Integrating Overdrive into your Koha system

The NH Downloadable Books Consortium brings audio and e-books to NH readers through their public libraries.  When nhaisLOCAL began the only way to get individual downloadable titles into a library's OPAC was to load marc records, with links to the title on the NH Downloadable site for each title into your local catalog. This is still an option (see NHAIS Copy Cataloging Services), but requires regular loading of records as new titles are added to the collection and removal of records if any are deacessioned from the downloadables collection.

There is now an option for libraries to integrate the downloadables titles into their nhaisLOCAL catalog without the ongoing loading of records. The new approach will let patrons search your OPAC for a title and will display what you hold and what is in the NH Downloadables Collection in real time.

Integrated Search results (double click on an image to enlarge it)

The Somersworth Public Library served as a test case for this nhaisLOCAL configuration and Michelle Baker, Library Assistant at Somersworth Public Library, has put together detailed directions to guide other nhaisLOCAL libraries in this integration process. The setup in Koha is easy, but you have to obtain some credentials from Overdrive which takes a bit of time. Michelle's directions walk you through the whole thing.

Once you have set everything up and it is working as you want it to, you will want to have all the old Overdrive records removed from your system. When you are ready to to have these removed please send a support request to nhu-pac@dcr.nh.gov and we will get it taken care of for you.