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Scholastic Parent & Child magazine ranked the 100 Greatest Books for Kids

Rick Riordan (I remember when we were both mystery writers!) has two books on the list. I've met Kevin Henkes, Lois Lowry, and Pam Munoz Ryan (who also has two books on the list). I've still got my postcard from Roald Dahl.

But this is what really made me happy:
87. Rules by Cynthia Lord

Read more about The 100 "Greatest Books for Kids as ranked by Scholastic Parent & Child.

HOW TO: Collection Development on the Fly

It’s time for that little bit of money to be spent and quickly or it will be spent by someone else. You haven’t had any time to work on an order and you don’t want to make a mistake. Look to the lists below to help you find all kinds of exciting books, DVDs, and audio books that should be in your library.

Every title on every YA list will not be automatically suitable for your collection. To double-check yourself, when you add a title to your order list, you can quickly skim the reviews provided by your jobber to see if an item matches your needs. Look to the sections for older readers in the children’s lists for other titles, especially if you serve middle school age.

YALSA Best Books for Young Adults
YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults
YALSA Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers
YALSA Great Graphic Novels for Teens
YALSA Printz Award and Honor Books
YALSA Amazing Audios for Young Adults
YALSA Fabulous Films for Young Adults
YALSA/ALSC Odyssey Award

ALSC Notable Children’s Books
ALSC Notable Children’s Videos
ALSC Notable Children’s Recordings
ALSC Newbery Award and Honor Books
ALSC Sibert Informational Book Medal and Honor Books

Projects of the Children’s Book Council in collaboration with ALA and other professional organizations:
Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People
Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K-12

As a teacher, librarian, and a children’s book writer, I truly believe my life has encompassed the best of all worlds. My day job for more than 26 years meant going into a library and being surrounded with beautiful books containing inspiring words. Since retiring from the public library in 2004, I no longer go “in” to my day job. I write from home.

However, once a librarian always a librarian! I still reap the benefits of all that. I maintain my ALA and Michigan Library Assoc. memberships, and friendships. And I get wonderful newsletters and journals that help to keep me up to date on the latest technology, research, and reading habits of kids. I want to share some goodies from recent library news that will be of help to writers.

Best websites for kids. You’ll find a listing of these on my sidebar and here from ALA’s Library Association for Services to Children.

Check out Writer’s Digest annual listing: 101 Best Websites for Writers.

Below are a list of research sites that were recently reported upon by the American Library Association, the Reference and User Services Div.

Title: BBC Country Profiles (free)
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/country_profiles/default.stm
This site supplies information on the history, economy, and politics of countries and territories.

Title: Blue Letter Bible (free)
URL: http://www.blueletterbible.org/
Containing 14 searchable versions of the Holy Bible. Passages can be compared between versions and there are lots of tools (an encyclopedia, a dictionary, 23 text commentaries, and 30 audio/video commentaries).

Title: BookFinder.com (free)
URL: http://www.bookfinder.com/
BookFinder.com indexes over 150 million books for sale from the catalogs of over 150 million sellers in 50 countries. Included are new, used, rare and out-of-print titles.

Title: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (free)
URL: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Part of the National Digital Newspaper Program, this site provides select digital access to American newspapers from 1880 to 1910. Also there is access to a directory of newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present.

Title: Lexicool (free)
URL: http://www.lexicool.com/
A directory to over 6000 freely available online bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and glossaries. Searches may be entered by language(s), subject, or title/keyword. Search results provide the number of entries and links to the online dictionaries.

Title: OnlineConversion.com (free)
URL: http://onlineconversion.com/
“Convert just about anything to anything else,” with 50,000 conversions and 5,000 units. Has popular conversions: length, temperature, speed, volume, weight, cooking, area, currency. Also contains measurements for women’s clothing sizes between countries, light-years, density, torque, horse height, meeting room size needed for attendees, even a “Fun Stuff” category where users can find their age in dog years, convert their names into Morse code, determine their weight on Mars, etc.

Title: Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) (free)
URL: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/
The Writing Lab at Purdue houses 200 free writing resources and instructional materials for students, teachers, and trainers. Included are formatting and style guides, grammar and mechanics, internet literacy, ESL, job search and technical writing, and research.

And check this out . . . in case you are wondering what are the best adult fiction books published thus far in the millennium. (By a panel of experts.)  I wonder what we would say is the best children fiction thus far? Perhaps we should survey? I’ll put the word out soon! Watch for it.

Happy researching (and writing)!

Shutta