Guides to Collection Development for Children and Young Adults

O'Brien, Sarah 
 

Book Review 

Gillespie, John T. (1998) Guides to Collection Development for Children and Young Adults. Libraries Unlimited (191 pages)

The essential handbook about collection development for children and young adults, John Gillespie has compiled a bibliography of bibliographies, indexes and professional reference material for any librarian who is focusing on building a bigger and better juvenile and young adult collection. This book is divided by sections covering periodicals, sources for children and young adults and sources for professionals. This expansive annotated bibliography is both detailed and extremely valuable for librarians. This book is highly recommended for anyone studying and researching Children’s Literature and more.

First extracted from the references from the Virginia Kay Williams article I previously wrote about, I ended up buying this book for myself to continue my education and research into juvenile collections. This is an excellent and easy to use handbook that should be on every librarians shelf, it provides access to bibliographies, indexes and professional reference material. As a graduate student studying Children’s Literature and Collection Development, this book would have been extremely valuable during my earlier courses, why my Children Lit professors did not include this handbook, I don’t know!!! As a future Children’s Librarian, I know this book will become extremely handy and helpful  throughout my career.