We’ve just added MetaMetrics’ The Lexile Framework® for Reading, commonly known as “Lexile measures,” to LibraryThing. These offer another way for members to view their books—this time by reading level.

The feature. You can look at pages for any Lexile, or for a range of Lexile measures.

• 200L (Clifford, The Gruffalo), 1580L (graduate-school texts)
• 300L-400L

We’ve also added a view of all your Lexile measures:

• Your Lexile measures: http://www.librarything.com/memberlexile/MEMBERNAME
• Tim’s: http://www.librarything.com/memberlexile/timspalding

You can, if you’d like, add the Lexile® measures column in Your books for easy viewing or sorting.

The Lexile measures in your catalog are based on more than 115,000 ISBNs to which Lexile measures have been assigned by MetaMetrics.

Background. Since LibraryThing was created we’ve drawn interest from teachers and school librarians. Our ease of use and advanced features have led a number of small schools to use us as their primary catalog, along with numerous classroom libraries and other collections. Many have, however, asked us to add something provided by other school-library systems, like Follett and Alexandria, namely Lexile® measures.

Lexile measures are based on the comprehensibility of the text—the lower the Lexile measure, the easier the book’s text is to comprehend. The official Lexile scale ranges from 200L to 1700L (see the Lexile map [PDF] for example texts), though actual Lexile measurements in LibraryThing range from 0L to 2000L. Check out Lexile.com for more on Lexile measures.

If you don’t want it… We recognize that Lexile measures are neither comprehensive or universally appreciated. We want to make them available to people who will find them useful, but hope they’ll be unobtrusive to others.

Come talk about it in the New Features group.

[Note: This post has been updated]

Labels: new feature, new features