Dear Ken et al:

We had made Lexile data initially available through Novelist. They provide
it in their widget offerings and API. We had only applied it as data on the
record page but were considering compiling it into our Solr records (which
had far more data than a standard MARC record) for possible use as a
filter/limit tool. Without the custom index option (e.g. Solr), I do not
think ILS vendors offer custom filter/limit tools on external data or on
custom fields.

In peace,

Amy M. Drayer, MLIS
User Interface Developer
[log in to unmask]
http://www.puzumaki.com

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:56 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 1:48 PM, Ken Irwin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > I wonder what tools folks are using to make reading level/lexile/etc.
> information available in their catalogs. I'm interested in:
> >
> >   * how you get the information for each book
> >   * how you record it in the catalog (MARC fields, etc)
> >   * how you make it searchable / limitable
> >
> > Bonus points for III/Innovative systems, but ideas from outside that
> realm are good too.
> >
> > Here's my current approach/hack: there's no leveling info in the
> catalog, but we javascript-up a button built from the title statement to
> create a link to Scholastic's Book Wizard, e.g.:
> >
> > Our catalog record: http://ezra.wittenberg.edu/record=b1267488~S0
> > Has a link called
> > Look Up Grade Level @ Scholastic: https://www.scholastic.com/
> teachers/bookwizard/?search=1&filters=&prefilter=books&text=
> Where%20the%20wild%20things%20are%20by%20Maurice%20Sendak
> >
> > It's better than nothing, but it sometimes fails (book not in
> scholastic's catalog, or weird statement of responsibility monkeys with the
> link-maker), and the information is not stored anywhere in our system.
> >
> > I bet there's a better way, and I wonder what you all are doing.
>
>
> I’ve been advocating such an enhancement to the bibliographic record for a
> long time.
>
> Reading levels can be computing with any number of algorithms, but they
> require full text access to the materials. These algorithms take into
> account things such as length of text, length of sentences, length of
> paragraphs, size of vocabulary, and frequency of unique words. Thus, longer
> items with larger vocabularies and more unique words are deemed more
> difficult to read. If we — the library profession — were to include in the
> bibliographic record reading levels as well as size of text based on number
> of words (not number of pages), then the reader could search do queries
> such as, “Find me a short book about Plato that is easy to read.”
>
> One one really wanted to, then a librarian could:
>
>   1. identify an item in the catalog
>   2. identify a digital version of the item
>   3. compute one or more reading levels against the digital item
>   4. save the result(s) in the bibliographic record
>   5. index the result
>   6. go to Step #1 until done (or tired)
>
> —
> Eric Morgan
>