Children’s services have been acclaimed as one of the great contributions of the American public library movement, yet in the early days of American public libraries, children were not even considered to be a part of the library’s clientele. However, beginning as early as 1876, library professionals began to speak out in favour of children’s library usage and rights, a subject that eventually became the focus of a whole corps of library professionals. Through an analysis of the professional literature of librarianship, starting in 1876 and continuing for a hundred-year period to 1976, Fannette H.Thomas has compiled this selected bibliography that explores the evolution of children’s work and the major developments, trends, innovations, and practices that evolved or emerged in children’s services. The development of the children’s service is traced from the days when one shelf of materials for children were culled from the adult collections to the appearance of special children’s rooms, reference services, and readers’ guidance, and from the pioneers in children’s librarianship to today’s story hours and multi-media use. This bibliographic exploration of children’s services in the American public library encompasses ten chapters including those devoted to historical focus, professional staff, organizational schemes, philosophical perspectives, client group, collection development, readers’ services, story hour, inter-agency co-operation, and multi-media. The volume’s entries reflect the plethora of information found in the professional literature about every facet of children’s services. Author and subject indexes complete the work. This is a useful resource for college and university libraries where courses in the history of librarianship, studies in public librarianship, or children’s services in the public library are taught.
