Book Length

Hi there! What are your parameters for short or long books?
What about short books at 6 hours or less, and long books 20 hours or more.
What do you all think? Thanks!

In AZ, we have our short books as anything under 6 hours, and anything over 12 hours for long. (This is a holdover from the cassette days, and is the equivalent of 1 cassette tape for short, and 3 or more for long.)

For MA1A, anything 5 and under is short, 15 and over is long. We were saying 10 and over for a while, but that really limited the options for folks.

In OR we use < 6 hours as Quick Reads, 6 - 9:59 as short length, 10 - 19:59 as a medium length book and over 20 as long length.

Thank you for your replies! How about braille books? What number of volumes make short and long? Thanks!

At MN1A:

Long Book = 12 hours+ for audio and 3 volumes+ for braille.

Short Book = 11 hours, 59 minutes or less for audio and 2 volumes or less for braille.

IMO, braille has been difficult to tag. When I first started, the short books in audio were almost always short books in braille. But I think when UEB replaced English Braille American Edition, braille books became long while their audio counterparts stayed short. (Call me out if I'm wrong.) I have wondered for years if we should have changed our BR titles so that 3 volumes or less should qualify as short.

That said, in the last few years, I feel like EVERY braille book on BARD is 1 volume, so I've stopped tagging BRs as Long or Short. It could be that weeks later the BR's BARD page gets adjusted and the number of volumes increases, but I don't have the time to double back.

Is there a query recipe for finding number of volumes? (I know we can use the numerical value from the 306 MARC field for audio book runtime ...if/when a 306 field is employed.)