[Eril-l] Kanopy vs. campus streaming?

[Timothy Streasick]

Greetings All!

UM-Dearborn is currently experimenting with turning off the Patron-Driven
Acquisitions completely for the very reasons that have been described above
(rising triggers and not enough money to cover all of them). We also
noticed that our faculty and students were triggering films on Kanopy that
we'd already purchased on other platforms (or were available in the Public
Domain), as well as triggering entire series that would have been cheaper
to purchase in a bundle. In short, there was a lot of money going into
Kanopy a lot faster than we felt comfortable with, and it made sense to get
ourselves in front of it.

We've actually found a great deal of success with this so far. If a faculty
member wants to use a movie on Kanopy they have been asked to request it
either directly through the library or from the "Request Film
<https://help.kanopy.com/hc/en-us/articles/218030598-What-is-the-Request-feature->"
form on Kanopy's platform. We then check to make sure the film isn't
available elsewhere before licensing it. If we decide to license the film
from Kanopy, we simply use the up-front license order form
<https://help.kanopy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002236634-How-do-I-order-or-renew-a-film->
that Kanopy has and order it; turnaround has been typically a few hours,
but I would recommend planning for at least 24 hours to be safe.

As I mentioned earlier, we've had a great amount of success with this,
saving over $3000 this semester alone. We even made it a policy from the
start to accept every faculty or student request as long as it wasn't
accessible elsewhere, so the $3000 only comes from preventing triggers* on
films we already have available or purchasing an entire series in bulk.

In order to start this we spoke to Kanopy and asked them to turn off our
PDA program. They weren't exactly thrilled about it, which was clear in a
phone conversation we later had with our rep, but they turned it off
immediately (sooner than we'd expected, actually) and have been absolutely
fantastic in working with us on the up-front licenses since.

Our faculty weren't excited about the change at first either - they really
enjoyed the ability to treat Kanopy like Netflix, especially when it came
to situations where they needed a relevant film on the fly. That being
said, after explaining the situation and working with them to get the films
they needed accessible (if they weren't already triggered), we haven't
heard any negative feedback. I should also add that handling requests from
faculty hasn't been a huge issue for us (we're a smaller campus and I had
time to manage the requests quickly), but I could see it being a bigger
issue if you're already too busy. Make sure you have a plan for how to
manage the requests if you decide to go forward with this route, especially
if you're switching *from *the PDA program.

I think Kanopy is a fantastic platform. It really makes smaller educational
documentaries easily available for a lot of people. Even after turning this
off, we're still spending a large amount on the platform. We just have a
lot more control than before, and it's helped with our planning and
collection management.

- Tim

*An assumption we made was that any film requested would have been
triggered. Clearly that's not always going to be true, but given the number
of films that would have been triggered but not requested, I think it
balances out.
-- 
*Tim Streasick*
*Electronic Access Associate*
*JASS and (Interim) History Selector*
Mardigian Library
UM-Dearborn
Ph: 313-593-5567
streatim at umich.edu
http://library.umd.umich.edu
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