It was a season of hot, fun, sometimes escapist reads. Summer isn’t officially over until September 22, but with most children back in school or about to go back, it feels over already. Did you get any beach reading done? (We did, and it felt great.) The 50 Most Popular Here are the fifty most popular books in US public libraries from June 1 to August 31, according to Syndetics Unbound.
Introducing the new Bowker Book Data website. ProQuest and LibraryThing, the co-developers of Syndetics Unbound, have announced Bowker Book Data, a new website for anyone interested in high-quality book data. Check out the website here: https://bowkerbookdata.proquest.com. Find out More The power of Syndetics Unbound comes from a combination of detailed, comprehensive data delivered and a simple, easy-to-implement architecture. A single line of code added to a library catalog or other book-world system brings everything alive, from enhancing records with data to rich exploratory features, such as similar books, series lists and professional reviews.
Here are the top twenty titles public-library patrons looked for in July 2021. This month sees both continuing summer favorites and some new releases. July saw The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave in first place in libraries for the third straight month. New in July are The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, and The Paper Palace, a debut novel by Miranda Cowley Heller.
Here are the top twenty titles public library patrons looked for in June 2021. Summer is here! The author of this newsletter believes a “beach read” is whatever you read on the beach, but publishers time certain releases for the summer. Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid heads the June arrivals. Following a family of adult children on a literal beach in Malibu, Ophrah Weekly wrote “If summer could somehow fit into a book, then you’d find it in Malibu Rising.
The following is adapted from an article by Stella Griffiths, Executive Director of the International ISBN Agency and Chair of ISO/TC46/SC9, that first appeared on ISQ (Information Standard Quarterly), a NISO (National Information Standards Organization) publication, in September 2015. The original article can be found at https://bit.ly/3wTpfZ2 ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is an international standard first published under the auspices of ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) in 1972. Right from the introduction of the very earliest audiobooks, microforms, and CD-ROMs, ISBN has not been a standard only for printed materials, though of course, print will always be important.
Show off your LGBTQ+ titles with Book Display Widgets. To celebrate Pride Month, we’ve made a page on our LibGuide of Book Display Widgets that showcase LGBTQ+ titles. Book Display Widgets, as we’ve mentioned before, are a great way to show off your collection. Our curated widgets on the LibGuide make it fast and simple to copy a widget into your own Syndetics Unbound account. Just click “Get This Widget” and it’s yours.
Here are the top twenty titles public library patrons looked for in May 2021. Summer is coming, and so are the books of summer! May saw popular new books from Laura Dave, Andy Weir, James Patterson, Jennifer Weiner and Maggie Shipstead. Georgia politician and voting-rights advocate Stacey Abrams, who had previously written under the pen name Selena Montgomery, released the legal thriller While Justice Sleeps. And Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball and The Big Short, released the only non-fiction book on top-20: The Premonition, a narrative a “nonfiction thriller” on the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Learn more about how Georgia Tech Library has enhanced their physical browsing experience for users with Syndetics Unbound. The Syndetics Unbound Browse Shelf interactive feature gives library patrons the physical browsing experience by using call numbers to pull titles into a virtual library shelf on the website. Browse Shelf cultivates the experience of searching a library’s stacks online, giving users a more traditional, serendipitous feel, similar to actually being inside the library.
Learn more about ProQuest’s use of library classification systems Written by Michael Olenick, Sr. Content Business Analyst at ProQuest With many different subject classification systems where most are referred to by their acronyms, it is sometimes hard to tell your BISAC from your BIC from your LCSH. Here is a brief overview of some classification systems that are used by our content team. BISAC subjects have been the North American book industry standard for over 25 years.
A closer look at the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) By Pat Payton, ProQuest Senior Manager for Provider Relations and a Member of the BISG Metadata Committee This week’s Syndetics Unbound story takes a deep dive into Bowker’s activities within the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), an independent not-for-profit group, with members from all over the book industry, including ProQuest/Bowker. Their work has a far-reaching impact on the library industry, including on Syndetics Unbound.
Here are the top twenty titles public-library patrons looked for in April 2021. This month saw much interest in the newly-published The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman. Subtitled “An Inaugural Poem for the Country,” this was the poem Gorman read at President Biden’s inauguration. Other notable new books include James Patterson’s The Red Book, Martha Hall Kelly’s Sunflower Sisters and Good Company by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah and The Midnight Library by Matt Haig remain at the top of the list.
Did you know that if your library subscribes to Ebook Central’s Academic Complete, your instance of Ebook Central contains elements of Syndetics Unbound to help highlight the titles in your Ebook Central Collections? Many libraries use Academic Complete as the beginning foundation to their ebook collection. Syndetics Unbound displays some elements within Ebook Central to highlight and enrich those titles. Academic Complete subscribers get the added value of 7 of the 18 available enrichment elements within the Ebook Central Platform, which include You May Also Like, About the Author, Awards, Reader Reviews, Tags, AltMetrics and RCL Core Titles.
In recent years, April 23rd has been a special day for the employees of ProQuest. It has been a time to recognize and celebrate World Book Day, also known as World Book and Copyright Day. This annual event first started on April 23, 1995, organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), to promote reading, publishing, and copyright. As a company whose entire business revolves around books and libraries, ProQuest has celebrated this day in years past by encouraging employees to dress up as characters from their favorite books.
ProQuest has reached an agreement with Patron Point to include Syndetics Unbound elements in their newsletter service. Recommends, is a reading recommendation service that helps libraries market content to their patrons and increase engagement and usage of their collection. Recommends helps users create eye-catching, branded monthly newsletters for new titles from the library’s catalog enriched with recommendations, summaries, and covers from Syndetics Unbound. The newsletters connect patrons straight to the library catalog to place a hold on the titles or search for other content.
Here are the top twenty titles public-library patrons looked for in March 2021. New this month include Life After Death: A Novel by Sister Souljah, the sequel to her 1999 bestseller The Coldest Winter Ever, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian science fiction novel Klara and the Sun. We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker was not released until the beginning of April, but interest was high in March. A quick check of some participating libraries finds a lot of holds!
Recently, ProQuest released Enrichment Highlights a new Syndetics Unbound functionality that improves a library’s search results page by adding key enrichment elements to them. Mount Laurel Library was an early adopter of this free update and has seen an increase in their collection usage as a result of it. “We added the Enrichment Highlights functionality to our catalog last December. Now the Syndetics Unbound content appears in the search results list making it much more visible to our patrons and staff.
Last year we released a major new feature to Syndetics Unbound—Mark and Boost Electronic Resources—to help libraries adapt to full and partial shutdowns of their physical collections during COVID-19. One year later, and Mark and Boost remains a powerful tool, letting libraries highlight and promote their electronic resources. The feature marks the library’s electronic resources and “boosts,” or promotes them within Syndetics Unbound’s discovery enrichments, such as You May Also Like, Tags, Book Profile, and Reading Levels.
In honor of Women’s History month, we’ve created several Book Display Widgets, which you can check out on our LibGuide. We talked about how easy Book Display Widgets are to make previously on the blog (see Showcasing Titles for Black History Month). Our curated widgets on our LibGuide make the process even simpler—all you have to do is click “Get this widget” to copy it into your own Syndetics Unbound account.
Here are the top fifteen titles public-library patrons looked for in February 2021. New on the list this month is Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah, no doubt because of the Netflix Series, which came out February 3. Hannah’s The Four Winds heads the list this month too. The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah The Midnight Library by Matt Haig The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles The Russian by James Patterson Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.
Syndetics Unbound’s Book Profile is a dynamic tool that lets users browse for titles using clickable profile terms, like character names, genres, topics, locations, and more. There are two kinds of Book Profiles—those created by editorial staff, and machine generated profiles. Today’s blog post is a dive into how Book Profiles are created. Fiction and Non-Fiction Profiles are curated manually by Syndetics Unbound editorial staff members, who refer to descriptions and reviews found in Industry journals to create a profile for a given title, using standardized terms.
Want to highlight some books for Black History Month on your library’s homepage? Use a Book Display Widget to create a virtual book display! Book Display Widgets supplement the catalog enrichment of Syndetics Unbound, allowing you to create virtual book displays, with covers that link to each item’s record in your catalog, driving traffic and discoverability. Making a widget is an easy process in the Syndetics Unbound admin. Choose what items you want to display.
Here are the top fifteen titles public-library patrons looked for in January 2021. They include some titles from our Top-in-2020 list, but some are quite new. Number four, The Four Winds: A Novel by Kristin Hannah wasn’t officially released until February 2, so its number one position was purely anticipatory. In other words, a LOT of holds! The Midnight Library by Matt Haig The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett The Duke and I by Julia Quinn The Four Winds: A Novel by Kristin Hannah The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.
Last year, we queried our customers about what their favorite Syndetics Unbound elements were. Not surprisingly, Recommendations were at the top of that list, but let’s take a deeper look at what you love the most about Syndetics Unbound. Public and Academic Libraries alike rated our You May Also Like recommendations as their favorite element. The recommendations provide the opportunity for serendipitous discovery of new titles and are based on both user suggestions from LibraryThing for Libraries and big data algorithms.
We recently did a blog post on the Top Syndetics Unbound Titles of 2020, covering what public-library patrons were searching for and finding in 2020. But what about academic libraries? This data was aggregated across libraries using Syndetics Unbound worldwide. The picture is more complicated in academic libraries than public libraries. First, academic libraries differ from each other more than public ones do. Titles that head the list month after month at technical colleges may not even appear at a law or divinity library.
Syndetics Unbound is excited and pleased to announce that we have worked with Patron Point, a library marketing automation partner, to offer Patron Point Recommends™ – a new reading recommendation service that helps public libraries market content to their patrons, increasing engagement and usage. Patron Point Recommends automatically creates eye-catching, branded monthly newsletters for new titles from a library’s catalog enriched with LibraryThing recommendations and summaries, and covers from the Syndetics Unbound service.
The Syndetics Unbound team is humbled and excited to announce our Platinum Award in the 2021 Modern Library Awards (MLAs) from LibraryWorks. This is the first time that Syndetics Unbound has been entered for an MLA, and we are thrilled to have been chosen for this award. Jenny Newman, publisher and MLA program manager, said, “It’s hardly a surprise that Syndetics Unbound scored so well. They’ve been at the forefront of the industry since their company entered the market in 2016.
Ever wonder what patrons are searching for in library catalogs? We have the answers for 2020, aggregated from all the public libraries that use Syndetics Unbound. United States Top Fifteen These were the top fifteen most searched-for books of 2020 in US public libraries. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins Camino Winds by John Grisham The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides The Guest List: A Novel by Lucy Foley The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes Walk the Wire by David Baldacci Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng 28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand The Dutch House by Ann Patchett Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover Fair Warning by Michael Connelly The Boy from the Woods by Harlan Coben Month by Month The top books above are mostly popular books that stayed popular for much of the year.
This blog provides a historical review of the life of R.R. Bowker, and the dynamic impact and legacy that he’s left on the library world today. By Bob Nardini Today the largest library on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus is closed to most people due to COVID-19. But one hundred years ago, despite lingering cases of that era’s influenza pandemic, at the building’s opening in 1920 the day was marked with public ceremony.
We’ve looked at a lot of different catalogs and discovery layers over the past few years, and learned a lot about usage statistics (read more about our new usage stats here. Out of that, we thought we’d share some tips about how you can optimize your Syndetics Unbound subscription. Don’t hide the content The more a user has to click, the less they will do so. If Syndetics Unbound is shown within an accordion, behind a tab, or very far down on a detail page, your patrons will see it less, and accordingly, interact with it less.
We’re very pleased to announce a major improvement to our Syndetics Unbound statistics page. Our new usage statistics include deep dives into coverage and interaction statistics, many charts and graphs, a date selector tool, and the ability to limit your view by instance. Syndetics Unbound subscribers can check it out in the Syndetics Unbound Admin, under Statistics. Some of the metrics we’re tracking and displaying now include: Coverage charts show the number of times Syndetics Unbound showed any enrichment on a catalog page, and as a percentage of all catalog pages loaded.
Want to increase usage of Syndetics Unbound? Increase its visibility! Many users don’t click beyond the search results page to view the detail record in your catalog. To that end, we’ve added an abbreviated version of Syndetics Unbound that launches small lightboxes for each element, directly from your search results page. We’ve seen usage statistics rise dramatically when libraries enable Syndetics Unbound on search results pages, so give it a try!
