International Children's Digital Library (ICDL)

The International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) is a five-year project funded primarily by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to create a digital library of international children's books, and is conducted by the University of Maryland. Its main goal is to create a collection of at least 10,000 books in at least 100 languages, freely available online to children, teachers, librarians, parents, and scholars throughout the world. I found this a truly heartwarming and well-executed digitization project.

Collection Principles
The library has posted its major policies, including its collection development policy, in admirable detail. Within the grant-supported five-year span, it is planned that 40 percent of the collection will be made up of important historical materials within the public domain and the remaining 60 percent will be contemporary copyrighted materials. Furthermore, “historically important literature and contemporary, award-winning titles will be added to the collection as they become available.”

The chosen books, displayed in their entirety, will be appropriate for children ages 3 through 13, and promote tolerance and appreciation of the diversity of all cultures. (Most of the rest of the selection criteria were along this general theme of global understanding.) The majority of books will ideally be suggested by people from within the country and culture represented by the individual book in question.

Anyone who has a book to suggest that fits the selection criteria is encouraged to submit a scanned item.

Object Characteristics
The digitized books – represented in their original full color – are free and available to anyone who clicks on them to read. The library does not enable downloading or printing of the books, though I found that it was possible to download and print individual pages of books, which were in .JPG format, for books that were no longer protected by copyright.

One can view a book in single page, double-page, or full-screen view, can zoom in or out, and can go back and forth in the book (obviously).

Though the library is free and open to all, registering for a free account enables users to select the language they prefer to use, return to the last page they were reading, and save their favorite books. This optional registration also helps ICDL know more about their audience. There is a kid-specific and an adult-specific registration page.

Metadata
For each book, the title and the authors are listed on the left hand side, and then on the right, there is listed a summary, publication date, publishers, contributors, and awards won. The default simple search is a kid-oriented “graphical environment”, with books broken down into categories of cover color; emoticons that show if a book is happy, sad, funny, scary; books for young kids, in the middle kids, or older kids; short or long books; true versus make-believe books, etc. The adult-oriented advanced search allows users to browse by country of origin, award-winners, recently added, authors/illustrators, and so on. In the browse mode, users can choose between the “cover” view (which also lists the title and the language) and the “text” view, which lists everything the cover view does, as well as a summary.

The user can also change the language of the directional and metadata field commands at any time.

Audience
Rather than serving as a sort of global storybook shelf, which the casual visitor might assume at first glance, the primary function of the ICDL is “to serve as the basis for ongoing research concerning the development of computer interfaces for children and the use of digital materials by children, librarians, classroom teachers, scholars and researchers in the area of children's literature.”