On March 16, the Baltimore-based nonprofit First Book and technology company Unbound Concepts announced a partnership with the goal of matching new books with young readers from low-income families. The endeavor will pair Unbound Concepts' Artifact app with First Book’s existing marketplace in order to match low-income students with personalized reading recommendations. First Book is a nonprofit that provides new books to children in need, primarily by offering material to educators who work in schools and communities in need at a 50 to 90 percent discount. Unbound Concepts is a reading-focused technology company, and its web and mobile app Artifact—often described as “Pandora for books”—harnesses data from readers, educators, publishers, and machine learning to uncover the unique attributes of books and then turns those attributes into searchable criteria. Each unique searchable attribute of the book, or “artifact” (likened to a tag or subject heading), might describe things like topics, questions, literary elements, maturity warnings, and more. This enables users to identify books with similar characteristics, not unlike EBSCO’s NoveList. What sets Artifact apart from NoveList is its bottom-up ontological structure and emphasis on user-generated content and computational text analysis to create a web of content fitting the needs of its users. There are currently more than 700 artifacts arranged into categories such as Essential Questions, Literary Elements, Themes, and Topics. The artifacts range from very broad (e.g. Style: Irony) to very granular (e.g. How does disillusionment become meaningful in the story?). Ideally these uber-specific artifacts will allow readers and educators to pick up on common threads, discovering multiple books dealing with nuanced concepts to meet their library and/or classroom needs. At this time most artifacts bring up only one or a handful of titles. You can also limit your search to books within a particular Lexile range, books with a particular Accelerated Reader score, or books that have been reviewed in Library Journal or School Library Journal.

QuickStart sessions

The two organizations offer a series of free orientation sessions called QuickStarts for educators who are already qualified to use the First Book marketplace, but want to combine it with the Artifact app. These sessions provide training on how to make personalized reading recommendations for their students and tailor their classroom collections to meet specific needs, as well as how to dig deeper into what’s already on their library’s shelves. The partnership goes beyond the QuickStart sessions. According to Unbound Concepts’ director of marketing Brad Schleicher, Artifact currently has more than 25,000 users. As that user base grows with this partnership, its web of concepts will unfold for even more useful and complex searching as users tag books to suit their own needs, paving the way for more robust artifacts. “Unbound Concepts associates will be building out specific artifacts for books from the First Book Marketplace, and educators will be encouraged to further build out these artifacts within the QuickStart programs,” says Schleicher in an email. “This way we are capturing the collective expertise of Unbound Concepts associates and the teachers/librarians who will ultimately use/are using these books.” Schleicher goes on to address School Library Journal readers and reviewers directly: “We would love the many talented SLJ reviewers to participate in tagging books they know and love so that [the tags] can be shared with other teachers [to] better enable them to search and discover books for their students." Learn more about the free QuickStart orientation programs and find out if your school or community program is eligible to participate, here.