Selecting Children’s Literature for Academic Libraries.

Bailey, Rachel

Bay, M.T. (2001). Selecting children’s literature for academic libraries. Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian, 19 (2), 1-6. doi: 10.1300/ J103v19n02_01.

Summary: This article gives academic librarians who are responsible for library’s children’s book collection, a crash course on how to select the best available children’s books. Suggestions include contacting education faculty, talking to elementary school teachers, using reference books, selecting books that have won major awards, searching the Internet and perusing periodicals.

Evaluation: Although this article was published over a decade ago, I still thought it had some good selection advice especially for the academic librarian who may not know much about children’s literature. This article is also helpful to me on a personal front. I have never considered academic librarianship because I enjoy working with children’s books and materials. The article reminded me that some academic librarians do indeed work with some of these materials. So, I may consider academic librarianship as a future career.