Patrons will sometimes tell us that they want “only new books” or, “none of those awful new books.” At this time, we can’t really do anything but search for specific books by publication date. I can’t create a subject code for “new” or “old” because those are relative terms and I would have to constantly go in and remove “new” from books that are now less than new.

But…what if we could set a patron preference for “new,” or “classic,” or “20th century.” Then, at night, Nightly would look for their books by subject, grade level, language, HasHad, under limit, AND it would scan the publication dates. The patron wants “new” books. While matching all of the patron’s preferences, Nightly will do some math; “is the publication date within 36 months of today’s date?” Yes! Send the book. No! Skip the book.

You can certainly create subjects for immutable criteria like 20th century fiction vs classics vs 21st century fiction. But that isn't necessarily what the patron is objecting to when they say they only want new books, it could be sound quality / analog to digital or something else entirely.

The trouble with publication dates is that sometimes it reflects when NLS produced the book and sometimes it is when the original was published. The more reliable way to tell the "age" of an NLS book has tended to be using the BookNumber/ KlasID.

The other concern I have for nightly subjects preferences that mean something other than match/reject this subject is performance. As I think about it more what you are really asking for is a new type of exclusion logic. That way it would be available to the RA's when searching for the patron as well. I'd need to check with the programmers to see what the performance cost of adding in a new exclusion check might be, and how much of an issue it might be for nightly.

If you are looking for a way to restrict nightly subject matching based on the "newness" of books - the best way to do it currently would be to setup a nightly ranges customization for that patron. The caveat with this is that only subjects from the stacks use Nightly Ranges so I suppose the question would be how much interest is there in adding Nightly ranges to turnaround subjects and/or to author selections.

It was a suggestion. You all asked us to contribute. We have many situations where a patron wants only books that were written recently, or only wants books that were written before the 60's or 70's. The feel that the writing style, in either situation, is more what the are interested in reading. Having nothing to do with the narrator or quality. Simply the content of the actual book.

I was trying to work through different ways that what you were asking for might be accomplished.

If it's writing style that you are after most, a cataloging solution might be best since publication date might not be as reliable.

If it's a new style of exclusion check, I'm still trying to wrap my brain around how to present the interface in a way that won't adversely affect performance. It would need to be a new option on the left side of the screen - just adding a "subject" would be hard to parse with the computer. There would need to be a way to specify which date you cared about since there are multiple dates associated with a title. And I need a way for you to tell me which direction the patron wants to exclude titles.

There's also functionality in KLAS that partially does this, but we acknowledge that there are some problems that might make it more useful. Those fixes haven't been done yet because folks don't seem to want to use it. If there is more interest in fixing the issues with nightly customization, we'd like to know that.

I, too, have often been told by patrons that they want only new books or only old ones. Usually it's the older ones that they want. Another common request is no books that are too long. I know we could create a local subject code for long books, once we decide how long a book needs to be to get that code, but that would be one more subject code that we would have to maintain locally. I'm not keen on adding yet another one to that mix.

I like what you're saying. Isn't that something else that could be measured in Nightly? Can't it use the field for book length? Then we could set up short, medium, or long books. Or, we could set the preferences up by a time range: 0-6 hours, 6-12 hours, 12-20, etc. Right now, determining a book length for the subject codes that we use, SL or LO (short of long) is a tedious process that is have accurate at best.