The Board of Directors have received several suggestions of next projects for the Consortium, and the one we have decided to further investigate is offering consortium-level pricing for EBSCO’s NoveList Plus.
NoveList Plus is the newest version of EBSCO’s popular reader’s advisory database, NoveList; NoveList Plus adds reader’s advisory suggestions for over 50,000 non-fiction works, on top of the over 150,000 fiction titles.
The database is wonderful for staff, offering powerful searches to help answer the questions we all get (“I’m looking for a book, it’s a mystery, and the detective has a peg-leg…”), book talks, book discussion guides, over 4,000 articles and lists, and the Pearl’s Picks and NextReads services, that allow you to “brand” recommended reading lists with your library’s name and email them to patrons.
Many of these services are immensely helpful to the public as well — offering advice on themed reading (with fiction and non-fiction suggestions for what to read based on books patrons have read and liked), what-t0-read-next, author read-alikes, and more.
Finally, there is also a K-8 interface, which allows school librarians, children’s librarians, teachers, or those studying children’s literature access to 17,000 titles with the same types of thematic suggestions and curriculum connections.
(For more about NoveList, see http://www.ebscohost.com/novelist)
The per-library cost will be entirely dependent on the number of libraries who are interested in participating. Normally, this database costs between $750 and $1000 for the larger public libraries; with minimal interest, the cost for participating for our largest libraries will be less than this cost, and significantly less for our smallest.
In order to determine whether or not we can offer this database and the price we can offer to our member libraries, we are looking for responses from those libraries interested in participating. Please email Stephanie Chase at schase[at]stowelibrary.org if interested.
We also have access to a free trial through the end of June. Contact Stephanie if you’d like access to the free trial.
