The University of Maryland/College Park’s College of Information Studies (CIS) and Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), in partnership with the Internet Archive, will launch a prototype International Children’s Digital Library November 20. To consist of 225 books—100 selected and digitized by the Library of Congress, 100 chosen by an international group of librarians, and 25 volumes of new material—the prototype is the first step in a five-year research project to create an archive of 10,000 digitized children’s books in many languages available over the Internet.
The ICDL will be built based on interface-design testing; experimentation with book-digitization techniques; new storage, retrieval, annotation, and delivery technologies; needs assessment collected from a cross-section of libraries internationally; and knowledge gathered from authors and publishers about fair compensation systems. The project stems from the university’s earlier SearchKids initiative, a visual browsing and searching interface for young people, which will be modified and expanded to accommodate the new domain of books.
Allison Druin, SearchKids director, is ICDL principal investigator. CIS Professor Ann Carlson Weeks and HCIL Director Ben Bederson are co–principal investigators. A panel of authors, publishers, librarians, and others from around the world will participate.
The project is supported by a $3-million grant from the National Science Foundation. Research results will be disseminated as conference and journal papers, at yearly workshops, and finally in a book that will describe the personal experiences of children who use the digital library.
Posted October 28, 2002.