Steph Gibson's List: Collection Development

This is the website of a professional childrens' book talker who reviews books and interviews authors for a Baltimore television station. It is a wonderful resource for videos of author interviews. My favorite use for this site is as a review source when I am planning book purchases for the library.

When buying books about other cultures, it is difficult to know whether a book is truly representing a culture other than mine in an accurate way. Debbie Reese writes here about children's books and their representations of American Indians. I use this site to check on books I am considering purchasing for the library.

When our library receives book donations that we cannot use, I often use this site to swap the books for books we would rather have.

Also picked this up from Melinda.
Fantastic resource for collection development and reader's advisory.

This is a book shopping site that is built around independent bookstores. I use it to host the library's "Wish List." When parents wish to buy a birthday book for the school, they can reference this list to see what we need and want for our library.

Each year the Children's Book Committee at Bank Street College reviews over 6,000 children's and young adult books and creates an annual list of the year's best.
This is the first year that the publication is available free on-line.

Wow! What an amazing resource! I cannot wait to spend a day in August clicking through all the topics to find new links for my library website.

This site allows you to input a URL and it will give you a rough measure of the site's readability. Very interesting to run this test on sites that are clearly targeting their graphics to elementary age students.