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OCLC Fiction Finder
OCLC Fiction Finder
5:17 PM EDT 8/3/05
I hope folks won't mind if I make a plug for an OCLC Research project, but I think Fiction Finder might be a great resource for Reader's Advisory. It's free to use and available to anyone. The database is built from approximately 2.5 million catalog records in WorldCat, all the records for fiction titles. OCLC Research does some special processing to group records for different editions of the same work, and the resulting database lets you explore fiction items listed in WorldCat in new and useful ways. It's a prototype so the usual caveats apply. For more information, see http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/frbr/fictionfinder.htm & to search the database itself, go to http://fictionfinder.oclc.org/
Re: OCLC Fiction Finder
5:26 PM EDT 8/3/05 as a reply to Eric Childress.
we don't mind at all! very cool. thanks for sharing (and welcome!)
Re: OCLC Fiction Finder
6:54 PM EDT 8/3/05 as a reply to Eric Childress.
I was using OCLC's & Google's Find it in a Library. Is this part of the same project? Regardless, this is truly neat. I can see all the possibilites for reader's advisory. I did a search using the category of settings and Connecticut and was pleased to find several titles as well as additonal subjects of Connecticut River Valley, etc.

Thanks for sharing. I'll have to play with this some more to see how it can be used to its best advantage. What are your thoughts about this?
Re: OCLC Fiction Finder
10:02 AM EDT 8/9/05 as a reply to Carol Kubala.
Thanks for the positive comments. It's a prototype and we've been interested in learning from users' experiences what uses and features Fiction Finder best suits (or could if we made changes). For my own personal use I've found it very helpful to use the settings feature to find novels related to places I'm planning to visit. We also have staff who've liked looking through novels in particular genre. Feedback is most welcome. Thanks for using the prototype.
Re: OCLC Fiction Finder
12:17 PM EDT 8/19/05 as a reply to Eric Childress.
This is great!
Nancy Pearl would be pleased to see you identifying books by some of their 'appeal characteristics'. In her print Now Read This series of RA books, she uses 4 appeal characteristics: character, language, setting and story.
In fictionfinder it would be helpful to know more about the fields you've identified, especially 'fiction categories' 'literary forms' and 'special forms'.

I look forward to using this more...keep up the good work.
Re: OCLC Fiction Finder
1:34 PM EDT 8/21/05 as a reply to Jennifer Peterson.
Thanks for the compliments on Fiction Finder. I've forwarded your comments on adding some info to colleagues working on the project. Thanks.. And BTW I think failed to answer an earlier question about Fiction Finder's relationship to Open WorldCat. There isn't a direct one as yet. We're surfacing Open WorldCat links in Fiction Finder. There have been and continue to be some background conversations about surfacing Fiction Finder features elswhere in OCLC services. We'd be interested in suggestions, wishlists, etc.

I think Nancy Pearl might be very interested in this WebJunction topic. Just bumped into some potentially useful links: http://www.kuow.org/thebeat_books.asp that describes her weekly radio show, and, of course, Nancy's own web site, http://www.nancypearl.com.
Re: OCLC Fiction Finder
10:26 PM EDT 8/31/05 as a reply to Eric Childress.
Hey! Maybe we could get Nancy to do a WJ live meeting with us. Do you think folks would be into that?
Re: OCLC Fiction Finder
10:41 AM EDT 9/1/05 as a reply to Chrystie Hill.
Who would miss a chance to chat with Nancy Pearl!!!
RE: Re: OCLC Fiction Finder
4:54 PM EST 2/24/09 as a reply to Eric Childress.
I'm interested if Fiction Finder is established on FAST? Second question - is there any catalog using POPSI indexing schema?