Manga in Libraries: A Guide for Teen Librarians

A comprehensive guide to manga collection development and programming for library professionals, Rudes’s title presupposes no existing manga expertise and will be of particular use to those who anticipate the need to defend manga collections or programming. The author is careful to define all terms, offer historical and cultural context whenever necessary, and prepare readers for many of the artistic and literary conventions that will be new to anyone more familiar with American-style comics and graphic novels. For those interested chiefly in collection development, she supplies a round-up of the most popular genres of manga and their respective target audiences, inventories the major manga publishers and imprints, and discusses age ratings. Several up-to-the-moment lists of recommended titles from librarians and other manga authorities are included. Notably, Rudes dedicates a substantial portion of the book not only to the value of extracurricular manga programming, but to proactively using manga as part of a contemporary school curriculum in order to support varied learning styles, cultivate SEL skills, and to provide students with positive representations of characters who reflect their own identities and experiences.