Online Resource of the Month

May-July 2007

Each month, your SDPL features one of our online premium resources, paid for by SDPL, and available at the locations indicated.

What is NoveList?
NoveList is a readers' advisory service covering all types of fiction. It was selected as a Library Journal Best Reference Database. It also offers a wide range of other resources like author and series searches, along with book reviews. With over 100,000 titles listed, along with 75,000 full text reviews, over 36,000 subject headings and a complete spectrum of searching options, NoveList gives both flexibility and power to even the most discriminating reader. Use the "Find a Favorite Author" or "Find A Favorite Title" feature to locate a list of John Grisham's titles, and then use one of these titles to find more than 200 legal thrillers. It also uses natural language searching to search NoveList's full-text reviews to find "fast-paced thrillers" or books that make good "read aloud" titles for a storytime or children's program.

When Should I Use NoveList?
This premium online resource is an excellent starting point for readers of all kinds of fiction for all ages. If you want a current fiction book review, use NoveList to find what reviewers say about the book. You can find out what other books have been written by that author you just read and loved. NoveList should be a good first stop for any literature or fiction lover.

How do you use it?
NoveList allows you to use a favorite author or title as a template to locate other authors and titles of interest. You can use three powerful search techniques to look for books by entering descriptive terms that appear in subject headings, reviews, and other fields.

NoveList also offers Advanced Natural Language searching and Boolean searching, and NoveList has added full-text searching of reviews to "Describe a Plot."

Explore Fiction
Users can still browse theme-oriented book lists at every reading level through "Explore Fiction," and look for outstanding titles in Best Fiction. Many title records have direct links to Web sites with information about the author or teacher resource materials.

NoveList contains materials for all ages including picture books, children's "chapter" books, young adult titles and books for adult readers. NoveList contains full-text reviews for adult, young adult, children's and easy fiction titles from several journals, including: Booklist, School Library Journal, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. In addition to these reviews, there are annotations and summaries, and all of them are searchable.

Some of the other useful features in NoveList are: Awards lists in Best Fiction; New Feature Articles monthly; Book Discussion Guides, and BookTalks.

Links to Library Catalog
One of the easy features within NoveList is the direct linking into SDPL's Library Catalog. When you are viewing a book record, the left-hand menu shows a link to check our library catalog about the book display. The text reads: "Links Check SDPL for Holdings." Select the link and a popup browser window displays the catalog record for the book. You can view the holdings in the record to see if the book is available for checkout or its status.

Explore question:
If you'd like to try out NoveList, access it here, and try this out:

In NoveList, select "Find a Series Name," and search for "Star Trek" or Nancy Drew to see the books in a series.