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This bibliographic essay examines the scope and variety of nonfiction works in comics form with the intent of expanding librarians’ awareness of the diversity of such materials and serving as a resource for librarians.

It provides some theoretical background for understanding what constitutes nonfiction in graphic form and an overview of works available in print.

The article provides a representative (but not comprehensive) survey of graphic nonfiction works in the genres of memoir, travel, journalism, history, biography, science, essays and educational materials.

The essay focuses on materials published in books in English; the library world would benefit from subsequent research exploring the richness of materials available in other formats and other languages.

The field of graphic nonfiction is expanding, and this article serves as a guide for libraries interested in building or expanding collections in this format.

Our world had always been multimodal, but studying how young children enact and embody literacy practices, especially reading, has often been overlooked. The purpose of this study was to examine how young children respond to nonfiction picturebooks in multimodal ways. This paper aims to answer the question: What multimodal resources do readers use to respond to and construct meaning from nonfiction picturebooks?

Undergirded by Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading and social semiotic multimodality, a 9-min video clip of three boys making sense of one nonfiction picturebook during reading workshop was analyzed using Norris’ approach to multimodal data analysis. This research stemmed from a five-month-long case study of one kindergarten class’s multimodal and collective responses to nonfiction picturebooks.

Findings demonstrate how readers use gesture, gaze and proxemics in addition to language to signal agreement with one another, explain new ideas or concepts to one another and incorporate their background knowledge. In addition to reading images, the children learned to read each other.

This research indicates that reading is inherently multimodal, recursive and complex and provides implications for teachers to reconsider what kinds of responses they prioritize in their classrooms. Additionally, this research establishes the need to better understand how readers respond to nonfiction books and a broader examination of multimodality in the literacy curriculum.

The purpose of this paper is to describe, situate and justify the use of creative nonfiction as an overlooked but legitimate source of text for use in social inquiry, specifically within the ambit of narrative inquiry. What potential lies in using creative writing, creative nonfiction specifically, as a source of text in social research? How may it be subjected to modes of analysis such that it deepens understandings of substantive issues? Links are explored between creative nonfiction and the social context of such accounts in an attempt to trace how writers embed general social processes in their narrative.

Three exemplars from literary magazines are described in which whiteness is the substantive theme. The first author is a woman who writes about her relationship with her landscaper, the second story is written by a man who is overwhelmed by guilt after uttering a racial slur, and the third text is by a man who describes his attempts to help a homeless couple. The authors’ interpersonal experiences with people unlike themselves tell something significant about the relationship between selfhood and power relations.

No singular pattern emerges when analyzing these three narratives through the critical lens of whiteness. This is because whiteness is not a subject position or static identity but a practice, something that it is done in relation to others. It is a collective capacity whose value is realized only in dynamic relationship with others. As a rich source of narratives, creative nonfiction may generate insights about whiteness and middle classness and how their intersections give rise to complex and contradictory sets of social relations.

There is very little precedence for using creative nonfiction as text for analysis in any discipline in the social sciences despite its accessibility, its richness and its absence of risk. Inviting the sociological imagination in its project to link the personal to the political, it opens possibilities for the analysis of both in relationship to each other. As a common form of narrating everyday understandings, creative nonfiction offers something unique and under-valued to the social researcher. For these reasons, the paper is highly original.

This article examines, elementary leveled graphic history, a genre of literature relatively untouched by research. Due to graphic nonfiction’s growing popularity in the realm of children’s literature and its potential benefits for young readers, teachers may want to incorporate this genre of literature into their social studies curriculum. Despite the genre’s appeal, educators should be careful when introducing graphic histories to their students, as nonfiction texts of any kind can possibly contain inaccuracies and biases that might foster misconceptions. In this study, we used a critical content analysis approach to investigate both images and text in four graphic histories on the Battle of the Alamo. We found these books contain several instances of factual errors and biased perspectives. After our analyses, we discussed implications for using these types of books in the classroom to help students enhance critical literacy skills. We connected recommended critical literacy activities to Common Core State Standards for informational texts and writing.

Graphic novels can contribute to effective content area reading on social studies topics such as the American Revolution. This action research study’s purpose was to examine student recall of facts, enjoyment of reading, and interest in the topic when using graphic novels as compared to illustrated nonfiction prose in social studies content area reading. Twenty-two fifth grade students (13 females, 9 males) in a public school in a Midwestern state participated in the study. Half of the students read about the Boston Massacre and Patrick Henry through graphic novels and read about Paul Revere and the Boston Tea Party with illustrated nonfiction texts, with the other half doing the opposite. The mean number of correct ideas recalled by students two weeks after reading two books in the graphic novel condition was 8.6 compared to 7.1 for the nonfiction prose condition with a medium effect size. Students rated their reading enjoyment significantly higher in the graphic novel condition indicating that graphic novels should be employed more often into the school curriculum. Suggestions for integrating graphic novels into the curriculum are provided along with other ways to take action.

The debate over quality versus demand in public libraries has been argued for some time, largely without resolution. In 1981 Nora Rawlinson wrote, “A book of outstanding quality is not worth its price if no one will read it.” The view espoused by Rawlinson and others gives a great deal of attention to best sellers, since it is demand which makes a book a best seller. This is not a new issue; Rawlinson quotes John Cotton Dana, writing nearly a century ago.

The constant updating and unstoppable advance of technologies, mixing of platforms, programs and codes and the new trends in funding, among other factors, have led us to a present-future full of interactive, collaborative, participatory and co-creative digital artefacts and works. Games, experimental projects, short films and interactive video clips, in relation to fictional and non-fictional narrative, like documentary and journalism mainly, generate a complex body of works that depend on a series of compatibilities between technologies and languages to work properly and keep up with the times. The main purpose of this article is to analyse how the expression forms of interactive nonfiction narrative can be exhibited and preserved, looking at four main genres: documentary, journalism, museums and education.

At the methodological level, a study of analogue and digital forms in the proposed areas was performed, and a series of projects as case studies were analysed. In addition, a series of initiatives and institutions developing preservation methods are listed and ten effective strategies have been proposed to preserve interactive and transmedia nonfiction works.

The results make it possible to propose new ways of exhibiting and preserving valuable digital non-fiction works that need to be catalogued and safeguarded for the future.

For non-digital artistic forms of expression, copies were the main way of ensuring their preservation, but how does this process work for digital art forms? This area is a virgin field that urgently needs to be studied to determine and generate structures for preserving these types of works.

The intent of this article is to show the direct outcomes of an inventory project, which served as the catalyst for collection development improvements.

An inventory project was undertaken with a major emphasis on the outcomes derived from the inventory.

Several types of problems were discovered, such as missing items, incorrect information (call numbers, collection codes, item types, etc. …), damaged materials, and weaknesses in the collection, which resulted in major improvements and changes in the development of the collection.

The results of the inventory project improved the accessibility of the collection to patrons by correcting many inconsistencies involving the shelving of materials, online records, call numbers, collection codes, item types, and bar codes. The location of missing items as well as identified areas of strengths and weaknesses assisted with collection development activities. The results of the project also provided an opportunity to hire a consulting firm to further assess the collection, which led to additional funds for supporting the collection. The single major benefit of the inventory process was that it provided the catalyst for instigating major changes in the curriculum collection development of the Teaching Resources Center.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the explicit teaching of information text schema with vocabulary instruction to primary-aged students in Hong Kong international education.

Data were collected through three quasi-experimental studies with different age groups and participants. Each study divided participants into two randomly assigned groups, either informational texts (IT) or vocabulary building (VB). Impact was evaluated with gain scores on a standardized reading comprehension test and researcher-designed cloze tests of fiction and nonfiction passages.

The explicit teaching of IT can benefit student reading comprehension from an early age, particularly to first language (L1) English students and possibly second language (L2) English learners. School reading programmes should include opportunities for students to experience IT (nonfiction) and fiction materials, and build their vocabulary through incidental learning and explicit teaching. For IT, they should be exposed to: layout – e.g., headings, sub-headings, glossary, and index; and content – photographs and specific/technical vocabulary. For fiction-based texts and VB, the following themes should be covered by younger aged students: antonyms, synonyms, and affixes.

Several limitations apply to this study which will need to be addressed in future studies. These include: the random sampling of students from the overall student population was not an option, given the necessity of voluntary participation and avoiding disruption to school routines. This study used meta-analysis to aggregate results across multiple comparisons largely because of the extremely small samples available. The data show large standard errors as a consequence of small numbers of participants. Hence, the current results, notwithstanding the power of meta-analysis, need to be validated with much larger samples in future studies.

This paper suggests that greater comprehension and cloze performance among L1 students was found due to the teaching of IT compared to vocabulary training, with the reverse result for L2 English learners.

Over the past half century, librarians have been increasingly interested in carefully and systematically examining their collections—making changes to strengthen and develop these sets of materials at both the individual library and the regional levels. Most of the techniques used to conduct these examinations were originally designed to evaluate the quality of nonfiction collections in academic libraries. In the past few decades, public librarians have successfully modified these techniques to evaluate both the quality and the use of their nonfiction collections. Recently, there has been surprisingly little literature on how these techniques could be applied directly to the evaluation of fiction collections in public libraries.