What's Next: Books in Series

摘要

Many people have bought a book only to find that it is part of a series and is sometimes not even the first volume. Catalogers encounter the same problem: sometimes it is difficult to determine where in the order of the series a title falls. There are many books that display the book number on the spine or title page/verso, but there are a number of series that do not, such as Robert Beatty's Serafina series. What is a cataloger to do when they need to fill a 490$v or 8XX$v, but cannot find the intended or publication order of a series? Sites like Goodreads, while helpful and free, do not always provide accurate or authoritative volume information and do not always group books together in series. Subscription databases like EBSCO's NoveList suffer from the same issue and are behind a paywall. Enter Kent District Library's (KDL) What's Next: Books in Series, a database which provides a full list of everything an author has written, in series order (Vnuk, 2012). The KDL considers a series to be two or more books linked by character(s), settings, or other common traits (Kent District Library, n.d.).