By DONNA URSCHEL
The ICDL is a five-year research project of the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab and the Internet Archive. The project brings together children, librarians, publishers and software developers to develop a digital library that addresses the needs of children, ages 3 to 13.
![international children's digital library](images/kids_1.jpg)
The Library of Congress is contributing digitized versions of 50 books from its collections to the new International Children's Digital Library (ICDL), a Web site that is making children's literature from around the globe available online.
The ICDL Web site, www.icdlbooks.org, which is free and available to anyone with Internet access, recently made its debut at the Library. From an initial offering of 175 books from 30 cultures in 18 languages, the site will grow to 10,000 children's books drawn from 100 cultures over the next five years.
To mark the site's debut, the Library hosted an event in November in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building. The event attracted several hundred members of the library, university and publishing communities who came to celebrate the effort to make children's literature digitally available around the globe.
The Library's digitized contributions are books in the public domain, published before 1923, which were selected from the general collections and from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. The Digital Scan Center of the Library's Information Technology Services office performed the scanning.
Jane Gilchrist, head of the Children's Literature Team in the History and Literature Cataloging Division, said Library staff had selected about 200 books and then invited 15 project members, including children, to the Library last April to review the titles for addition to the children's digital library. Titles from the Library's Rare Book and Special Collections Division were displayed by Gerald Wager, head of the division's Reference and Reader Services Section.
"They were favorably impressed," said Gilchrist, who enjoyed showing the works to the attentive children.
Nine other libraries have donated titles to the project, including the national libraries of New Zealand, Switzerland, Croatia, and Singapore, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Finnish Institute for Children's Literature, the Helsinki University Library, the Swiss Institute for Child and Youth Media, and the Prange Collection of the University of Maryland.
The $3.3 million project is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the Kahle/Austin Foundation and the Markle Foundation.
Twelve publishers are part of the project, too, donating use of titles under copyright. They are interested in bringing literature to children worldwide and in gathering research on the intellectual property issues. They will try to determine, through this project, the effects of digital access on the material and whether this access is fair to authors, illustrators and others. The publishers include HarperCollins, Scholastic, Random House, Children's Book Press and Getty Publications.
Seven children, ages 7 to 11, helped design the Web site, along with educators, librarians and technologists. Consequently, the site is organized and presented in a child-friendly format. When the research team asked the children how they wanted to look for books, the youngsters did not mention the Dewey Decimal System. Instead, they hunt for books based on how the books make them feel, such as happy or scary; or types of characters, such as animals; or where the stories take place.
Pages from the ICDL Web site
Ann Carlson Weeks, a University of Maryland professor who is part of the ICDL team, said the project hopes to generate useful research in five areas. One objective is to determine the appropriate interfaces, or graphic symbols, that will help children successfully access the books. A second is the intellectual property issues that involve the publishers and authors. A third consideration is the effectiveness of using an intergenerational, interdisciplinary design team. The fourth issue is how schools, teachers, and public libraries can benefit from the resource; and the fifth is to determine how this digital resource contributes to libraries' collections development.
The mission of the International Children's Digital Library is to bring a new world of literature to children everywhere. Even in poor villages, there are usually one or two computers available for educational purposes and youngsters eager to see the colorful and inviting pages of books.
"Universal access to all human knowledge and culture is within our grasp, and this library project is bringing publishers, librarians and researchers together to make a system that works for children," said Brewster Kahle, director and co-founder of the Internet Archive.
And, as the ICDL staff likes to say, at this library the books will never be off the shelf.
Donna Urschel is a freelance writer.