Sorry, I personally fail quesiton 1. There is no series that I would like to read. Oops, guess there is one that's coming out now that has my attention...The Guardians of Childhood. The search for that series was interesting because it is divided into picture books and chapter books. The view option has been very helpful to me in the past when there is a large series of books and a patron has wanted a list. Being able to just print out the titles of the series in order has come in handy often.
The read alike panel offering 9 choices has been a great tool to interest my young patrons in finding new authors to try. They are very interested in the brief description because they can relate to the book they have read and know that the next one has similar content. TheNoveList database has information about way more books than I have or will ever read which makes it so helpful.
A few years ago I attended an informational session about NoveList in Topsham. It was a great training and spurred me on to share all that it had to offer with our patrons. At that training we learned that you could get a link to your library's catalog so that patrons could link through and see if the book they wanted was in your collection. Ever since that time at WPL we have had a link from our homepage to NoveList that shares our catalog.
One of the most interesting searches I did involved a sixth grade patron who only wanted to read a book that had a murder in it. I was skeptical about how many choices she would have and was quite surprised to find that we had at least 30 books in our Children's Room collection that fit the bill. Sometimes we don't know what we have until someone asks.
Having read a few blog posts I hope that if folks get the chance to ever take a formal training on NoveList that they take advantage of it. Many of the features that are surprising folks were covered that day. NoveList also sends out monthly tips that you can sign up for that keep your skills sharp and introduce new options.
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