PC Library Presents at OPAEYC Conference

Photo Credit: Some rights reserved through a Creative Commons license by Travelin' Librarian




The Olympic Peninsula Association for the Education of Young Children (OPAEYC) held its 15th Annual Early Childhood Conference (co-sponsored by the Peninsula College Early Childhood Education Program). The theme of the conference was "Building for the Future."

The Peninsula College Library provided a "Mountain Workshop" titled, "Tactics and Tips to Find Quality ECE Resources." The 90-minute session was well-attended and covered "tried and true time-saving strategies to find and evaluate quality ECE information resources; differences between Web and database searching and tactics used in each; how to distinguish popular and scholarly sources; and how to evaluate any information source for quality."

Attendees received a handout on ECE resource links and performed a hands-on search exercise to find one popular and one scholarly source in order to identify and compare their features. The session contributed towards Stars Competency: Professionalism & Administration.

One interesting point of the presentation showed how the development of the early childhood education field from invisible college to national organization parallels the development of the early childhood education literature, based upon a quick and dirty bibliometric analysis of WorldCat holdings:

< 10 ..... 1800 to 1927 ..... (NANE 1929)
< 20 ..... 1928 to 1959 ..... (*OMEP 1948)
< 100 ..... 1963 to 1967 ..... (NAEYC 1964)
< 1000 ..... 1968 to 1988 ..... (**UNESCO 1981-89)
< 2000 ..... 1989 to 2007

From 1800 to 1927 there were an average of fewer than ten publications per year. From 1928 to 1959 the average number of annual publications was fewer than 20 titles per year, etc. The peak year, in terms of ECE publications, was 2000 with 2,434 publications. Data comes from a search of WorldCat.org on March 14, 2008.

*OMEP = World Organization for Early Childhood Education 1948 (Organisation Mondiale pour l’Education Préscolaire)
**UNESCO coined the term "Early Childhood Care and Education" in 1981.