Database of the Week - NoveList

The end of the academic school year is fast approaching and what better way to kick off the summer than to catch up on all those books you’ve been wanting to read but haven’t had the time. To help you in this endeavor the featured database this week is NoveList.

NoveList is a fiction database that provides subject heading access, reviews, annotations, and much more for over 135,000 fiction titles. It also includes other content of interest to fiction readers, such as Author Read-alikes, What We're Reading, Book Discussion Guides, BookTalks, and Annotated Book Lists.

Novelist has many different ways to search its database. The tabs include:

Search Our Database – search the database by author, title, series, description, or Boolean phrase.

Browse Lists – search hundreds of lists of book titles, pre-defined by award, genre, subject, and more. The Best Fiction link allows you access to over 300 literary awards by reading level.

For Readers – by selecting this tab you have access to the customized content that NoveList develops for its readers, including Author Read-alikes, Book Discussion Guides, What We’re Reading, Annotated Book Lists and other content written by nationally-known fiction experts.

NoveList has lots of handy tools to help you create and store personal reading lists. The Sign in to My NoveList feature allows you collect information you plan on reusing in a future NoveList session. After you sign in, you can save search results and create alerts. Alerts are a great feature – you can keep up to date with popular authors or genres by using a saved search to set up an alert. NoveList will send you an email every time a new book meeting your search criteria is added to the database. You can also save lists and retrieve previously saved lists. All items are saved in a folder that only you can access.

The NoveList interface is colorful, inviting and simple to navigate with several links on the homepage to guide you. However, if you need a little help getting started it does contain several training modules and a Help link.

What I like best is its ability to create and save lists. You can add books you’re interested in reading and it saves not just the title, but a link to reviews of the book and publishing information. As you read books off your list you can update your list to reflect what you have yet to read. So get ready for summer reading by visiting NoveList.

Linette Neal, Reference Librarian