Hi y’all. I’m in the last semester of a Master’s Degree in Library Studies at UW-Madison and I’m taking a class on Reference Services. For an assignment, we could choose anyone to shadow or interview who provides reference to a population. I challenged myself to find a professional reference provider of children/youth related-materials who did not work in a public library setting. I started researching institutions with children’s literature collections and was successful in finding this helpful list. 

First, I reached out to The Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature at the University of Minnesota because they are in the same upper Midwest region as I am. I got an email from their curator (who suggested I wasn’t really looking for a collection like theirs and should consider talking to public library reference staff), but she never got back to me about setting up an interview. Next I contacted the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at The University of Southern Mississippi and got a very enthusiastic response about setting up an interview.