Community service: Vetting my local library's children's space books

Space fans, here is a valuable community service that you can perform in your neighborhood: Vet your school library's space book collections. My kids' elementary school librarian asked me to take a look at the nonfiction space book collection and cull any outdated or just wrong books. It took me an hour and a half to thumb through the six feet or so of shelf space that composed the planetary science section, and I plan to return to go through the astronomy, geology, Earth science, and planetary exploration sections. I wound up eliminating almost a third of the books, for which the librarian was grateful, and I promised to get back to her with a list of some recommended books on subject areas that are now thin. I was glad to have a volunteer task that I could do on my own schedule.

I only eliminated about five books for just being terrible. Age was the major factor in my decisions, but it was a complicated issue: the less actively a world is being explored, the older the books that are still good. The oldest book I found was first published in 1963 and revised in 1984, and I actually left that one on the shelf. Its last page is hopefully still inspiring to young children at the same time that it is heartbreaking to those of us who were children in 1984...or 1963.

This book was an example of an interesting trend: I found that books illustrated with art rather than photos tended to age better. I'm not saying that art necessarily makes for better illustration. I think art-illustrated books age better because illustrations are often used for general concepts that don't change as much over time -- things like orbital diagrams, or phases of the Moon or Venus. Often, concept art illustrates future events that still haven't happened or haven't been observed, like those lunar colonies, surfaces of worlds beyond Mars, or a major impact onto Earth.

The newest book that I eliminated for being out of date was a book on Mercury published in 2007. That was before MESSENGER arrived, and the quality of the Mariner 10 images that are included in children's books is pretty uniformly terrible. The Mars section of the shelf also fared very badly, because for some reason all the books I found there were quite old -- the newest mission mentioned by any of them was Pathfinder, and our understanding of Mars has changed a lot since 1997! Books about the Moon tended to be old, too, but have held up better with time. That being said, nearly all of the newer books about the Moon barely mentioned any of the missions launched since Clementine, and many stopped at Apollo!

As I worked through the shelves, I developed these cutoff dates for planet-specific books. Books older than these should be closely investigated to see if they still hold up. This list of dates would be different (more recent) for middle- and high-school level books, which should cover the topics in more detail so would need to be more up-to-date, particularly for Mars, asteroids, and Saturn. This list only applies to the planetary books in the Science section (Dewey 520s), not the space exploration books in the Engineering section (Dewey 629.4), which I have not gotten to yet.

• Mercury: 2008 (before the first MESSENGER flyby)
• Venus: 1993 (sigh. There's not been a lot since Magellan that you'd put into a young child's book)
• Moon: Depends on the focus of the book.
• Mars: 2005 (after Mars Exploration Rovers landed, but 2008 would capture Phoenix ice and amazing Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter images)
• Asteroids: 2000 (which gets you Ida, Gaspra, and Eros, as well as the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact)
• Jupiter: 2001 (which gets you most of the Galileo mission as well as better global Cassini images)
• Saturn: 2005 (to capture the initial results from Cassini)
• Uranus: 1987 (sigh. Books published after 2005 have the chance to include the news that Uranus is not as boring as it was when Voyager passed by, as witnessed by Earth-based telescopes.)
• Neptune: 1990 (again, sigh. Books published after 2005 would hopefully include changes observed since Voyager, including the fact that the "dark spot" is not permanent.)
• Comets: Depends on the focus of the book. Of the five comet books that were on the shelf, only one showed a photo taken by a spacecraft, and that was a Giotto image of Halley. All other pictures were Earth-based photos of pretty comet comas and tails. Books published after 2006 could have featured Stardust and Deep Impact images of comet nuclei, but the two on this particular library shelf didn't.
• General solar system: Books for this age group after 2000 are usually okay; after 2006 is better because they should have a more detailed picture of the diversity of small bodies in the solar system.

Pluto presented an interesting challenge, because New Horizons will change everything, but those changes haven't propagated to books yet, of course. In the end, I eliminated none of the Pluto books on the shelf; I deferred that for a year. I also didn't eliminate any books just because they called Pluto a planet, because I don't think there's any harm at all in letting kids notice that its status changed over time. It was interesting to see how books published in different years handled Pluto's planetary status. Some from the early 2000s had sidebars talking about differing opinions on its status. More recent ones that included Pluto generally also included Ceres and Eris in solar system diagrams. I think it would be a fun library project for a strong elementary-school reader to take a stack of solar system books off the shelf, learn how to look at the publication date, sort them by date, and then read what each says about Pluto.

When I was done, I had eliminated nearly all of the library's books specifically about Mercury and Mars, and I wasn't particularly happy with the comets section for its lack of spacecraft images. So here is a list of books that I will recommend that the school librarian investigate for purchase, based on my past book reviews. Many of them are actually series of books that cover the entire solar system, so if your library is missing a different subset of planets, you can probably find replacements here.

General solar system books:

• Our Solar System, by Seymour Simon. I personally reviewed and updated this one for the Smithsonian in 2014, so I can verify its accuracy!
• Professor Astro Cat's Frontiers of Space, by Dr. Dominic Walliman and Ben Newman (my review here).
• Show Me Space: My First Picture Encyclopedia, by Steve Kortenkamp (my review here).
• Lonely Planet Kids How to Be a Space Explorer, by Mark Brake (my review here).
• I know that Dorling Kindersley (DK) books are always very popular with children, but I've tried a few times and never gotten them to send me review copies, so I can't speak to any title's specific quality. They have a new book (Space!) coming out next month.

Book series:

• Inside Outer Space (2014) includes 10 titles for very young elementary students. (I haven't reviewed this for the blog yet, but have copies on my to-be-reviewed shelf and I can recommend them.)
• Astronaut Travel Guides (2012, but seems to have been reprinted in 2014) includes 8 titles for younger elementary students (my review here). I particularly liked their second-person approach -- you are exploring the planets.
• The Universe Rocks! (2012) includes 4 titles for older elementary students, one of which (To the Planets and Beyond) is a particularly detailed and up-to-date general solar system book (my review here).
• I really liked the Far-Out Guide to the Solar System series, which includes 12 titles for older elementary students, but it was published in 2010. It's really not out-of-date yet. It should hold up for a long time for everything except Mars, maybe the Moon, and, of course, the Icy Dwarf Planets. (My review here).
• Based on past experience with the publisher, I predict that the 8-book Secrets of Planets series to be published this year will be very good, but hopefully I'll see review copies soon to verify that.

I have just gone through Amazon to find new nonfiction space series and have sent out a pile of emails requesting review copies of brand-new space books. I usually post my reviews in November; stay tuned!