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INTERNATIONAL BOOKS AND COLLECTIONS II Children's Services at the National Library of Canada Irene Aubrey I am honoured and happy to have the opportunity today to speak to you, briefly, about the children's services at the National Library; I will emphasize two aspects in the development of the National Library's children's services which deal directly with bibliographical access to Canadian children's books: our booklists and the separate children's collection which we are presently assembling. Some of you may not be familiar with the events that led to the creation of the position of Children's Literature Librarian/Consultant , and I will begin by giving you a short description of those events. In the Canadian Association of Children's Librarians Bulletin of Spring 1969, Elinor Kelly asked in her Chairperson 's greetings if the time had come for the Canadian Association of Children's Librarians to press for the appointment of a children's consultant at the National Library to advise on children's books. In the year that followed, plans were pushed forward, and, eventually, in 1973, the Canadian Library Association and what was then the Association canadienne des bibliothécaires de langue française (now the Association pour l'avancement des sciences et des techniques de la documentation) presented a brief to the Secretary of State on the need for a children's consultant at the National Library. It recommended that a new position of Children's Literature Librarian/Consultant be established to provide professional services to librarians , publishers, officials and agencies of the government, specialists, and the general public using the resources of the National Library. I started work in June 1975, and, since May 1977, have had the assistance of a full-time library clerk. Generally, my duties have been to advise and assist libraries and librarians in the field of service to children, to provide a reference and bibliographic service in the field of children's literature, to plan and implement a program of acquisition of Canadian children's literature, to publicize the children's service and collection , and to plan and direct the work of the children's services. The reference and bibliographic services constitute a great portion of the work. Requests by mail, telephone, and in-person have come from varied sources, inside and outside Canada, from librarians and teachers, authors and illustrators, publishers and booksellers, governmental and non-governmental agencies, children's literature specialists , children's book centres, universities, and the general public. The reference requests cover a wide spectrum of information on subjects such as the National Library's children 's book collection, Canadian and non-Canadian children's literature, professional children's literature, children's book awards, children's reading surveys, multilingual programming in children's libraries, children's audio-visual materials, children's literature conferences, and marketing of Canadian children's books. Although most of the bibliographic requests have been for booklists which we have compiled, there have also been special requests which deal with Canadian children's literature , such as French books as a second language, historical fiction books, sources for Canadian children s literature, and the children's Canadian literary output in a given year. We have drawn up a mailing list of persons who have requested our booklists in the past and to whom we automatically send our new booklists as they appear. The National Library plays a role in the bibliographical access to Canadian children's literature through our booklists. There are six: 1. Notable Canadian Children's Books /Un choix de livres canadiens pour la jeunesse. The first edition of the catalogue was prepared, in 1973, by Sheila Egoff and Alvine Bélisle for distribution at the display held at the National Library. The catalogue was very popular and was soon out-of-print. I revised and updated the second edition in 1976 and included the notable English- and French-Canadian children's books for the years 1973 and 1974. The illustrations in the original edition do not appear in the revised edition. A few changes were made in the chronological order of the books, which are listed according to date of first publication. Changes have also been made...

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