Thursday, November 21, 2002

Online Library for Children Aims for 10,000 Titles and Child-Friendly Design, With Professors' Help By BROCK READ Washington To design what they hope will become the world's largest online collection of children's books, researchers at the University of Maryland at College Park sought help from the Web site's probable clientele -- grade-school students. The collection, the International Children's Digital Library, is a collaboration between the university and the Internet Archive, an organization that promotes the creation of digital collections. The Web site currently includes 200 books from 27 different cultures. By the time the five-year project reaches completion, coordinators expect to have collected 10,000 titles from around the world. The library's colorful and graphic-intensive interface was designed by a team of professors from the university's Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, who worked with grade-school students, ages 7 to 11, living near the campus. While the university professors contributed ideas and completed the programming and design, many of the library's most notable features were recommended by the students -- including an array of background designs that viewers can choose and a mechanism that allows them to search for books based on the feelings they evoke. The books' texts appear as full-color images that viewers can flip through page by page. Students can search the collection for works from specific regions, or they can browse in a more esoteric fashion, sorting books by languages, lengths, and even their predominant colors. "Computer tools should support, and be a product of, children's work as builders, designers, and researchers," said Allison Druin, an assistant professor of computer science who led the university's design team. Ms. Druin and her colleagues said they hoped that the online library would expose children to new cultures without intimidating them. At present, the site includes books in 15 different languages. Most of the books are in English, but selections are available in Spanish, Italian, and obscurer tongues such as Khmer (spoken in Cambodia) and Niuean (spoken on the island of Niue in the South Pacific). Only a fraction of the foreign-language titles are available in English translations, but project coordinators expect to recruit more translators to create English-language texts. The books in the collection were acquired from the Library of Congress and a number of participating libraries throughout the world. Almost half of the selections are still under copyright, and appear with the permission of their authors and publishers. The project, financed by the National Science Foundation, could serve as a model for other institutional endeavors, according to Ben Shneiderman, founding director of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. "We tell everyone that the children are our partners in technology research," he says. "It's a phrase that sort of jolts people, but it's the type of thing that more universities should be doing." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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