Websites with lists/reviews of educational books, videos, software for children ages 5-18?

October 13, 2004 4:07 PM

Librarianfilter: My girlfriend is "wondering if anyone could recommend good websites containing lists/reviews for educational books/videos/software for children (ages 5 up through high school)? I recently acquired the responsibility of selecting materials (I'm a librarian) for our University's Educational Resource Center and don't have an education background so I'm new to this. I know about the Parent's Choice Foundation. I was wondering if there is something similar for librarians/educators? I get tons of catalogs but want lists/reviews, preferably online. Thanks!"
posted by adamkempa to Education (3 answers total)

This is sort of a meta-answer, but the Educational Resources Information Center is a good place to search for bibliographies, depending how much work you want to do. I'd suggest some descriptors like Adolescent Literature, Elementary Education, Annotated Bibliographies and Childrens Literature. Limit your result set to just bibliographies, book reviews and full text ERIC Digests and you should be able to find some really good booklists.

The magazine Booklist is the American Library Association's review mag with reviews of books for both adults and children. They decided when they redesigned the ALA Web site to no longer archive their reviews [@#%!] but you can still find a lot of them online if you go to the old archive pages [which could disappear at any minute, be warned].

YALSA is the Young Adult division of ALA and they have a YA Services bibliography online [pdf] which isn't strictly educational books but may be able to get you started. Parent's Choice is really a good place to start [I used to write/edit for them occasionally] . My pal Dawn is a YALSA maven and you can get ahold of her via her website if you want to talk to an actual children's librarian.

Lastly, if you just want to browse some other education resources, the Indiana University's School of Ed's library has a good list of online educational resources including a hefty list of other professional organizations and online reference works.
posted by jessamyn at 5:11 PM on October 13, 2004

AcqWeb was my friend when I took Collection D. Of course, I did really badly in the class. YMMV.
posted by stet at 5:59 PM on October 13, 2004

Your girlfriend might also consider joining and posting the question to the appropriate Library-Oriented List. Librarians love email lists, and there's (at least) one for just about every specialty under the sun.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:45 PM on October 13, 2004