By Jeffrey Thomas
WASHINGTON: The books are in 48 different languages and beautiful to behold, and you can easily search for the ones that will make you feel happy, sad, scared or merry, or the ones with bugs, worms and spiders. The International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL), a nonprofit foundation, offers for free its collection of more than 2,500 books on a completely noncommercial site with no advertising.
It’s waiting for you online, whether you are interested in learning a foreign language through literature, enlarging your world view, or just looking for a good story to read yourself or to a child.
The ICDL goal is compelling: all the world’s finest children’s books available in every language for free, exemplary books that help children to understand the world around them and the global society in which they live.
Current holdings for the top 10 languages are English (1,471), Farsi (407), Mongolian (237), Spanish (123), German (80), Serbian (77), French (46), Arabic (26), Filipino/Tagalog (24) and Yiddish (23).
Both in terms of the fight against global illiteracy and in promoting cross-cultural literacy, the ICDL can play an important role by providing access to materials from around the world. “Even in wealthy parts of wealthy countries - say Washington, DC, or Maryland - public schools regularly have kids that speak 30 or 40 different languages at home. That’s just part of the world we live in,” said Ben Bederson, an ICDL director and associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. “If their parents didn’t bring books from their home country with them, they may just not have access to them.”
The ICDL has a thousand volunteers working on getting every one of its books published in every language. It is eager to receive more books from publishers and rights holders, Bederson said.
As another example of how access can be expanded, Bederson cited the ICDL collaboration with the government of Mongolia and the One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC) on a World Bank-funded literacy project. The Mongolia government has published 200 new Mongolian children’s picture books and distributed them throughout the country on paper, but also wanted to have digital access to help investigate the potential of digital learning technologies in rural areas.
“We have made a Mongolian version of the digital library, we’ve added their 200 books, and there’s an ICDL server sitting in Ulan Bator,” Bederson said.
The most frequent users outside the United States are from South Africa, China, the United Kingdom, Canada, Iran, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and Egypt.
Founded in 2002, the ICDL was initially funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and Microsoft Research. An interdisciplinary research team at the University of Maryland did the actual work of creating the digital library and its interface. Since there had been virtually no previous published work on the subject and since the researchers believed the best designs for children come from children, the designers worked with children to see what they were interested in and how they looked for books online, said Bederson, one of the principal investigators.
Bederson’s University of Maryland colleague and the ICDL project director, Associate Professor Allison Druin, works with children in the design and understanding of the use of technology. She has what she calls a ‘Kidsteam’, which is a group of about six children aged 7 to 11 years who come to the lab two afternoons every week and two weeks full-time in the summer for a kind of bootcamp, Bederson said.
As a direct result of collaborating with children as design partners, the Maryland team developed a unique search interface. The search buttons on the ICDL website, for example, enable children to look for books based on the colour of their covers. “Lot of times kids are just looking for a book to read and they don’t really have anything in mind,” Bederson explained. “So they might just be interested in the color of the book because of the way they feel. It turns out it’s also a great way to re-find books - books you’ve read before but can’t recall the name.”
Kids can also search for books that other children found funny or that made them feel happy, sad or scared.
The Maryland team also did traditional scientific research, looking at what children are able to do with computer interfaces. One important finding was that younger children have much less ability to control a mouse accurately, and so the buttons on the ICDL search interface are four times larger than on a typical desktop computer interface.
“Designing for kids is a lot like designing for accessible things throughout the world. Making things simpler and easier is good for almost everybody almost all the time,” Bederson said. “That is one of the reasons people like the ICDL: Because it’s designed for children, it also works very well for an important part of our audience - which is people with less experience with computers and people who might not be good readers of the language that the interface is in. They might be learning English as a second language.”
The ICDL has a contract from the rights holder for every book it offers unless the work is in the public domain. “The reason that rights holders give us rights is partly that it’s a public service, partly it’s a bit of a business experiment,” Bederson said.
The publishing industry is still trying to figure out whether making books available digitally increases or decreases sales.
Unlike digital music, where the digital copy is the same as the original, readers prefer the paper book despite its much higher cost. “For a pure reading experience - especially for children where you might want to have your child sit on your lap - there’s some real value to having paper books.”
“I view having digital books as great advertising for the paper books,” Bederson said. – America.gov.
n For more information, visit the International Children’s Digital Library (http://www.icdlbooks.org/). |
