Andrea Rapp and Fred Isaac both write about old, or is it historic?, children's books. Deciding which category describes a book is one of the first steps in determining what to do with it. Age alone doesn't determine historic value and current library thought has it that old books on the shelf are unappealing and downright detrimental to library use. My local public library adheres to that "philosophy" so while you can find multiple copies of books published in the last few years on the open shelves, you can't find anything published more than 20 years ago. It makes for a very frustrating experience when one is using the library for more than browsing. With Jewish children's books, I think that many old ones can be considered historic because of the rarity of books for Jewish children within children's literature as a whole and especially because individual titles often mark significant developments in the relatively short history of American Jewish children's book publishing. Since there are no historic Jewish children's book collections in the United States - or anywhere else, as far as I know -research by scholars, students, and authors is impeded and a small but important part of the children's book publishing record is, at best, incomplete. If a Judaic library has the space, setting aside historic children's books into a separate collection would be a good idea so long as the space is designated, accessible, identified, and physically maintained. (A musty basement storage room isn't an archive and it isn't a historic collection.) Online catalogs make books accessible to far-flung searchers and the titles in a special historic collection can be indicated in the catalog record, along with information on each book's content, physical characteristics, and publication data. Libraries within a city or region could cooperate in establishing such a collection, deciding on where it will be housed, how it will be advertised in the community, etc. The need for at least one significant collection of historic American Jewish children's books certainly exists so the issues raised by Andrea and Fred are important beyond their specific library circumstances.
Linda R. Silver Jewish Valuesfinder --- Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: hasaf...@osu.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
