Databases: Databases for Children's Literature include subject-specific collections such as Who Next...A Guide to Children's Authors (accessible on campus only), as well as multidisciplinary resources like Literary Resource Center, JSTOR, Project MUSE, Humanities Source, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and publisher-specific databases like Cambridge Core, Taylor & Francis Journals, SAGE Premier and Wiley Online Library. All can be accessed individually from our A-Z Databases site, and some (mostly the multidisciplinary and publisher-specific resources) are automatically included in WorldCat searches.
Academic ebooks: The Library provides access to thousands of ebooks across multiple collections. All are accessible via WorldCat, or by collection using our A-Z Databases site (under the Database Type select eBooks). Two collections particularly relevant to Children's Literature are JISC Historical Texts includes over 350,000 digitised texts spanning the 15th to the 19th century, and Cambridge Companions Online is a package of over 550 books from the Cambridge Companions series including the Cambridge Companion to Children's Literature. For more on ebooks for children, see below.
Websites: The Library uses the social bookmarking tool Diigo to recommend useful websites:
This is the link to our 'books' tag
This is the link to our 'children's literature' tag
This is the link to our 'poetry' tag
Images: If you are looking for copyright-compliant images to use in your assignments check out our advice here.
Open access means an item is free to view (usually online) and there are no paywalls or subscription fees. An increasing number of open access resources are being made available to support academic study, including platforms such as Project Gutenberg (older books), the Directory of Open Access Books (contemporary books), CORE (research articles), the Directory of Open Access Journals (contemporary journals), EThOS (theses), The Bielefield Academic Search Engine (BASE) (research articles) Europe PubMed Central (life sciences literature) and Open Access Theses and Dissertations (theses and dissertations).
All of these and more can be accessed from our A-Z Databases site (click on All Database Types and select Open Access).
There are also a variety of discovery plugins you can use to find open access resources. The Unpaywall browser plugin flags up whether an open access version of an article is available direct from the article’s landing page. You can also use Open Access Button - a plugin (or web interface) that lets you search for a freely available version of a particular article.
An increasing number of websites are developing digital collections of children's books and making them freely available online. You can also use Toppsta to discover author and illustrator events that are taking place online.
The sites below offer access to entire texts. Apart from International Children's Digital Library and Project Gutenberg the sites all feature early children's books.
The following sites feature more contemporary collections:
The sites below aim to inspire young people to read more. They are useful in establishing authors and illustrators currently in the limelight, current issues, and reading initiatives.
Most databases and ebooks can be accessed off campus. However, in order for the various online platforms to recognise you as a BGU student, and prompt you to login with your BGU credentials, it is important to access them via WorldCat or A-Z Databases. If you don't do this, and instead use a search engine to try to access a database, you won't be recognised as a BGU student and may miss out on content you would otherwise be entitled to view.
If you are looking for journal articles, one way to avoid this is to install the LibKey Nomad browser extension (installation instructions are here). Once installed, if you are off-campus and using search engines to look for articles it will display an onscreen alert - like the one below - if you have access to a particular article.
