unapologeticallyb00kish

I’m feeling bereft at this moment! I discovered a simple, yet amazing tool and was psyched to share it with everyone. After embarking on a research filled journey to learn more about this tool, I discovered that it was nearly as old as me. I’m talking about The KDL What’s Next®: Books in Series database that has been in operation since the mid-1990s and faithfully updated by the Kent District Library (Michigan) staff. 

What does it do? – It keeps track of fiction series books and provides one quick and easy location to search. I like that it lists all the series by an author and users can easily see titles of the books in a series written by their favorite author. The interface is very basic and simple to use, but one of the aspects that is refreshing is the no frills information that it provides. I’ve found some alternatives, but they run ads and their pages are so busy that it is distracting and hard to find the information I am searching for.

I spent a few hours searching for several series and found that many of those I explored were up to date. The 29th Dragon Masters book that released on August 5, 2025 was listed as is the 30th book which won’t release until December 2025. However, other series like the Babysitter’s club graphic novels are only updated to book 15 even though there are currently 17 published in the series with book 18 dropping in October 2025. I was surprised to find that The Babysitter’s Club wasn’t updated as it is incredibly popular among my elementary school students. After noticing this gap, I decided to investigate Manga and graphic novels. KDL doesn’t include Manga titles and has very few graphic novels recorded in the database. I’d argue that these are important additions as they are so popular among my secondary readers and some of the series are so long that it would be nice to have all the series information in one location.

Overall, I will be adding a link to the KDL database on my school website in order to help students easily access fiction series information. What about you? Have all of you been using this for years, or is this your first time hearing about this tool?