PD posting- website review

I wanted to have a look at a website for young people’s book awards and I found a site for the Young Australian’s best book awards (YABBA).

The URL indicates that the author of the site is an Australian organisation rather than a commercial entity, which lends credibility to the website. There is no specific author mentioned, and the corporate author we can assume is the YABBA organisation. There were sections for students and teachers and the content was tailored specifically for those age groups, with there being few crossovers such as the ‘puzzles’ section which has interactive puzzles such as find words, cross words etc for people to play. If you accessed the puzzles section through the ‘for teachers’ tab, and opened the drop down menu in the ‘for students’ section then the font changed colour indicating it was already in use, which I found quite a useful little detail. The reviews section in the ‘for students’ tab was empty, and as the section for reviews could be accessed via both the students and teachers this was a little disappointing. The website has information for both students and teachers and can ideally be of use to teacher librarians and children and youth librarians as a resource which can be used to assist in the identification of age appropriate literary trends by Australian authors, in particular the reviews section, which is why I was disappointed. As a children’s or youth librarian I would want to use that particular part of the website as a source of information about current literature that may be appropriate for the collection. I didn’t realise there were book awards for individual states, I assumed book awards for young people were a national level event and so it prompted me to investigate into book awards that were state level for future reference, where I found NSW has the Ethel Turner Prize, QLD has a young adult criteria in the Premier’s Literary awards, and there were similar stories in the other states, however when I went to the ‘About YABBA’ section it stated that YABBA was “established in 1985 by a group of Victorians keen to see children engage in reading Australian books. Run by a volunteer committee our goal after more than 25 years is still the same.” (YABBA, 2013). In my opinion this should be replicated across all states and territories as it gives community members a chance to contribute their opinions to the selection of children’s materials in an organized manner.  I think that young people’s book awards are a useful tool in a children and youth library context as they can not only promote appropriate useful literary materials through nominations etc, but they can also provide information on materials that would be suitable for collections for various age groups. “Juvenile literature selectors in academic libraries often concentrate on collecting award winners as the primary focus of the collection.” (2011, pp.47). While set in an academic library context, this principle can also be applied to public and school libraries.

Reference List

Thornton, E.(2011) Globalizing children's literature in academic libraries using automatic acquisition, Collection Building,30 (1), pp.47 - 52

YABBA 2013 About YABBA. Retrieved 19^th May 2013 from http://yabba.org.au