Holocaustkidlit.com Goes Live | Online Searchable Database of Children’s Holocaust Literature

Yesterday at Hebrew Union College in New York City at the annual conference of the Association of Jewish Libraries, I announced and demonstrated the debut of Holocaustkidlit.com, a new website featuring an online searchable database of children’s Holocaust literature published in the United States and Canada from 2002 forward (excluding self-published and educational titles).

The source for the database is the Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database.

 

 

The database includes fields for the following:

• Title
• Author/illustrator
• Place, date, and name of publisher
• Age group
• Genre
• Geographic scope
• Holocaust category (e.g., occupation, flight, resistance, Jewish resistance, concentration camps, recovery, return)

The database also includes a synopsis, Sydney Taylor and National Jewish Book awards, and links to online reviews.

Who can benefit from this site?

The site and database provide information that can be helpful to the following audiences:

• Educators
• Librarians
• Editors/Publishers
• Students
• Writers/authors
• Scholars

The site can be used to understand, for example, how many and which books have been published for children that deal with China or the number and which titles deal with concentration camps. But the site can also be used to produce data on publishing trends. For instance, 2009 was a banner year, perhaps inspired by the commemoration of Kristallnacht. Other patterns at a simplistic level include the takeover of teen/YA as a genre over older readers since 2010 and the domination of Germany, Poland, and the United States as the settings. There is opportunity, too, to ramp up the publication of titles dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust.

I invite all of you to check out the website and let me know your thoughts through the comment section.