What is the proposed product or service?

A CARLI-wide downloadable film collection

What does it do?

As you know, films are becoming available in digital form. This would create a central repository of such films that could be "checked out" ala My Media Mall or Net Library.

What problem does it solve?

Interlibrary loan of films is still very limited. This would solve that. It would also allow for the creation of a very robust collection (as more and more films are available digitally) because it would decrease the amount of duplication. Moreover, market preassures are going to do away with DVDs in the next decade or so. There is too much money to be made by film companies directly selling to consumers rather than through middlemen. In other words, this will help solve a large scale format migration problem.

Is it the only product or service that does this?

There are services like My Media Mall which serve digital content to libraries. However, you (the user) are subject to their collection development.

Will this require integration with an existing CARLI product or service?

Hmmmm...I can imagine a link from a Voyager (or even an Open World Cat record (if that could be accessed via a proxy server for authentication) record for a film that would allow the "check out" process to begin.

What is the advantage of doing this consortially?

As I said earlier, it would allow for the creation of a large, varied, and shared, resource that would obviate the interlibrary loan issues with films. It seems doable (look at I-tunes, YouTube, even Wal Mart is getting into the downloadable film game).

CARLI Actions on this Product

This was reviewed by staff and declined for the following reason. While we have the disk space to store this data, CARLI does not have access to enough bandwidth through CITES to serve streaming video to libraries.

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