Dear colleagues,
I would like to draw your attention to a new children’s books resource which may be of interest to you and your students: https://nccb.tcd.ie

The National Collection of Children’s Books (NCCB) is essentially an online platform, with a catalogue and database, that facilitates the exploration of over 250,000 children’s books in over 90 languages from five libraries in Dublin, Ireland. The project, funded by the Irish Research Council, began in December 2013 and ended in December 2015. NCCB was led by Dr Pádraic Whyte (School of English, Trinity College Dublin) and Dr Keith O’Sullivan (Church of Ireland College of Education).

The National Collection of Children’s Books (NCCB) was a two-year interdisciplinary and inter-institutional project (Church of Ireland College of Education and Trinity College Dublin) examining children’s books held in five libraries: Trinity College Library; Church of Ireland College of Education Library; Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street; the National Library of Ireland; and Cregan Library, St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra (DCU). It is hoped that the NCCB project is the first step towards a more comprehensive detailing of collections of children’s books in libraries throughout Ireland.

The NCCB website has two main functions:
A centralised catalogue of children’s books collections in the five aforementioned libraries, allows users to search for items across the five libraries. The main catalogue of records includes all titles in over 90 languages, including English, Irish, French, German, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek, Spanish, as well as other European languages. It is hoped that the project will contribute to the continuing development of the strong Irish profile in children’s literature research by providing a centralised online platform that will attract both national and international scholars and encourage new research in the area.
There is also an additional database section that highlights a significant number of texts of interest from these libraries and provides further detailed descriptions of, and images from, these texts. The additional database focuses on English-language texts of interest to the NCCB’s English literature scholars. However, it is hoped the database will encourage other language and literature scholars to explore the main catalogue and, if they so desire, develop the database further.

Further details can be found at https://nccb.tcd.ie/about

Wishing you all the best for 2016,
Keith O’Sullivan and Pádraic Whyte