Curated Topics
Rialto curated lists are ready-made collections of themed, high-quality titles across a range of subjects and publishers. They help quickly identify relevant books for your collection.
What Is in a Curated List
The available lists under Curated Topics come from two different sources: ProQuest for Curated Topics, and Syndetics Unbound for Distinctions & Honors and Notable Lists. Each list contains approximately 100 unique titles from various publishers.
As of February 2025, ProQuest is no longer generating new lists, however, historical lists dating back to September 2019 remain available.
Distinctions & Honors and Notable Lists are sent to Rialto on a weekly basis from Syndetics Unbound. Syndetics Unbound define these lists as follows:
Distinctions & Honors
- Criteria: Everything else, including celebrity and book-club “picks,” bestseller lists, and “starred” reviews.
- Examples: Oprah’s Book Club, NPR: Books We Love.
Notable Lists
- Criteria: These are one-off or lists of books (or other media), appearing in a book, a magazine, or even a blog.
- Examples: Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of the 1980s, Guardian 1,000 (“1000 novels everyone must read”), 1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up
Working with Curated Lists
You can review curated lists from the Curated Topics page (Collection Development > Market > Curated Topics).
The List Type column has three values:
- Curated Topics — Themed lists of titles selected for relevance and quality.
- Distinctions & Honors — Titles that have received awards or formal recognition from respected organizations or publications.
- Notable Lists — Titles recognized for importance or popularity within their field.
You can use the List Type filter at the top of the Curated Topics page to filter results by list type.
If you know the name of a list or have a specific keyword in mind, you can search the curated lists to quickly locate the titles you want to review.
- Enter the term(s) in the search box and select the spyglass icon to retrieve relevant results.
- Select a list from the results to review its titles.
When you open a curated list, a list of available offers is displayed. You can then search by Title, ISBN, Author, or Keywords by choosing the desired option from the dropdown, entering your search text, and selecting the search icon (
). To clear the search, select X in the search field. You can also use facets to hide irrelevant offers (see Working with Facets).
Select an offer to view its details in the right-hand pane. The details pane provides additional information about the selected title, including bibliographic data, professional reviews, author information, and awards.
From the details pane, you can take the following actions:
- Create a Purchase Request — Submit a request to purchase the item (see Creating a Purchase Request).
- Share in Email — Send the offer details to a colleague within your institution (see Sharing Offers via Email).
The Create a Purchase Request option is available only to users with Alma roles that include purchasing privileges. Users without these roles only see the Share in Email option.