If you don't want to spoil an ongoing story line by reading the books in a series out of order, how can you sort out which comes first?
You can try searching the Internet. Often the author's website, or that of a fan will tell you. You could try looking for publishing dates, but what if you're looking at dates of reprints and new editions? Another way would be to use one of the library's databases. One I like to use is called NoveList.
Go to our home page: sfpl.org
Under eLibrary there is a link for Articles & Databases
To get to Novelist you can click on N, or choose Books &Literature from the drop-down.
Once you have Novelist open you can see that one of the options to search on is Series. You can type a keyword from the name of the series, or you can type the title of one book in the series, or just type the author's name. When you click on the name of the series, or on the title of one of the books in the series, you will get the list of all titles in the series in order. Each title has a link to the catalog of SFPL so you can check availablity and reserve (hold) a copy.
Here is a video to show how:
If you cannot see the video, please let us know.