Why I Love NoveList, And You Should, Too: Part One

Librarians are expected to know everything, and that can be a little intimidating. Luckily, I find that you don't have to know everything... you just have to know where to find it. This can be particularly tricky when doing readers' advisory, because no matter how many books you read, shelve, and hear about, there are always more that are just out of reach: there are just too many books in the world for any one person to know them all. As such, please allow me to introduce you my personal favorite RA database.

What is NoveList, and why do I care?

In short, NoveList is a reader's advisory database. You care because it will make your librarian life easier by orders of magnitude, and if you geek out about stuff like this (like I do), you can have a lot of fun with it, too.  There's a lot to it, but no need to be intimidated; we've split it into two parts to make it more manageable. (Don't have NoveList where you work? Check the library in the town where you live; it might surprise you!)

Here's what NoveList has to offer you:

The Toolbar

For this article, we're just going to focus on the toolbar at the top of the page. I think we can get through this without too much worry, right?

 Lists & Articles

The "Lists and Articles" tab of the menu bar offers:

• Author Read-Alikes - For those who love a certain author and have no idea what to pick up once they've finished reading their entire body of work
• Book Discussion Guides - Why reinvent the wheel for your book club, when you can get the questions here? You may even see things you hadn't thought about. ("Wait, there's symbolism in the rain? I just thought it was lousy weather!")
• Feature Articles - Read about topics and recommended titles from a variety of genres. More on that in a moment.
• Grab and Go Book Lists - Planning a lesson or program, or need a new display? Grab a list and go for it!
• Picture Book Extenders - Ideas and activities to make your picture books last past story time. Includes summaries, discussion questions, related titles, activities, grade levels, author information, etc. (Helpful hint: When a parent complains that they just can't read The Princess and the Pig one more time, print out this page to give them more to do than just reading it again and again. Great book, by the way.)

Articles

This section of the database is truly impressive. Each article has been written by a contributor to the database; credentials are listed at the bottom of the article, so you know that they know their stuff. They may be very specific or fairly broad in scope. For example, the wonderful "#SherlockLives: An Investigation into the Enduring Appeal and Many Sides of Sherlock Holmes" by Jennifer Brannen goes into detail about the enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes, a couple sub-genres of Sherlockian literature, and commentary about its broad appeal. This is obviously very focused, whereas "Sesquicentennial: The American Civil War in Fiction" by Bethany Latham is a "Civil War Round-Up," much more broad in scope, and recommends books that may appeal to a wide variety of readers. There are as many articles as their are topics, all lovingly-written by people who have a real interest in their particular topic.

 Professional Toolbox

This tab is the librarian's gateway to becoming amazing at Readers' Advisory. Here, find:

• Readers' Advisory - There is so much stuff here! Book display ideas, discussion guides, lists of award winners, lists of books that have been made into movies, genre overviews, articles about using social media for RA, success stories of what other librarians have done... and so much more! If you're going to play around with NoveList, I recommend you start here.
• Working with Youth - This page includes sections on reading for pleasure, reading for school, ideas for educators, matching readers with books, programming, and more. There is a newsletter called "Kids & Books" that can be accessed from this page.

Spotlight On... 

 

• Award Winners -You can easily see lists of award winning books and the year they won, and search books by genre.
• Genres - Sure, we all know what a romance novel is, but what exactly is a "paranormal romance?" Find all the genres and sub-genres you could ever need here, with reading suggestions.

And so much more!

We're just scraping the surface of what this database has to offer. Check back in two weeks to read part two of Why I Love NoveList, And You Should, Too. July Update: NoveList rolled out new features! We have the scoop on what's new!