The University of Arizona has put online a database of its collection of non-US children’s books — the world’s largest collection. The database, which contains information on more than 30,000 books, is called The World of Words: International Collection of Children’s and Adolescent Literature. It’s available at http://wowlit.org/.

You can do a simple keyword search (an advanced search allows you to query by a number of other factors, including ISBN, author, illustrator, and translator) or you can browse by region, age, or genre.

I took a look at children’s books from the Caribbean. I didn’t get a count of results but they were ten to the page and there were 81 pages of results. Each result includes a picture of the cover and a brief summary of the book and metadata like page count, ISBN, author and illustrator, and theme. There’s a permalink for you and a form for a comment, though I didn’t see any entries with comments.

The site will continue to be updated, and you’ll find additional information about children’s books and the creative factors behind them at the site blog. I actually found several of the YA books that looked like good reads. How about a direct link to a WorldCat ISBN search?