How do you decide what’s in a series? There are two really great websites that we have found quite helpful. One is Kent District (MI) Library’s What’s Next Database.  It’s really good for figuring out what books belong in a series, especially since the book itself may not always tell you. The other site another library suggested to us was Fantastic Fiction, which allows searches by ISBN.  Between the two sites they really cover practically any book we have owned.

How are you keeping track of your series? Just so everyone working on your series project knows what’s going on, you need to keep a list of what series you have. This is especially important if you have separated your fiction into genres. You don’t want part of a series in mystery and part of series in historical fiction if the series is a historical mystery. In our library we started with a spreadsheet and quickly realized that we needed more. So we designed a relational database that holds series information. It has a web interface so staff can input information and search for information. It also holds details about subseries as well.

What are you doing with subseries and series finished by other people? Subseries turned out to be an interesting challenge because things like Star Wars books or Dragonlance books were all related, but they were written by many different authors. For books that were in a series but had a subseries, the series was used for alphabetizing on the shelf and the subseries appeared on the label in the “series spot.” Then there were the series begun by one author (eg., Robert Ludlum, Robert B. Parker, and others) but the remainder of the series was finished by a different author. To keep the series together, the spine label reads the original author’s name, not necessarily the actual author.

How are you handling not having every book in a series? It’s perfectly fine if the answer is you aren’t doing anything. You may have book one of a series but not any subsequent materials. You may have book three and not any other books. We pose this question because inevitably there will be a patron who comes to you and says, “I found book three on the shelf. Do you have books one and two?” If you’re part of a consortium, it’s most likely that you can get the first two books from another library. However, from a collection development perspective you will want to decide to either only have first books and see if people want more, or you may decide to see if anyone cares that you have book three but not the other two, before buying the first two books you don’t currently have. We say this a lot, but every library in every community is different. What works in one place may not be appropriate for another.

How are you telling patrons a book is in a series? Some consortia have online catalogs that allow notes to be put in for individual books. This means a series name and number could be put there. We have seen this more with juvenile books series than adult materials. Sometimes the book’s call number is the series and number only. We are fortunate that our book labels allow us to print the series name and number of the spine of the book. In addition, we are using a field that will display the series as a note in our public catalog display.

Many readers like to find a series and stick with it until the end. Helping them find that series is one of the services that we provide as librarians.

Melanie A. Lyttle is the Head of Public Services Madison Public Library. You can watch her YouTube channel, Crabby Librarian, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rv5GLWsUow. Shawn D. Walsh is the Emerging Services and Technologies Librarian at Madison Public Library.

The post To Series or Not to Series…Does it Matter? first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Do you have commonalities between large numbers of books in your collection? There are some major groupings libraries tend to use to divide books into genres. Common ones include mystery, science fiction, fantasy, westerns, inspiration, and romance. Do these groupings represent what you would consider a sizable portion of your collection?

Are there special niche books that are particularly important in your community that should be kept together? Some libraries like to keep local authors together on shelves. Other libraries choose potentially more narrow genres to group together like suspense, horror, historical fiction, or urban fiction. There can also be chick lit, humorous, book and TV, Amish, teen books for adults, sagas, supernatural, and war stories. Some libraries have a large collection of books that are recommended by the staff, and these books are all grouped together. What is really special in your library?

Do you have a defensible reason for changing either to separated genres OR putting together books that were separated before? Some communities, for whatever reason, tend to have more adults who read within a particular genre as opposed to reading a particular author. Would breaking the collection into smaller groupings, like genres, encourage more browsing or help patrons find what they are looking for more quickly? If you have books separated into genres, combining all fiction books together saves shelf space if you need more room. People are going to resist change whatever it is. When they want to talk about the change, you need to have answers for them.

How are you letting the staff and the public know changes are coming? Whether you have a newsletter, Facebook, newspaper articles, or some other way to tell the public, you’ll have to do it more than once. You may even want to get the staff and public’s opinions before you make a final decision about what to do with your fiction collection. Whatever decision you choose, make sure your staff is able to answer questions about why books were moved from “where they’d always been.” Preparing staff makes the change easier for both staff members and patrons.

Whatever you decide to do, someone isn’t going to like it. That’s just the way it goes. However, providing clear signage to help people find what they’re looking for will help quite a bit. However, making sure your decision is the right thing for your community is ultimately the most important thing.

Melanie A. Lyttle is the Head of Public Services Madison Public Library. You can watch her YouTube channel, Crabby Librarian, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rv5GLWsUow. Shawn D. Walsh is the Emerging Services and Technologies Librarian at Madison Public Library.

The post Separate or Keep Together? first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Choosing your genres…This may seem obvious, but choose all your genres before you get started and stick with it until the end. Look at what books seem to circulate well. Look at review magazines or other publications to see how they group fiction materials. Take a survey of your patrons to get ideas. However, we also strongly suggest you pull some books from a section of your shelves. Look at what genres they represent. Does your collection gravitate towards a specific direction? However, keep in mind that if you choose to create niche genres, these will be more fluid. When the books go out of style, you may want to dissolve the genre and return the books to other areas. Or someday there may be a new niche where a large number of books are published, and you may want to keep all these books together. For example, with the craze for vampires and other supernatural entities, our library decided to create a supernatural genre to keep these books together. And, in the future when vikings or something else become extremely popular, we may need to create a new collection.

Where do you go to determine genres…Many book vendors have genres listed within their online catalogs.  OCLC’s WorldCat has genres specifically listed in their catalog entries as well. But keep in mind that both OCLC and also the commercial vendors are judging each book individually. Also, if you are part of a consortium, see where other libraries have placed books or series of books. This may give you ideas about what genres you would like to include in your library.

When to take a broader look at your collection…When you are putting books into different genres, you will find that some authors write in multiple genres. Some libraries classify strictly based on genres, while others try to keep author’s works together. This is particularly important if the library is in a community where reading an author’s entire body of work is important. However, our advice to you is do one author at a time, and pay attention to books in the authors’ series. You may find that throughout a series, each book has a different genre assigned to it. At the very least, you need to keep all the books in an author’s series together.

How are you keeping track of what you have done…Is there a master list somewhere that says this author goes in this genre, or this chunk of an author’s work goes here and this chunk goes there? It’s more than likely that you will have multiple people work on this project. How does everyone make sure they know what is going on and don’t either duplicate already completed work or do something that doesn’t match previous patterns?

When a patron disagrees with you…There will be patrons that don’t agree with what genre you have assigned to a book or a series of books. They may want to suggest additional or different genres to use. Not all their suggestions will be great, but listen to them because some will be very helpful. Take notes, and tell them you will consider what they say. It may not change what you ultimately do, but your patrons will feel they have been heard.

Good luck with your genre-fying project. It will be great.

Melanie A. Lyttle is the Head of Public Services Madison Public Library. You can watch her YouTube channel, Crabby Librarian, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rv5GLWsUow. Shawn D. Walsh is the Emerging Services and Technologies Librarian at Madison Public Library.

The post Genre-fying Your Library’s Fiction Collection first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

By working with SCCLD, JukePop is able to connect the public to independently published content, one chapter at a time, and allows readers to provide feedback and ratings. As it says in the ULC award website, SCCLD and JukePop wanted to provide a new route to independent eBooks because of the cost to libraries and challenges to library patrons. This new platform cannot replace demand for comprehensive commercial eBook services, but JukePop is able to offer a twist on ebook content: self-published fiction in an easy to use and highly interactive platform.

The public can view the JukePop platform by visiting the SCCLD website. Clicking on the cover icon for each book takes you directly into the first chapter of the book, for quick reading. Each book can be tagged for content and genre. JukePop provides analytics that will help quality content be showcased, including through reader retention and reader rating. A recent browse in JukePop led me to works in a wide range of genres, including adventure, dystopian, and paranormal—content runs eclectic, but appears to be family friendly.

Some libraries might be reluctant to provide broad access to self-published fiction, or even to promote access to a new platform from the main library website. While it is understandable that libraries want to be cautious about new technologies or forms of content, SCCLD appears to benefit from working with a company that can mediate these concerns. All of the content in the platform is separate from the SCCLD catalog, and, according to their website, all comments regarding content or technical problems should be directed to JukePop.

While digital content will continue to shift with available technologies and modes of expression, libraries should consider the possibilities of providing new ways of sharing self-published and independent fiction, especially in an era that delights in serial media. SCCLD should be recognized for taking an experimental leap into providing patrons access to a new writing landscape, which may help readers—and public libraries—better support creative communities.

References

Barack, Lauren. “JukePop Opens Kickstarter to Get Indie Ebooks into Libraries” The Digital Shift. September 27, 2014.

The post Santa Clarita Library and JukePop: A New Collaboration for Independent, Self-published EBooks first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Define “Young Adult Graphic Novel.” – We started by looking at the young adult graphic novel collection, and we decided we were going to pull some of the series that were showing up on “Best Adult Graphic Novels” lists. That should bring a built-in audience to our new adult graphic novel area. Out of the young adult collection came Sandman, Spawn, and Watchman. The young adult collection thus became the bastion of the superheroes of DC and Marvel with a strong Star Wars presence. It’s not that adults didn’t read these books voraciously, but it brought the content of the graphic novels more in line with the content of the young adult novels we had.

Where are the compilations of newspaper comics going? – Libraries put these books in all different places, including non-fiction and young adult sections. Not that it doesn’t happen, but when did you see a high schooler reading Doonesbury? And many people like Dilbert, but searching in the 700s is a daunting task. We rescued the newspaper comics compilation books from 741.5 and put them in the adult graphic novel collection. As soon as we did, they started circulating quite a bit more than they had before.

Where do the graphic novels go that students may be assigned for class? – Maus and Persepolis are good examples of books that teachers frequently incorporate into their curriculum. These books had been living in the young adult section, but unfortunately no one was reading them. However, we had an eighth grade English teacher ask us about other books similar to these, including some of Gene Luen Yang’s books and A Game for Swallows. Would we be getting additional similar titles, he wondered, because he’d like to assign his class to read some of these types of books? To give these titles more cache and also to entice adults who would also be interested in these books but never find them in youth materials, these books were moved. All “literary graphic novels” now live in the adult graphic novel collection.

How is this section not a repository for unloved books? – Given the more conservative view our community has about books for youth, there were a number of graphic novels we didn’t have in the library’s collection. We now have the graphic novel versions of titles by Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Janet Evanovich sharing shelf space with the Walking Dead. We have Sin City and Hellraiser. Without this section of adult graphic novels, we couldn’t adequately accommodate many popular titles that appeal to a quiet minority of our community who never requested we purchase these books but seems to be checking them out regularly.

How do you evaluate success? – Obviously, circulation is one way, and the graphic novels have only been their own section for six months or so. It seems like people are reading the books, even if it’s only the staff who are grudgingly admitting that “there might be something to these graphic novels.” Every time we talk to an adult about Maus, Persepolis, or American Born Chinese and he or she decides to check out the book, we have success. However, overhearing that a 24 year-old male patron said to his friends via social media, “You have to come to the Madison Public Library. They have really great comics [referring to our adult graphic novel section].” That is the best sign of success ever.

You know your patrons best. What do they want in their adult graphic novels? You may decide what makes up our adult graphic novels section does not work for you. Use this as a guide, and no matter what you decide, we hope your section is popular with the patrons of your community.

Cover Photo Credit: carmichaellibrary (CC BY 2.0)

Melanie A. Lyttle is the Head of Public Services Madison Public Library. You can watch her YouTube channel, Crabby Librarian, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rv5GLWsUow. Shawn D. Walsh is the Emerging Services and Technologies Librarian at Madison Public Library.

The post What is an Adult Graphic Novel? first appeared on Public Libraries Online.