Two pairs of Davis records

Research

What the scholars published

Research papers examine who controls library systems. Each date comes from the cited paper.

1. 2016Nick Srnicek publishes Platform Capitalism (Polity), the account of platform economics that later library scholarship builds on.
2. 2023NYU's Engelberg Center publishes The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy: library ebooks are licensed, not owned. The report carries OverDrive's own claim to about 90% of the US and Canadian library ebook market, which is the vendor's figure rather than an independent measurement.
3. 2023Shim & Jhaver (Rutgers) publish a 15-librarian study of digital-content distributors: moderation and curation labor shifts onto librarians while control of the catalog does not.
4. 2026Mike Olson publishes "Operating the franchise" (Information Research 31(2)): library vendors operate as franchisors, and librarians administer "systems they neither control nor can meaningfully modify." In the academic catalog-and-discovery market the paper measures, a different vendor holds 72% of that market and 84% at the largest research libraries, an HHI of 6,934 against the "highly concentrated" threshold the paper cites. This is not the ebook market in the row above, and neither vendor is named in the records below.

Filings

What the filings say

Corporate and nonprofit records, two registries, one date line.

1. Mar 7, 2016A Utah nonprofit, entity 9699080, is incorporated as Parents Empowered in Education Resources and Support. The sole incorporator is a Utah private individual, not the book-rating operator.
2. 2021, fallFrancisco Partners, a private-equity firm, acquires Follett's K-12 software and content business, including the Destiny library catalog used across US school districts. The parties' announcements say September; independent trade press says October. The month is disputed; the acquisition is not.
3. Oct 26, 2021Entity 9699080 renames itself Empowered Parents by unanimous board vote.
4. Oct 30, 2023Simon & Schuster becomes KKR-owned, $1.62B.
5. May 16, 2025RatedBooks.org files Utah Articles of Incorporation, entity 14574510.
6. Aug 1, 2025The IRS grants RatedBooks.org 501(c)(3) status, EIN 39-2728966.
7. ~2025-09Follett Content Solutions enters the public-library market. Whether this is the company's first entry is not established here. The timing relative to the Baker & Taylor collapse is our reading, not a claim the company makes.

Board decisions

What the boards voted

Statute and school-board minutes, as passed and as published.

1. Feb 11, 2022Utah HB374 is numbered and publicly distributed. Sponsor Rep. Ken Ivory; floor sponsor Sen. Todd Weiler.
2. Mar 24, 2022HB374 is signed into law, defining "sensitive material" for Utah school libraries.
3. Aug 2, 2022Davis School District's board passes a complete rewrite of its library policy on first reading, the first document in that board's published record to use the phrase "sensitive material." Checked across every text-readable attachment, agenda and set of minutes published from Oct 2005 to Jul 2022: no earlier use.
4. Mar 19, 2024The Davis board approves a Sensitive Materials Appeal Committee recommendation to remove three titles as one item among Consent Items 1–6, carried 7–0, none opposed, no title named in the minutes. The titles are in the attached exhibit. No recording of the meeting is held here, so what was said aloud is not established.
5. Aug 19, 2026Read row by row, Utah's statewide removal list holds 37 titles. Davis School District is one of the removing districts on 36 of them, Washington County on 32, Granite on 8. The statute needs three districts before a title reaches the list, so a large district that runs the formal process is almost always among them rather than acting alone.

Software

What the software does

Product announcements, catalog access, and the published product, as observed.

1. ~2025-10RatedBooks announces BookLens, a barcode-scanner tool aggregating three rating databases into a single point-of-shelf lookup. The tool is documented; the announcement date rests on a working note, and the earliest saved copy of BookLens itself is Jul 2026.
2. Dec 1, 2025A Tooele County (UT) curriculum director directs staff by email to pull four reviewed titles from the library and from the district's Follett system.
3. Feb 20, 2026The book-rating operator, one of three parent volunteers, is given access to Davis School District's Follett catalog at an elementary school to enter titles, authors and ISBNs. The complainant's notes describe about 90 minutes of librarian-level access; the district neither confirms nor specifically denies that description.
4. Feb 24, 2026A Davis library supervisor sends a memo to library staff in the district: the district does not upload rating systems into Follett, and parent volunteers should not have administrator access.
5. Apr 14, 2026Two product videos demonstrate removal-target selection against a school district's Destiny catalog export. Neither video names a district or a school; one is addressed to a district, the other to parents. A third video, on Jun 1, works against a named Davis School District high school's inventory list.
6. Jul 1, 2026On camera, the operator describes a paid integration of RatedBooks ratings into a library's own catalog system, priced by the size of the library.
7. by Aug 17, 2026The policy-flag mechanism described on camera is present in the published product. The date is when the page was saved, a no-later-than bound, not the date the mechanism appeared.