This presentation was a general poster session at the American Library Association annual conference in Orlando, Florida, June 2004
After 4 years of revisions, a collaborative project involving library and counselor education faculty on evaluating child/adolescent literature for therapeutic use has made the leap to the World Wide Web. Originally designed as a paper and pencil measure used to train graduate students in bibliotherapy, the form was recently converted to a web accessible format and a web accessible database of these evaluations was initiated. Counselor Education students and a library intern were involved in the process of refining the evaluation items to be compatible with a web-based form. Our future directions include usability testing of the web site, tracking trends in the use of literature in therapy, and determining the effectiveness of the tool for increasing the competence of emerging counseling professionals in using literature in therapy. This poster session will establish the need and benefits of bibliotherapy, review the stages of project development and implementation, and present the current version of the Bibliotherapy website for viewer feedback and discussion. Although this project emerged from collaboration in an academic arena, previous project presentations at library conferences elicited strong interest from public librarians in the potential value of such a database of evaluations for working with their patron populations.