The Public Libraries Stock Quality Health Check (SQHC) is a practical tool which enables public libraries to undertake an assessment of the relevance, depth and range of collection stock in relation to the communities they service. More information about this project is available from here.

For the second phase of this project we need to identify 500 children’s and young adult fiction titles which together are indicative of a healthy collection. This is not a shopping list of titles, but an indicative list. There will be a very broad range of titles in this list from the very popular to the very literary. It will range from picture books to young adult novels, and will include formats such as graphic novels as well. This will provide a snapshot of your collection. It is planned to revisit this list in a few years time.

Your help is requested for compiling this list.

Have a look at the pages which are linked below and suggest titles and authors for consideration for this list of 500 titles. Look at who is there already, and add your suggestions. Keep in mind that the aim of the final list is to produce a list of 500 titles which are indicative of a healthy collection and cover the range from picture books, graphic novels, and other formats
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We have not included authors who do not specifically write for young adults, although they may be read by young adults, which is why there are no Stephen King books on this list.

Some of the categories will lean more towards pictures books and junior fiction, for example animals. The paranormal list will be much more weighted towards young adult readers. The aim is for balance across the 500 titles not within each list.

The hundreds and hundreds of titles suggested will be whittled down to 500 titles (clustered in categories) at a meeting in July (date yet to be confirmed).

The aim is to have each title only mentioned once in the list (but it will be the job of the project team to sort this out). At present the project team needs help with suggestions. Please add your suggested authors and titles to the wiki in dark blue. Do not delete or edit (unless to correct spelling) the work of others as we need as many suggestions as possible so that the final list is indicative and robust.

• Are there other categories which should be included?
• Can some of these be collapsed together?
• What titles do you think are missing from these lists? Please add these in.
• Is the title in the right category? Please note next to it the list you think it better fits.
• The series list is missing titles, please add in the titles you think are most representative of each series.
• Does the whole potential list cover a representative range of readers in the birth to teenage age groups?

Please add these ideas and comments and the associated suggested titles on the page set aside for this.

The follow list shows the draft categories and the early suggests for inclusion in each category.

Adventure
Animals
Australian
Australian classics
Classics and modern classics
Family
Fantasy and magic
First experiences
Friendship
Historical
Humour
Indigenous
Paranormal
Realism?
Romance
Science fiction
Series
Sport
War and conflict
Suggestions for other categories