Power Up Your Ram Card (Student ID)
Poudre River Public Library District, Colo.
Innovation Synopsis
Poudre River Public Library District partnered with Colorado State University to enable the CSU ID to serve as a PRPLD library card. The initiative, Power-up Your Ram Card, allows students convenient on-line and in-person access to all public library services without the need for two separate registrations or cards.
Challenge/Opportunity
Colorado State University Morgan Library and Poudre River Public Library District already collaborate on a community author series, shared database purchases and staff training. The CSU community is a significant segment of the population that PRPLD serves, representing approximately 17% of current cardholders. The catalyst for this project was a CSU student who questioned why his Ram Card which serves other purposes such as a public transportation pass, could not be his public library card too. Why not? A dual purpose Ram card would encourage easier and greater use of public library resources, especially popular digital resources including eBooks, magazines, music and audio, services that do not support the academic mission of a university library.
Key Elements of Innovation
IT staff at both libraries developed a simple process. Participants opt-in on-line to share their student record. CSU prepares a nightly file in MARC format for PRPLD, containing only information that is required for a PRPLD card. The project includes use of the open source CSharp-MARC library. Once in the PRPLD database, students become public library cardholders with the same privileges and responsibilities as other community cardholders. The project was piloted during freshman orientation in June 2014. Our two libraries developed a public awareness campaign to advertise throughout the campus and officially launched the project at start of fall semester.
Achieved Outcomes
To date, approximately 1,100 individuals have registered their Ram Card IDs as public library cards, a positive indicator of success for 7 months of promotion. Both libraries want to increase this number and realize that frequent marketing efforts, analysis and follow-up with students are necessary to keep them engaged public library users now and in the future. Promotions in both libraries and on campus are on-going as are social media announcements and personalized email messages via OrangeBoy’s customer intelligence dashboard. The primary technical goal to connect students to public library resources was achieved. The IT team met the challenge of data conversion, formatting, massaging, validation, exporting and scheduling. A similar dual library card /student ID has been proposed to our local school district.
