Come See Us at PLA!

Next week we’ll be at the PLA 2018 Conference in Philadelphia, and we’d love to see you there! You can find us at Booth #837 from March 20-24. Here’s what you can expect when you come by our booth.

Golden Ticket Giveaway

Free candy AND a chance to win…who can resist? Stop by our booth anytime to pick up a chocolate bar and a chance to win a great prize! This offer is only good while supplies last, so come early to make sure you don’t miss out.

Author Signings

Three popular authors will be making appearances at our booth. Visit our booth during the times listed below to get a book signed, and spread the word about their incredible work to your patrons!

Wednesday, March 21

4:00 – 5:00 p.m.

LAURIE MORRISON

Co-author of the middle-grade novel Every Shiny Thing

Thursday, March 22

11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

CLAIRE LEGRAND

Author of the YA fantasy novel Furyborn

Thursday, March 22

1:00 – 2:00 p.m.

BEATRIZ WILLIAMS

Author of the historical novel The Summer Wives

Champagne Toast

We’re looking forward to celebrating hoopla’s five-year anniversary with our library partners. We’ll be hosting a champagne toast at our booth on Thursday, March 22, at 3:00 p.m. Join us!

Alexa, Meet hoopla!

We’re excited to announce a cool new bit of hoopla functionality—integration with Amazon’s personal assistant, Alexa! We’ll have a number of devices at our booth, so be sure to come get a full demonstration of all the ways Alexa will allow patrons to interact with hoopla just with their voice.

Come by our booth for any or all of these events, or to learn more about all the ways Midwest Tape and hoopla can benefit your library. We hope to see you there!

Updated 2/17: Coming Soon to the Library Admin Site: Advanced hoopla Reports

Helping our Partner Libraries gauge success with hoopla and cardholders continues to be a powerful asset to hoopla’s reporting. Recently, we have worked with select Partners to provide statistics on circulations and registered users. In the very near future, we plan on offering this data by adding additional functionality to the report menu.

These reports include:

• Patron Report: A new report that lists e-mail addresses, card number, date registered, and total number of circulations (if any) for each registrant at the selected library.
• Usage Report: This report is still under development.

(It is important to note that a user's borrowing history is not shared.) 

Circulations are an important metric for all libraries and patron usage is directly tied to this measuring stick of how successful a service is at your library. Our hope is that our Partner Libraries take these reports and analyze their digital offerings across the board.

Improving the reporting tool for your library is our main goal with this report. We feel the statistics will provide invaluable help your library plan for 2015 and beyond. 

For more details about the report, be sure to reach out to your hoopla Coordinator or your Account Executive.

(This story was updated on February 17 for clarity and content.)

hoopla LightSpeed: App Evolution for Brighter Connectivity

Welcome to the latest iteration of the hoopla app (hoopla 3.0), or as we've come to call it, LightSpeed! 

This is a sneak peek of what's to come in a few short weeks. LightSpeed represents a major and significant app upgrade. It's something needing to be explored firsthand. Before LightSpeed's release, we will continue to show off some images that will help convey this upgrade before you and your patrons have access to it. Lightspeed covers both our mobile apps and hoopladigital.com.

Above is the new hoopla Home Screen, featuring direct access to a user's borrowing history (My Titles) and showcases some of the featured titles per format. New Format Home Screens, reached by choosing (Browse All), give users quick access to both borrowed titles and newly discovered favorites.

We want to thank you for your input and the role you've played in LightSpeed's creation; and, to thank you in advance for the key role you'll play in patron communication of its features and benefits. Please be sure to check library.hoopladigital.com for additional sneak peeks soon! 

hoopla Hits the Midwinter Superhighway

Chicago and Toronto play host to the annual ALA Midwinter Meeting and the OLA Super Conference. As always, hoopla will be in attendance, and we have some exciting news to share with you. If you are in Chicago or Toronto, we want to see you!

Please be sure to stop by our booths:

• ALA Midwinter January 30-February 2 (Chicago): Booth 2029
• OLA Super Conference January 28-31 (Toronto): Booths 413/415  

If you are unable to attend, be sure to visit library.hoopladigital.com for further details on this exciting news!

A Helpful Video Guide to Using hoopla on Apple TV

Our support team answers many questions throughout the day, including questions on using hoopla with Apple TV. Currently, we support Airplay Mirroring to allow hoopla users to enjoy their borrowed content on their television. For assistance in enabling Airplay Mirroring, be sure to check out the below video:

hoopla On AppleTV Tutorial from hoopla digital on Vimeo.

An Introduction to the Library Community

To foster growth and collaboration among our library partners, hoopla is developing a Library Community. This Community will be a safe location our project manager, technical contacts and any other library staff members can go to provide feedback, submit ideas to peers, and stay in the loop with hoopla developments. With links to onboarding documents and promotional materials, the Community also offers an enhanced one-stop shop for continued support of the hoopla service at partner libraries. 

Currently, we are in a "beta testing" phase, and making adjustments to the Community. Our goal is to roll out the Community to partner librarians in 2015. Please check back soon for more details!

This is the Library Community menu, with access to troubleshooting/knowledge documents, onboarding and promotional pieces.

Community Chatter feed. Stay in the loop with updates on what's going on in hoopla or the Community.

hoopla digital Temporary Outage Updated 4:15 PM ET

hoopla Partner Libraries,

Update: 4:15 PM ET: hoopladigital.com and mobile apps appear to be operating at close to normal. Please let us know if you are seeing any unusual behavior when visiting the site, or using our mobile apps. Thank you for your patience.

We wanted to ensure you are aware of the temporary service interruption on our patron website, hoopladigital.com.  The website is currently blocking patron access to hoopla digital, mobile apps are experiencing somewhat spotty functionality. Our hoopla team will continue to respond to any patron inquiries that they receive.

Our developers continue to work toward a resolution, and we are hopeful this interruption will end soon.  This effects only the patron site, mobile apps appear to have mostly normal functionality.

Please stay tuned to this site for further updates.

Thank you.

hoopla's FAQ Series Simplifies Digital Access for your Patrons

Over the last few weeks, our hoopla Support Team has sent out a series of e-mails to our Partner Libraries project managers and technical contacts. We wanted to provide those e-mails in an easily digestible format below: 

FAQ Overhaul Underway

In the same vein as enhancing the registration page to include a message to help users register for hoopla, we are continuing to make it easier for hoopla users to get answers to support questions. Right now on our FAQ page, hoopladigitial.com/support, we are in the midst of an update of our FAQ. We’ve added new categories, such as the "ABC's of hoopla," designed to help users get quick answers to some of the errors first time users may experience when registering. Also, an enhanced "Widevine Plug-In" section features an updated link that makes it easier to download Widevine for users' computers.

If you see a frequently asked question that is not answered on our support page, please let your hoopla Coordinator know, or drop us a line at support@hoopladigital.com.