One of the problems with providing these services to our patrons is that we have to justify the cost of the subscription. That's easy to do if we know a lot of patrons are using the service, but traditionally it has been hard to interest people in free access to subscription content. I asked a while back what we could do about this, but the discussion forum was very new then, and we didn't get any response.

We've been thinking about this, and about what kind of content our patrons would be interested in accessing. In terms of the physical collection, a trend we cannot ignore is that audio/visual materials are circulating more and more. So we've decided to try adding a video content service to our collection of information services.

On the one hand, MyLibraryDV requires the user to first download and install special software (and there are some obvious wrinkles: when I tried it, it told me sorry, there's no Mac support at this time-- odd, since I am not using a Mac); whereas, services like Ebsco Host, ReferenceUSA, and Electric Library allow the user to just jump in and get started right away, with no special software. On the other hand, those services provide mostly textual information, but MyLibraryDV provides movies. And we know people like to watch movies. The question is, do they like movies enough to bother with installing special software?

We'd really like to get some feedback on this. Is the need to install software in order to get started a problem for you? If you've tried out the service, what do you think of it?