Awards and Honors, Better Than Ever

Looking for books that won the Women’s Prize for Fiction? This year’s finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award? We’ve revamped how Awards and Honors display in Syndetics Unbound, making it easier to spot what awards a book might have won, and to find all the other books under that award.

On an item page in the library catalog, you’ll now see all the awards, distinctions and honors, and notable lists that apply to that item, along with the stage (so you can easily find nominees, longlists, and winners), and the year.

Once you open an award, you’ll see all the books under that award (filtered, as always, through the library’s holdings). Our new interface lets you filter the list of books by stages (longlist, shortlist, nominee, winner, etc.), categories (biography, fiction, best first novel, etc.), and years—so you can easily pull up the 2023 nominees for the Nebula Award, the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for History, or the 2024 Stella Prize Longlist.

Give it a try in your catalog, and let us know what you think!

Deep dive into award types

Awards and Honors is a flexible grouping that has historically included a lot of different types of distinctions. Our goal with the division of awards into three basic categories (awards, distinctions and honors, and notable lists) is to separate out the “true” awards from some other distinctions. The criteria for each is as follows:

Awards

• Criteria: Awards must be awarded repeatedly at a set interval. They must be chosen by some sort of group or process, not an individual.
• Examples: The Booker Prize, Hugo Awards, Academy Awards, Wolfson History Prize, Stonewall Book Awards.

Notable Lists

• Criteria: These are one-off or lists of books (or other media), appearing in a book, a magazine, or even a blog.
• Examples: Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of the 1980s, Guardian 1,000 (“1000 novels everyone must read”), 1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up

Distinctions

• Criteria: Everything else, including celebrity and book-club “picks,” bestseller lists, and “starred” reviews.
• Examples: Oprah’s Book Club, NPR: Books We Love.