Year in Review: NoveList's 2016 Most Popular Searches

As the end of the year approaches, I am going to be occasionally pointing you toward some "Year in Review" posts by others. However, please note that I will only be sharing those year end wrap up reports that have training implications. I will not be linking to every single "Best List." You can go here or here for that.

Today's post is a perfect example. Over on their blog [and available to anyone, whether you subscribe to the database or not], NoveList has posted their list of the most popular searches from 2016.

You can click through for the entire report, but below I have pulled one list from the larger post to explain why you should care about this data even if you NEVER use NoveList.

I always take notice when NoveList posts this list:

Top 5 Keeping Up... pages
The Keeping Up... genre pages in NoveList deliver all the important info you need on understanding popular genres and help you better pinpoint books readers will love. Find all the Keeping Up... pages in NoveList by entering UI 440110 in the search bar. These were the top 5 most accessed this past year:

1. YA Lit
2. Mystery
3. Historical Fiction
4. Biography and Memoir
5. Romance

Why? Because this is probably staff searching for information to help them understand a specific genre better. Either the staff are getting more questions than normal on these genres or they do not feel like they have a handle on them-- or both! No matter the reasons, these are the genres you should start with for yourself. These are the most searched on a large database. Are you up to speed on what is going on here? The data seems to suggest that chances are, you are not.

But to take the training implications a step further, I would like you to also ask yourself to think about your own personal knowledge gaps. What genres have you been asked about this year, especially if it was more than once, where you did not feel "up to speed?" Maybe it is not one of these 5 but there is at least one. If you have NoveList go check out the page for that genre and if you do not, start researching the trends and award winners for that genre right now.  Need help? Click on the genre in my list of tags in the right gutter of the blog for places to begin.

Everyone, reading this...myself included... has at least one knowledge gap to close. None of you are exempt.

There is much more to learn from NoveList sharing their data with all of us. You can click here to see it all, but please as you read it, apply what you see to yourself and your own experiences helping patrons. You will get much more out of the post if you take this extra step.

 Finally, for comparison's sake and because I never shut up about using the backlist, here is the link to my post on the 2015 NoveList Year in Review.