Newbery Winners Collection

Few things are more exciting to a children's librarian than ALA's Youth Media Awards. There were so many deserving books honored this morning, and I can't wait to get my hands on all of them. I'm sure I'm not the only one who is jumping for joy over books today.

In honor of today's announcement I figured I would share a little about a new collection I've started at my library: A collection of the Newbery Award winners.

There are a few different reasons I created this collection:

1. It makes it easier for kids to find an award winning title to check out. The kids in my area get a yearly assignment to read a book by an "award winning" author, and this collection makes the process of choosing one just a little big easier.
2. Moving these titles from our juvenile fiction collection provides more shelf space in what I consider the most crowded shelves in our children's area.
3. A separate collection will hopefully bring attention to some of the older and less known Newbery winners. These books seem to get lost among the more popular titles in our juvenile fiction collection.

The steps I took to create this collection were similar to those I took when I started our graphic novel collection.

1. I weeded to make space for this new collection. This happened to be in our reference section, which was in dire need of some weeding. 
2. I gathered existing Newbery winners from our collection and recataloged them. I choose JFIC NEWBERY as the call number for this collection. Each call number is then followed by the year the title won.
3. We were missing a few titles so I purchased new copies. The added advantage of this is that many of them have newer, arguably more appealing, covers.
4. I made a sign to identify the collection and draw a little more attention to it. 

If you have any questions about this collection, or would just like to share your joy over today's awards, I would love to hear from you in the comments. You can also reach me on Twitter (@MsKellyTweets).