U of MD Creates International Digital Library
Archive will provide global access to 10,000-volume collection of children's books
Susan DiMattia, Kathy Ishizuka -- School Library Journal, 10/1/2002
The University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab and College of Information Studies (CLIS) will create the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL), an archive of more than 10,000 digitized children's books, with the support of a $3 million National Science Foundation grant.
ICDL will enable children around the world to access a wide range of books in many languages via the Internet.
The five-year project builds on the University of Maryland's earlier project, SearchKids, a visual browsing and searching interface for young people, which will be modified and expanded to accommodate the new domain of books.
ICDL will also explore various interface research areas, including scale, metadata, book readers, localization, and community building. Additional issues involving intellectual property, copyright protection, and distribution are being examined with the help of a panel of authors, publishers, librarians, and others.
Allison Druin, SearchKids director, is ICDL's principal investigator. Benjamin Bederson, SearchKids co-director, and Ann Carlson Weeks, professor of the practice at CLIS, are the project's co-principal investigators. Weeks's work will focus on examining children's and librarians' use of digital resources and the impact such technology can have on collection development policies and library programming practices.
Research results will be disseminated in conference and journal papers, as well as through yearly workshops and a final book describing the children's personal experiences with the library.
In November 2002, ICDL plans to launch a prototype of 225 books: 100 books selected and digitized by the Library of Congress, 100 books chosen by international librarians, and 25 volumes of new material from publishers and authors.
