Build Diverse Booklists with Novelist
Happy Black History Month, everyone!
If you haven’t noticed yet, Novelist has a new look that is: just like all the other Ebsco products! If you want a broad overview about the new Novelist experience, you can click here to learn more about it from Ebsco itself.
But I’ve already blogged about that. What I’m here to blog at you about today is how the tools in the new Novelist experience can support you when building diverse booklists to use in Bibliocommons, printed booklists, display inspiration, and more.
Novelist’s advanced search has lots to offer, but I am going to focus on the author facets. You have to scroll down a bit to find them, but here you can see options for the author’s gender identity, cultural identity, and nationality. Lots to choose from!
For instance, let’s say you want to make a Black History Month fiction display in your Teen space, you can select “Black” as the author’s cultural identity.
Then you can select “Teen” as the Audience, and “Fiction” to return a list of novels.
Using just those three facets, you’ll get a list of more than 1700 titles! That’s a lot! Maybe too much! So, to go a step further, you can also use keyword searches. Here, I’ve used “secret societies” because secret societies are cool. You can see the results have narrowed down to a manageable list of 55 results.
From there, you can use the “Check the Library Catalog” button to be whisked away into our collections in Bibliocommons, find read-alikes, save items to lists in your Ebsco account, and all the other good stuff Novelist can do with its results lists.
Our collections are built to reflect the vibrant, diverse communities we support. Take a cruise through Novelist’s author facets to find out how they can help this vital work.
-Mary, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
