This is a guest post by Maureen Dorosinski, Librarian / Production Supervisor, Florida Bureau of Braille and Talking Book Library Services.
The question:
Meagan from FL1M had a question: “Do we have exclusions for certain dates? Many of our patrons are auto select from their preferences, but only want books from a certain time period.”
Nancy at KLAS suggested we could set up subject codes based on dates. For example, instead of putting everything in the "Bestseller" category, a Bestsellers of the 1990s, Bestsellers of the 80s, category.
First Stop:
Nancy completed a process of setting up the bestseller codes for the various decades. She set the following in place, and filled them:
- BEF50 / BEN50 - fiction and nonfiction prior to 1970
- BEF70 / BEN70 - fiction and nonfiction from 1970 - 1979
- BEF80 / BEN80 - fiction and nonfiction from 1980 - 1989
- BEF90 / BEN90 - fiction and nonfiction from 1990 - 1999
- BEF00 / BEN00 - fiction and nonfiction from 2000 - 2009
In putting these codes on the titles, she also removed the generic BES, BEF and BEN codes, so what is remaining in those subject headings are the more recently published titles.
Second Stop:
Since NLS uses an amalgam of LA Times, New York Times, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller lists to tag books, our cataloger Dina took things to the next level and further populated these tags from NLS by searching all the New York Times Bestsellers, and adding the appropriate subject headings to previously unnoted bestsellers.
To streamline the process, she went to Bookshare.org. They have a section of the top 10 fiction and non-fiction titles from the NYT list, these lists round up the titles without repeating them, and can be filtered by year and month.
Going Forward:
Nancy says the automatic codes being used are BES, BEF and BEN. When MARC records come in, those are updated. If, in your review, you see a recently added title that was originally published in 1970, you might want to add the 1970 bestseller code to it, but other than that, those should stay pretty static. And yes, remind the RAs that these categories exist, for either selection or exclusion.
Maybe another library could continue, Dina says we'll have to add subject headings for the 2010s and (eventually) the 2020s and assign them as appropriate. Maybe you will share their queries with us to import!
Get Bestsellers By Decades at Your Library:
I have attached the text queries with all the books we have tagged in each of the categories. To apply them in your catalog:
- Add the new subject codes as listed above to your catalog using Headings Maintenance.
- Import the first query file.
- Use the Change Headings - Query Set tool to apply the new heading to the Query Set and remove the old heading.
- Repeat for each of the query files.
I’m sure KLAS would help out if you need them!
Downloads:
Thank you!
Maureen in FL
