From: Shauna Sandberg <ssandber>
Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2002 12:51:17 -0700

I'm going to jump into this conversation and make what may seem a rather mundane observation about a very philosophical issue, which I'm sympathetic to, and am familiar with, namely historiography etc. Most of the conversation thus far, has swirled around longer nonfiction and biography, but I've noticed a trend in "creative nonfiction," in what I traditionally think of as the picture book category. These are books that are oversized and illustrated (as opposed to photographs for instance) and hence look like "picture books" but are packed with information. These books have stood out to me because I'm a children's librarian at a small public library. And of course, one of my jobs is to try to decide how to catalog or classify new books, which more importantly determines, where they are shelved in my library.

I realize that I'm exposing some personal biases here, and I certainly don't pretend to speak for anyone else, librarians included. However, frankly, my picture books section is largely used by preschoolers and those books tend to get very ragged and beat up. So anything that I can (in good conscience) move to another section of the library, I do so. I also find that, generally, children and adults who use the picture book section, aren't usually looking for long or in depth books, and I feel that very specific topical kinds of books, better serve the audience who come in looking for say books on frogs, if they are in the non fiction section--which puts like items together.

So what's my point? My point is, that these slightly fictionalized picture book looking titles that are filled with information of a scientific type say, raise some interesting issues for me professionally as a librarian. Does this mean that they shouldn't be written or published etc? absolutely not, and I can punch a million holes in my own reasoning as I write this, i.e. there are lots of picture books for older readers, maybe preschool teachers would love to stumble on a more informational book in the picture book section, maybe library classification is too arcane and artificial anyway, and I realize that teachers in particular, may welcome narratives that offer a variety of ways to teach information. But I'm just speaking purely practically, of how the the increase in these books is affecting my job on a day to day basis.

I'm not suggesting that publishers, authors etc do anything differently, but am pointing out issues this trend poses for me, and frankly the way that these books are used by library patrons, because of the way they have access to them. These books also make purchasing decisions more interesting shall we say, as frequently, when I'm purchasing nonfiction, I'm trying to fill "holes" in my library nonfiction collection. If I need books on rockets or shells, or the Constitution or whatever, then I am going to tend to look for more traditional (hate to use the word noncreative) nonfiction titles to meet that need. Of course I won't ignore other books that are well done or well reviewed no matter what their make up. But I, like everyone else, have a limited budget..

(recent examples of books in this area include Crawdad Creek by Scott Russell Sanders, published by the National Geographic Society and This is the Rain by Lola Schaefer which comes with an OCLC summary of
:"cumulative text describes how water falls from the clouds as rain and eventually makes its way to the sea." )

Just some thoughts which I hope will be seen as observations and not critiques of these types of materials.
Received on Wed 03 Apr 2002 01:51:17 PM CST