Following Literary Threads in the Library: this book leads to this book leads to this book

The fifth grade students are exploring how Destiny, our catalog, can help lead them to a book that will answer an information need or fulfill an independent reading need. We talk about literary threads in the library and how students are able to follow themes, ideas, settings, characters, and more within a neighborhood or from neighborhood to neighborhood throughout the library.

Those of us who work in library inevitably get the question, "I finished _________, what should I read next?" I love to recommend books to students and encourage them to seek each other out for recommendations, but Destiny can also be a good option. Here are some of the literary threads that were sewn today:

How did the students arrive at these results?

I modeled how to use the "explore" section within Destiny to find books and then sent them off in pairs to help each other to put this resource into action. I will use this student's search to show what they were doing.

Navigate to Destiny:

Type in the search terms.

(I teach them that less is more and Destiny is a powerful database.)

Click on the hyperlinked title.

Scroll down to the "Explore" section.

Choose one or two of the subjects, subject headings, or suggestions to follow.

(The blue hyperlinks lead to other books in our library. I showed them how they could copy any of these suggestions and search in our local library catalog, but for this exploration, they had to find a book in our library.)

This student clicked on "courage--fiction" and these results came up. The student checked out Willow Run because of this search.

Here are other literary threads that were sewn!