Good things come in fives: fingers, food groups, the Great Lakes, and LibraryWorks’ Modern Library Awards. We’re thrilled to receive our fifth consecutive Platinum Award in 2020 for Transparent Language Online.

The Modern Library Awards (MLAs) are like the People’s Choice Awards, but better because the voters are librarians. The MLAs were established to recognize the top products and services in the library industry, with products and services being reviewed by the LibraryWorks database of more than 80,000 librarians at public, K-12, academic, and special libraries.

Only librarians who have firsthand experience using a product or service are permitted to judge it. Each judge scores the product from 1-10 on a series of questions regarding functionality, value, customer service, and beyond.

Awards are given on the following scores:

• Platinum (8.5 – 10.0)
• Gold (7.5 – 8.4)
• Silver (6.50 – 7.4)

For the fifth year in a row, Transparent Language Online has received a Platinum Award, the highest honor possible!

Our Library Programs Manager, Lauren Gancarz, gives credit back to our customers:

“We can’t thank our library customers enough for helping us to achieve this award five years in a row. Throughout the year, we receive insightful, actionable feedback about how to improve Transparent Language Online for library patrons and their staff.  Whether that be new language offerings or updates to the reporting dashboard – we’re always listening. I take that feedback back to my team and we use it as a guide for the year ahead.”

That feedback enables us to develop a platform that patrons love. Our team regularly travels to conferences around the US and Canada to meet with librarians and better understand what they need to serve diverse communities interested in learning languages.

In 2019, customer feedback inspired us to:

• Expand our ESL collection to include new beginner English courses for speakers of Tamil and Hebrew.
• Improve the mobile experience, including new push notifications that encourage learners to log in every day and refresh their Learned Vocab.
• Enable librarians to schedule recurring reports, so they automatically receive reports on a regular basis to better monitor usage and measure ROI.
• Redesign and expand the Library Marketing Kit to help our customers reach their patrons and make the most of this resource.

This award speaks to the success of that collaborative relationship with our libraries. To our existing library partners, thank you, merci, gracias, 谢谢, and beyond. To librarians curious about bringing languages to their communities, we’re excited to meet you in 2020 and show you what’s new in Transparent Language Online for Libraries.