Whittemore Library: Children's and Young Adult's Literature: Finding Information in the Library

The General Types of Information You'll be Using

Background Info: Basic, Authoritative, 'Facts', "Reference'
AKA: 'Reference Information'
Found in:
-- Dictionaries
-- Encyclopedias
-- Specialized Handbooks
-- Directories
-- Government Websites (such as Regulatory info. or relevant statistics)
News & Trends
Found in:
-- Newspapers, online or off-
-- Databases containing Newswires/Newspaper/Newsletter content
-- Databases containing Trade Journal content
-- Online equivalents of Trade Journals (of varying quality)
Detailed, 'Deep-Dive' Scholarly Analysis
AKA: Scholarly Journal Articles of research results, Scholarly Books ('Monographs'), and 'Grey Literature'
Found in:
-- Academic Databases (some a mix of topics; some specialized) containing Journal Articles
-- Online Academic Journals
-- Academic Monographs (Online and Print)
-- Reports, Working Papers, Conference Proceedings, Dissertations (In databases but also on gov't & NGO websites - aka 'Grey Literature')

Our Specialized Databases for Children's Lit Students & What They Offer

Why are we giving you so much detail about the databases listed below? Because they have a bit of every type of specialized information that you need to succeed in your children's Lit class assignments and program. Which is why we pay for the FSU community to access them, and why your professors make you use 'em.

Yes; there's also useful information online...but these databases have what you need.

Books and Authors
Reader's Advisory / Book-Finder Database, allowing you to see lists of books of various topics, in various genres, and recommending books similar to those already read.
Children's Literature Comprehensive Database
Offers more than 240,000 reviews of children's books - all full text searchable, from 35 review sources.
ERIC
Provides citation and abstract information from over 1,000 educational journals and related documents from the Educational Resource Information Center and educational symposium report literature dating back to 1967.
JSTOR
Archival Journals, featuring full-text articles of more than 2,800 academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
MLA Directory of Periodicals
The MLA Directory of Periodicals provides detailed information on over 25,000 journals and book series that cover literature, literary theory, dramatic arts, folklore, language, linguistics, pedagogy, rhetoric and composition, and the history of printing and publishing. Articles published in works listed in the directory are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.
MLA International Bibliography
Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the bibliography directs researchers to more than 3 million citations from journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, scholarly websites, editions, and translations published from the late 19th century to the present.
Novelist
NoveList is a fiction database that provides subject heading access, reviews, annotations, and much more for over 135,000 fiction titles. It also includes other content of interest to fiction readers, such as Author Read-alikes, What We're Reading, Book Discussion Guides, BookTalks, and Annotated Book Lists. For school media specialists and teachers there are Picture Book Extenders and articles on Teaching with Fiction.
PsycINFO
Search over 9,900 sources (including more than 2,000 periodicals) to locate information on psychology and related fields from 1840 to the present.
Teaching Books
TeachingBooks.net provides original, in-studio movies of authors and illustrators and a wealth of multimedia resources on K-12 books that generate enthusiasm for books and reading.
Teacher Reference Center
This database provides coverage on key education topics such as Assessment, Continuing Education, Current Pedagogical Research, Curriculum Development, Instructional Media, Language Arts, Literacy Standards, Science & Mathematics, and more for K-12 Teachers & Librarians.

Public School Databases Used by MA K - 12 students
Many of these are funded by the state-funded Massachusetts Library System, to provide all MA public K - 12 schools with access to quality databases. If you're a future MA public school educator, you'll want to be familiar with what your students will be using.
- Gale OneFile: High School Edition
  Designed for middle- and high-school students, this database provides access to age-appropriate, authoritative digital content such as magazines, journals, newspapers, and reference books covering a wide range of subjects, from science, history, and literature to political science, sports, and environmental studies.
- MAS Ultra: School Edition
  Designed for high school libraries, this is a full-text reference database of popular magazines and e-books covering many subjects, including history, science and health. It also includes thousands of full-text primary source documents and videos from the Associated Press.
- Pebble Go
  Standards-aligned, nonfiction articles for early elementary students, across Science, Social Studies, Biographies, Animals, and Health. All articles also available in Spanish.
- Primary Search
  A full-text database of carefully curated content for elementary school students, including full text for the most popular children's magazines, e-books, and easy-to-read encyclopedic entries written specifically for kids.

Our 'Discovery Tools'

All the 'search interfaces' - the individual databases and other places - where you can actually look for the information mentioned above - and, often, get immediate online access to the full text. Or, if it's one of our print books, get the info you need to go retrieve it from our book shelves.

The Minuteman Network Catalog
The Whittemore Library belongs to this MetroWest network of 40+ libraries; together we save money on, and share our resources. Print books owned by other Minuteman libraries (but not FSU) can be borrowed online, whereupon they will be quickly sent here for you to pick up and use.
Best For:
-- Print Reference Books owned by FSU (In the 1st floor Quiet Study Room)
-- Print books owned by FSU and by other Minuteman libraries
-- Any 'legacy' physical media forms (CDs, DVD, Blue-Rays, Books on cassette tapes, etc.)
-- Minuteman's Libby/Overdrive & Kindle eBooks, shared by all
-- Minuteman's Streaming Audiobooks, shared by all
-- Minuteman's eMagazines (popular digital magazines), shared by all
A List of All Our Databases
Listed A - Z. Sortable; can limit by subject or format type.
Best for:
-- Articles, because the majority of our scholarly journal articles can be found here.
-- eBooks (Digital reference books and scholarly books). Most of ours are in a few eBook databases.
-- Streaming Documentaries and Instructional Videos. We have a few video databases that Ram Search cannot search; you must search in them directly.
Publication (Journal) Search
A way to look for individual journals directly, by title, without going through a database.
Best for:
-- Articles
Ram Search
'Ram Search' is a 'federated search engine' that can search almost all our databases at the same time - except for our streaming video databases. Returns results (usually many...too many) in all formats, so we recommend that you 'limit' your results, right after you run the search, to narrow it all down to a more reasonable number. But it really is a good place to get started, and especially helpful for interdisciplinary topics.
Best for:
-- Delivers a bit of everything, including print books owned only by FSU. Many people use it to efficiently find peer-reviewed articles, though.