Friday, September 30, 2016

Challenge #5: Browse Hoopla Categories

Our last challenge drills down a little further on Hoopla's content organization. Challenge-takers so far have noted that Hoopla is functionally geared toward browsing, more so than searching (though you can search and find particular titles).

One of the best ways to browse Hoopla is by exploring their Categories, which are many and varied! For example, here are all the categories available for Television:

So, your challenge for this week: pick a format and explore the categories. Find a category that appeals to you. Is it "The Great Courses?" "Just Added to Hoopla?" "British Favorites?"



Report in the comments:

Which category did you pick? Did the content in that category seem to fit? How accurate was their categorization?


23 comments:

  1. looked at comedy and drama in television. categorization seems to be accurate in those 2. however, most content appears to be from several years ago.

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  2. I was browsing through the TV series and movies and I was a little disappointed the material is so outdated the movies not so much but the TV series needs some help.

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  3. I looked at the Romance ebooks - they have an impressive amount of titles! I was also pleased to see they offer a second level of categories within romance (paranormal, historical, LGBT, etc). I would prefer to be able to see how many results there were (page 1 of 4 or items 1-50 of 200) instead of the current "Showing 1-50."

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  4. I wanted to see what they had in the way of non-fiction on audiobook for my commute. They didn't have a general non-fiction category, which makes sense cause that is huge, and I wan't interested in some of the categories offered like "business" or "celebrity memoir," or "self-help," so I decided to try "featured non-fiction" and found exactly the kind of books I was interested in browsing. One of my all-time faves (Bad Feminist) was right in the top row. Gonna go dig deeper and see what I can find to check out.

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  5. I looked first for travel books, but they don't carry the sort of thing I was looking for (but Total BooX totally does). Then I looked for ebooks in children's -- lots of options for genre searching. Looked at some mysteries and also animals ==> Ducks, Geese, etc. A better selection than I would have thought for something that specific!

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  6. On my phone app, catagories are called genres. I pursued DIY TV shows: The Happy Painter was there, I looked at the Craft options in Ebooks where there are several knitting and crochet books, not so many for sewing and others. My biggest hoopla challenge so far is the limit of 6 items per month. :)

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  7. The categories section is fairly easy to navigate, as it's in alphabetical order. Although it does appear a bit cluttered, the top categories section helps simplify that problem. The overall content seems current, with a good mix of older stuff included. Some sections, like tv series and movies can use more selections.

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  8. The Disney's Comic category was pretty cool. Had most of the movies in graphic novels and also awesome old shows like darkwing duck and chip n dale rescue rangers! Also there is a High school musical graphic novel.. who knew? A great comic to sing-a-long with I'm sure. :P

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  9. Looked at several categories/genres: Disney Audiobooks; Featured Young Adult; and Urban Fiction. Tons of content in Disney and Young Adult with a good mix of old titles and new. The Urban fiction selection has the big titles (Cartel, etc.), but outside that it's slim pickings with only 76 titles. Which reminds me, it would be nice to know how many titles/pages are in each category without clicking through to the end. I find the recommended titles to be pretty helpful. Definitely better to browse in Hoopla rather than search.

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  10. I was home and I wanted to stream some Bollywood music for laundry-folding purposes. The most likely-seeming category was "World," but once I was in World there was no way to narrow it further. I clicked on something by Anoushka Shankar (Indian, not Bollywood) hoping that I could go from there to more stuff from India. Alas, no, clicking on "India" in that record led nowhere. Then I started over with a keyword search on "bollywood" and there is A TON OF BOLLYWOOD. So, in conclusion, I think Hoopla needs some librarians on board to improve their indexing. (Margaret)

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  12. I feel silly but I honestly don't see a "categories" option. It only says "recommended" "featured" and "popular." I can sort by genre on the top right though. What am I missing? Hmmm...I will keep playing around.

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  13. I looked at Fiction/Dystopian and Fiction/Humorous and those seemed to be fairly accurate. I'm not sure I would personally browse that way as it's still a pretty unwieldy list that doesn't have that many ways to filter. I think I'd probably stick to searching for specific authors/titles.

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  14. I looked at audiobooks--first I checked out "kids only" category which was really mostly picture books with a couple of chapter books thrown in. Then I noticed the "tween audiobooks" category. This is where there are a lot more chapter books, though I wouldn't have necessarily categorized them as "tween"--Lemony Snicket, Annie Barrows, etc. Not a huge selection, but there were definitely some good titles. The "teen" audiobook category seemed like it had the biggest selection.

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  15. I went pretty deep into the teen audio book section because I'm really trying to promote those. There are some series that I like to recommend that aren't on hoopla (yet?) that I hope we get soon. I know we are getting lots of titles every month so I'll keep checking. But what's there is pretty good!

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  16. Have to agree that the Hoopla categories need some work. On the iPad, you have to look under "genres" first (at least in the movie section(, then it becomes "categories." There's an "African Films of the 70s and 80s" category, but no "Japanese" category, for instance. I can search "Japanese" in movies and get a list of some Japanese movies (including at least one Jackie Chan movie, hmmm), but there really ought to at least be a breakdown of country of origin in categories.

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    1. I also just discovered that there are Japanese films in the their collection that DON'T show up when you search "Japanese."

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  17. I glanced at "political" audio books. Seems like a bit of a conservative slant.

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  18. I chose Gardening from the Categories page. The breadcrumb at the top of the page reads Categories -> Psychology -> Psychopathology -> Gardening. Um ??? Pretty weird. I like that there are subcategories of Gardening on this page. But, when I try to searching for more than one category, it doesn't seem to work. For example, "Gardening with Less Water" includes Desert and Gardening in its categories, but when you search those as keywords, the title does not appear. Hoopla needs some help with categorization and keyword searching.

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  19. I chose TV. It jas a lot of genres to pick from,but not a lot in any of them,however i love some of the choices available,being that I'm 'old school. Download to your tablet and watch on your laptop or pc,use HDMI to watch on your tv. Cool.

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  20. I chose TV. It jas a lot of genres to pick from,but not a lot in any of them,however i love some of the choices available,being that I'm 'old school. Download to your tablet and watch on your laptop or pc,use HDMI to watch on your tv. Cool.

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  21. It took a while of poking around to see the different ways to search - genres, categories, filters, tags (though search box).... I picked audiobooks and located a book called Savor (Thich Nat Han), under one of the Health categories. Then I tried looking for it using the tags weight loss and mindfulness, which does work, even though it was categorized under Heath and Nutrition. The categories are quirky but lead to some interesting discoveries, like NPR (includes a collection of Driveway Moments). It would be nice if you could choose ALL, instead of scrolling through 1-50, 51-100, etc. I do like how quickly the display comes up, especially for 'similar authors.' Or if you want to find everything that a particular narrator has done (under Audio Books) you should be able to click on their name and see all the audiobooks they have narrated. I really like that I can instantly start listening to "White Trash", when there is a gigantic hold list for that under our regular print collection. Something to mention to the patrons! - Emily O

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