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Forty Years of Outstanding Books

Origin, History, and Committee Processes

Paula Brehm-Heeger

In 1959 the National Education Association Journal published the first installment of what would become the long-running Outstanding Books for the College Bound and Lifelong Learners lists. While the list was first published in the December 1959 issue of the NEA Journal as “Outstanding Fiction for College-Bound Students,” it was actually compiled by the Book Selection Committee of the American Library Association’s Young Adult Services Division (YASD). The original YASD selection committee was chaired by Marian L. Trahan from the Oakland Public Library and included a total of six members representing public libraries in Boston and Detroit, schools in New York and Connecticut, and one representative from the ALA Booklist and Subscription Books Bulletin. Of the many lists that have been produced on a regular and lasting basis by the Young Adult Library Services Association (formerly the Young Adult Services Division), the Outstanding Books for the College Boundlist appears to be the only one that was created at the request of an outside group.

By the time the Outstanding Fiction for College-Bound Students list was published in 1959, there had been a long history of collaboration between the NEA and ALA dating back to the turn of the twentieth century. For example, in Assessment of the Role of School and Public Libraries in Support of Educational Reform, released by the U.S. Department of Education, it was noted that as early as 1897, the then ALA president John Cotton Dana “urged the National Education Association (NEA) to appoint a committee to study the interrelationships between the two organizations.”¹ This report goes on to note that at that time few school libraries existed, and public libraries continued to “assume an educational role for almost forty years, supporting the needs of students and teachers.”² Additional evidence of collaboration appears in the NEA’s Addresses and Proceedings documents from the late 1950s. These documents include reports from a joint committee of the National Education Association and the American Library Association, whose function centered on “identifying problems of mutual interest and relationships in the field of library services and education, and of making recommendation for action on these problems to the appropriate units within the two associations.”3

This committee’s existence indicates that the NEA/ALA relationship was active and ongoing in the 1950s. Reports from this joint committee focus on general issues, including advocacy efforts aimed at legislation of interest to both associations and cooperative programs by the NEA at the annual ALA conferences. Both the 1958 and 1959 reports also mention several book selection and book recommendation activities by the ALA youth divisions, including the revision and publication of “Aids in Selection of Materials for Children and Young People” and arrangements for the NEA Journal to publish book lists and editorial reviews with the cooperation of YASD. It is worth noting that both the 1958 and 1959 reports indicate interest on the part of the NEA/ALA joint committee in cooperative programs focused on higher education.

This growing interest in higher education by both the NEA and ALA in the late 1950s is not surprising. In 1958, the United States Congress passed the landmark National Defense Education Act, and the number of students attending postsecondary degree–granting institutions had increased during the 1950s. In 1949 the total fall enrollment in degree-granting institutions was just under 2.5 million. By 1959 this figure had increased to more than 3.6 million—a more than one million student increase in a decade.⁴ This increase is noteworthy, too, because prior to the passage of the act, financial support by the federal government for higher education had actually declined in the 1950s. This decline coincided with the completion by returning World War II servicemen of their postsecondary education. While the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (the GI Bill) supported approximately one million veterans in the pursuit of higher education, this support peaked in 1949. When these GIs began to leave the ranks of college students in the early 1950s, overall federal government support for college attendance likewise decreased.⁵

When the Soviet Union launched their Sputnik satellite in 1957, however, everything changed. Once again, federal support for students seeking higher education began to increase. While the efforts for educational support of the kind provided by the 1958 National Defense Education Act had been gaining ground for several years, “the immediate catalyst for the legislation was the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, which directly challenged the scientific, technological, and military prowess of the United States.”⁶ Among its many provisions, the National Defense Education Act made “over the period of four years . . . available nearly a billion dollars for school improvement” and also made it possible for students to take loans for college education at subsidized rates with the intention to “increase the flow of talent into science, mathematics, and foreign language careers.”⁷

A review of the articles appearing in the NEA Journal from 1958 to 1960 hints at the complex nature of the U.S. educational landscape in late 1950s and provides insight into the reasons the NEA turned to YASD’s Book Selection Committee for the creation of the Outstanding Books for the College Bound (OBCB) book lists. NEA Journal articles suggest increasing concerns about Soviet skills in science and technology. However, many articles also indicate a desire by educators to expand students’ knowledge of culture and to support students’ creativity in an era when science, math, and technology-related subjects were topping the nation’s list of educational priorities.

Several writers in the NEA Journal, in fact, express their concern about the negative consequences for students subjected to a standard curriculum with such a specific focus. In his 1959 NEA Journal article “Hard Education?” Charles G. Spiegler relates a story about a public librarian desperately attempting to recruit young people for an after-school program taking place at the library focused on the history of jazz. Mr. Spiegler notes that, to his dismay, one after another of the students refused to attend, too focused on their extensive homework to participate. He articulates his concern that “we have begun . . . to harden the once-soft underbelly in our educational system by definite, absolute courses of study, strictly defined, strictly to be adhered to in a well-disciplined age of conformity. And yet, to my mind this isn’t hard education at all! In fact, it’s the easiest, softest, laziest type of education I know.”8 A similar theme can be found in an April 1959 article by Charles C. Cole Jr. In his article Cole discusses the need to ensure that the minds of new undergraduates are stretched, especially those of gifted and top-performing students. He expresses his concern that the current emphasis on standardized curriculum does not always do enough to hold the attention of students with exceptional abilities.⁹

NEA Journal writers for these years seem acutely aware of the opportunities and challenges presented by the increase in numbers and changing demographics of students seeking a college education. In an October 1958 article Walter Graves discusses these changes in the makeup of the student body, noting that, “For every student in college 50 years ago, there are now 11 jamming our college classrooms.”¹⁰ Graves also acknowledges the “greater heterogeneity” of college students.¹¹ In his October 1959 article Charles Spiegler argues that with millions of young Americans coming to college from various backgrounds, including less-intellectual backgrounds, “dare we, in a democracy, do less than send them back to their cultures somewhat better than we found them?”¹² And a March 1960 article echoes many of these themes by pointing out that the study of different cultures by girls pursuing higher education is “important in developing respect for the values and philosophies of other peoples” and that these college-bound girls are “intelligent, maturing young people who need challenge.”¹³

Interestingly, while the ambivalence about the new focus on science and math education and the challenges and opportunities that resulted is obvious in the NEA Journal, a review of articles in the Young Adult Services Division Journal from the same era does not seem to reflect similar concerns. For example, the December 1959 issue features a “Recent Adult Books for Young People” book list and an article about a conference institute titled “Adults Books for YA Scene,” but there is no specific mention of the Soviets, the Cold War, or a growing national focus on the need to improve science, math, and technology skills.

It is in this context, then, that the NEA turned to YASD to create the first OBCB list, and that the list focused, tellingly, on fiction, followed by biography and theater lists in the early 1960s, with no general nonfiction list produced until 1971. Even more telling, it wasn’t until 2004—more than forty years after the initial OBCB list—that a science and technology list was even introduced to the OBCB series. Throughout the 1960s, the focus of the lists remained on fiction, biography, and theater. Even when the focus of the lists began to expand in the 1970s and 1980s the specific subject areas remained nonscientific and nontechnical, with topics such as dance, performing arts, poetry, and music—a stark contrast to the focus on science and technology evident in the NEA Journal articles of the late 1950s and 1960s.

Evolution and Change in the 1970s

The 1960s witnessed a remarkable increase in the number of people attending degree-granting institutions. By the fall of 1969, approximately eight million people were enrolled in postsecondary institutions—a more than twofold increase from the 3.6 million enrolled in the fall of 1959.14 In 1965, the Higher Education Act was passed, representing the next major piece of federal legislation supporting higher education. It was also in 1965 that the NEA Journal published an Outstanding Books for the College Bound list for the final time. The Outstanding Theater for the College Bound list was featured in the NEA Journal’s October 1965 “Bookshelf” section.

By the time the OBCB list was set to be updated in the 1970s, the ownership of the list clearly belonged, then, to the YASD. Any mention of the NEA or the NEA’s role in the creation of the list among the committee members selecting the OBCB titles is practically nonexistent in OBCB documents from the 1970s forward. However, it is worth noting that in an August 1971 committee correspondence, the idea is presented that “these lists are used for the most part (at least 90 percent of the 1000s sold) by high school English teachers and librarians in small to medium sized high schools” and that the style of annotations provided for the list should be made in light of what “might be more meaningful to that audience.”¹⁵ The NEA may no longer have been involved in the publication of the lists, but teachers and educators remained a primary audience for OBCB.

Prior to 1971 the lists had been produced one at a time and released at periodic but not regular intervals. In 1971 the concept to revise all the lists together was discussed, and the pattern of revising the OBCB list every five years seems to have been established at that time.¹⁶ The 1971 committee began what would evolve into an ongoing discussion on many OBCB committees about what types of books should be included on the list. The available documents from 1971 do not include any official selection criteria. The statement is made that the list is “not a ‘good reading’ list” but a “strong survey list” designed to “give a readable, interesting, broad introduction to a field,” and it is specifically noted that this list is different from the Best Books list (presumably a reference to the Best Books for Young Adults list).¹⁷

When the committee charged with producing the 1976 OBCB list began their work in 1974, demand for the OBCB list was strong. Correspondence from YASD president Carol Starr to OBCB committee chair Ruth Smith states that the OBCB lists “were among the most frequent requests the YASD office receives.”¹⁸ This popularity was likely a significant factor in the decision to continue to update the lists on a regular basis.

The 1976 committee appears to have been one of the most active OBCB committees. The 1970s were a time of great change and transition for higher education, and it makes sense that the committee working in the middle of this decade would likewise be interested in updating and changing the makeup of the OBCB list. At the beginning of the 1970s, 2,384,000 students in postsecondary degree–granting institutions were age 25 years and older. By 1980 this number had increased to 4,535,000.19 In 1970, 3,537,000 students entering degree-granting institutions were female. By 1980 this number had risen to 6,223,000. The ethnic makeup of higher education students was changing, too. In 1976, 82.6 percent of students were white and 15.4 percent were minority. By 1980, this had changed to 81.4 percent white and 16.1 percent minority. During the overall 1976–2008 time period, the percentage of Hispanic students rose from 3 percent to 12 percent, the percentage of Asian/Pacific Islander students rose from 2 percent to 7 percent, and the percentage of black students rose from 9 percent to 14 percent.²⁰

It was in this historical context that the 1976 OBCB committee began their work. The July 1974 letter inviting committee members to serve on the OBCB Revision Committee included a very basic function statement “to revise the 5 ‘outstanding’ lists published for ALA for young adults for completion in 1975.”²¹ In a September communication to her committee, Chair Ruth Smith set out basic suggestions for how the work of the committee should be accomplished. In October she offered detailed suggestions of how committee members could locate potential titles for the list. This October communication included a suggestion to consider ways that ALA’s Association of College and Research Libraries division publications might be a resource for finding titles for consideration—an important and insightful suggestion on the part of Smith, as in later years ACRL would be asked to take a direct role in the production of the OBCB list.

The question of how to best define an outstanding book is discussed at length in committee correspondence in 1974. Smith attempts to answer the question with assistance from YASD president Carol Starr. This discussion includes one of the few mentions of the NEA’s role in the creation of the OBCB by any OBCB committee; Smith relates that Starr informed her, “the ideas originated with the National Education Association for the purpose of providing the college bound with material they ‘should have read’ when they finish high school.”²² Smith’s dissatisfaction with this explanation is clear as she poses the rhetorical question to her committee, “How’s that for an ambiguous statement?” Smith does provide some additional detail about the evolving definition of an “outstanding book” by stating in one letter that these are books that should be “important titles which presumably will stand the test of time because they are concerned with fundamentals rather than fads.”²³ This ongoing discussion leads Smith to suggest to her committee that they “formulate a set of criteria on which we can agree and submit them to YASD for approval.”²⁴

The 1976 committee also clearly struggled with another issue that has probably become a familiar conundrum for OBCB committee members over the years: how to effectively gather potential titles. Unlike other YASD/YALSA book lists and awards, titles that can be considered for the OBCB lists were not (and continue not to be) bound by format or publication date. This issue, combined with questions about how best to define outstanding, led the 1976 committee to discuss several changes to the list, including format, number of titles, and scope.

Minutes from the 1975 ALA Midwinter Meeting include a series of questions about the lists asked by the committee, such as, “Can we redo them as we see fit? Why is there no creative writing list? Why is nonfiction except biography and theater all lumped together? Why not a list of ‘The Arts’? Why not a list or lists of 150–200 titles of basic books? Can the content of the books determine the number and type of lists?”25 With no overview or history of the NEA’s involvement in the creation of the lists and no historical context for understanding the reasons the subject areas were selected for previous OBCB lists, the 1976 committee suggested significant revisions to OBCB. The 1976 committee would not be the first to consider revising the list’s format and topics. Nor would they be the first group to express concern about retaining “Outstanding Books for the College Bound” as the list title.

The 1976 committee provided a plan to overhaul the list, along with specific selection criteria developed for each of what they proposed to be four new lists. They suggested the following statement of purpose for the OBCB committee be officially adopted by the YASD board of directors: “These lists offer the thoughtful student a careful selection of those ageless and contemporary books that encompass the ideas, experience and discoveries which have made significant contributions to human knowledge. Reading these books will promote the self-growth and openness of ideas necessary to develop a creative and evaluative mind.”²⁶

The changes suggested by the committee were not, however, approved by the YASD board of directors. In a letter to her committee and to YASD president Carol Starr, Smith communicates the rejection of the committee’s plans and instructs her committee to “proceed with our assignment by following the original format . . . retain the original five categories and make the additions and deletions which will bring them up to date.”²⁷ While Smith’s committee failed to enact changes during their tenure, they did submit a formal committee report at the 1975 annual conference restating their proposed changes and asking that they be enacted before the next release of an OBCB list.²⁸

One other noteworthy development during the tenure of the committee that produced the 1976 OBCB list was a January 1975 Library Journal article discussing the updating of the OBCB list. This article stated, “Librarians and publishers both will be waiting to see the result of the updating project, which is being carried on at a time when unprecedented heavy pressures for the restriction of the reading of young people are being mounted evidently with the backing of the United States Commissioner of Education Terrel Bell.”²⁹ After the publication of this Library Journal article, Ruth Smith received a letter from a concerned mother of a 13-year-old in New Jersey. This mother wrote to express her belief in not restricting reading for young people.³⁰ In response to the letter, the executive director of YASD wrote to the New Jersey mother and assured her that “‘hostile pressure’ will not affect the revisions of these lists” and that the development of the lists “help librarians who are trying to withstand pressure from adults trying to restrict the reading of teenagers.”³¹

1980s

The work of Ruth Smith and her innovative 1976 committee appears to have prompted a fresh look at the Outstanding Books for the College Bound list. At the 1979 ALA Midwinter Meeting the YASD board authorized the formation of a new committee to begin revising the OBCB list. The function statement for this 1980 committee was “To revise the YASD ‘Outstanding Fiction for the College Bound’ list. To establish criteria for the selection and procedural guidelines for the list. To examine procedures and make recommendations related to the future production of the entire set of Outstanding lists, including consideration of a name change.”32

Despite a clear interest in having the committee members revise elements of the list beyond the traditional work of adding and eliminating titles, OBCB committees during the 1980s continued to follow one traditional procedure for creating the list. While the entire list with its separate topic areas was referred to collectively as Outstanding Books for the College Bound, and all titles were released at the same time, selection for the titles in each of the four or five topic areas was accomplished by separate committees, with each committee having a different chairperson. These individual committees had similar but independent selection criteria that they were instructed to “develop carefully and with thought.”³³ The individual topic-area lists were given titles that included the topic in the title name such as Outstanding Fiction for the College Bound and Outstanding Biographies for the College Bound. This was the procedure for the 1986 committee, which, like previous committees, had individuals appointed to work on each topic-area list, and each topic area was chaired by an individual with one person acting as the coordinator of the other chairs and committees to ensure that the final list was submitted in the proper format. However, it was during the 1986 committee’s tenure that this tradition began to change. That committee made the recommendation “to prepare Outstanding Books for the College Bound as a single work that combines separate lists”—a recommendation that was enthusiastically received by YASD’s publishing staff.³⁴

This 1986 OBCB committee began their work facing questions that had plagued earlier committees. Communication from the 1986 committee indicates that the number of titles to be included in the overall list, as well as the specific criteria for selection titles, was still up for debate. For example, Mary Ann Paulin, chair of that year’s Outstanding Biographies for the College Bound list, asked in one memo, “Are we limited in numbers to the titles that will fit on a trifold, the old format?” and in the same memo wondered “how much emphasis will be given to balancing the lists and to choosing books readable by students.”³⁵ Paulin also suggested a set of specific criteria be used in selecting titles, including “accuracy, objectivity, credibility, believability and literary quality.”³⁶

A July 1985 letter from OBCB Fiction Committee chair Leslie Edmonds states that while she did speak with YASD executive director Evelyn Shaevel and “other chairs of other committees” about the list and the work of the committee, there remained “many unanswered questions” regarding the format and the topics on which the OBCB list should focus.³⁷ The ongoing questions about selection criteria are addressed in Edmonds’s letters to her committee, and she does recommend that specific criteria such as literary merit, readability, and balance of types of fiction be used.³⁸

One additional criterion Edmonds mentions in her communications regarding selection of titles is “titles from 1980 to present need to be added.”³⁹ The inclusion of this statement indicates that the apparent long-running tradition of viewing the OBCB list as an update appears to have continued throughout the 1980s. During this era the OBCB committee continued to be referred to as the Outstanding Books for the College Bound Revision Committee.

1990s

The OBCB committees worked throughout 1990s to expand the kinds of titles and subjects that were included in the OBCB lists. They may have, as Paulin suggested in her 1986 communication, been looking to increase the readability of titles and interest of students in topics on the list. Topics such as film and music appeared. Committee correspondence from this decade focuses heavily on discussions of specific titles and was less concerned with defining what exactly qualifies as an outstanding book. Questions and comments related to criteria still do appear, however, such as a May 1990 comment by one committee member about a title: “I’m not sure it will stand up over time as a book to be read over and over again.”40 Communication from the January 1989 Midwinter Meeting of the Outstanding Nonfiction for the College Bound Committee reinforces that the question of selection criteria was still being discussed as “establish criteria for the list” is the first item on the committee’s Midwinter agenda. The idea that the list remains a “revision” of earlier OBCB lists is also evident, as multiple discussions about the “elimination of some titles” and the need to “determine titles to retain from previous list”⁴¹ appear in committee communications from the early 1990s.

The committees of the early 1990s clearly struggled with the “many questions about the ground rules for the compilation of the lists.”⁴² It is not surprising then that in 1994 the first documented Guidelines for Outstanding Books for the College Bound were established. This signaled an end to much of the confusion and concern about criteria and committee procedure. These guidelines codified the informal procedures which had been used by various OBCB committees for several decades. The guidelines included a clear charge and purpose for the committee and defined the target audience as well as guidelines for title eligibility and committee voting and selection procedures.

Recent Changes

The eve of the twenty-first century brought two significant changes to the OBCB committee and list. First, 1999 is the first year the list was published under its new name, “Outstanding Books for the College Bound and Lifelong Learners.” The inclusion of “lifelong learners” in the list name is not surprising, as by fall 2000 nearly six million people older than the age of 25 were enrolled in degree-granting institutions, with 2,749,000 of these students actually being more than 35 years old.⁴³ This trend in the diversity of students shows no sign of changing as projections for 2012 are that more than seven million students will be more than 25 years old and more than three million will be over the age of 35, making lifelong learners a growing audience for this particular YALSA selection list.⁴⁴ The second significant change in 1999 was that, for the first time, the committee included members from ACRL. This experiment in making the OBCB list a joint production of YALSA and ACRL has continued to evolve with the 2004 and 2009 committees. In the 2004 ALA Midwinter Meeting postconference report, OBCB chair Mary Arnold notes that both she and the individual from ACRL acting as the ACRL liaison for the committee believed that future ACRL recruits for the OBCB committee “need more information about the selection committee procedures and time commitment.”45 This issue was addressed by the 2009 committee by having a limited number of ACRL committee members involved. This targeted ACRL involvement allowed the YALSA members, many of whom have experience in selecting nontextbook titles for inclusion on book lists designed for a general audience, the chance to work in a focused manner on gathering input from ACRL without losing focus on the nature of the OBCB list.

The 2004 OBCB committee made a significant change to the list format. This committee abandoned the traditional format, more than four decades old, of using specific topic headings such as biography and fiction in favor of more general, liberal-arts-based topics such as history, science and technology, and literature and languages. Committee reports from 2004 indicate an interest in shifting toward academic categories with “scope and criteria statements based on academic standards.”⁴⁶ The driving force behind this change to the list was, in the words of 2004 OBCB chair Mary Arnold, “the unique makeup of the committee.”⁴⁷ According to Arnold, 2004 YALSA president Caryn Sipos was focused on creating a new, meaningful partnership between ACRL and YALSA, and the inclusion of ACRL members on the OBCB committee was part of this focus. When it came to the list format, Arnold reports that “it was the academic librarians who pushed to change the sections to closer resemble college department tracks . . . as an ancillary result, since ACRL members are much more likely to read and recommend nonfiction, we ended up with a heavily nonfiction list as well!”⁴⁸ The format change proved to be a success, and the most recent 2009 OBCB list follows this new, updated format.

The latest iteration of the OBCB list demonstrates that this long-running list is one of the most durable, flexible lists offered by YALSA. It has been examined and reinvented by decades of dedicated committee members, and the result of this hard work continues to keep the OBCB in demand and relevant to today’s college students and lifelong learners. While they would likely be thrilled to know that individuals seeking postsecondary education of any sort are still using the OBCB, one can’t help but wonder what the OBCB founders would think of the changes to the list and the most current version. Would they be surprised? Would they approve of the changes? Or would they simply be happy to learn that students still read and librarians still work diligently to connect these students to just the right resources to help them succeed in college and in life?

Notes

1. Shirley A. Fitzgibbons, “School and Public Library Relationships: Essential Ingredients in Implementing Educational Reforms and Improving Student Learning,” 2000, www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/aasl/aaslpubsandjournals/slmrb/slmrcontents/volume32000/relationships.cfm. Printed with permission from the U.S. Department of Education.

2. Ibid.

3. National Education Association, Joint Committee of the National Education Association and the American Library Association, Addresses and Proceedings of the Ninety-sixth Annual Meeting Held at Cleveland, Ohio, 96 (June/July 1958): 338.

4. National Center for Education Statistics, “Table 189: Total fall enrollment in degree-granting institutions by attendance status, sex of student and control of institution: Selected years, 1947 through 2008.” Digest of Education Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_189.asp.

5. “Federal Funds for Higher Education,” Encyclopedia of Education 2002, Gale U.S. History in Context.

6. Pamela Ebert Lattau, project leader, with Jerome Bracken, Richard Van Atta, Ayeh Bandeh-Ahmadi, Rodolfo de la Cruz, and Kay Sullivan, “The National Defense Education Act of 1958: Selected Outcomes,” March 2006, https://www.ida.org/upload/stpi/pdfs/ida-d-3306.pdf.

7. “An NEA Year to Remember: 1958,” NEA Journal 48, no. 1 (January 1959): 68.

8. Charles G. Spiegler, “Hard Education?” NEA Journal 48, no. 7 (October 1959): 39.

9. Charles C. Cole Jr., “Flexible College Curriculums,” NEA Journal 48, no. 4 (April 1959): 47–48.

10. Walter Graves, “Today’s College Student,” NEA Journal 47, no. 7 (October 1958): 498.

11. Ibid., 498.

12. Spiegler, 39.

13. Ruth Wheeler, “Home Economics for College-Bound Girls,” NEA Journal 49, no. 3 (March 1960): 19.

14. National Center for Education Statistics, “Table 189.”

15. Jane Manthone to Andrea L. Balcken, Aug. 6, 1971.

16. Andrea L. Balcken to Rosemary Young, May 6, 1971.

17. Ibid.

18. Carol Starr to Ruth Smith, Aug. 20, 1974.

19. National Center for Education Statistics, “Table 190: Total fall enrollment in degree-granting institutions, by sex, age, and attendance status: Selected years, 1970 through 2017,” Digest of Education Statstics, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables/dt08_190.asp.

20. National Center for Education Statistics, “Fast Facts: Question: Do you have information on college enrollment?” http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98.

21. Mary Jane Anderson to Outstanding Books for the College Bound committee members, July 31, 1974.

22. Ruth Smith to Merry Ann Mickelson, Nov. 4, 1974.

23. Ruth Smith to Professor May Benne, Nov. 26, 1974.

24. Smith to Mickelson, Nov. 4, 1974.

25. Marion Hargrove (recorder), Minutes of Outstanding Lists, Revision Committee, ALA Midwinter Meeting, Jan. 20, 1975.

26. Jana Varlejs (recorder), ALA Midwinter Meeting, 1975.

27. Ruth Smith to YASD president and Outstanding Books for the College Bound committee, Jan. 25, 1975.

28. Ruth Smith, Report for Outstanding Lists Revision Committee (ad hoc), June 20, 1975.

29. “Books for the College Bound: Aid in Updating the Lists Asked,” Library Journal (Jan. 15, 1975): 84.

30. Holly Lucas to Ruth Smith, March 14, 1975.

31. Mary Jane Anderson to Holly Lucas, April 15, 1975.

32. Evelyn Shaevel to Dona Helmer, Feb. 20, 1979.

33. Evelyn Shaevel to Outstanding Books for the College Bound committee chairs, March 26, 1985.

34. Evelyn Shaevel to Herb Bloom, April 24, 1985.

35. Mary Ann Paulin to Outstanding Books for the College Bound committee chairs, [1986].

36. Mary Ann Paulin to Outstanding Biographies for the College Bound committee members, [January 1985].

37. Leslie Edmonds to Outstanding Fiction Committee, July 12, 1985.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Dolores Maminski to Lucy Marx, May 11, 1990.

41. Mary Huebscher to Lucy Marx, Dec. 14, 1989; Outstanding Books for the College Bound: Nonfiction Agenda for Midwinter Meeting, 1990.

42. Elizabeth M. O’Donnell to Susan K. Horiuchi, Dec. 12, 1989.

43. National Center for Education Statistics, “Table 190.”

44. Ibid.

45. Mary Arnold, Outstanding Books for the College Bound Postconference Report, Jan. 30, 2004.

46. Mary Arnold, Outstanding Books for the College Bound Conference Report, [2003].

47. Mary Arnold, e-mail to author, Nov. 28, 2010.

48. Ibid.