[Eril-l] [EXTERNAL] Swank Flex Model Subscription Questions

[Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion list]

Greetings Erin!

We use the Swank Flex 50 model at UM-Dearborn. Regarding your questions:

   1. I tend to treat the 50 films as separate "slots" and will swap movies
   in and out of those slots as needed throughout the academic year. I worked
   with our faculty to curate a list of 35 films that we license for the whole
   year, leaving 15 film "slots" that get swapped in and out as courses need.

   This requires a bit of additional bookkeeping on my end. First, it
   requires me to get faculty to share the dates they need the film to start
   and end; second, I need to keep a spreadsheet oriented like a calendar of
   the school year to help track when films get slotted into and out of the
   collection throughout the year. This is the workflow I've had since about
   2019 and it's worked out for me and feels pretty stable for my needs.

   2. Because films can slot in and out of our collection pretty rapidly
   (I've licensed them as short as three weeks), we don't tend to put the
   Swank films that swap throughout the year in our catalog. By the time they
   hit our local collection in Summon they need to be removed, so we chose not
   to add them in the first place. The 35 films we license for the
entire year *are
   *in the catalog, but since it's for the whole year we don't indicate any
   license end dates or such. For discovery we offer direct links to faculty;
   I haven't personally observed any serendipitous browsing of the platform on
   my campus (as much as I would encourage it), so for our purposes sharing
   the direct links has been working and I haven't heard negative feedback
   from faculty (yet).

I think this works for us because we've worked hard to establish a culture
where faculty touch base with the library in advance when it comes to
licensing streaming films. We adopted mediated access with Kanopy back in
2018, and that's been the more-widely used platform on our campus. Our
faculty have had years to get used to looping the library in on their
streaming video needs for the upcoming semester there, and it hasn't been
much of a stretch to get them thinking of Swank that way too. When we have
had faculty get tripped up by things going in and out of the streaming
platforms (both in Swank and Kanopy), I've just used that as an opportunity
to help get them acquainted with the workflows we use while I resolve the
issue; I've never had a moment when there hasn't been an open "slot" in our
flex plan that could be used by a faculty member. Thankfully both platforms
are pretty good about turning on licenses rapidly so even *if *there's an
issue, it's usually resolved within 24 hours. That being said, I've only
directly encountered that a handful of times since 2020.

If you have any more questions or if there's anything additional that I can
share with you, I'm more than happy to! I've been pretty happy with the
flex plan on our campus. Now if only they could get 20th Century Fox films
on the platform...

- Tim Streasick
-- 
*Tim Streasick*
*Electronic Resources Librarian*
University of Michigan-Dearborn | Mardigian Library
streatim at umich.edu | 313-593-5567
Name Pronunciation: tim stree-zihk (Audio Recording of my Name
<https://acagameia.com/files/tim/Tim%20Streasick.mp3>)
Pronouns
<https://umdearborn.edu/students/center-social-justice-and-inclusion/lgbtq-um-dearborn/name-pronoun-and-gender-information>:
He/Him/His
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.eril-l.org/pipermail/eril-l-eril-l.org/attachments/20250916/7008dd5e/attachment.htm>