A Library For Young Browsers
By Leslie Walker
The Washington Post
November 21, 2002
SLIS Summary
A University of Maryland team, headed by Education Professor Allison Druin, received $4.4 million in grants to create the world's largest digital library for children. The International Children's Digital Library opened its electronic doors this week, offering a pilot version with nearly 200 digitized books in 18 languages for children ages 3 to 13. Plans call for the free public library to offer 10,000 books--100 titles from 100 cultures--by 2007.
The digital library is being designed by the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab, and hosted by the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Contributors include the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Markle Foundation. The Library of Congress has contributed 50 books so far. Other titles have been donated from the national libraries of Singapore, Croatia, New Zealand and other countries.
The eclectic library allows children to hunt for books based on the color of their covers, how they make them feel, the kind of characters depicted, and other "unconventional" ways. One of its goals is to test novel ways of navigating the pages with graphical rather than text cues.
The project is unusual on many levels, not the least of which is who helped design the library--kids under the age of 14, working with professors to figure out what kind of new visual aids might help youngsters explore books more easily. Students from Yorktown Elementary School paid weekly visits to the university's lab to help create experimental search tools.
"One of our most interesting findings was how kids wanted to look for books based on how they made them feel," Druin recalled. "They said, 'I want to find all the happy books.' Or 'I want to find books that are scary.' No library in the world has shelf labels that say 'happy books,' so the kids are rating the books on how they make them feel."
"We are developing new technologies that reflect real thinking about children's needs and cognitive abilities," said Druin, who is creating the library with her husband, University of Maryland Computer Science Professor Benjamin Bederson. "If you look at existing technology for children searching on the Web, so much of it depends on reading and typing. From 4 to 8 years old, kids know exactly what they want but they have poor typing skills and have a heck of a time finding it."
An equally important goal is to bring together publishers, librarians and software developers to explore difficult copyright issues that ensue from making books publicly accessible on the Internet. While publishers remain leery of making books available for free online, some like Random House and Harper Collins have donated titles for display in the experimental children's library. More than two-thirds of the material in the library is in the public domain, with expired copyrights.
Druin predicts one of the biggest impacts of the digital library will be to empower youngsters who are dependent on adults for their learning experiences. "Kids have such a mind of their own, and we give them so few tools that enable them to be in control. The goal is to put kids back in control of some small piece of their life so they get a sense of 'Aha, I can do this. This is mine.'"
Read the full article
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17546-2002Nov20.html?referer=email
Visit The International Children's Digital Library
www.icdlbooks.org/
Posted November 26, 2002