This page is a subset of the Physical Library - Global web page. That is, all the links on this page are integrated within the other information retrieval resources provided on the Physical Library - Global web page. A short tutorial is available to teach the most basic skills for moving data from the Internet to your word processing files and diskette.

• Bookstores in the U.S. and World.
• K-12 Libraries
• Library of Congress
• Search for Video (Educational Television (U.S.), Film, Video, Videodisc, DVD)
• Public Libraries.
• Search Museums & Exhibits Around the Globe, by Yahoo. Use Search Only Museums... or browse the links.
• Search for Periodicals
• Post-Secondary Libraries
• Critique of the online accessibility of children's resources.

Silicon Bookstores

At this time, certain online bookstores provide the best search systems for locating works for children and adolescents in terms of the size of their searchable collections and their degree of focus on search screens for children's and young adults' publications. Of these children's oriented online bookstores, Amazon.com provides the most categories of age levels from which to select.

For the best service strategies, try and compare: buy online and Fedex publications to your door; search online and call your local bookstore, which generally saves you the shipping cost (think global, act local). If they are not as fast as online delivery, then act global as well. In general, my local bookstore can be as fast and less expensive as well.

Amazon Bookstore, over 2.5 million titles.

This bookstore will also let you indicate topics of interest and notify you by email as new titles arrive.

To search for children's books try these two general strategies:

1. Click the link on the left of their Search page titled Children's Book by Age
2. Enter these search phrases exactly into the Subject field of the standard search page.
• child books/baby-preschool
• child books/ages 4-8
• child books/ages 9-12
• child books/young adult

Barnes & Noble

This bookstore provides over 1 million titles. To search their Children's and Adult's categories of publications, click the pull down menu on the left and drag to Children and Young Adult. Next, click the Go button.

2MillionBooks.

They provide over two million discounted books.


To search for works appropriate to children and young adults, from their home page click the Categories button. Under the word Book on the Categories page there is a long pull-down menu of categories. This list includes five ways to search children's categories. Look alphabetically in this pull-down menu for Children.

K-12 Libraries

Searching elementary, middle or high school libraries is an excellent way to scan for age appropriate books for different maturity levels. That is, by default, each library is an is already presorted index of age appropriate materials for the age level of that school building and region. If you need materials specific to a geographic or cultural region of the country, search the online school libraries within that region. At this time, the percentage of K-12 libraries that are online is very small but this should change rapidly in the next couple of years.
• WebCollectionPlus from Follett. Their online product was made available as of January, 1998. Their school listing shows that only a tiny fraction of their over 27,000 elementary, middle and high schools have their collections online and Internet searchable as of January 1998.
• Winnebago Software Company, with over 25,000 K-12 library accounts, plans to have an online version of their cataloging software available by fourth quarter of 1998.
• WebPALS in South Dakota).

Several South Dakota K-12 schools use WebPals in their libraries.
• Other competitors are emerging with online versions of their software for K-12 schools.

Library of Congress

• Library of Congress (http://lcweb.loc.gov/catalog/), This page provides three World Wide Web (WWW) search methods using form pages plus a link to the command method (LOCIS).
The Library of Congress holds over 27 million books as of December 1996, adding 400,000 titles on average per year, with 4,310 permanent staff.
• Library of Congress Information System (LOCIS) via Telnet (telnet://locis.loc.gov:23) [Telnet interface].
This link provides direct connection to the text-based command search system. If the above Web link to LOCIS does not work, and you have the telnet application, try this link as an alternative way to connect. For doing simple searches for children's books by title or author, the WWW interface is easier to use. For doing more comprehensive searches of juvenile literature, the telnet interface is the only approach that is effective. Thorough searches of LOCIS for books for children requires some training in using the Telnet interface. The current web interfaces are not adequate for the task of isolating the full set of juvenile literature.

 

LOCIS data (1/20/97): juvenile literature = 50,085 publications: SLCT LOC3/SUBJ/Juvenile literature

Books for Children - Search Training

 

• The Text based search tutorial by Houghton.
• The Video clip based search tutorials by Houghton.

General Tutorial Information for Searching

 

• About LOCIS by LOC staff.
• How to Search LOCIS: Quick Search Guides by LOC staff.
• Guide to Using LOCIS the Library of Congress' online catalog. By: Michael Muchow, Humanities Librarian University of Missouri-Columbia ELMUCHOW@MIZZOU1.MISSOURI.EDU Table of Contents: 1) Conceptualizing the LC Catalog 2) Searching for a personal author 3) Searching for a corporate author 4) Searching for a title 5) Searching for a subject 6) Boolean searching 7) Searching for a series 8) Searching by call number, ISBN and ISSN number 9) Combining searches 10) Limiting searches 11) Quiting LOCIS 12) Conceptualizing the LC Catalog.

Public Libraries

Public libraries would appear, like public schools, to have pre-sorted children's resources into special areas that make them easy to find. This is a good concept and if you visit the library in question, this is true. You can go to the childrens' or adolescents' room and find these works segregated into this space. But online, this is generally not the case. These works are mixed with adult works and though these libraries could catalog their resources by age divisions to make them as easy to find electronically as they do in their physical spaces, most public libraries do not do this. Further, if they do catalog in some age specific way, they seldom tell their public about it on their web pages. The best advice for finding children's works on a particular topic at this time is to carefully read the public library's web pages for special assistance in methods for retrieving sets of children's works. If you do not find any help, use one of the online bookstores to identify topics by age level and their titles. Now you can return to the library to determine if the title of interest is available in the public library. Of course, if you already know the specific title or the author's name, public library search systems are just as efficient as those in any library in determining if the work is present.

Also try these different approaches to find works for children. Search for child appropriate subject headings, e.g., dinosaurs, dogs, etc. Also, search the subject field and if that seems inadequate, use the same terms in the keyword field. A keyword search generally searches deeper into sub-headings. For search terms, try:

• children's literature - texts on the subject of their literature or sometimes it means books for children
• children's books - texts about children or children's issues
• children's stories - texts which are stories for children
• juvenile literature or try just juvenile- texts which are stories for children (different catalogers use different terms)
But all catalogers do not mark their books the same way. Strategies that work in one library may not work in another. Further strategies are needed to find B-K-12 appropriate literature in public libraries. For a given public or academic library, none of these approaches are universally effective. Many libraries simply do not provide a way for patrons to search just their holdings for children and young adults, even libraries with outstanding children's collections.

• St. Joseph County Public Library's Index of online Public Libraries, South Bend, Indiana
• Yahoo's Index to online Public Libraries

Three major public library sites are listed below.

• Boston
• New York
• Smithsonian
• Boston Public Library
This library holds over 6,529,998 books as of 1994, adding 241,000 per year, with 487 permanent staff. BPL maintains a special collection of children's books, the Alice M. Jordan Collection research collection of children's books, that may be used only in the library by BPL card holders, but its card catalog, the Alice M. Jordan Collection Database, is searchable over the Internet. See also Metro Boston Library Network. The Metro collection of libraries has over 3 million books.
• Search of BPL's Research Library Online Catalog, the non-circulating collection. (617) 536-5400
data (12/24/96): children's stories=283 SUBJECTS found with 1000 stories American, approximately 1500 stories in other categories including other languages.
• Search of Metro Boston Library Network's Circulating Collection.
• data (12/24/96): children's stories=432.
• New York Public Library
This library holds 7,006,050 books, adding 121,000 a year on average, with 709 permanent staff. This collection of libraries has over 3 million books. This web site is currently undergoing significant construction.
• Search of CATNYP, main library non-circulating collection.
data (12/24/96): children's stories=176 SUBJECTS found with 658 ENTRIES.
• Search of Leo, circulating collection. Comprehensive total complex as children's stories are broken into many subject categories.
data (12/24/96): children's stories=129 stories, American.
• Smithsonian
This library holds 1,169,016 books, adding 13,000 per year, with 120 staff. Reference desk for art section: 202-786-2384
• Search of SIRIS, Smithsonian Institution Research Information System.
data (12/24/96): children's stories=108 Records

Searching for Periodicals

In general, magazines, journals and newspapers are aimed at the adult market. To effectively find K-12 resources, you will need to know the name of specific publications that write for children. In many cases, the articles in magazines written for children are not indexed by the online services. It is likely however, the children's publication maintains a web page from which you can gather more information. At this time, Yahoo's Yahooligan's for Kids site which is given below is the most effective tool for isolating K-8 online and offline resources.

Journals and Magazines

Ask ERIC, Web System

ERIC is the U.S. Educational Resource Information Center, in Web graphics format. At this Web site you will find: lesson plans; facility to Search the ERIC database of articles; and search help. These citations and abstracts are collected from 16 special educationally focused clearinghouses and the total collection represents some 500,000 articles and documents with over 25,000 added per year. This ERIC search system may not have as many features as the ERIC database service at your local campus library.

Free Medline

from InfoTrieve Online

Uncover

UnCover is an online table of contents index and article delivery service for thousands magazines and journals. Millions of articles are available through a simple online order system; approximately 5,000 citations are added daily. Table of contents information is entered into the database as the journals are received from the publishers, so issues are indexed online at about the same time that they arrive in libraries or on the newsstand. "Almost every article cited in UnCover can be ordered online and delivered to your fax machine within an average of 24 hours. Searching the UnCover database is absolutely FREE! You pay only for the articles you order."

Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL) is the business parent of Uncover which also provides an array of other database services.

CARL WAIS Server, a Wide Area Information Server interface to CARL's services.

Information Express

has a searchable database of thousands of journals deliverable by fax or mail. Use their Guest Log-in to search for free. Fax delivery requires a fee.

Yahoo's Trade Magazines Index divides a larger number of magazines into numerous sub-categories.
• Yahooligan's for Kids. Enter the term magazines in the search window to find online magazine resources more focused on the needs of children and young adults.

Newspapers

A Yahoo Index to Newspapers from around the U.S.A. and World.
• Yahooligan's for Kids. Enter the term news in the search window to find online new sources more focused on the needs of children and young adults.
• American Journalism Review, access to over 3600 newspapers.
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College, University and Community College Libraries

It is not the major mission of post-secondary libraries to collect works for children. However, campuses with teacher education programs are common, and many of these have specialized K-12 curriculum materials. To effectively hunt for K-12 resources in these libraries, you will have to know something about the campus and the degree to which teacher education is important there.

When searching these institutional libraries, here are two possible strategies for hunting fiction and nonfiction works for children and young adults in academic libraries. Search for the call number PZ7, the Library of Congress fiction catalog number. Next you must use a library's help screens to find a limit option that can restrict your search to the children's collection, usually an IMC (Instructional Materials Center), Curriculum, Children's or Juvenile Literature collection. For a nonfiction search strategy, search a subject area such science, social studies, or author search and use the limit command that you found for children's collections. Hunting the subject field for Juvenile literature is effective at the Library of Congress but generally not effective elsewhere.

Innopac Sites (III) Primarily Academic Sites

These example sites use the same search software as Hunter Library at Western Carolina University does with their Online Catalog.
• The Central North Carolina Library Consortium
• University of Arizona Library or University of Arizona Library II
• Ohio State University via WWW or via telnet - Z39.50
• University of Oregon via WWWor via telnet
• List of Hundreds of Other III Sites in the U.S. and around the World.

Other Search Software Systems - primarily Academic Sites

• Vendor Listings, from the WebCats site maintained by Scott and Macdonald. Their home page also provide indexes based on geography and library type (K-12, public, religious, law, etc.). Based on their indexes, Innopac is the largest, larger than the next three in size combined. Next in size are:
• 2. Library Corporation (BiblioFile)
• 3. WebPALS (Minnesota and South Dakota).
• 4. Data Research Associates
• 5. SIRSI Corporation
• 6. Ameritech Library Services
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Critique

Several ideas are emerging from the development, study and maintenance of this web page index to online physical resources. First, the emergence of K-12 libraries as searchable collections through the Internet will make practical a new era in the analysis of children's literature. This will will lead to interesting comparisons between different collections in different schools. Second, many city libraries have gotten their physical collections that people can visit and use far ahead of their online search capacity to examine and pull from this collection. This is a curious mismatch. Further, certain information systems are much stronger in making resources for children readily findable online.

 Analysis of Children's Literature

 Imagine the capacity to sit and your desktop ask questions about the children's resources in tens of thousands elementary, middle and high school libraries. It is not possible yet, but the software is being made available by school library vendors for schools that wish to do so beginning with the year 1998. With a few keystrokes you will arrive at a school library's search screen and can browse as if you were scanning their card catalog while sitting in the building's library. Through this development, we can move the analysis from a single writer or the comparison of a few writers and their role in the classroom to comparison of entire collections. What questions could and should be asked as this capacity arrives? Here are some initial thoughts. Which regions of the country or of a state prefer which writers? In what grade levels do the best resources appear? What titles do not appear based on geographic patterns at county, state, nation or international? What biases appear in different collections and how is this bias useful or not useful to the building in question? Will such a development lead to greater resource sharing among school libraries on a larger geographic scale? What resources deemed universally of highest quality appear or do not appear in various collections? Why? Are their patterns in the collections that differ from elementary to middle to high school other than simple a difference in the maturity level of the books? In a globally based economy, what collections of books and other resources best help their students move from provincial to international perspectives? Please share other questions that I can add to this list.

City or Public Library Mismatch

 City libraries have always provided well executed missions for children's collections. I found five with collections numbering 50,000 to 70,000 books for children and young adults. Yet my weak hypothesis from searching just these five large city libraries suggests that a percentage of city libraries which have superb collections have not cataloged these collections in such a way that they can be searched online separately from their adult collection.

Is this lack of distinct searchable labels in their databases explainable in part as due to insufficient cataloging resources? However, it does not take that much longer to enter a notation for child or young adult in a database record if this has been thought through administratively. How many of the city libraries with the best children's collections allow their set of children's works to be queried separately from their adult collection? Please contact me via email if you are aware of public libraries that have such child centered online systems in place. I would like to be able to make a comparison of the best of them.

 Ranking Online Information Resources for Usefulness

 At present, the online search systems for Cable TV and bookstores appear to have a commanding lead over city library systems in providing searchable online information tailored for our younger citizens. Public school libraries are coming online and will soon be in a strong position to challenge commercial entities for the best online systems in seeking age appropriate resources. If there is a weakness among city libraries in this regard, it would seem to be an oversight that should not be too technically difficult to address.