Role of award winning historical children's literature in contemporary children's literature collections

Abstract

Since the 1970's there has been a profusion of children's literature published and current developments in information technology have made the concept of a collection more flexible. Consequently the literature and resources available for inclusion in contemporary collections has grown dramatically. This has led the writer to speculate whether historical children's literature (picture books and junior fiction published prior to 1970) is still valued by contemporary children's librarians and child readers. The focus of this study is the analysis of five contemporary children's literature collections to determine to what extent historical children's literature is included or excluded from the collections and to ascertain reasons for its inclusion or exclusion. A quantitative survey of the children's literature collections has been conducted to establish what evidence there is of historical children's literature within the collections. This is supplemented with a content analysis of the current collection development policies and interviews with the children's librarians responsible for collection development to facilitate a greater understanding of the quantitative data and to identify policies, attitudes and practices that support the inclusion or exclusion of historical children's literature from the collections.