GRAND ISLAND, Neb. (KSNB) – The Grand Island City Council approved a three-year, $80,000 contract between the Grand Island Public Library and the popular digital service ‘Hoopla’ at Tuesday night’s meeting.

The contract will give the Library a budget to use Hoopla as part of its operations for the duration of the contract.

Library Director Celine Swan said patrons will notice a difference when requesting items through the service.

“We have a spending limit on our budget as we have a contracted budget for the next three years with Hoopla,” Swan said. “People can come in and get their items for the day and once the library reaches the limit for the day, they will have to wait until the next day to come back.”

The limits come in response to Hoopla’s growing popularity among library users. In recent years, user interest in Hoopla has driven up the library’s costs to the point of threatening to deplete its entire digital materials budget. This new daily limit is considered a necessity for the library to maintain a sustainable budget for all library programs and operations.

“The hype just exploded, especially during COVID,” Swan said. “People realized they could get amazing services from the library just by using their card. Our budget has increased by at least $15,000 in the last three years.”

Demand across the country has been high, but in Grand Island, Swan said he received a lot of feedback from families and individuals when issues with the service arose.

“When Hoopla wasn’t working exactly as planned, I got a lot of calls from people who love Hoopla and from a lot of families, who use Hoopla to get their items and save money, because they don’t have a big budget,” Cisne said. “The world has different ways of meeting their needs, not everyone can go out and check things out on Kindle or Amazon.”

Swan also said the service is popular with other groups and classrooms because it saves them money by getting the amount of books they need.

“Book clubs read a lot of great books and a lot of times they don’t want to have to pay to buy a book, so they can hop on Hoopla, borrow that item and save a lot of money,” Cisne said. “For classroom teachers “With Hoopla, there is no limit or license to the number of books, so if a teacher wants their class to read the same book at the same time, everyone can log in and take advantage of that.”

Hoopla has been a free library resource offered to patrons by the library and will continue to be so under this new agreement.

Programs such as Libby, Tumblebooks and Bonus Burrows will not be affected by the contract.

The program will begin under the new budget cap on Thursday and will run for the duration of the contract in 2027.

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