Four Views of a Novel: Characteristics of Novels as Described by Publishers, Librarians, Literary Theorists, and Readers

Publishers present novels with summaries, librarians provide subject headings, classification numbers and annotations, literary theorists write reviews. Readers share opinions and tags in social networks. These groups share interest in the same novel and possibly in the same library catalogs. I analyze the descriptions of novels written by these four groups to propose the enhancement of library catalogs. Results show that the story, information about the author, genre, personal experience with reading the novel, and an evaluation (awards, personal evaluation) are consistently presented by all four groups and should become standard elements for the subject description of fiction