I know very little about the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Award

[james_davis_nicoll]

Having just discovered that it existed at all today.

This prize recognizes authors and illustrators who demonstrate artistic excellence in Canadian children’s literature.

I am very intrigued by how they select the winners:

Winning books are selected by juries of children from a public school in Ontario (juries alternate yearly between one public school in Toronto and a public school outside Toronto).

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The turning point for me was when I went to a school whose library was not organized by grade level. At my previous school, I had explicit permission to read books from the shelves for older kids, but I didn't want to because they were Not For Me.

(Also, I think they had a lot of mundane lives-of-preteens fiction that didn't appeal to me at all, whereas the second school had a lot of 1940s-60s vintage science books and science fiction, for some reason.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Waterloo Public Library tried to keep young people from the adult stacks but not every librarian enforced this. One learned who to keep an eye out for.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I went to a two room, four grade country school house. One small library per room. Read them both in the first couple of months of access. Thank goodness we had our own library.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've encountered this at a school library. As far as I can recall, all my school libraries just had the usual fiction vs nonfiction division (I don't think any had enough books to make shelving by genre divisions worth the trouble).

Public libraries, yes; I got my first 'adult' laminated library card when I wore out my cardstock-for-kids library card.