Welcome to the Lewis Library's Children's Literature collection!
The Children's Literature collection is located on the 3rd floor of the library. All books are available for checkout for assignments or to take to your schools to share with your students.
In this collection, you will find fiction and non-fiction, picture books and novels, award winning books, and even a few pop-up books. Our collection is cataloged and shelved using the Dewey Decimal call numbers. Picture books are arranged by genre, while Juvenile fiction is arranged by grade level.
This chart, adapted from Cullinan and Galda's Literature and the Child, provides brief descriptions of children and young adult literature genre's (Cullinan & Galda, 2002, p. 8). When searching for children's books in the Lewis Library Catalog, you may notice categories identified as subject genre/form.
| Picture Books | Interdependence of art and text. Story of Concept presented through combination of text and illustration. Classification based on format, not genre. All genres appear in picture books. |
| Poetry & Verse | Condensed language, imagery. Distilled, rhythmic expression of imaginative thoughts and perceptions. |
| Folklore | Literary heritage of humankind. Traditional stories, myths, legends, nursery rhymes, and songs from the past. Oral tradition; no known author. |
| Fantasy | Imaginative worlds, make-believe. Stories set in places that do not exist, about people and creatures that could not exist, or events that could not happen. |
| Science Fiction | Based on extending physical laws and scientific principles to their logical outcomes. Stories about what might occur in the future. |
| Realistic Fiction | "What if" stories, illusion of reality. Events could happen in real world, characters seem real; contemporary setting. |
| Historical Fiction | Set in the past, could have happened. Story reconstructs events of past age, things that could have or did occur. |
| Biography | Plot and theme based on person's life. An account of a person's life, or part of a life history; letters, memoirs, diaries, journals, autobiographies. |
| NonFiction | Facts about the real world. Informational books that explain a subject or concept. |
References
Cullinan, B.E. and Galda, L. (2002). Cullinan and Galda’s literature and the child (p. 8). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.
Library of Congress. (2014, July 10). Frequently asked questions: Children's and young adults' cataloging program (CYAC). Retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/aba/cyac/faq.html
The Juvenile Nonfiction collection is cataloged according to the Dewey Decimal System (like your local public library). Here is a chart for browsing:
The Juvenile Fiction collection is arranged alphabetically by author's last name. Books that have a call number of J + authors last name, are picture books; books that have a call number of JUV are early chapter books and chapter books. The Juvenile Fiction collection can be found on the 3rd floor of the Lewis Library.
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