It’s that time of year. It seems like school has just started, and fall, at least here in the Midwest where we FINALLY got some rain, doesn’t seem like it can possibly be coming our way. The Monster Kid’s plotting for his Halloween birthday party has gotten to the invitation stage, and we’re just two weeks from all those “31 Days of Halloween” promotions. The schools in my district are ignoring the fact that Halloween is just around the corner, but they may be the only ones in our community actually succeeding at it.

And with the spooky season looming just ahead, librarians, parents, kids, and even teachers (at least teachers in other school districts) are seeking out scary books for kids (or not so scary books, as the case may be) for storytelling programs (sometimes even storytelling festivals), lesson plans, party ideas, monster stories, chills and thrills, and just plain old fun. Most people don’t have the collection a library has of picture books, chapter books, poetry, cookbooks, monster guides, Halloween tales, scary stories for around the campfire (or a flashlight, if you’re inside) fall crafts, and lesson ideas. So, off to the library we go!

A lot of kids only have access to their school library for information on various topics. So I visited a school library to find out a little about how kids search for (and hopefully find) scary books there. Let me first explain that most school libraries are part of a “specials” rotation (assuming there are “specials” teachers in the school) So kids from each classroom cycle through for half an hour (or maybe an hour) usually once a week. On the other days, the kids will have art, music, and gym. Sometimes this is that class’ only access to the library for that week (depending on the school culture). Often that time has to include a short lesson or story and the kids’ search for books followed by checkout. It’s a lot to handle in half an hour to an hour once a week, especially if you are a solo librarian (hopefully there are volunteers backing you up) with thirty kids to help and check out. Assisting each child individually and keeping order is nearly impossible. So you want to make the kids as independent as they can be in trying to find the books they want (with the side benefit that they will develop the skill to  find them on their own).

An awesome catalog system can be a huge help with this. Gone are the days where you had to teach kids how to find subject, title, and author cards using the arcane subject organization system developed by the Library of Congress. The online catalog is a miracle. I have personally automated a school library and the difference is incredible. It’s not that the LC system isn’t still used, but we now have this amazing tool called the keyword search, which allows people to search using whatever word they think of. The great thing is that something will probably come up that will be related to your topic. The problem is that lots of things will come up that aren’t related to your topic but that have the word or phrase you used in them, someplace in the catalog field.

So let’s say the very busy (and awesome) school librarian is having many demands made on her at once and a kid asks “Where are the scary books”?  And the librarian says “Go type in the word ‘scary’ into the search box for the catalog’. 25 books come up, including a book of poetry about scary animals and  a science book on scary insects. Only five results show on the first screen before you have to click on “next” to see the next five results.

Let me ask you something. When you do a Google search, how many times do you go past the first page or results? Most people don’t. And it’s more than likely that  most kids won’t go past that first screen either. Getting the librarian’s attention a second time may be difficult(thirty kids all clamoring for attention…), so that child might leave without a scary book.

I decided to check my public library’s catalog. When I did a keyword search using “scary” I got 510 results. That’s way too many to be helpful! Then I saw that the list was for ALL the books (and media) in the entire library that came up under the keyword scary. I had to click on a subject heading, Children’s Literature, to refine my search. That was slightly better but still too many to be helpful. My first page gave me 20 results, including one book by Norman Bridwell (author of the Clifford books),  Strawberry Shortcake’s Spooky Night, a Geronimo Stilton book, and a YA title. Okay, “scary” is a pretty nonspecific term. It’s probably likely that the keyword search results would be all over the place. But it is kind of discouraging. I tried some other keywords. “Halloween” brought up completely different results, with the exception of the Bridwell book, and I think all of them would be more satisfying to a kid that what I found when I looked up “scary”. And this is interesting– there were 765 books in the overall collection that came up, and 367 of those were in the children’s collection (chances are a fair amount of them were by R.L. Stine, and many of the books found under “children’s literature” also seemed to be YA titles, but still–  there were not only more relevant results, but from a larger pool of books!

Now, my own kid loves monsters. So I did a search for “monster”.  Wow! 1139 books, 373 of which were in the children’s collection. Many of these were R.L. Stine and YA books, but once again, the first page of results was almost completely different. Still, that is a heck of a lot of books, and as I said, most people won’t go past the first page of results. So I got more specific and did a search for “Halloween monster”.  What a difference. This brought up only 31 books in the entire catalog, 14 of which were children’s titles. That’s a REALLY narrow pool of results. Because I did the earlier searches on “Halloween” and “monster”  I know there are lots of books on each topic– and I’m curious as to why there’s not more overlap. The children’s department in my library has tried to make it easy to find Halloween books (which will also have monsters) by grouping books related to individual holidays together, but obviously there has to be overlap as well as stuff they’ve missed. But that’s a start. What if I want to find a book on a specific monster, though? The Monster Kid is all into those Universal movie monsters, so I decided to search for “Frankenstein”. Would you believe there are 144 titles devoted to Frankenstein in some way, and just 20 in the children’s section?  Four of those were YA titles, and four were graphic novels. But interestingly, the Frankenstein book my son has checked out and sitting in his bedroom upstairs, titled Frankenstein, a Crestwood House book by Ian Thorne, did not show up at all.

So, “look it up in the catalog” is an okay place to start, and it can simplify things if you are searching a small collection or have time and patience to scroll through results and try different keywords (or maybe not, if the first three results that pop up in the school catalog in a search for “monster” are about monster trucks). But simple keyword searches can be tricky– either overwhelming you with information, providing you with a list of titles that doesn’t suit your needs, or even leaving out something you KNOW ought to be there, because you’ve seen it there before. You might find the books in places you won’t expect sometimes (who knew a five year old would have such a desperate need for Halloween cookbooks?) but you might never find them at all, without help.

If your keyword search doesn’t seem to be taking you where you need to go, and you can’t figure out how to successfully narrow your results, don’t be afraid. Ask the librarian. That’s why she, or he, is there… to help find those places where the book you need, or one like it, may be.

Have a bewitching time searching, and finding, what you are looking for, for this coming holiday season!