portal: Libraries and the Academy

A preservation needs survey of children's literature collections at the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries is analyzed. The genre, the subject of a growing body of scholarship, has enduring value and is collected in universities to support programs in literature, education, art, cultural history, and more. Even well known children's literature titles prior to the twentieth century are now scarce; preservation of modern titles is not an unreasonable precaution. In this survey, older titles housed in special collections had many problems as a result of their provenance. Too brittle to be rebound and too rare to be replaced, yet too expensive to conserve, these volumes were boxed and placed in the palliative environment of an off-site storage facility. Cataloged online for the first time in preparation for their transfer, they are being used more heavily; their condition is monitored each time they are recalled. Out of copyright and usually short texts, the brittle titles are good candidates for in-house digitization. The survey found that the new titles in circulation cannot be subjected to simple re-binding. Processed and handled with consideration for their structure, the modern children's titles in the academic library setting will survive so long that replacements, when they are eventually needed, are not likely to be available.