible stewards of public funds, this is just a very difficult area for libraries right now. And because our relationship is often intermediated, that both publishers and libraries rely on intermediaries to deliver our digital content through platforms, this... It doesn't create. It adds to the trickiness here. And I want to stress that we absolutely need these intermediaries, the same way that we use wholesalers on the physical side. I do not want to try to develop and host a platform for ebooks, and I'm sure most publishers don't either. So, the intermediaries are very important to this ecosystem. But I would argue that we also need direct relationships as well between publishers and libraries, so that we have these direct lines of communications when there are thorny issues that impact our shared interests. And this is why I'm really pleased with the relationship that we've been nurturing with Annick, and that we are looking to develop with others as well. Brendan: Absolutely, same here. For our digital program, Annick has followed the accessibility journey of many other Canadian presses over the last decade. We're happy to produce our whole list of books in accessible EPUB formats, and many in audio as well, that we're now seeing substantial platform engagement from library vendors that build upon those accessible features in our ebooks opens new opportunities to engage with leading libraries, and the Edmonton Public Library is right at the vanguard of them. Vicky: So, now we're going to move on just to our next theme, which is how both of our organisations more specifically intersect with the publishing ecosystem as a whole. And so one of the pieces that I would like to highlight is the fact that at EPL, we spend 7.2 million dollars a year on collections. That's our annual collection budget. And so other public libraries in Canada, if we collectively added up how much we spend, I imagine we're a fairly large collective customer of this industry across the board. And I think it's important to note that this collection spending isn't just on the front list that libraries purchase, and here at EPL, we purchase the midlist and backlist as well, because we want robust, broad, and diverse collections. And I also want to give a shout out to BookNet as a key tool in helping us with this. For example, we have a new branch opening soon, and we had to buy a whole new collection to put in that branch, which isn't something we do every day. And so you want to build out a collection that isn't just the brand new, very popular material. So, BookNet really helps us with being able to run reports and find those perpetually popular but older titles that are still in print that we can add to our collection to identify gaps, help with these special projects like
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  our new branchesand such. So, many thanks to BookNet for providing tools to assist with that so that we can spend our money on the books. I also want to note that here at EPL, we have a business plan goal to increase the amount of diversity, equity, and inclusion and Canadian content in our collections by 15% over the period of the business plan, which runs until the end of next year. So, that's a particular area of focus that we've had of late. And we've also had a particular focus on children's material. We want to ensure that we're contributing to the growth of the next generation of readers, given again that decline in reading. We need to make sure those young people love reading, that they're exposed to great literature that's produced by Annick Press and others. And so this year we added almost $200,000 to these budget lines for one-time spending to again bulk up that area of our collection. Brendan: So, Annick is a proud part of the Association of Canadian Publishers, and they represent Canadian publishing in the English language from coast to coast to coast. The ACP members publish 80% of Canadian-authored books annually, and their new program of certification of Canadian publishers is part of an effort to highlight the extraordinary contributions by Canadian publishers to the writing and publishing sector, as well as to raise buyer awareness to keep their spend within Canada. Annick is also a client of eBOUND Canada, which has a digital complement to certification with accessibility in mind called eBOUND Checked. They also have a website for sourcing Canadian published ebooks in libraries, canadiandigitallibrarycollection.ca and I will leave a moment for that to... Vicky: All right, so I think that we also would be remiss if we didn't talk about writers, that arguably writers are the most important part of the publishing ecosystem. Without writers, we would have nothing on our shelves and Brendan would have nothing to publish. So, there are a number of ways again in which both areas support writers. So, some of the examples here at EPL, we participate in the public lending rights program as well as the payback program through Access Copyright, which are both programs that provide royalties to writers who have items that are in library collections. As with many libraries, we also host a writer-in-residence each year, which is a paid position in which the individual both provides mentorship to other writers and also has time to work on their own projects while being paid, which is a luxury that not all writers necessarily have. And then we also have something called Capital City Press, which is a way to celebrate our local authors, where it's a platform to self-publish and promote the work of local Edmonton authors. And then of course we have many programs and events that celebrate reading, writing, and all that good stuff. Brendan: On Annick's side, we think of writers grouped with creators and illustrators. And in addition to our publishing program, we run an editorial mentorship program, which for the past five years has offered emerging and underrepresented writers time, professional guidance, compensation, and an opportunity to learn more about the children's publishing industry, which has not traditionally provided equal access to everyone.
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  Vicky: All right,so now we're going to dive into some of the more specifics about the relationship that we've been nurturing, Brendan and I, between our two organisations. And so it actually started with BookNet. BookNet facilitated a request from Annick to review EPL's data in library data, because Annick was interested, Brendan in particular, in a more detailed and granular view than is available in the aggregate. And so this came a little bit... It was a bit unexpected when we got this request, and we asked to understand a little more about it. And we understood that it was to really just help understand the way that library materials might reflect what's happening in previous seasons and such. I'll let Brendan speak about that a little bit more momentarily. And so we approached this request with curiosity. It was, as I said, a little out of the blue, didn't quite know what to make of this. But because to date, our relationships with publishers here at EPL have mostly been indirect. I know this varies at other libraries, but we haven't been quite as involved in nurturing some of those relationships. And it's been primarily brokered through those wholesalers and those digital platforms. So, I was really intrigued by the opportunity to connect directly with a publisher. And Brendan and I have met previously through other contexts, but we have been very interested in this. But having it through this particular lens was quite intriguing. And so as we scheduled the meeting, the more specific question emerged around understanding what our current applications of library data are here at EPL. And we understood that Annick wanted to understand how we look at this data ourselves. And so it was an interesting opportunity to understand really what the curiosity of the other side too, what questions a publisher had for libraries and the way that they thought about data, and how that might even influence the way we might look at data as well. Brendan: For Annick, library data has been an important supplement to tracking circulations. It's also been a great way to deepen our dialogue with EPL and other library systems. Annick includes all library circulation reports of our titles in our weekly internal sales mailings. They're particularly valuable for showing which frontlist titles are breaking out across library systems. But where these reports can be at a mismatch with sales reports, although few and far between, comes up sometimes in our backlist most often for picture books from 30 or 40 years ago, which can be grouped in large clusters of ISBNs. Being a publisher of books for children, we have lots of sales activity driven by backlist. Obscuring this activity can be noticeable however seldom it appears. From the library side, clustering ISBNs is necessary according to the BookNet team, because reporting from library data is linked to catalogue ID numbers, which vary by system. Different structural logic can govern those IDs for a variety of reasons. To learn more about this and the many benefits that publishers could gain from using the platform, the ACP Library Committee, my co-chair David Larson of the University of Manitoba Press, and I asked the BookNet team, Lily Dwyer and Lauren Stewart, to present the benefits that publishers could find on the platform. This was back in 2024. They gave many useful examples, and one of the offers following that was to see which systems would be willing to present their data disaggregated from the all library reports. This would allow us to see, with greater precision, which of our titles were present in their systems.
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  Lily asked aroundand found the Edmonton Public Library, along with some other systems mainly in Alberta, like Marigold and Strathcona, were happy to let us test this out. It opened a great way to see through overlapping bundles on the system and find what a collection of books looks like branch by branch. From that, another generous offer from EPL's team to meet with us and answer questions came about how they use the reports and how we can build on a common framework. Vicky: Well, maybe just add that at EPL our mission is we share, and that really is our philosophy. So, it's these opportunities to share information and collaborate and have conversations. It is part of the way we operate. And so it's one of the things I love about working in libraries, the fact that it is such a collegial space for the most part, and so being able to share information within this space is something that's awesome, I think. So, after this initial meeting that we had where we shared information, it was really great for bridging understandings. There was a genuine interest on both sides to understand each other's context and a lot of collegiality and collaborative discussion. And so this led to an invitation to discuss further some of the digital challenges and opportunities. As I said, this is an area that is for most public libraries an area of concern, and there are some differences that are notable between some of the smaller or Canadian and local presses versus some of the larger and multinational publishers when it comes to these dynamics. So, the more that we can understand about why these differences exist and what the different dynamics behind some of the pricing and licencing models are, I think that just enriches our ability to have really good discussions and understand how to express our mutual positions and concerns and such. So, again, really value the opportunity to understand the other side of the business to help strengthen my own understanding even of how publishing works and such to then consider how to address the challenges that I experience in this context. And then we also from here invited Annick to present their catalogue and also to explore programming and other opportunities, because again, children are such a big part of our audience, particularly for programming at EPL. And so given the particular focus of Annick Press, it really seemed like there are a lot of rich opportunities there as well. Brendan: Yes, a meeting with the library team in this context has us firing on all cylinders, able to discuss the specifics of our program and take in a greater understanding of their system-wide approach. We can say for sure that across their 22 branches, there are a good number of our titles that are present in each branch. This presents a shorthand for which titles we highlight in catalogue presentations and also linking to digital editions that may have special features of note. If I can say to the audience one clear call to action, especially from the library communities, it's to recommend that this level of data access be something that more systems consider granting to publishers in order to build on our conversations. And as far as interesting areas to develop library data in the future, as more digital edition metadata is taken into BookNet systems, we hope to make links between print and digital circulations clearer too. Vicky: And so we've identified a handful of future opportunities for us to continue to collaborate on as well. So, as you may know, Annick has Paper Bag Princess Day each year
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  on, I thinkit is March 7th, I should know that. So, we had a really great conversation about that. We had our manager for youth services attend the last call and really had a good conversation about how at EPL we can be intentional with our promotion of Paper Bag Princess Day. We have participated in the past, but now having had this more fulsome conversation, our planning cycle will be that much better and we'll be more deliberate in how we approach this day and more consistent because it has been a couple of years since we've had a fulsome approach to celebrating Paper Bag Princess. I am of course very fond of that title. I remember having it read to me when I was a child, so it's great to see that we can share that with the next generation as well. So, we're starting with this, and I think that there was some valuable information shared back with Annick as well about the planning cycle that we have here at EPL, which again may be different than other libraries just to help them with their own program and how they approach that for libraries as well. We also here have a number of projects that there's opportunities to pursue in future. So, we have different special buys that we conduct for all sorts of different reasons. So, I mentioned the new branch that we are opening. There's different programs that we have like our Welcome Baby initiative that we're looking at opportunities or desire to purchase more Canadian content is also an area for continued conversation. Of course we run a summer reading program every year and often have books and other material as giveaways, so again many opportunities there. And then just further collaboration. So, I'm such a firm believer in the serendipity of relationships and that you never know what thread you might pull on in future that will lead to something really magical that you don't necessarily expect when you first have the conversation about, say, disaggregating data in a particular database. You never know where those conversations might go. And so through this relationship building, and I'm sure we are going to continue regular check-ins, I am certain that additional ideas for collaboration are going to emerge between our two organisations. Brendan: And we welcome all of it with the marketing team at Annick and their library marketing initiatives like the library and educator newsletter and the special events that they work on. It was so great to speak with the EPL team and get a sense of procedures and timelines and just how we can connect better on all of those levels. So, absolutely we look forward to those regular check-ins and further collaboration. Vicky: And I'm just going to tease one very, very new idea we had to elevate our partnership. It was a bit of a throwaway at the end of our conversation. We are going to... I need to set it up still, but we're going to have another meeting to discuss opportunities to partner for a project on EPL's giant two-story digital wall, which is pictured here on this slide. And of course we had one little thread of conversation in that meeting that I think there's some potential around. So, maybe nothing comes of this, maybe we determine we cannot do anything, but something awesome might also come of this.
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  And so Iwanted to share it and I wanted to end on this to really emphasise the fact that again, you never know what might come of these relationships. I think effort is never wasted in building relationships, and so I really wanted to underscore the exciting potential of working together. And so thank you so much. Brendan: Thank you. Kalpna: Thank you, Brendan and Vicky. That was amazing. I was busy writing notes about everything you guys said, so that was great. And the chat is very active, so we've got a bunch of questions for you guys if you are up to it. I will start with... There's a couple of questions just about how you got to connect with each other and what recommendations you would make for outreach and stuff like that. So, one question for Brendan is, what is the best way to reach out to librarians who are managing collections and what role do library associations play in facilitating those connections? Brendan: I was thinking about this coming into the presentation, and it has been a priority to open more of those conversations through the ACP Library Committee. I think reaching out between organisations, coming up with shared programming and policy priorities, is especially important at this moment for many of the reasons that Vicky outlined. And beyond that, I think direct connections to libraries reveal that we have so many shared priorities. The way that we structured this presentation was an unintentional juxtaposition in a lot of ways, and we just had so much overlap. And I think we want to work together more, both directly within our organisations and in our collectives as well. Kalpna: Yeah, that's great. I've got a bit of a practical question, which I love here. This is for Vicky. Does EPL directly order from publishers like Annick or go through vendors such as Whitehots, and do you think there are some situations in which it's beneficial to work with an intermediary, like for a smaller publisher or larger publisher? I think speaking to your approach for ordering for the libraries, the question here. Vicky: For the most part, for our circulating collection, we generally do work through a wholesaler and intermediary because almost all of our material arrives shelf ready. So, the processing pieces, the adding the labels and the catalogueing and all of that is part of the services that we contract. So, again, that varies vastly between libraries whether or not they do that. So, that's one of the key benefits for us, having some of that work done. There are other projects though. I had alluded to our Welcome Baby project, which is where at baby's first immunisation appointment they get a package at the health clinic where they have some early literacy resources included in a bag, and they get a board book, their own baby's first board book. Hopefully it is not their first one, hopefully they already have a house full of board books. But for that project, we keep thousands of books on hand for that project. And so in those cases we do work actually directly with the publishers. And so there are specialised cases in which we do work more directly with publishers for those sorts of purchases. So, the Summer Reading Club example I gave as well, that might be an opportunity to purchase things more directly when we don't need that processing and catalogueing work.
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  Kalpna: Right, thankyou. I've got a question for Brendan here. How have you been able to help your colleagues wrap their heads around library circulation data as an additional demand factor along with sales? Have you had to offer your team training or...? Brendan: So, I don't make the weekly sales report circulations, but we thought it was an important component to export reports and compile them. And it just gets sent to all staff in a circulation. There are further notes that are added by certain team members that might explain how a title is appearing on library data, and we'll usually see that following the sell- in of the title. But it's just become integrated into our weekly practice, and that supplement is the constant reminder, I think, that we need to go, "Huh, well, we can build something upon this." So, automating it and having a regular look is a good way to, I would say, integrate it into the overall workflow. It's going to look different at different publishers. Kalpna: Yeah. Great. Still a few more questions, so that's great. This is a question for Vicky. How can Canadian libraries leverage the certified Canadian publisher program? Is this valuable to you? Does it help expose more titles for purchasing? And could libraries use that information for the readers' advisory so where you decide to put books on display or on lists and things like that? Vicky: Those are all great ideas. I was asked this question this week by my CEO. She became aware of it, and so I think those are all awesome ideas, and I'm going to parrot those back to my CEO now. I've been thinking about the Canadian identity and how that was something I was thinking about in the preparation for this presentation, because I think that that's also something, again, that probably most people on this call are interested in and something that we all play a role in supporting. And as much as there's a lot of American culture I enjoy and appreciate, I think we need to protect what's unique about our identity against the sort of cultural hegemony of the U.S. as well. And so I'm intrigued by the ACP and ways in which we can ensure that we are promoting and celebrating what's uniquely Canadian about our culture, our literature, and all of that. So, I am excited by this program, though I'm only just thinking about it now. Kalpna: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, so much potential and possibility there. Another sort of question for you, Vicky. Brendan did mention the valuable data about backlist titles found through library data. And is there anything publishers can be doing to better highlight backlist titles to libraries? Vicky: Oh, that's a good question. I think it is useful to... I mean, we look at, of course, our circulation data and such, but we do not have data points on the things that we do not have. Right? Like that is an interesting problem, that we can't measure the success of something we don't have. So, I think being aware... I know our selection librarians look at this and try to find those gaps and if there is something that is popular in the backlist that maybe we do not have. But of course we only have so much time in the week.
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  So, I thinkthose are really important things to highlight to libraries. And if there are any gaps... The particular area of interest would be that gap, if there is something that is missing, that's valuable. And there's this idea of intrinsic value too, that maybe it's not, you know, a heavily circulating or heavily selling book, but it is... Again, if we're talking about the Canadian lens in particular, like a classic that's missing or something like that. And so aligning with a library's particular... I would guess most libraries do have an interest in Canadian content. But if there are other areas that are particularly strategic objectives for the library, as I noted, we have that objective around diversity, equity, and inclusion content as well as Canadian content. So, I think highlighting... If there are things in the backlist that sort of align with those organisational goals, that would be really important as well. So, the actual mechanism of how to do that for us, I think it is based on relationship too. Like, what is your relationship with libraries? How much do you know about them? Do you know about some of those strategic objectives and such? So, yeah. Kalpna: This is another very practical question, which I find very useful and super specific but I'm going to share it anyway. This is for Brendan. In your work with EPL, what does your bibliographic data exchange look like? So, are you sending metadata using ONIX directly to the library, and does that differ in your approach with other libraries? Brendan: I haven't asked that question at all, and… Kalpna: Yeah. Brendan: ...I haven't asked that question, because that's a key area of focus for me but the answer I guess I could make is that it comes from ONIX. It comes to EPL in a number of different ways. So, we have the digital vendor platform side, which is going to focus on ebooks, and we have the flow through for print information that's appearing on EPL in a way that is satisfactory. So, it looks closely matched to what we're sending out through the supply chain. And I don't know, Vicky, maybe you want to comment on how EPL picks it up, but it's looking good on my end. Vicky: I'm a little hazy on the details for that one, so I'm going to wave my hands a little bit. Totally fair. Brendan: If I can just make a comment though on the question you were asked previously in highlighting backlist, I think the best answer is always to refresh metadata because that will send the update around the supply chain. So, we have such a focus on the backlist as a children's publisher that we're often doing a pass and adding a longer description about the title or making sure that the author creator bios are up to date. These sorts of things send the whole file out into the world all over again and can renew interest. Kalpna: Right. I've got a question for Vicky. What types of digital reading platforms does EPL offer to its readers? And did you have any information on how those platforms perform for readers with accessibility needs? So, for instance, text to speech or alternate navigation? Vicky: So, I mean the big one is of course OverDrive. That's where most of our access to digital reading occurs, though we do also have Hoopla and others as well. And I know the older version of the OverDrive app, pre-Libby, did have better accessibility features, but that
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  is an areathat is... It isn't great as I understand it, that it's not as accessible as it could be. And so that is certainly an area of some degree of concern. We do also subscribe to CELA, so the Center for Equitable Library Access, and that's specifically for customers with perceptual disabilities, and the material that they provide is accessible. But of course it's not as wide a catalogue as some of our other digital collections, which is a big problematic, though of course CELA can...through copyright law, they can produce accessible versions of titles that don't exist on the commercial market. So, that is one of the ways that we serve that accessibility need. Kalpna: Right. And then I think we still have time for at least one or two more. These are two different questions which nicely overlap, so I'm going to try and combine them both, and I guess it is for both of you. So, in regards to the reading for pleasure side, is EPL or Annick considering any direct messaging about that to their patrons and book buyers? And what does that messaging look like? And the other complementary question was that there are a lot of initiatives that address literacy but not so much about reading for pleasure. And what collaborations could you see in the industry that would reverse that trend away from reading for pleasure? Vicky: So, we had one of our staff here... We called it Project Read. She did an environmental scan of some of the literature around the decline in reading, doing some market segmentation of the different types of readers like aspirational readers, lapse readers, and thinking about the different buckets of reading that exist, and also a scan of what other libraries are doing in this area to try to promote reading. And I've mentioned our strategic plan. Our strategic plan runs until the end of next year, but we're already at work on our next one. And the one thing we know for sure is that reading is going to be a significant part of that plan. So, we have all morning tomorrow, our senior leadership team is going to be talking about the strategic plan. So, this is really going to be a focus for us because we really want to take up that mantle and increase reading for pleasure. And it is reading for pleasure that we're particularly interested in in Edmonton. When we think about again that investment, I said we spend 7.2 million dollars a year on collections, and the recreational aspects of that have always been part of our mission, and so this is something we're thinking about. I do not have the specifics right now because we are just at that, maybe not the beginning, but we are still in the early stages of figuring out what we are going to do. And as you can probably tell from my physicality on this one, I'm really excited about this because again I got into libraries because I love reading. And so being able to refocus on that core and talk about reading and really celebrate it. I do think that we got a little... We lost focus on that for a while in libraries, and so I'm really jazzed that for the next four years after this we're going to be laser focused on reading and celebrating it. Brendan: Yes. On Annick's side, I think we're looking for marketing initiatives on a regular basis to promote reading and to promote the list that we have. The editorial program that we put together is trying to address this issue and it remains the core of our publishing program to try and make books that are interesting enough that kids fall in love with reading.
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  We look topublish in different genres to accomplish that and adapt that mandate to things that make them laugh and things that entertain them and things that they can find in their classroom that are going to help them grow with them too. I think books for older readers are an important part of our program. Graphic novels are an increasing part of our list and very visually exciting, along with highly illustrated chapter books and things of that nature. So, yeah, just making sure that there are great books and great creators that we're working with is the most effective strategy that we have. Kalpna: Yeah, that's great and a very inspiring note from both of you to wrap this up with, I think. So, thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you for all those great questions from everybody attending. Before we go, we would love it if you could provide feedback on this session. So, we'll drop a link to the survey in the chat. Please take a couple of minutes to fill it out, and we'll also be emailing everyone a link to the recording of the session as soon as it's available. And to our attendees, we invite you to join our upcoming session, "Ethical AI applied to publishing: Presenting wâsikan kisewâtisiwin, an AI tool for writing Indigenous content" scheduled for December 6th. And you can find information about all of our upcoming events and recordings of previous sessions on our website at bnctechforum.ca. Lastly, we'd like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage for their support through the Canada Book Fund, and thanks to you all for attending. Bye. Vicky: Thanks. Bye.