Getting value for money depends on knowing exactly what is there. Ashgate have published several guides to children’s books in recent years, including information books, a fiction sourcebook, historical fiction, and poetry. The bottom line for working library managers is made up of two simple criteria: One, does the list do its job in a fast‐moving world; and two, is it worth getting the list when that is money taken away from other things? The answers are “yes, as far as it can” and “well, what else could you get for £50?”. What you get in this guide are some 250 reference products (print and multimedia) of interest to today’s teachers, librarians and parents. Entries cover bibliographical details (including price), target age range, coverage, language and layout, retrieval devices (such as contents, index, a useful feature), children’s assessments (school classes at various levels provide critiques, some good, all realistic), and how they perform in relation to the (English) National Curriculum. Material is arranged in four main sections for print (pre‐school and Key Stages 1‐3, that is 5‐7, 7‐11, and 11‐14, respectively) and one section for multimedia. Hancock is project manager for the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Roehampton Institute, in the UK, and has organised an editorial/reviewing team of people mainly from there, as well as classes from a primary, junior and secondary school locally.
The evaluations are thorough and sensible, truly critical where necessary, and well backed up by details. There are lots of good features (like comparing dictionaries by looking at the way they define a common concept), and the editorial team are prepared to commit themselves to a personal selection in each section (for example, of reference works for Key Stage 1, with costings, so, for instance, the reader gets an idea of good value for money if he/she spends £40). Unusual, too, is the way the guide includes “mini‐libraries” like “Little Gems”, picking out ones worth buying and saying why. At each stage, criteria come from several directions: editorial team, National Curriculum, class reaction, the Roehampton Survey (called Young People’s Reading at the End of the Century, edited by Kimberley Reynolds, awaiting publication, research which Roehampton carried out for the British Library), usability and price. This, as researchers say, is good triangulation! No surprises about the most popular publishers: Oxford University Press and Usborne top the list, followed by Kingfisher, HarperCollins and Ladybird. Multimedia cover CD‐ROM, software and Internet resources, like new releases of Encarta, products from Dorling Kindersley, Attica, Grolier and New Multimedia. This is a hybrid section with good choice (as far as one can hit a moving target) and a sound toolkit of purchasing CD‐ROM, but some pretentious educational jargon about learning that could have been left out. All in all, then, for people with the cash to spare, a guide worth getting, although why not a paperback or better still an up‐datable and editorially extensible CD‐ROM? If you are going that far to advise on “the now”, professionals would, I think, like that extra step.
