Series Order... for Author picks?

The best way to ensure that a patron gets a series in order is to add that series as a preference. With a Series Preference, KLAS is careful to only send a series in order... however it does not consider series order when it is looking at Author or Subject Preferences, other than to skip series that the patron has a specific preference for.

For patrons who do not want to receive books that are later in a series as part of their Subject picks, the best thing is to create an exclusion for the "Sequel" subject for that patron. This will block them from receiving Subject picks that are not either stand-alone titles or book 1 in their series (so long as it is included in your cataloging, of course).

However, many libraries have their Author Preferences set to not consider subject exclusions, and you may have patrons that want to get all of an authors' books but only in series order. Some authors write a LOT of short series, making it difficult to add all of them to a patron's profile, let alone keep up with them over time.

It isn't a perfect solution, but you might consider checking the Serve Order for your PCC-Author program in Nightly Configuration. KLAS can check for appropriate and available author picks for each patron starting either with the earliest KLAS ID or the most recent. If most of your patrons seem to want their authors' newest books, even if they haven't had all of the older titles, you'll want that set to "Latest First." But if the majority seem more concerned with getting the books in order, switch it to "Earliest First."

And because there will always be exceptions, you can create special rules for individual patrons, allowing you to adjust things for those frequent callers who feel strongly about how they get their books.

That said, please chime in to let us know--do you have a lot of patrons that are concerned about series order, or do most of your patrons prefer the new titles? Does serving Author Picks in KLAS ID order get most of the series in order, or are there too many prequels and other series books that are, for whatever reason, not numbered in line with their series order? Do you have any tips for your peers having to do with series order, or any ideas for us about how we might improve things?

We want to hear from you!!

is there some kind of a query that you can run for author series? I'm sure some my series are not correct because of download only books or maybe another state read one of the books but didn't note is was part of series. I'm not sure if this is even possible but it would help to know which series is completed. Maybe I'm just wishing for a quick fix. but I'll take any suggestion

I think there are two basic questions:

1) Does each book that is part of a series have the series name in the Bib-Record.
2) Does each book that is part of a series have the correct sequence information.

Question 2 you can query for. I have actually been working on this recently, and the query I used was this:
Klas ID begins D; Langcode begins E; Series from aa to zz; SerSeq is Blank; Gradecode begins A; Fiction begins Y



This query finds adult fiction digital books that are labeled as part of a series, but have a Series Sequence of "0". I chose to limit to adult fiction because this is the biggest demand. When I included non-fiction and youth books, I found a great many books that truly do not have a particular reading order associated with them and should have sequence "0". There are still many books in series like "Everyman's library" that the query I used will flag, but it is more manageable.

Question 1, I don't have as easy of an answer for. The best thing I can think of is to run that same query (without "SerSeq is Blank") and export to excel. Then use a Pivot Table or CountIf function to get a count of the number of series books for each author. You'd then need to ask a library who is very confident in their cataloging to do the same. After that, you can compare the number of series books by author to see where you might be missing series info.

I'd be happy to help with the excel stuff. I wouldn't mind comparing that data for my library; it would be good to know what info we're missing. We would just need a confident library to volunteer their data to compare to.


Or maybe, hopefully, somebody will have a simpler solution to your question.

Hello All!
I have attached a related instructions sheet for finding titles in your system that are probably part of series but do not have series information on the record..

I also have a recent email thread... I had taken instructions from a very kind John Owen and not truly understood what they meant:

I'll add it here:
"Under View, Administration, Batch Manager, choose the Add Record button, the plus sign, and enter the information below replacing the Param 1 with the Series you'd like to analyze, Param 2 with the Patron Id and Param 3 with your email address. You will be sent a spreadsheet with the details. You can leave the patron information out."
...
" I included the Words "Series Code" to identify what needed to be in the field. If you want the entire series heading reported, leave the Param1 field blank."
Program Name: ps/patronseriesxlsp.p
Param 1: (SeriesCode e.g., DAE)
Param 2: (Patron ID)
Param 3: (Email Address to send the Spreadsheet)"

Then, after trying it out by leaving the series code blank because I thought it would analyze all of the series, Nancy says:

"The program is going to list all the pertinent information for the series. You then review the information provided to see if there is a problem....I think you need to run this by series code, rather than leaving that first parameter blank."

How about you give this query a try? This should give you records that have a series in the MARC record but not on Title-Bib:

Basic Tab:
Medium | Equals | DB
Series | Is Blank

Advanced Tab:
MARC Tag | Tag | Equals | 440
MARC Tag | Data | Is Between | 0 | ZZZZZZZZ