1. Let Your Catalog Do the Work For You!

2. How Your PAC May Help … Some Library Systems provide features that make searching by Lexile Levels easy for parents and children … and very importantly easy for you as the librarian. Let’s look at an example.

3. TLC Libraries For Virginia Libraries who are customers of TLC (The Library Corporation) … the “Reading Programs” PAC feature, may be your Lexile “ Best Friend.”

4. How Does This Work? TLC can help you establish “Lexiles” as a “Reading Program” (your catalog may already be setup with this function.) Parents and children can then easily search by Lexile Level. The next few slides include screen shots to illustrate this TLC feature from the user’s perspective.

5. In the Pac, the patron chooses the “Reading Programs” tab as illustrated below:

6. The patron enters a Lexile Level, for example, “0660” and clicks search. Note that the “contain” search parameter is the default.

7. Voila … a search for Lexile Level 0660 titles is generated.

8. As you can see below, the patron can now place holds immediately or save selections to a list.

9. Here is a look at the list that magically generates.

10. How does the library staff make this happen? Simply enter the Lexile information in the 526 field of the catalog record. We recommend using the wonderful list of suggested books that Enid provided on the Wiki. The next screen shows how easy this was to do.

11. The Lexile Level in the Catalog Record

12. What About New Book Releases? Many catalog records for new books already contain the Lexile level, so by leaving in the 526 field, new books that are added to the local library’s catalog are automatically searchable by Lexile Level in the “Reading Programs” feature.

13. Check with Your Vendor! If you are a TLC customer, check with them if you need help. If you are not a TLC customer, check with your vendor to see if there is a similar PAC feature that will help your Lexile searchers. Good luck in finding ways to make your PAC do the work for you!