Whether it’s a library patron, friend, or you who is looking for the title of a book, armed with only the sketchiest information — the cover was red, I think it had the word ‘free’ in the title, it was about a girl who lives with a female relative — these resources will help. They (particularly AskMeFi and AddALL) may also help in creating booklists on various themes.
AddALL - Used links to descriptions given by booksellers for titles from any time period, for juvenile, YA, and adult readers, fiction and non-fiction, in the form of books, periodicals, maps, brochures, etc. To use it to find book titles, simply type in a keyword or two — no phrases — or a word from the title. On the next screen, you can exclude words and further focus the search.
For children’s and young adults’ books, Loganberry Books - Solved Mysteries is my first stop, though I actually search Loganberry using Google’s site search from Google’s search page. To do so, type in site:http://loganberrybooks.com/ keyword(s)
Another one for kids — specifically, for picture books — is Search the Children’s Picture Book Database. It allows a keyword search, and or a Boolean search. A search of ’storks’ brought back 5 books; a search of ‘colors’ brought back 224 titles. What’s great about this service, from Miami University, is that the results for each result are author, title, webcat link, publication info, list of other keywords for the book, and a summary.
For a one-time charge of $5, you can be part of the Ask MetaFilter (Ask MeFi) community and ask a question per day (and respond to as many as you want). For free, you can browse other people’s questions and read the responses. There are about 850 questions listed under the tag ‘books’ right now, including: “Please recommend novels whose heroines are similar to the protagonist of Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym?” and “Does anyone recognize what book this illustration [linked] is from?”
Fairly new on the scene is What’s That Book? It’s a free resource for anyone looking for a book based on a description. You can post a question, search, or browse questions and responses in these categories: Children’s Books; General Fiction; Science Fiction & Fantasy; or Non-Fiction. A couple of recently answered queries in the fiction section are: “mother and son separated in El Salvador” and “thinly veiled fictional account of Studio 54 and assorted partygoers.”
Another newish one is Book Cover Search. You can do keyword and key phrase searches. The bummer is that it seems to search only text on the cover, not descriptions of the images. A search for “red flower,” for instance, resulted in a lot of responses, but all had the words “red flower” in the title. If a book had the image of a red flower on the cover but was called Garden Desires, I assume it wouldn’t be found.
There’s also Google’s Book Search, in beta, (about), which searches the full text of books in its collection. If you find what you’re looking for, there are links to either buy the book or find it in a library. Today it turned up 1,029 books with the phrase ‘red flower’ in the title or text.
There are LOTs of RA and search strategies (questions to ask the patron or other book seeker), as well as many useful listed and linked print and online sources, collected at IPL in a pathfinder.
** Related: Slam the Boards, Sept. 10: Librarians invade the ‘Ask’ sites. A day-long ‘answer-fest’ on all the Ask sites (so many!), with librarians answering reference queries and identifying themselves as librarians. The purpose is to market libraries as authoritative and helpful sources of information.