Search & Explore the Biography Clearinghouse’s Collection on Library Thing!

By Xenia Hadjioannou & Mary Ann Cappiello on behalf of the Biography Clearinghouse

Wondering how to find and curate biographies suited to the interests of your students or to your curricular needs? Frustrated by a piecemeal approach, cross-referencing booklists, award lists, and Google searches? The Biography Clearinghouse has a year end gift for you! 

We have created a collection of biographies for young people on LibraryThing, an online book cataloging service. The collection makes use of “tags” with which users can use to guide and focus their searches. This continually updated collection is intended as a tool for educators of all subjects and age groups, librarians, and anyone else who enjoys and works with biographies. We are busily tagging the books in our collection and will continue to add and tag more titles!

The best part about it? You can access our collection for free and without having to sign up for an account. You can search the collection by theme, literary elements, geographic location, format feature, profession/discipline, etc.  

To learn how to access, navigate, and search through the Biography Clearinghouse Collection review the information below.

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How do I access the Biography Clearinghouse Collection?

Simply go to https://www.librarything.com/catalog/Teachwithbios. There you will see our entire catalog listing. In the “Tags” column you will see all the tags assigned to each book by members of the Biography Clearinghouse. 

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How do I search through your catalog? 

• I am looking for information on a particular biography. How do I search through your catalog?

If you already know the title of the book you are looking for, type it in the “Search this Library” field and hit search. You can also search by author or illustrator names.

For more advanced search options, you can click on the triangle next to the “Search this library” field to expand the search menu. You can then use the available options to constrain your search.

• I am looking for biographies on a particular topic/theme or with certain characteristics. How do I run my search?

The easiest way to conduct a keyword search through our catalog is through our “Tags” list. To access our “Tags” list click on the “Tags” tab. The number in parenthesis next to each tag represents the number of biographies in our catalog to which that tag has been assigned.

Clicking on a tag will produce a listing of all books in our catalog we have annotated with it.

Have any questions? Biographies to add to our collection? Suggested tags? Please email us at teachwithbios@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you.

Xenia Hadjioannou is an Associate Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the Berks campus of Penn State University where she teaches and works with preservice teachers through various courses in language and literacy methodology. Xenia is the co-author of Translanguaging for Emergent Bilinguals. She is the Vice President and Website Manager of the Children's Literature Assembly, and a co-editor of The CLA Blog. 

Mary Ann Cappiello is a Professor of Language and Literacy at Lesley University, where she teaches courses in children’s literature and literacy methods. For twelve years, she blogged about teaching with children’s literature at The Classroom Bookshelf. She is a former chair of NCTE’s Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction K-8. Mary Ann is the coauthor of Text Sets in Action: Pathways Through Content Area Literacy (2021).