Children's Literature Comprehensive Database (CLCD) is powerful tool for finding information about children's as well as and young adult literature. The principal developers of CLCD are librarians and professionals from the book industry. The database has grown since its inception in 2004. It now offers over 500,000 titles with reviews, MARC records, author/illustrator links and images of book jackets. CLCD includes the information gathered from 38 review sources and recently (August 2010) added the reviews from two audio review sources.
The database offers two methods for accessing titles, search and browsing. The opening screen devotes most of the screen to the full‐text search word(s) search method. There is a link on the left side of this initial screen to the browse capability. The developers have been able to put the search box and all search qualifiers for limiting the search on one screen. The search defaults to a keyword search, but the user can change the criteria to be an exact word or exact phrase. The search can also be limited to specific fields. These fields include author/illustrator, title, series, awards, etc.
The qualifiers are important for a successful search. Besides the main qualifiers there are other limiters. The search can be limited to a specific age group or grade level. Since reviews often refer to age appropriateness, the FAQ page recommends using the grade level and adding five. Thus a child in the fourth grade would translate to nine years old. A very useful limiter is the category of the book. The default is to search all, but it can be limited to fiction or non‐fiction titles. Another limiter is to search by language; however, English titles are in the majority. Another useful qualifier is the genre that limits the search by various themes. There is also a limiter section by reading metrics.
The results page has a sidebar with a variety of options, such as save, sort, download, modify the search and new search. The sorting capabilities are by year, author, title, language, Dewey, LC and Lexile range. The results themselves are displayed in relevancy ranking and include brief bibliographic descriptions, call numbers, and Lexile numbers. There is a green dot next to the title if there are any reviews attached to the title. Recently added is an orange dot that indicates that there is a curriculum guide also attached. Once a title is selected, the full record gives the bibliographic information, annotation, subject headings, any awards received and full text reviews. Most of the sections have links to the awards homepages, subject pages, and curriculum tools. CLCD has also been adding images of the books to many of their records. A nice touch to the record is a link to OCLC's WorldCat to find libraries that own the book. The one drawback to the result is that one can only download/save on the brief listing page. There is no way to save the item from the complete display page.
The other search capability is by browsing. The browse searching is not recommended for title searching. The default is to browse by author. While there is a text word browse it is very cumbersome. For example, searching for the title, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants cannot be found in browse. Search for the author, Brashares, Ann, brings up the title immediately. Because the search capability is so strong, there seems to be little to recommend a user select the browse feature.
There are few databases that offer the fullness of CLCD; however, the Database of Award Winning Children's Literature (www.dawcl.com/) is a worthy supplement for librarians to consider with over 8,300 records from 91 awards from six English‐speaking countries. This database has a longer historical coverage going back to 1921, is free and offers a variety of search limiters. Many of these are like the limiters of CLCD, but there are a few interesting ones, including format and gender of the protagonist. It also gives brief annotations of the works and lists the awards the books have received. There are no reviews attached to the records. Comparing the two databases, however, it is clear that CLCD has so many advantages. These would include powerful searching capability, the breadth of titles and the inclusion of reviews and curriculum guides. CLCD is a highly recommended resource for all libraries.
