Making your catalogue work for you - Amy Heap
•Descargar como PPTX, PDF•
2 recomendaciones•682 vistas
Presented at The librarian’s guide to the galaxy #ra2015
Recomendados
Recomendados
Más contenido relacionado
Destacado
Destacado (13)
Más de PublicLibraryServices
Más de PublicLibraryServices (20)
Último
Último (20)
Making your catalogue work for you - Amy Heap
- 1. Making Your Catalogue Work for You NoveList and NoveList Integration
- 5. Read-alikes
- 6. Keeping up with genres
- 11. The toolbox
- 13. Audio books
- 15. Simple
- 16. NoveList Select
Notas del editor
- NoveList Plus is a great Reader’s Advisory tool made available to all of us, free, through NSWNet. It has lots of great features and we’ll take a quick tour through those this morning, and we’re going to look at how you can get NoveList to integrate with your catalogue so that it can be working harder at Reader’s Advisory.
- I am a champion for a number of our databases, as every librarian should be, but Novelist has always been a particular favourite of mine. That is partly because it is full of the books that have made my life so rich and full, but also because it is so helpful for my work as a librarian, not only with Reader’s Advisory, but also marketing and promotion.
- There are lots of freely available RA tools online, such as Goodreads, and your customers may be familiar with those and used to reader reviews. I love to read what regular people from around the world have thought about particular books, but I don’t necessarily feel swayed by reader reviews, particularly if I don’t feel that I have interests in common with the readers. What NoveList has to offer that is different, is professionally suggested books (they use the word recommend), professional reviews, series information, many, many read-alikes and resources specifically for librarians.
- Let’s take a tour of NoveList. On the first screen you have a large banner with popular titles with three read-alikes underneath. These may be high profile new releases, such as the Ishiguro, or topical titles like the Terry Pratchett books. I have used these in newspaper articles and newsletters when there has been a heavily reserved title or a film version released. There are two pages worth of these, just hit the arrow to see the rest. Of course, every book in Novelist has read-alikes, so if there is a book or theme you are wishing to highlight for any reason, you can search for it and find the read-alikes. These are not only for title, but also series and author.
- Amazon does ‘Customers who bought this item also bought” and Goodreads does ‘Readers also enjoyed’ but often the link between the books is simply the nationality of the author, level of popularity or release date. Novelist actually justifies their read-alikes – when you hover over one, this pop up gives you a description of the book, the reasons why it is a read-alike and the opportunity to agree or disagree. Some of the suggestions are hand crafted, they have over 25 librarians on staff, and they also have an algorithm that takes into account the subjects, genres and appeal terms. The top example is a suggestion generated by the algorithm. It is a read-alike for Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, based on the genres of Love Stories and Historical Fiction, as well as the subject of India. The second example has been written by a librarian and is a read-alike for Burial rites, based on the fact that the suggested book is also a literary historical novel about an intelligent woman whose treatment at the hands of her master has resulted in terrible crimes. Both of these examples give detailed information to help us know if the books will be a good match. If, for example, a reader wanted to read more books set in Iceland, after reading Burial Rites, then the second example would not suit them.
- Lots of readers are very genre focused, and this can be discomfiting for us if their preferred genre is one that makes us run a mile. The Keeping up with genres page is great for customers to explore but also good for us to be informed about all genres, including those we are less likely to read.
- Here is the Science Fiction page, which helpfully defines the genre, links to articles considered to be genre essentials, and to reading lists.
- Scroll down and you get recent titles, more helpful articles and a reading map that you are encouraged to print and use as part of a display. This is also a great thing to share on social media. It is difficult to fill our social media accounts with original content, so it is very helpful to have access to material that is ready to post.
- Reading lists for the genres are also easily accessed from the front page. I think we easily think of NoveList for fiction, the name has ‘novel’ in it, but non-fiction is here, too. You can pick the age group you want your lists to apply to, as well. You can share this with customers so they can do their own research. I think an information session exploring the wonders of Novelist is also a great idea – user education and database promotion, win-win. You could either make it part of a session promoting all of your databases, or do a ‘What to Read Next’ session sharing NoveList as one of a number of useful tools.
- The lists look pretty basic until you click on the genres and discover a world of sometimes wacky sub-genres you never knew existed. Paranormal westerns – it’s a thing! And look at all the sub-genres for science fiction. These lists are great for when you are serving customers, creating displays or bookmarks or booklets to help people find great books.
- Across the top you find a link to the Professional Toolbox, which is full of helpful resources for librarians. You may like to do seasonal RA like the Americans do, do some reading on RA strategies, social media and RA, common RA scenarios and using the appeal characteristics. Plenty of options for educating yourself and getting ideas to use in your library. You can use the success stories provided to justify your own ideas to the powers that be.
- The Lists and Articles link across the top also has very useful items such as awards and notable books. While Novelist can, at times, seem very American, the list of awards is absolutely massive and includes lots of Australian awards. You will also find the book discussion guides here; very useful if you are running book clubs.
- Under ‘Spotlight On’, you can also find the audio book section, complete with listen-alikes.
- When you search for a particular book, you can see the wealth of information available. The appeal characteristics, which you will hear us talk about often with Readers’ Advisory, are here, and you can click to get definitions – the storyline (is it action-packed, character-driven or plot-driven?), the tone (is it light, dark, funny?) writing style (is it dialogue-rich, lyrical or spare?) – these help us be far more detailed in our understanding of what people like and why, and help us to search for books that are more likely to appeal to them. The results page also links to the title read-alikes, professional reviews, reader reviews on Goodreads, author information, and book discussion guides are under lists and articles.
- So, having established what an excellent and helpful resource NoveList is, apart from having the link on our eResources pages on our websites, how can we get Novelist working for us? It can be integrated with your catalogue in a really simple way, by having a link to NoveList’s listing on the results page for searches. A catalogue can be a dry and clinical sort of a place for our customers if all they can get is shelf location and availability, the link to NoveList makes them aware of further information and will hopefully open the treasure trove of Novelist for the customer. It works on ISBN, and I have found that as some items have multiple ISBNs, sometimes the link brings no results in NoveList. This is very unhelpful for customers at home, but you can inform them in the library, that you can just do a title search once you are in NoveList and get back on track. The other simple link is to have your own catalogue linked in NoveList, so that under the search results, as well as the read-alike information, you have a button that links back to your catalogue, so customers can check right away if you hold that book. Bitter is the disappointment of making a long list of fabulous sounding books only to discover later that your library doesn’t have copies.
- There is another, rather more involved and exciting option, called NoveList Select. This does come at a cost, the pricing is available on NSWNet, and is very reasonable at less than $1000 for even the biggest library, and it is available for all the major library management systems. It makes our catalogue an in-your-face Readers’ Advisory tool, putting book discovery front and centre. When customers search for a book, as well as the availability and shelf location, they can see series information, suggestions of other books they might like, including reasons for those suggestions, based on series, title and author, as well as the summary of the book. In the past I have compiled booklets of genre based reading lists using NoveList, and having to go back and forth, checking the catalogue and discovering we don’t hold copies, is an annoying waste of time. You can filter Novelist Select to only display titles available in your catalogue. Some libraries choose not to filter, giving patrons the option of discovering more and then requesting a book or obtaining it some other way.
- Scroll down and you can see an excerpt from the book, the appeal characteristics, lists and articles it appears in, professional and reader reviews. In essence, all the great things you usually go to Novelist for, are right there in your catalogue, no searching required. The Readers’ Advisory implications are obvious, but there are other angles as well. You can advertise your other under-utilised databases, your eNewsletters and library programs and events. I confess that when I agreed to talk about Novelist integration, I thought what we have, the link on the results page, was the only option. Now that I know about NoveList Select, I am very keen to get it! It is not yet very common in Australian libraries, but I do have a couple of Australian examples.
- This is Sutherland Shire Libraries’ catalogue results screen. Their Library Management System is ENCORE.
- Scroll down to find NoveList’s suggested titles and appeal characteristics.
- This is Ipswich Libraries’ results screen.
- Ipswich uses Bibliocommons as their Library Management System. You can adapt Novelist Select to your own style.
- It’s great to have genre experts in our libraries, those staff members who know all about cosy crime, romance or fantasy, and we turn to them whenever we have a question about that genre. But when we rely on one person for RA on a particular genre, we risk giving poor customer service, and we sell ourselves short. We have a comprehensive RA tool available to all of us, which can equip us to gain a knowledge of any genre we can be faced with – hello paranormal westerns; and we can integrate it with our catalogue to get it doing Readers’ Advisory work for us. Next time you are having a tiresome day, take some time out for database familiarisation and get lost in NoveList so you can point others in the right direction.