--- On Thu, 7/9/09, Montgomery, Renee <ReneeM at lacma.org> wrote: > Attached is a personal project to which I'm hoping you all can > contribute in your infinite knowledge to all-things-museum > related.? As a personal project with the help of several others, > I'm trying to develop a bibliography of books about children in > museums - museums of all kinds, but fiction books only,? like > books stories children solving crimes, wandering around at night, > traveling through time, encountering dinosaurs, ghosts, etc, etc > with museums as the background. Can be picture books or K-12 novels. > > Renee Montgomery > Assistant Director > Collections Information and Risk Management > Los Angeles County Museum of Art
No attachment came through so I don't see your list. In the likely case that this mailman list is not configured to allow attachments, perhaps you will want to have a version on a webserver and provide a link? One interesting possibility is to use a shared spreadsheet such as the one on Google Docs, or even better the one on http://www.Zoho.com I can think of several examples but they may be ones you know about. The Blue Balliett books which begin with Chasing Vermeer are obvious modern examples. However, there are so many more. It would be helpful to see the list as you intended. The OCLC fiction finder database might be a help. Of course it is limited to books that may be found in libraries. It seems like an early effort. A search for one of my personal interests, "time travel", yielded many false hits, including Prince and the Pauper and War of the Worlds, on the top page. The individual book pages show how many libraries but not a way on this interface to list them. For that I'd have to find the book on a related system, http://www.WorldCat.org A search for a particular author brought up hundreds of false hits. An attempt to report the problems showed a list of 5 issues but the link to report additional problems is broken. As with the time travel search, it all depends on what types of subjects libraries use today and have used in the past. Frequently topics like time travel fall under generic categories like "space and time fiction" which can encompass a wide range of stories. On other subject searches when I wanted to make a fairly thorough checklist I used large heavy reference volumes like the Cumulative Book Index and its predecessor, the U.S. Catalog. Each volume covers 1-4 years of "new" publications for that period so a title is not relisted until there's a publisher, artist, format, or other major change. Some of the USCat/CBI volumes have appeared on Archive.org. Files can be up to 600 MB and the PDFs are not always searchable. However, since they are alphabetically arranged, this is not a show stopper. The CBI volumes attempt to be more international in scope and include books from other English-speaking countries, including the obvious ones, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Checking the CBI for 1948-52, I do not see a fiction subhead under museums but that is just one brief span of time. You might want to look at the titles on my Time Travel Literature database ( http://www.TimeTravelLit.com ). My search of "museum" in the subject and plot fields yielded 28 entries and most seem to be kids' books. There might be something new there for you. James D. Keeline Lead Programmer Balboa Park Online Collaborative http://www.BalboaParkOnline.org San Diego, CA
