Using Descriptive Words to Find New Books to Read

When do I use this search?
If you don’t have an author or title in mind, use this search and describe the kind of book you want to read in your own words (as you might if you were using a web search engine). This search matches the words you enter to NoveList’s over 36,000 different subject headings, and also to the text of reviews and descriptions (all parts of the title record). You can find books by searching for descriptive words and phrases commonly found in reviews – for example, “fast-paced,” or “light reading.” You can also find books by searching for words that describe the genre, character(s), time periods, events, themes or settings you want to read about.

Scenario
A young reader comes to the reference desk looking for a book he has read before and wants to read again – but he can’t remember the title or author of the book. He describes the story to the librarian: it is about a boy living on his grandfather’s farm who tries to save the farm with winnings from a dog sled race he enters.

Here's How in NoveList:

1. From the home page, click on the "Search our Database" tab. Select a search strategy - "Describe a Plot" in this case - by clicking on its link (circled in the picture above).
2. Enter the search criteria in the find box and limit your results, if desired, before clicking the "Search" button. For this scenario, the words "boy", "grandfather," "farm," and "race" are entered in the find box. Click the SEARCH button to perform the search. [Show me a picture]

For more information about step 3: Tips to Enter Descriptive Words Tips for Limiting Your Results

What You See (the search results):
NoveList displays a list of books whose title records contain all the words you entered. [Show me an example] The list is relevancy ranked, which means that the titles with the best match to all your search terms are at the beginning of the list.

4. Show the results list to the young reader. In our scenario, he was looking for the book Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner, which is towards the top of the relevancy ranking. [Show me a picture]

Using Describe a Plot to find a particular book when its title and author are unknown will not always work this well (this scenario is an actual example of an interaction between a librarian and a reader), but can be a good starting point for helping readers in this situation.

Some Examples of Descriptive Words:

Genre - mystery, adventure, westerns, love stories, fantasy
Character - women detectives, Indians, eleven year old boys, brothers, African-Americans, mothers and daughters
Time Periods - sixteenth century, Victorian, colonial roman, prehistoric
Events - civil war, world war II, depression, gold rush
Themes/Subjects - courage, moving, survival, bible, wilderness, animals, awards (Newbery, YALSA, etc.)
Setting - south, Ohio, England, Boston, Africa, northwest