Eastern Michigan University has been and continues to be a pioneer in Children’s Literature Studies. The EMU library houses one of the largest collections of children's literature in the nation. In a speech dedicating the "Helbig Collection of Literature for Children and Young People" to the Friends of EMU’s Halle Library, Alethea Helbig said those who founded Children’s Literature Studies at EMU in the late 1960s—Marjorie Miller, Helen Hill, Agnes Perkins, G.B. Cross, and herself—were instrumental in defining Children’s Literature as a field of study: “Trained in literature studies, we looked at children's books somewhat differently from what had long been the case. We saw them as works of imaginative literature worthy of critical examination in their own right, rather than as handmaidens for teaching reading or other subject matter, although those are legitimate uses. And we began to discover that others elsewhere in academe were doing the same.”