Note: An ILA is currently in effect per Council action in 2019; however, Bibliotheca, the company that owned cloudLibrary and the cloudLink platform, sold this portion of their business to OCLC in 2024. This updated ILA reflects the new ownership. The following is updated background information from the original 2019 resolution.

The Schertz Public Library began offering e-books and e-audiobooks to our community more than 15 years ago. Digital resources are no longer a novelty, but an essential and in-demand service libraries provide to their customers. It is a service, however, that comes with some challenges. On the upside, digital content: 

• Offers flexibility to our customers. eBooks and eAudiobooks are one more way to fit reading into busy lives. 
• Provides access to reading materials to people who aren’t able to physically come into the library. From deployed military personnel, to children at home with an illness, to shut-in elderly persons, reading can still be part of life even when access to physical materials is limited. 
• Makes it easy to update content or provide access to digital-only or out-of-print content. This is particularly important when providing non-fiction and educational materials. 
• Allows libraries with limited space for physical collections to maintain minimum materials per capita levels when they run out of room. 

On the downside, digital content: 

• Costs far more for a library to provide than regular print materials. The average cost of an eBook to libraries is around $50 vs. $29 for print. Digital audiobooks average around $70.
• Is difficult for customers to discover without a platform for viewing it and the ability to integrate the titles into regular library catalogs. 
• Is proving to be almost impossible to build robust collections over time because publishers are metering the content. Metering is the practice of requiring a library to purchase a copy of a book over and over again because the license only lasts for 26 or 52 check-outs. Other metering models are based on unlimited check-outs for a limited period of time, such as 12 or 24 months. Some publishers allow libraries to purchase titles with a perpetual license, meaning that the library owns the title forever. A perpetual license title can cost more than $100, but fewer and fewer titles have perpetual licenses. 

In 2017, eleven public libraries in the Dallas area, discouraged by the unfavorable terms of their digital consortium, the high cost of providing digital content, and their inability to build up the number of titles in their digital collections even after significant investment, began looking for a way to share their digital content with each other. Their idea was to create a system based on the way libraries share their physical collections through interlibrary loan. Each library in the group would own its own content (unlike most consortia which own titles collectively) and let other libraries borrow a title when its own customers weren’t using it. They formed a coordinating committee, partnered with Bibliotheca (formerly known as 3M), one of the largest digital content providers to public libraries, to create a platform that allowed title sharing, and created an interlocal agreement. Once the libraries began sharing their content through this digital interlibrary loan system, they all saw dramatic increases in usage and decreases in wait time for their customers. Library customers immediately had access to more than 10 times the number of titles they had previously. Several months later, Bexar County’s Bibliotech library joined the group and the number of titles available to customers skyrocketed. Since its beginnings in 2017, the group has grown to almost 70 libraries across Texas. The number of shareable copies available to customers is currently more than 300,000. 
 
The initial length of the agreement was 10 years and is still set to expire in 2027. Once a library joins the group, the interlocal agreement is in place until a library dissolves the relationship with written notice, violates the terms and is voted out of the group by the coordinating committee, or the CloudLibrary Cloudlinking program is no longer available.  

Our goal in being a member of this consortium is to greatly expand the number of eBook and and eAudiobook titles available to our customers at minimal cost. This is keeping with our policy values of enhancing quality of life for our residents and being fiscally sustainable. The minimum threshold spend of $10,000 required to be a part of the consortium purchases about 140 eBook titles and about 50 eAudiobook titles. If we were to purchase these titles and made them available on our own non-shared platform, customers would never have more than a few thousand titles to choose from due to metering as explained in the Background section. By being part of the consortium, our customers have access to the titles we purchase as well as an additional 300,000+ titles.

Being a part of the consortium through this interlocal agreement greatly expands the amount of digital content available to our library customers, as well as greatly leveraging the amount of money we spend on digital content.

Recommend approval of Resolution 25-R-016 to update the Coudlink interlocal agreement. 

The interlocal agreement does require each participating library to spend a minimum amount per year on content, as well as a $1,000 annual Cloudlink fee. The requirement is to spend a minimum of $10,000 or 10% of a library’s materials budget, whichever is less, in order to have a robust collection for users. For the Schertz Public Library, this means we must meet an expenditure level of $10,000 per year, a number that we already surpass. We have increased our spending with Cloud in the years since joining the consortium as it gives us more content for our money. In FY24, we spent approximately $26,000 on Cloud digital content and $10,000 on digital content in our other digital platform, Overdrive. The Texas State Library and Archives Commission also provides the digital platform, Boundless, to accredited public libraries through a program called eRead Texas. Boundless is powered by a Baker & Taylor product called Axis 360. Use of this platform is free to us, but we do not control any of the content, meaning we can't add anything our customers may want to read. Having access to all three major platforms is desirable as not all published titles are available through every vendor. We purchase print titles from multiple vendors for the same reason. We consider Cloud to be our primary platform, but Overdrive is necessary as it is currently the only vendor licensed to provide Kindle format titles to public library users. Money for digital content is already a part of our materials budget--this interlocal agreement update does not require us to spend anything additional to what we are already spending.

This Interlocal agreement is advantageous to our customers in that they will have access to many more unique titles than we can afford to provide on our own. They will also have access to more copies of titles, driving down wait times. Staff recommends adoption of this Resolution authorizing the Public Library Interlocal Agreement for Mutual Access to CloudLibrary Digital Resources