Library Future's Take on Hoopla's Content Problem

In “Hoopla's Content Problem: Strange, Skewed Results Still Dominate Catalog,” Laura Crossett and Jennie Rose Halperin document some unfortunate search returns in Hoopla’s Pay-Per-use model: “in trying to offer the most content over quality content, Hoopla serves up an enormous amount of erroneous, low quality information at the top of search results. Top line searches return a plethora of irrelevant, seemingly AI-generated, and even pirated materials that often differ greatly from the choices that librarians make for their communities.”

They contrast searches done on WorldCat and Hoopla for fiction and non-fiction topics, with Hoopla returning “so much of what our colleague Sarah Lamdan of the American Library Association calls ‘vendor slurry,’ or low quality materials” that by any objective standard skew radically to the right and religious, such as a search on “Democrats” that retrieves the titles Whites, Blacks, and Racist Democrats and The Only GOD (caps in the original), the U.S. Constitution, and the Democrats as two of the first hits.

They rightly ask “why does that content rise so high in the search results? Are patrons searching for bestselling authors looking to read poor quality summaries of their work? Should patrons searching for information on hot-button topics be getting such clearly skewed results?”

 Readers may try their own Hoopla searches. Mine validate the criticism. Should America’s Death Spiral from ebookit and the self-published Democrats’ Dirty Deeds and The Ass is a Poor Receptacle for the Head really be coming to the top of a search? Interestingly, a search for “Republicans” does not offer any similar quality (if opposed in view) results in the first ten hits, but others appear later, including summaries of various works such as Summary of Steve Benen’s The Imposters, written by IRB Media. AI generated schlock, anyone?

The authors “are not advocating censorship of materials. Hoopla is free to offer whatever content they want, and libraries are free to select whatever content they feel best fits the needs of their communities. But the key word is select. Hoopla’s model bypasses selection in favor of an all-or-nothing subscription in which you get what you get, and the lack of oversight at the top trickles down to patrons seeking quality information at their libraries.”

To be fair, librarians can suppress content in Hoopla, an activity which, we can hope, would be done on the basis of quality and factuality. The problem is that the “slurry” has become so commonplace that it would have to somebody’s fulltime job to de-select.

My aim in sharing Library Future’s post is not to discourage Indie titles. Far from it. An emphasis on quality Indie and small-press titles is vital as a wedge against outlandish Big 5 license terms (i.e. costs). But are we pushing poorly edited and factually dubious content even while we teach information literacy and fight misinformation? As a library director, my concerns also have to be in part fiscal. Hoopla use is growing for us, and the costs are now all-but unsustainable. Are patrons borrowing mere summaries—which they probably don’t really want— at a cost every time? Are we paying for works that have no more truthfulness than a debunked social media post?

If you are concerned, please consider joining Crossett and Halperin’s call to discuss strategy.