Finding Childrens' Literature

Tips for Searching for Childrens Literature

I’ve been getting some questions at the Ref. desk about finding childrens literature now that the collection has been moved. I’ve discovered some handy tricks (with Nancy’s help) and listed them below. Beneath these take home messages are more in depth explanations.

Take Home Messages:

· The term “Juvenile Literature” will give you far more results than “Children’s Literature” in both WorldCat and the UW only catalog.

· A WorldCat search is the best if you are looking for children’s books about a particular subject because you can search based on that subject, like dinosaur, and then limit your results to “juvenile audience.”

· An advanced search is the best option if you need to find all of UW’s children’s books in a certain language. Just do a search for “juvenile literature” and limit your results to the language you want (if in WorldCat, remember you can limit your search options to “Juvenile Audience.”)

Subject headings

The catalogers have consistently used the subdivision "juvenile literature" for many years.

I learned, however, that catalogers also use the subdivisions "juvenile fiction" and "juvenile poetry." So when searching for children’s literature you will get more records if you use “juvenile” instead of “children.”

In UW WorldCat Advanced search, this search can be done:

Subject: (juvenile literature) or (juvenile poetry) or (juvenile fiction)

and limit to Audience juvenile

However, an easier search would probably be:

Subject: juvenile

Audience: juvenile

Genre Headings

Our catalogers assign genre/form headings to most materials. There isn't a standard list for these, as there is for subject headings. Sometimes the headings are loosely based on LCSH, but most of the time it sounds as though the cataloguer makes a decision. Tom Wallace has used adventure fiction -- juvenile as a genre/form search and said he had success. This is in the UW-only catalog. Remember you can look up particular LC subject headings using The Library of Congress Subject Headings in Suzzallo Ready Reference or online at http://classificationweb.net/Auto/

Finding Child. Lit in other Languages

One patron wanted to find all of the children’s books we have that are written in German. For this kind of search you must use the advanced search option in either WorldCat or the UW Only Catalog. When in the advanced search screen you can limit your results by doing a LC Subject search for Juvenile Literature and limit it to books written in German (or another language) in the language menu.