Chinese Zodiac Library Guide: An Annotated Subject Guide for Librarians and Educators

An annotated, hostable subject guide on the Chinese zodiac, written for school and public librarians and for teachers building a Lunar New Year unit.The guide separates adult-level background from classroom-ready material. Background entries point to museum and encyclopedia sources — among them curator-written material from National Museums Liverpool, a museum essay on a Tang Dynasty bronze mirror from the Smith College Museum of Art, and the teacher-facing zodiac page from the Lam Museum of Anthropology at Wake Forest University — each annotated with how a librarian or teacher might actually use it. Books and activities are then sorted by the age of the reader.It also states a framing position explicitly: the Chinese zodiac is living cultural heritage tied to the Lunar New Year and is best presented as tradition and story, in the way a folktale or holiday custom would be treated, rather than as fortune-telling. The animal traits come from old legends rather than from science, and they describe a tradition rather than any real child in the room. Librarians serving families who celebrate the Lunar New Year are encouraged to treat the guide as a starting point and to invite community members to share their own customs, since traditions vary across China, across the diaspora, and across other cultures that keep a lunar new year of their own.The maintained web version, where the licence notice is published, is at https://chinesezodiac.com/teachers/library-guide.