We recently improved the relevance of our Student Library collection by adding more than 10,000 reading levels to borrowable K-12 books in our search engine.

What are Reading Levels?

In the same way a library-goer may be interested in finding a book on a specific topic, like vampires, they may also be interested in narrowing their search for books that are within their reading level. The readability of a book may be scored in numerous ways, such as analyzing sentence lengths or complexity, or the percentage of words that are unique or difficult, to name a few.

For our purposes, we choose to incorporate Lexile scores—a proprietary system developed by MetaMetrics®. Lexile scores are widely used within school systems and have a reliable scoring system that is accessible and well documented.

While the goal of our initiative was to add reading levels specifically for borrowable K-12 books within the Open Library catalog, Lexile also offers a fantastic Find a Book hub where teachers, parents, and students may search more broadly for books by Lexile score. We’re grateful that Lexile features “Find in Library” links to the Open Library so readers can check nearby libraries for the books they love!

Before Reading Levels

Before Open Library had reading level scores, the system used subject tags to identify books according to grade level. Many of these categories were noisy, inaccurate, and had high overlap, making it difficult to find relevant books. Furthermore, with grade level bucketing, there was no intuitive way to search for books across a range of reading levels.

Searching for Books by Reading Level

Now, lexile score ranges like “lexile:[500 TO 900]” can be used flexibly in search queries to find the exact books that are right for a reader, with results being limited by grade levels. https://openlibrary.org/search?q=lexile%3A%5B700+TO+900%5D

Putting It All Together

By utilizing these lexile ranges, we’ve been able to develop a more coherent and expansive K-12 portal experience where there are fewer duplicate books across grade levels.

We expect this improvement will make it easier for K-12 students and teachers to find appropriate books to satisfy their reading and learning goals. You can explore the newly improved K-12 student collection at http://openlibrary.org/k-12.

What Do You Think?

Is there something you miss from the previous K-12 page? Is the new organization more useful to you? Share your thoughts on bluesky.

Credits

This reading level import initiative was led by Mek, the Open Library program lead, with assistance from Drini Cami, Open Library senior software engineer. The project received support from Jordan Frederick, an Open Library intern who shadowed this project as part of her Master’s in Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree.