USBBY
voluntary association
The United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY) is a national section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY).
History
The United States National Section of the International Board on Books for Young People, USBBY, was established in the early 1960s by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Children's Book Council (CBC). It was incorporated as “Friends of IBBY” in 1979 and was headquartered at the Children's Book Council in New York City at that time. The name was changed soon thereafter, and USBBY was hosted by theInternational Reading Association (IRA), now the International Literacy Association (ILA) in Newark, Delaware from 1985 until the end of 2008. From 2009 the USBBY Secretariat has been located at the Center for Teaching through Children's Books in Skokie, Illinois.
USBBY is chartered as a non-profit corporation serving to promote and develop excellence in books for children and young people. The structure of USBBY consists of a board of directors, with a president, president-elect, past president, treasurer, secretary, and 12 directors, plus the executive director. Members include librarians, teachers, university professors, authors, illustrators, publishers, and students. Membership categories range from individual, to organizational, and patron membership (currently the American Library Association, Children's Book Council, International Literacy Association, (then the International Reading Association) and National Council of Teachers of English).
USBBY's regular activities include: a biannual USBBY Newsletter, a biennial regional conference, and sessions at ALA, IRA, and NCTE annual conferences and the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “USBBY” as voluntary association. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as voluntary association. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17153803. VIAF identifies the subject as 142348266. The Library of Congress control number is n97100907. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1985, 2008 and 2009.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “USBBY”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow USBBY primary sources, USBBY archive and USBBY research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “USBBY”?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “USBBY” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.