From: Susan Daugherty <susaninaruba>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:29:40 -0800 (PST)

I've always relied heavily on the award-winning books of the year when purchasing for K-12 school library collections, first in Wisconsin and Illinois and now in international schools. Although I haven't always agreed with every single selection, I have compared the award winners with the rest of the books over about 30 years of librarianship. Being close to the CCBC during most of my career, I could go look at the other books (non-award winners) with my own eyes and compare.

Award winners, while occasionally being a bit esoteric for your typical kid, are generally of a high caliber, and I feel that my collections were added to with the best books of the year every year. You do sometimes have to supplement with books that fit the curriculum in addition to the award winners as most series books do not win prizes, but the Notable Science and Social Studies lists are invaluable. I was even interested to note than when I purchased books that received a mention in Booklist (i.e., a favorable review) and compared them to the starred reviews, the starred books were always superior.

Librarians do know what they are doing and are darn good at it. If they are taught well in library school how to select and do what they are taught, an excellent library collection will result. It does take quite a bit of effort to search out all the award lists, but I always enjoyed it and felt the results were worth it. (By the way, if you are short for time or do not have access to prize lists, the Wilson catalogs for each grade level are a pretty decent compilation of the best of the year.)

Susan

 










Susan Daugherty, Middle School Librarian
 TASIS-England
 Coldharbour Lane
 Thorpe, Surrey TW20 8TE
 UK



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Received on Wed 23 Jan 2008 02:29:40 PM CST