 Okay this is Susan Nisley. I work at the Nebraska Library Commission and today's online training session is on Novelist Plus, one of the new Nebraska Access databases that we began having access to on July 1st of this year. We will spend the hour looking at how you can use this database. So one of the first questions I always like to answer about this training, about this database and training sessions is what is Novelist Plus. It is an online readers advisory service designed to answer the question, what should I read next? The target audience for this database as I see it includes librarians who perform collection development duties or who perform readers advisory services. I think this database will also be of interest to some of your patrons who are avid readers who are always looking for new books to read. If your patron is someone who likes to go in and browse bookstores, who likes to browse the library shelves and come away with new ideas of books they might want to read. I think they could become very big fans of Novelist. The experience of browsing around Novelist is actually somewhat similar to browsing around a bookstore. When you finish you usually have a list of titles for additional books you might want to read. Additionally, I think teachers and school librarians are an ideal target for this database. If they are looking for a perfect book to supplement a lesson or a title to engage a reluctant reader. So we've got a lot of potential audiences for this database. So let's talk now about coverage. We actually have access to two different versions of Novelist. We have access to Novelist Plus and Novelist K8 Plus. Novelist K8 Plus is actually to the best of my ability to determine it. It is a true subset of Novelist Plus. I have not found anything in Novelist K8 Plus yet that I haven't also been able to find in Novelist Plus. And so that is why when I do training I do use Novelist Plus since it is the more inclusive broader database. So as far as what is covered, Novelist Plus covers fiction, narrative nonfiction. And what they mean by narrative nonfiction is nonfiction that reads that you read for enjoyment or that reads like fiction. And so that would include things like biographies, memoirs, historic nonfiction. It does not include textbooks or how-to books like cookbooks or something like knitting for dummies. Novelist Plus targets readers by reading level or audience category. And they have four audience categories that they target. And you will see these audience categories showing up throughout the interface. Adult teens, which they categorize as ages 13 through 18, ages 9 through 12, and ages 0 through 8. So Novelist K8 Plus contains the same information with the following two exceptions. There is no information about audiobooks in Novelist K8 Plus, whereas Novelist Plus does include information about audiobooks. And Novelist K8 Plus doesn't include the audience level adult. It does include teens ages 9 through 12 and ages 0 through 8. So that is the distinction between the two versions of Novelist that we have access to. So what kind of information is included in Novelist? You're gonna find about specific books you're going to find. Bibliographic information, and by this I mean information like author, title, publication date, publisher, ISBN. Also metadata about books. And it's not going to be complete cataloging information, but you will find subject terms that are associated with the book, genre labels that are associated with the book, other descriptive labels that are assigned to the book. For many titles, you'll also find professional book reviews from publications like Booklist, library journal, school library journal, publishers Weekly and Kirkus. You will find series information if a book is part of a series. That includes information about the order in which the books should be read in the series. For popular authors, you'll find author information. And then you're also going to find a lot of proprietary content that is created specifically for Novelist by Novelist staff members or by other readers advisory librarians in the field or other literary professionals who are interested in books and reading. And this supplemental proprietary information is really aimed at helping us become better readers advisors. And it is described in many areas of the interface. It'll be categorized, this information is often categorized under the heading lists and articles. And so we'll see that content as we go along. So to start out, I thought we do a search for a known title. And this is a really good strategy that you can follow if you are doing readers advisory. Oftentimes, you will be able to ask a patron what is a book that you really liked. And if they can tell you a book that they liked and that they'd like to find more books that are similar to it, you can use that book as a starting point. So I'm going to go ahead and do a search for the girl with the dragon tattoo. So I'm going to type that in my search box at the top of the screen. And I do want to point out over here on the left, the default type of search performed is keyword. I could select title, author, series or narrator from my drop down menu here and do a more specific search. But typically I will just leave my search set as keyword and I'll show you why I do that as soon as I get my search results here. So I'm going to click on search. And when you do a keyword search, your results will be displayed in a tabbed result list. By default, I'm going to get the books tab first. So any books that match my search terms will show up. Searches, search results are sorted by relevance and so the best match is ideally going to be at the top of my list. And in this case, that's the exact title I was looking for. So that's why I didn't really feel the need to actually specify that I'm doing a title search. Just pointing out the other tabs that you can access. There's an audiobooks tab. And so if there are audiobook versions of this title, you will find those on the audiobooks tab. If the book is part of a series, you'll find information about or a link to the series record on the series tab. On the authors tab, you'll see that my top result is a record for the author of the book that I was looking for. And then here's that lists and articles category that I was talking about when I was talking about the supplemental proprietary articles and lists that are created for novelists. If in this case, the girl with the dragon tattoo appears or is referenced in any lists or articles, then that material will show up on the lists and articles tab of my result list. So obviously it is probably mentioned in this article about thrillers and suspense. It was probably named on library journal best books of 2008, et cetera. So that's kind of how the tab result list works. So I really want to go into the record for the specific book. So I'm going to click on the title and this is going to take me to what is called a book detail page. There are, you will find detail pages for books, for authors, for a series, for audiobooks. They will all have their own detail pages. And so what you're going to see most often is a book detail page. So I just want to go over what kind of information you can typically expect to find when you're looking at a page for a specific book. Most notably, you've got the cover image of the book. And underneath that, you will see popularity rating with yellow stars. And I want to say a few words about this popularity rating. This information actually comes from sales data obtained from Baker and Taylor about the number of copies sold to bookstores and libraries. So this popularity doesn't really correspond to, oh, the majority of readers who read this book gave it five stars. This is how much they liked it. This has a little bit more to do with how many copies of the book were distributed. So it is not unusual if you've got a book that doesn't have as wide of readership or it's got a narrower audience. Even though it's highly reviewed and well-respected, it might have only a few popularity stars and that just means that it hasn't not as many copies have been distributed. You also have a link to Goodreads, which is the social networks networking service that lots of readers like to use. And you have some red stars under the Goodreads link. And those stars actually do correspond to what Goodreads users have rated the book. So when all of the ratings from Goodreads users were compiled and averaged, they gave this book four stars. I actually like this link to Goodreads a lot because when you click on it, it will take you out to the Goodreads page for the particular book in question. So you can get more information about the book, bibliographic information, information about where you could purchase it. There's a preview option. You'll also get lots of user reviews. Obviously, these are not professional reviewers, but I think it's still valuable to get a flavor for the book. You can get a sense of whether it might be a book that you or your patrons would like based on the type of people who are reading and reviewing it, the types of things they say, et cetera. So I really do like this Goodreads link. Moving over to the right, you always have the title of the book. You have the month and year of publication. You have the author name and you'll see that the author name is a hyperlink, and if you click on it, you go to the author detail page, which I mentioned a minute ago. Depending on the author, you'll have a little background information on the author, information about the types of material or types of books that the author typically writes, and you'll have information about books he or she has published. So that's an example of an author detail page. You're always going to have one of the audience or reader level indicators. In this case, this book is aimed at an adult audience. It's fiction, and if the book has been given an award, then you'll have the blue ribbon icon here. If the book is part of a series, you'll have the series title and its place in the series, and you can click on that link if you want to go to the series detail page. Obviously, the serial detail page lists all the books in the series in the correct series order. You're going to have a very brief description of the book at this point in the record, and then you're going to get to something called book appeal terms. And I want to stop a moment and talk a little bit more about these book appeal terms because this is really a corner stone of the novelist database and how they make book recommendations. Appeal terms really are an attempt to capture why people enjoy a certain book. Appeal terms try to capture sort of the mood or the flavor of a book. Appeal is different than subject or genre or geographic location. So you can have two books that have the same subject matter that appear in the same genre are set in the same location, and yet they might appeal to vastly different users. So you could have two books that are about librarians that are mysteries and are set in Nebraska, but maybe one is a cozy mystery with a quirky, funny protagonist, and maybe the other is a really dark, dark noir type mystery that is more disturbing, that has a more existential angsty kind of main character. Those books might appeal to very different users. Appeal terms try to capture that. So I want to go ahead right at this point and click on this definition of appeal terms. You're always going to have a link to this definition in each detailed record. And so I want to at least show you how to get access to some important information about appeal. When you get to this about appeal in Novelist Plus page, you do have a paragraph describing what appeal is. You'll have a link that says learn more about the use of appeals in Novelist, and you can go out and look at that page if you want more information about appeal. And there is actually a link here where you can download a copy of a little booklet that they've put together about appeal. This is a booklet that we handed out during the road show, but you can download a print copy as well. The other link is probably even more important on this page. It will take you to a page that lists all the appeal terms used in Novelist by Novelist staff members. This page is not particularly laid out in an appealing manner, but I think it would be really useful to print it out and keep it handy behind the desk because I think it's a useful tool when you're doing searching. Appeal terms are organized into broad categories. So there are terms that describe the characters in a book, terms that describe the storyline, pace, tone, writing style, if applicable, illustrations, and if it's an audio book, then audio characteristics. So this page will go by each category and it will list all the appeal terms that might be used to describe, for instance, characters in a particular book. It will also tell you what audience levels, a particular appeal term is used for. So Ability Diverse will describe characters living with physical, mental, or emotional conditions. And it is used in association with teen titles and titles for ages 9 through 12 and ages 0 through 8. So I really think printing off this page would be handy to have this appeal term list handy. So you can look for books that have sarcastic or sassy characters, or snarky, or strong female, twisted, unlikable, mischievous, large casts of characters. Under storyline, you can have things like plot-driven, or sweeping, or non-linear, action-packed, or character-driven. I think pace is one where it's really easy to understand why the pace of a book might matter to a reader. If you have someone who likes fast-paced books and you give them a recommendation for some leisurely paced epic that spans continents and different generations of a family, they might not enjoy that book. So pace is something that I think is often very important to readers. You also have tone, and here you get it things like chased versus explicit versus, I think, steamy, racy humor. So you can kind of target the level of explicitness in a romance, perhaps, spiritual, or silly or sobering. Writing style, illustrations, and audio characteristics. So again, these are really central to how Novelist helps to identify books that might appeal to a reader. So returning back to our record for this particular book, you do have a genre category, and it will tell you what genres this book has been assigned to. And genres really go beyond what we think of when we think of genres. We might think of basic genres like romance, mystery, western, science fiction. They include those basic genres, but they also include genre terms like books to movies, Scandinavian crime fiction, translations, et cetera. So genres go way beyond what we think about when we just think about genres off the cuff. Next we have the actual appeal terms assigned to the book for the various categories. So characters in this book are authentic, brooding, complex, strong, female. The storyline is character-driven and intricately plotted, et cetera. So just looking at the appeal terms assigned to a book can help you or a patron identify whether that book might be of interest to the patron. Scrolling down the page, in the middle of the page, you have a section where information is divided into tabs. The first tab will show you professional book reviews. The next tab will show you any audiobook editions of the particular title that are available. More about this book actually doesn't add a lot to your understanding of the book, but it does give you publisher number of pages. It will also give you a list of ISBNs that have been assigned to different editions of the book. Finally, we have that lists and articles tab. And as you'll remember earlier, I mentioned that a lot of that supplemental material written specifically for the database shows up under lists and articles headings. So in this particular case, we know from the blue ribbon icon that the book has won awards. So we have lists here, links to lists of awards that the book has won. So you can find out other books that have won the similar awards. We also have a link to a reader's advisory article on getting up to speed in thrillers and suspense. So as we proceed throughout the session today, we're going to look at a lot more of this type of supplemental content that's included in the database. Just keep in mind that when you're looking up records for individual books, if there is some of that supplemental content that's related to the book in question, it will often show up on those lists and articles tabs of the detailed book page. Finally, at the very bottom of a book detail record, you will have the genre headings and the appeal terms assigned to the book broken out. And this is basically a form and you'll be able to select the individual genres or appeal terms or subject headings associated with the book that particularly appeal to you. And then you can do a search from this point to find other books that share those same appeal terms or subject headings. So that is one way that you can search for additional titles that share some of the same characteristics. Before you do that, though, I would always suggest that you look over on the right side of the screen to the section called Read-A-Likes. For every book in the database, there's going to be a list of up to at least nine Read-A-Likes that appear on the right side of the book detail page. These are books that are recommended that if the patron likes the girl with a dragon tattoo, they might also like these other books. If you hover your mouse over one of the book covers, you will get a pop-up window that gives you a description of the book. It will tell you the audience level, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, and they're also going to tell you, and this is important, they're going to tell you the reason why it's considered a Read-A-Like. What aspects does it share in comment with the original book that you started out with that will again help you decide whether it's a good match for your particular reader based on what they liked about the book. One thing I want to point your attention to here is under the reason, if you see a person's name at the end of the reason, that means that this recommendation is made by a human being. So this has been hands-on recommendation by one of the Readers Advisory Staff Members at Novelist. Occasionally you will find recommendations that have no name associated with the reason, and in those cases that recommendation was derived from a computerized algorithm that they run, and so it is going to look at things like what appeal terms does share in comment, things like that. So you've got human-generated Read-A-Like recommendations and also machine-generated recommendations. Up here you'll see there's a View All link, so if you want to print out a list of all the nine Read-A-Likes for your patrons so that they can take that list home with them and look up books for future reference, you can display that list and then print it out in a nice format that you can handle your patron. So that is an overview of the book detail page. So again this is one strategy for finding recommendations for patrons. Start with a book you know they've liked and then from there you'll see appeal terms assigned to that book, you'll get Read-A-Likes, etc. So it's a good starting point. So I'm going to go ahead and go back to the home page. And what I want to do now is I want to start out looking at these recommended reads lists over on the left side of the screen. There are I think when we were out doing the road show I said oh they're like thousands of these lists. Well I finally did an explicit search on the document type recommended reads and I think they're like 670 of these lists. So not as many as I said but still a lot of recommended reading lists here. In order to view these lists you do have to decide whether you're interested in fiction or nonfiction and again you have to decide what reading level or audience level you're interested in. So I'm going to leave my list set to fiction and I'm going to say teen audience and what you'll see here is you'll see categories that they've grouped their recommended read lists into. If you scroll through and you click on a category you are then going to get a flyout menu that shows you the titles of lists that they have filed under that particular category heading. So under all kinds of lives you'll have lists that give you suggested suggested books that deal with Muslim teen lives or Asian teen lives or the disability experience for teens. So you've got probably 10 different lists under this category that you can access. Down here you have a category that is focused on the fantasy and science fiction genre. So when you click on that category and view the specific lists that they have filed there you're going to see lists that focus on more subgenres within that category. So witches and wizards or steampunk or dystopias. One category of lists that I really want to show you because I think it's really interesting and unique is they have a four fans of category. We often think about doing readers advisory based on other books that a patron has liked but here they're approaching it from a slightly different direction and they're saying you know ask the patron what sorts of TV shows do they like? What sorts of movies do they like? Even what kinds of musical groups do they like? So they're doing readers advisory based on all sorts of media consumption. So I get a particular kick out of this one here it says for fans of One Direction if you've got teens who like the One Direction music group what books might they like? So this is a recommended reading list for fans of One Direction and it gives you the description. All of these books on this list would be described as charming chick-lit and romance set in the UK as well as a few titles directly inspired by One Direction fan fiction that will please the most die-hard directioners. So you've got the list you can scroll through and see the titles that they're recommending. If you hover your mouse over one of the cover images you will get a description of the book. They do indicate in their help documentation that these lists are updated or looked at once a year so that doesn't mean that they're going to add all new material all new titles to the list but you will have if there's been anything newly published within the last year that would fit on the list you will see those titles showing up on the list. So we've got something that came out in September of 2015 on this list. If you would like to be able to print this list and hand it to a patron so that they can take it with them you may want to reformat the display so that you get the detailed description of the book along with the cover image and bibliographic information. So once I've changed my display so I've got the book description I can then click on the print icon and I have a nice clean page that I can send to the printer and then hand out to the patron. One thing you might have noticed once we're in a recommended reading list over to the right you'll see additional lists and these are the additional lists that were in that same category for fans of so you can easily access other similar lists over to the right. Just as a reminder you can access those recommended reading lists directly from the homepage by drilling down through the categories but they will also appear when you do searches they'll appear on the lists and articles tab on book detail pages. So we've talked about searching for a particular book as a starting point for readers advisory sometimes you may want to just start with you you don't need to you don't necessarily want to look at what appeal terms were assigned to a particular book you just want to use appeal terms to find a book and there is a couple good ways to do that. On the home page right under the search box you've got and I'm in the mood for books that are tool again you do have to choose a reading level and in this case I'm going to choose the reading level ages 9 through 12 and what this gives you is it gives you some pre combined appeal term combinations so they've taken some appeal terms and combine them together and then give you some book recommendations so you've got books for 9 to 12 year olds that are character driven and mischievous spare and lyrical attention grabbing in color colorful or silly and gross so I'm going to click on silly and gross and that's going to give me a scroll in carousel of about 10 books that share those two appeal term characteristics if you don't find an appeal term combination that appeals to you that's already predefined you can also use their appeal mixer which is really fun tool so I'm going to click on that and here again the first thing you want to do is select your audience level or reading level so I'm going to select teen and what you can do here is you start out by selecting an appeal term category so I'm going to select character and the nice thing here is if you don't happen to have printed out that list that lists all the appeal terms used for each category once you specify an age group and category the drop down menu to the right of that category is going to list all the possible appeal terms you could use in that situation so you can scroll through the list of character characteristics in this case I'm going to select culturally diverse and then I can add another appeal term I could choose another character characteristic if I wanted or I can pick another category so I'm going to pick in this case I'm going to pick tone and here I'm going to select emotionally intense so I'm looking for books aimed at teens that feature culturally diverse characters and that are emotionally intense and I'm going to click on find titles and you'll see I have 23 suggestions again I can scroll through the carousel hover over a particular cover image to bring up a brief description of the book or if I want to view a list of all 23 titles at one time where I can view the description and possibly send the list to a printer I can do that as well going back to the homepage I want to work my way down the page a little bit and show you some other additional options for finding books lots of patrons like to read books in a particular genre and so starting using genre as a starting point for readers advisory can also be helpful and they do have a browser genre section in the middle of the page again you have to specify your reading level so I'm going to select adult in this case this next next page is going to display carousels of books for many popular adult genres so at the top of the list there's adult arts entertainment and sports books I can scroll down the page to view other carousels focused on different genres once I find the genre that interests me and I'm going to select mysteries here I can scroll left and right through that list and they will show me ten mysteries so ten representative mysteries that my patrons might be interested in if I want to go beyond just the ten mysteries that they recommend in their little carousel I have an explore mysteries link here if I click on that it's going to take me to another page and again it's going to basically show me carousels for sub genres within the mystery genre so I've got forthcoming mysteries I've got police procedurals historical mysteries cozy mysteries noir and hard-boiled again they'll show me ten noir and hard-boiled titles on my scrollable carousel or I can click on view all to get a longer list in this case it actually does do a genre search and it pulls back a standard result list and so you'll see in this case I've got 1,565 titles that they have categorized as noir or hard-boiled mystery fiction so if you want you can certainly go through and view all 1500 titles but you might also want to scroll over to the left and you'll see you've got some options for refining your results here and I really like some of these expandable categories here basically what you've got here is if you expand genre for instance you'll see a list of some of the top genre headings that are assigned to the books in your current result list so obviously hard-boiled fiction and noir fiction with the genre headings we searched on and so those are obviously terms that appear with all of or most of the books in this list police procedurals adult books for young adults books to movies African-American fiction etc if I were to click on any of these genre headings what it's going to do is it's going to refine my results so it's going to look at the 1500 books in my result list and then narrow it to just the titles in my result list that have the new genre heading that I clicked on so it's not going to go out for instance and search for all African American fiction it's going to look at my list of 1500 noir hard-boiled mystery titles and then just show me the African-American fiction ones I'm in this case I'm going to look at tone and I'm going to go ahead and limit my results further to those that are also assigned the tone darkly humorous and so now I'm down to 134 which is maybe slightly more manageable than 1500 so you can see how you can start out with a broad genre like mystery and then really working with your patron zero in on the exact type of mystery that the patron likes and then narrow it even further using additional appeal term categories or genres to get a manageable list for your patron to work off of going back once more to the home screen I'm going to scroll down a little bit further but we're going to continue to talk about genre there is a section called keeping up and there are what they call keeping up pages that are focused on particular genres and these are really useful for us as librarians we probably have some genres that we are pretty familiar with because we may read within that genre but there are probably other genres that we hardly ever read anything in and we might feel the need to develop our own readers advisory skills in those genres to learn more about them and that's what these keeping up pages are designed to help you with so I believe at the moment there are 13 keeping up pages for different genres so I'm going to go ahead and just click on browse all keeping up pages they do add pages on different genres to this list I believe we've had about two new keeping up pages that have been added to this list since we started our subscription in July I'm going to go ahead and scroll down again since we've been talking about mystery as a genre I'm going to go ahead and pull up the keeping up page for mystery and basically what the keeping up pages do is they give you brief background information on the genre as a whole and then they are going to give you links to additional articles and lists that would help you learn more about this particular genre so there's an article about getting up to speed in mysteries an article about mystery trends an article about police procedurals so again you can really delve into a particular genre and learn more about it you'll also see a list of awards that are given for that particular genre so that of course is a route in to finding good titles within that genre or well respected titles of that genre and you will also then see recommended reading lists that would have books from that genre on them so there's a getting cozy recommended reads list that would have titles that are considered cozy mysteries lists with books for fans of Sherlock etc you'll also get a display of some recent titles that have been published within that genre there'll also be often a reading map that if you click on it it is usually something that you can print out it's usually going to print out in an 8 1⁄2 by 11 dimension and it would be something that you could put up by your circulation desk and it's just kind of a visual graphic that gives people some book suggestions if you like this book then you might also like this book and here's why so if you have some of the books highlighted on the reading map in your collection you could always incorporate them in a display and generate some interest or buzz for those titles and then finally again you have links to yet more articles on doing readers advisory in the mystery genre so those keeping up pages are I think really useful for us as staff members and if you scroll down to the bottom of that keeping up page that lists all the keeping up articles you've got something called genre overviews it's going to give you even more information about genres so I'm gonna click on genre overview and this page tells you a little bit about what genre overview articles do and then you again have links for audience levels so I'm going to go ahead and select adult and this is what I think is interesting you've got 32 genre overviews so they're going way beyond just the basic genres that we all think of mystery science fiction romance etc and you'll notice we usually think of genres in terms of fiction but they also have genre overviews for what would be considered nonfiction so biographies in memoir is one but also something like business writing which I never think of as a particular genre but certainly there are people out there who like to read within that genre I'm going to go ahead and just bring up getting up to speed in food writing again something that you don't necessarily think about in terms of a genre so they'll tell you what is food writing what happens in a food writing book why do people like to read this type of book you'll get some key titles and key authors and then a little bit more background information on how to help fans of that genre so again a lot of information to help you is the librarian finally towards the bottom of the homepage and I just want to point out some of the things that I've shown you that you can access from the homepage are also available under this browse by link so you can browse by genre or browse by appeal from this drop-down menu as well and then award winners you can access it from this browse by list or there's also a link to browse awards from the bottom of the page on this page they'll give you some recent award winners you'll have a list of popular awards that you'll probably recognize divided into adult teen and children's categories over to the right you'll have awards by genre so again if you're looking for books to recommend within a particular genre going the route of looking for books in that genre that have won awards is one strategy and then at the very bottom of the page you have the option to browse all award winners and notable books so this is truly an alphabetical list that you can scroll through or if you know the title of the award you can do a search for it so here we've got the Golden Sower Awards for Nebraska and you'll get the awards for the past years hey moving on I'm gonna go ahead and start working my way across the bar at the top of the page and show you a couple of additional resources up here under especially for you've got a readers advisory page that you can access and as you can imagine this page is really aimed at librarians who are going to be doing it readers advisory and who maybe want to get better at it so you've got becoming a better readers advisor and you've got links that will take you to lists of articles on just that subject so if you want ideas on how to train your staff to be better readers advisors or yourself I'm clicking on this link will bring up 13 different articles on readers advisory this is kind of a repeat they've also got links to the genre overviews and the keeping up with particular genres articles here and then you've got some inspiration for everyday readers advisory including book display ideas book discussion guides etc and I'm going to show you where to get access to those links in just a minute over to the right I do want to point out there's a link to novelist tutorials this actually takes you to a YouTube channel for novelist and they have many different tutorials some of them very short two-minute videos that talk about novelist strategies for searching etc so you've got that available to you you also have a link to readers advisory newsletters and I would really encourage you to think about subscribing you get one a month by email and in each newsletter they usually include some search strategies that you can use to find particular types of books those of you who are signed up for the Nebraska access mailing list may have seen me send out a couple emails where I give you some tips on how to do particular searches to find particular types of books usually I'm getting those ideas from the newsletter that I get each month so that is something that I found useful you'll notice under especially for there's also a page specific specifically for working with youth so if you're a children's librarian or a school librarian you've got this page where they link to articles that would be focused on books that would be of interest to children or teams or that might work particularly well within a school environment so you've got programming ideas ideas for educators etc and you actually have the option to sign up for a newsletter that's gonna focus specifically on books for kids so that's a second newsletter you can sign up for finally under a quick links a couple things that I want to show you for really popular authors they have real-life articles author real-life articles you'll see it's obviously not all authors there are 316 of these but in many ways they're similar to those genre overview articles if you go into one of these for Gillian Flynn for instance they will tell you what genres the author typically writes in they'll talk about why readers like this particular author they'll suggest other authors that people who like Gillian Flynn in this instance might also like so similar authors so again if you have a person who likes a particular author and you can find an author read-alike for that author that will give you some tools for making recommendations you also have book discussion guides and I think this is pretty impressive you've got over 900 book discussion guides available so there are really two ways you can use these these book discussion guides if you have a book group and they are reading a particular book you can certainly look to see if there is a book discussion guide in novelist for that particular book they're reading and probably the best way to do that is just look up the book that's being read find the book detail page for that book and then go to the list and articles tab within that book detail page and if there's a book discussion guide for that book it's going to be listed on that lists and articles page the other way you can use this book discussion guides list is maybe you have a book discussion group and people have trouble thinking about what book they want to read next for the group so maybe you want to browse through some of the titles included in this list some of the titles that discussion guides are available for maybe you'll get an idea of something for your book discussion group these book discussion guides typically follow a standard format you'll get a summary of the book and they will usually list three or four discussion questions and these questions are obvious obviously not yes or no type questions that questions are designed to stimulate discussion so under each question you're going to have something written several paragraphs that talk about the types of issues that the question might stimulate so if you ask the question and nobody in the group says anything gives you some ideas about how to let elaborate a bit and maybe get some discussion started many times there'll also be some background information on the author sometimes helps inform discussion some ideas for further reading in case you are in a book group where people don't all read the same book but read similar books so I think these book discussion guides could be really useful to incorporate into book groups that your library might support some other fun ways to access book lists there's a books to movies category so when you click on that link first you'll get a list of books that have been made into movies that came out in 2015 it's a lengthy list so you can scroll through it and you also have links to archive so you'll have that broken down by past years so here's books to movies released in 2014 and if you scroll down the page further you'll get to books turned into movies in 2013 etc finally I'm going to scroll to the very bottom this page and I just want to show you here they have at the bottom of the page a pro tip and they just tell you that novelist now catalogs books to movies as a genre to find even more books adapted for the big screen search for and then they actually give you the search terms and the field code to type in if you want to do a search for all books that have been assigned to the genre heading books to movies this is actually the kind of pro tip that I often find in their newsletters that I get so they'll be a really specific search strategy to find a very specific type of book I'm in this particular case I could go back to my search screen and type that in but they also have made it a hyperlink so I can go ahead and just click on that and in this case now I've got a list of 2,600 books that have been turned into movies so like I said that's just kind of another fun way to get ideas for books people might be interested in. We are running out of time so let me just open up this quick links menu again and point out curricular connections are going to be particularly of interest to children's librarians and school librarians and teachers these are going to be lists of books that could be used in connection with school curriculum so ideas for instance here's one opening the world story finding novels to support the world literature curriculum that just is a really good example of the types of lists that show up under this category so ideas for books that might be used in a school setting you've also got picture book extenders these are nice in that they focus on a particular picture book but they give you ideas about how to use the book with children to do things like teach pre-reading skills what sorts of things to point out about the book what types of questions to ask a group of children about the book they'll have questions that they suggest you use for different age levels or grade levels I should say and they match those questions with with standards so there I believe using the common core standards but I'm usually there's some correlation between common core standards and state standards we use so again gives you an idea about how to how to use a picture book in a classroom and it does give you usually ideas for additional books that you might read in conjunction with the picture book being focused on we are out of time if any of you do have questions feel free to type them into the question box otherwise feel free to get in touch with me directly by email or phone I am going to go ahead and probably get this recording up by next week so that if you have additional staff members you'd like to have an opportunity to watch this that will be available otherwise thank you for attending and if you one final thing if you logged in a little bit later you might not have heard me say this if you're the one that signed in I have your name in my attendees list but if you have additional people watching with you and you want to make sure that they get CE credit do be sure to type their names into the question box and then I'll have those names so I can turn them in as well otherwise I'm going to go ahead and turn off the recording and I'll be online for a few minutes more so you can feel free to stick around and ask questions or log off and follow up with questions later if you do have any thanks so much for attending