Partnerships with Children's Digital Library Benefit Kids
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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 2/25/2008 2:00:00 PM
The International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) just got significantly bigger. The organization has announced that it will team with the Boston Public Library (BPL) to provide digital access to hundreds of titles from the library’s Alice M. Jordan Collection.
The collection encompasses such familiar titles as Robinson Crusoe, Little Red Riding Hood, Mother Goose rhymes, Aesop's Fables, Grimm's fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen's stories—and more. Some 557 BPL titles are already part of the ICDL and hundreds more are to come, says Tim Browne, executive director of ICDL.
Also waiting to be scanned for online viewing by kids, librarians, teachers, and scholars are hundreds of titles from the University of Connecticut and the University of Minnesota, Browne says. Minnesota is contributing the "Oz collection," featuring the works of Frank Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz. Connecticut is contributing Black Beauty and contemporary works from Hans Wilhelm, among many other titles.
Founded in 2002, ICDL has online 2,400 "exemplary titles" contributed by nations around the globe. Access is free. The organization’s mission is to make available digital books that help children “understand the world around them and the global society in which they live," according to a press release from the organization.
The three new partnerships are being funded by an Institute of Museum and Library Services federal grant to the University of Maryland, which hosts ICDL. The university in turn awarded three sub-grants of approximately $50,000 each to BPL and the two universities.
Such partnerships are familiar terrain to ICDL, which has already collaborated with such holders of important children's collections as the University of Florida, with its Baldwin Collection; and, outside the United States, with the International Youth Library in Munich, believed to be the largest children's collection in the world.
Speaking of the newest partnerships, Browne says, "I don't think there's any doubt that these are three of the most important children's collections in the U.S. And by the ICDL getting them, we make these important collections available to children the world over."
A handful of works from the two universities should be online within a few weeks; postings of new books will likely continue over the new few years, Browne says.
