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OverDrive's Advantage program

OverDrive's "Advantage" program allows individual members of a consortium to purchase titles specifically for their users. These Advantage titles are available in addition to the titles in the base digital collection.

The Advantage program is a great way for individual libraries within a consortium to customize their collection for their community's needs or to reduce wait times for popular titles by offering extra copies. (Some library consortia can span an entire U.S. state, so customization at the county or city level may be helpful to tailor the collection.)

Schools with OverDrive collections can use Advantage accounts to purchase titles for specific grades within a school, specific schools within a district, etc. In the APIs, Advantage is treated the same way for libraries and schools.

In the OverDrive APIs:

  • You can determine whether a library or school has any Advantage accounts associated with it via the Library Account API. In the response, there's an advantageAccounts link that you can call to get a list of all Advantage accounts for that consortium.
  • The collection token (retrieved from the Library Account API) you use in future API calls determines which titles are shown in the responses: consortium-only, Advantage-only, or Advantage + consortium titles.
  • When using the Circulation suite of APIs, a user's library card or school login determines which titles they have access to. Via the Patron Information API, you can retrieve a specific collectionToken that represents all titles that specific user has access to.

Advantage sharing

Advantage accounts can also choose to share the titles they've purchased with the consortium. The Advantage account maintains ownership of the titles, but users from all over the consortium can borrow and place holds on them.

In the OverDrive APIs:

  • Shared titles appear in the Library Availability API v2 (shared = true).
  • If a title is shared, you'll see which Advantage account owns the title, how many copies they own, and how many are available. In a Library Availability response, an Advantage account has a positive account id, and the consortium account is always id = -1. See this Library Availability API response about shared titles to learn more.
  • Users who belong to the Advantage library or school have priority when placing holds on shared titles. This means that they will skip ahead of consortium users on the wait list.