Getting Smart about Series

This is a guest post by Sam Lundberg - Reader Advisor for the New Mexico State Library for the Blind & Print Disabled, and current President of the KLAS Development Advisory Committee.

We’ve had a lot of interest recently from across the community for Nightly AutoSelect to be more “series smart,” and not send book 3 in a series before a patron has had book 1.  I’m among the chorus that’s been asking for this since the beginning of DoD, but I think it is worth talking about exactly how we want this to work.  There are a lot of different ways that Nightly could be series smart, each with a different impact on the patron experience.

I’m going to lay out a few of the ways that I’ve thought of, along with advantages and possible drawbacks. I’d love to hear what others have been thinking on this subject, and I’m sure Keystone would appreciate knowing exactly what we want, rather than a vague mission to make it better.

As a preface, I have no idea how practical any of these solutions are from a programming side.  I’ve tried to lay out specific rules that an algorithm could follow, but that doesn’t mean they would be easy, or even possible, to put in place.  Some of these rules may also bog Nightly down to a crawl, requiring more time to run each night.  This is a thought exercise to figure out exactly what we, as a community, want, rather than a menu of actual possibilities.

Option 1 

1a) “First in the series only”

• When Nightly picks a title by Subject, it checks the “series sequence” field and excludes any book with a value greater than 1.

This is basically what is accomplished by libraries that use a “Sequel” subject code.  Autoselect wouldn’t send out any sequels, which would exclude a large number of books from popular authors who write primarily or exclusively series. For context, I just ran a query and found that 321 of the 564 mystery titles we’ve added this year have a series sequence between 2 and 999.

Since this would be based on a Nightly setting, it would be library-wide rather than patron by patron.  However, if KLAS also adds the ability to customize Nightly Functions by Serve Code, you could create an “AutoSelect No Sequels” serve code and an “AutoSelect All” serve code and select the appropriate one for each patron.

1b) “First or next in series only”

• When Nightly picks a title by Subject, it checks the “series sequence” field and excludes any book with a value greater than 1 UNLESS the patron has a “HasHad” for the previous book in the series..

Like 1a, except that subsequent books in a series can be sent if the patron is caught up in that series.  This would help increase the available possible selections for series-heavy genres like Mystery.  However, there is no mechanism for a patron to catch up on a series once they have missed a book, or for new patrons to get started on a long-standing series, without a specific request or Series preference.

Option 2

2a) “Not this book, but this series”

• When Nightly picks a title by Subject, it checks the “series” field and instead sends out the earliest book in that series not marked as “Has Had”.

The idea here is that, instead of sending out book 7 in a series, Nightly would go back and send out book 1 (or book 5 if the patron had the first four books already).  This method would ensure that patrons are still able to access series books, but will always do so in order.

However, because the book Nightly initially found isn’t being sent out, there is no “Has Had” record added to that title, so Nightly will keep finding that book and sending books from that series over and over and over.  How much of a problem this is will be very contextually dependent.  If you use “Latest First” service for Subject, the books Nightly finds will change constantly.  

But if you use “Earliest First” and don’t update your KLAS ID Ranges often, then nightly will check the same books every time.  For instance, if your KLAS ID range starts at DB090000, Nightly will find Joanne Fluke and Stuart Woods at 90001 & 90002 respectively, so patrons with a mystery Subject preference would receive those entire series in rapid succession under this scheme.  And given the prevalence of this sort of long-standing series, patrons may receive a large number of older titles as they are bumped back 20, 30, 50 books in a series.

2b) “Not this book, but where I left off this series”

• When nightly picks a title by Subject, it checks the “Series” field, locates the item with the highest series sequence in that series with a “Has Had” record, and sends the next book.

2a would fill in gaps if a patron skipped books or started with book 15. 2b wouldn’t fill in gaps, but would select the next book after the highest numbered book the patron has read.

For example, if a patron has read books 1, 2, 4, and 8 in a series and Nightly wants to send them book 10, 2a would instead send book 3, while 2b would send out book 9.

Option 3

3a) “Not this book, but this series, but not too often”

• When Nightly picks a title by Subject, it checks the “series” field and instead sends out the earliest book in this series not marked as “Has Had” UNLESS a book in this series is already in the Service Queue or a pending order, in which case Nightly will skip this title and series.

See Option 2, except that the frequency of a series being sent is gated by the length of the service queue, rather than the frequency the queue is refilled.  If the patron’s service queue is 30 books long, you know there will be at least 30 books between each book in a series.  However, this makes more sense for long running series than for short trilogies.  I could see wanting to have different behaviors based on the length of the series, but that is getting complicated to keep track of.  Keep in mind, this only applies to Subject and possibly Author.  Books selected by Series, Request or Reserve would not have this same gating.

3b) “Not this book, but this series, but not too often, and picking up where I left off”

• When nightly picks a title by Subject, it checks the “Series” field and instead sends out the next book after the highest number book in the series marked as “Has Had”, or book 1 if the patron has not read any books in the series.  UNLESS a book in this series is already in the service queue or a pending order, in which case nightly will skip this title and series.

Like 2b, this option just differentiates between filling in the gaps in a series or continuing from the highest numbered book a patron has read.

Option 4

4) “This book and this entire series”

• When nightly picks a title by Subject, it checks the “Series” field and queues all unread books in that series.

This could work well for shorter series, especially trilogies with a tight story, but would create a very hit-or-miss situation when dumping an entire 20+ book series.  As with 2b, I worry that having a cutoff point for different behaviors would create confusion and unexpected outcomes.  I think it would be possible to catalog our way out of this problem, flagging series as either a tight story or as episodic/procedural, but that isn’t something every library, including NM, could commit to.  This rule would also need to differentiate between sequence 0 books (which are often more a collection and less a series) and numbered series. 

Practically, I don’t think this could work as the default option given the sheer quantity of long-running series, but I could see this as an alternative that specific patrons would want to opt-in to.

Option 5

5) “Just care about what is in the Queue now”

• When Nightly picks a title by Subject, it checks the Service Queue for any books in the same Series.  If another book in the queue is in the same Series and has a higher Series Sequence, the new book is placed ahead of the book already in the queue, rather than at the end.

Basically, if Nightly is trying to add book 2, and book 3 is already in the queue, book 2 is slotted just ahead of book 3, rather than at the end of the queue.  This would only address the issue of patrons being sent books out of order in immediate proximity, such as when several books in a series are added at once by the NLS.  Limited potential help but also limited potential harm.

So what option (listed above or something else entirely) would you want?  

A big consideration is do we want this to be patron-by-patron?  Or do we want it to be library-wide?  And what do we want to be the default behavior vs. the opt-in behavior?  Should this apply only to Subject selections, or Author as well?

Personally, I’m in favor of option 3b “Not this book, but this series, but not too often”.  I think it addresses the core problem of books being sent out of order while avoiding any big drawbacks.  It isn’t perfect, and will be clunky for short series, but that’s what Author Preferences and Reader Advisors are for.  That said, I’m sure there are all sorts of circumstances I’m not accounting for that should be considered.

What are your thoughts?  How, exactly, do you want Nightly to be series smart?