For the purpose of this activity, I chose to consider children’s picture book fiction in general. In browsing through the CSU Primo library database list, I thought the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) would be an appropriate option to compare to my local library catalogue. I was a little disappointed that the ICDL was not really a database, per se, but rather more of a curated listing of books on a website that had been categorised by various concepts/themes. My first desire was to find a search bar option, but this was not available as a website design feature. While there was the inclusion of bibliographic element details (including language, genre, abstract, publisher etc.), these were not searchable options to filter resources. Furthermore, the homepage read more like a blog, with the latest entry dated 2nd June, 2021. Overall, not really a website/database that I would personally utilise for sourcing resources or even general browsing.
Alternatively, I explored my local library catalogue. Firstly, I was intrigued that picture book was not a general category of resource. Junior fiction was the closest category (whereas I would generally consider this to be the early chapter book-type readers in the collection). In only selecting the junior fiction category, without inputting any keyword into the search bar, I was surprised that the entire first page of collection of the 24k+ resources listed, were French language books. I gleaned more appropriate hits, when I inputted the keyword of ‘animals’ into the search bar, where I could then filter results according to 17 different element types (including media type, audience, carrier type etc.) It was also interesting to see icons for Trove, National Library of Australia and Google provided above the search results. Clicking on these icons took me out of the library catalogue to these specific platforms –-onto pages with results including the particular keyword search.