To Grade, or not to Grade, that is the question

Hello All, 
I'd like to put this out there if anyone has any ideas, or has encountered something similar before. 
We are looking at producing at WTBBL the first two (so far) of a charming series of books by an author/artist from the San Juan Islands. 
She painted all the illustrations in these quaint tales of talking animals who wear hats and have their portraits painted by the author. 
The stories themselves are not really "children's stories", but aren't really "adult" either ; they're rather age-less. 
And since it's a local author, and local setting, we want to make it as available to all our patrons as possible. 

But, in getting them in the catalogue prior to production, there's a problem when it comes to assigning the Grade: there's no good selection for "age-less" material, or just a general "children's" or "family" or anything like that. 
I'm assuming that by not assigning a grade to it that the nightly auto-select would never pull it for any patron, but I could be wrong? 

The only other library with a holding of these books is the San Juan Public Library, and they have it in with "children's stories" - I imagine because of the illustrations they feel it fits with picture books, but since we're only producing audio of the text......

Has anyone else encountered a similar dilemma, and if so, how did you address it?  

Thank you!
Ryan

You should absolutely email ks7 before doing anything because I'm sure there are interactions between ReadingLevel and GradeCode that I don't understand, but looking at the Code Maintenance screen I'd think you could set up a code for something like "All Ages" and then have Adult, Young Adult, and Juvenile all point at that as well as itself. I'm also wondering if this could have the corollary benefit of creating a ReadingLevel for the rare patron that is equally interested in children's books and adult novels.

I'm not sure how often this comes us, but it seems like a worthwhile option to have if it isn't too much trouble to set up.

This is an intriguing problem (or I need to get out more). I know if you don't give it a grade level that it will not get flagged as being outside of the grade level given to the account. I do not know however how it would get treated by Nightly. I imagine it would not really go out to anyone who doesn't have whatever subject headings it is given.

Just piling on here. But isn't Nightly looking for more headings than just Grade Level and Reading Level? I would think it would still go out as long as the Reading or Grade level wasn't an Exclusion..Meaning that if a patron doesn't have it flagged it would still get picked up based on other subject and author preferences.

Nightly will only pull books from the reading level in the genre.
I.e. a patron with an adult reading level with a fantasy preference will only receive adult fantasy - the system will automatically ignore all other grade levels

I've wanted an "all ages" option for a long time. There are a lot of patrons who read sci-fi and fantasy who don't care if it's "adult" or "YA" and there's just no good way to serve them everything.

It would be totally fine if it went out to anyone with the subjects listed, however I worry that by assigning no grade will make the system ignore it completely and not send it to anyone, since everyone has an assigned reading level.

Nightly uses things like the reading level and language as reasons to send or not send a given title that it found doing the subject searching. It goes something like "I have this book that could go out as a Romance, can I send it?" "Hmm, the language is English - does that match something on the patron record? Yes - good. What about reading level ... does it match something on the patron record"

At this point, blank would NOT match something on the patron's record and so would be a reason not to send the materials.

Meanwhile, Sam's idea is intriguing, but right now, there is only the ability to put one reading level on a title. So, while you could create one for ageless materials, and assign it to this title, you'd then have to apply that same preference to the patrons who would be interested in these materials. There is nothing that would allow "ageless" to go out to all ages.

That being said - we are talking about auto select from subjects here.  The selection of materials by Reserves or Requests does not rely on reading level.

Yes, and that is my point, Nightly would see "Animal Stories" as a subject preference, and if the Grade Level is blank, there would be no flag. Unless of course "Blank" must be a grade level in the patron profile; which might be the case since it is listed as an option in the Main tab.

"Blank" on the catalog record is recognized as not matching a patron with a grade level. In fact, we had to fix this when it was discovered that Duplication was not treating that as a mismatch, due to incompletely cataloged Adult books unintentionally going out to Juvenile patrons. (And since the recorded file can be added for duplication before the full catalog record is available from NLS, this would likely be a very common problem if we reinstated that bug and re-labelled it as a feature.)

I'll take the request for an ability to map a catalog grade level to multiple patron reading levels, and the reverse, to Development and the KDAC.