CHILDREN'S LITERATURE COMPREHENSIVE DATABASE SPEEDS AND SIMPLIFIES ELECTRONIC SEARCHES FOR CHILDREN'S BOOKS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 5, 1999,


   Children's Literature, a Bethesda, Maryland-based business that promotes literacy among children by facilitating access to the highest quality books and educational software products, has announced a new service: The Children's Literature Comprehensive Database (CLCD). This service will be offered through The CLCD Company, LLC, a sister company.

"The CLCD is an exciting new service available through the World Wide Web that makes it easier than ever for community and school librarians, teachers, and library patrons to locate the very best book selections for young readers," said Marilyn Courtot, owner of Children's Literature and President of the CLCD Company. "With a mere touch of a button, the database makes it possible for users to quickly and easily identify books of interest to young readers. The database makes it vastly easier for librarians to identify new books to purchase, develop their children's book collections, conduct patron and staff searches, create specialized bibliographic and reading lists, perform subject research, and more, " Courtot added. CLCD enables users to:

  • Obtain bibliographic information on the approximately 300,000 children's books, filmstrips, videos, etc. that have been cataloged by the Library of Congress in the MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) records.
  • Identify books that are suitable for specific age groups as defined by reviewers in those cases where reviews are available.
  • Read more than 15,000 critical reviews of thousands of children's books to better determine whether a specific book is of interest. Approximately 250 reviews are added to the database monthly. The reviews cross all publishers' lines and can serve as a powerful tool for acquisition librarians and others involved in the purchase of quality children's books.
  • Find books using any significant word, author name, subject, ISBN, publisher, publication date range, or language. Searches can be further restricted to any one of 12 genres and formats: Atlases, Biography, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Fantasy, Folklore, Historical Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Poetry, Science Fiction, and Sports.
  • Obtain either brief or full displays of bibliographic information. Brief displays contain the title of the item, its publication date, author, illustrator, and classification. A single click brings up the full record for an item that includes reviews when they are available. Full displays also show the publisher name, annotation, subject terms, etc. and hypertext links for subject headings, author names, illustrator names, and reviewer names that can be used to display lists of all works with a particular subject term, author, etc. With another click, the entire MARC record for the entry can be displayed.
  • Generate lists of similar items based on the Library of Congress Classification Num ber, and display full MARC records for each item.

    • "CLCD is completely independent of all publishers and does not accept advertising," Courtot pointed out. This ensures that search results are objective because they are returned strictly according to a relevance ranking that is based solely on the user's search criteria, Courtot explained.

    Courtot further explained that the database indexes all relevant words contained in the MARC records and database reviews, thereby offering a true full text search capability. As a result, when age is specified in a review, users will be able to find book titles using age criteria.

    The CLCD is updated monthly and is priced to fit any library or school budget. The subscription rate for a single user is $249.95 for unlimited searching for one full year. Discounts are available for multiple users and site licensing. An up-to-date browser such as Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape 4.0 are required for users to successfully take advantage of the full range of CLCD features.

    To try out the service, visit www.childrenslit.com. Details for entering trial subscriptions are available on-line.

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    Now in its sixth year, Children's Literature is dedicated to helping teachers, librarians, childcare providers, and parents make appropriate literary choices for children from infancy through young adulthood. Founded in 1993 by Marilyn Courtot, a librarian, Children's Literature's mission is to promote literacy through the love of reading. In addition to the CLCD service, Children's Literature publishes a monthly newsletter as well as several unique bibliographies that serve as a time-saving guide to the best of the best among the dizzying maze of more than 80,000 children's books in print. Children's Literature's team of 100 reviewers includes librarians, editors, teachers and physicians. Its annual "Top Choice List," now in its fourth year, provides a guide to the very best children's books that are published each year, and has been cited in several major publishers' catalogs. Children's Literature also licenses its book reviews to BarnesandNoble.com. Children's Literature's World Wide Web site (http://www.childrenslit.com) receives thousands of visits each month and has been called "a treasured resource" and "a great service for parents of voracious readers."