Abstract
Literature for Children is a collection of the treasures of children's literature published largely in the United States and Great Britain from before 1850 to beyond 1950. At the core of this Collection are books from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature, housed in the Department of Special Collections and Area Studies at the University of Florida. Books from the Departments of Special Collections at the Florida Atlantic University, Florida State University, and the University of South Florida join volumes from the Baldwin Library to complete the Collection. The foundation for this Collection was a cataloging and preservation microfilming project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The NEH project included a digital color management strategy for the reproduction of illustrations as children saw them.
About: Florida State University
The John MacKay Shaw Collection, housed at the Florida State University Libraries in the division of Special Collections & Archives, includes over 22,400 books in the Childhood in Poetry Collection and over 46 linear feet of other materials that document the personal, business, and collecting activities of John MacKay Shaw, an internationally-known book collector. The Childhood in Poetry Collection is one of the foremost repositories of the poetry of childhood. It includes the books by, for, and about children, and additional materials he collected relating to the themes (bibliography, biography, children, collecting, publication, and writing) of the collection. The books included here come from the Childhood in Poetry Collection and from the Goldstein Library collection.
University of Florida
The Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature in the Department of Special Collections at the University of Florida's George A. Smathers Libraries contains more than 93,000 volumes published in Great Britain and the United States from the early 1700s through the 1990s. Its holdings of more than 800 early American imprints is the second largest such collection in the United States. The product of Ruth Baldwin's 40-year collection development efforts, this vast assemblage of literature printed primarily for children offers an equally vast territory of topics for the researcher to explore: education and upbringing, family and gender roles, civic values, racial, religious, and moral attitudes, literary style and format, and the arts of illustration and book design.
A great strength of the collection is the many English and American editions of the same work. Other strengths of the collection include 300 editions of Robinson Crusoe, 100 editions of Pilgrim's Progress, fables, juvenile biography, 19th century science and natural history, 19th century alphabet books, moral tales, fairy tales, 19th century juvenile periodicals, 19th century boys' adventure stories, 20th century boys' and girls' series, Little Golden Books, and juvenile publications of the American Sunday School Union and other tract societies.
The Baldwin Library is a key resource of the Center for the Study of Children's Literature and Media. The Center is an interdisciplinary center based in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. Members of the Center include faculty and researchers from the university community; teachers, librarians, media specialists, and others working directly with children; and artists and writers creating works for children in print and other media. Its purpose is to encourage the exploration of this vital area of our cultural life through scholarly and critical investigations; through meetings, symposia, and seminars; and through the development of innovative ways to make the research and concerns of our members available to the general public.
University of South Florida
The University of South Florida maintains multiple collections of literature for children: historic and contemporary, for use in education and library science research as well as historical and social studies research. Collections of historical literature for children are held by the Department of Special Collections in the main library on the Tampa campus. Collections include boys, girls and animals series collections, chap books, early American textbooks, and pop-up book collections among others.
Collections of contemporary literature for children are held in the Juvenile Collection by the Nelson Poynter Memorial Library on the St. Petersburg campus. The Juvenile Collection exists to support the courses offered by the College of Education and to encourage adults to evaluate for themselves the appropriateness of Juvenile Collection materials for their individual children.
