One of the challenges we are seeking to address is to be able to tap into the collective knowledge and opinion of people knowledgeable about good children's books. There is never a substitute for the match between a person deeply knowledgeable about children's literature who also happens to know the likes and dislikes of a particular child. But you don't always have that PDKACL there when you need them. We are in the process of building what we hope is the next best thing and we could use your help.
Once you have registered as a community member and are logged in, you will find at the bottom of every product page (where you are looking at a single book) two places where you can enter information about that particular book.
The first is the Reviews section where you can offer your observations, opinions, and suggestions about how best to use the book. We are trying to impose some structure to this process so that there is consistency among reviewers and so that the same type of information is addressed for all books. We certainly want to capture opinions but also to move beyond that to information that a parent or teacher can acquire quickly (two minutes) and use immediately. Please see Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon as an example. There are fifteen categories which might be pertinent in a complete review. You do not need to contribute to any more categories than you think you have something useful to share with others. If your focus is much more on Writing Style and not so much on the Illustrations, do one and not the other. Also, not all categories are going to be relevant to all books. Please see the attached for a guideline to doing reviews.
The second category of information we are providing, and hope that you can and will contribute to as well, are tags. As with Reviews, these follow a specific structure. We want, hypothetically, a person to be able to search for all books with realistic depictions of trains, at a given reading level, set in Canada, with a values theme of leadership. Oh, and by the way, written by a female author. Hypothetically.
If you take a look at the Find a Book tab, you will see that it is set up exactly for this purpose. However, most publishers do not capture this type of information. We have created a tagging structure which we hope you will use to assign tags to books. The more books we get tagged the sooner, the more useful this database becomes for everyone. Until there are some thousands of books thoroughly tagged, the volume of candidate books from a search will be relatively small (particularly with the greater the number of criteria you might wish to use) and that has been indicated by an SLR (Sharply Limited Results) next to those fields containing information we are capturing and that are not available from publishers.
When you submit a review and/or tags, we will incorporate those with our own information and contributions from others into a single community review.