International Children's Digital Library

The International Children's Digital Library is a project founded and funded by the International Children's Digital Library Foundation (ICDL Foundation). The goal of the digital library is to "build a collection of books that represents outstanding historical and contemporary books from throughout the world." The Foundation seeks to be a comprehensive repository of children's books that represents all cultures and languages so that children from all over the world so that every child can benefit from these books and resources. Additionally, the Foundation hopes to foster tolerance and appreciation of diverse literatures, languages, and cultures. All resources available in the library are free of charge.

Some facts of note:
* The ICDL has been visited by over a million unique visitors since its launch in November, 2002.
* Users come from 166 different countries. Ten most frequent locations: US: 50%, South Africa: 15%, China: 7%, UK: 6%, Canada: 5%, Iran: 4%, Taiwan: 4%, Philippines: 4%, Australia: 3%, Egypt: 2%).
*The collection includes 2414 books in 41 languages.

The library's main page displays featured books & book of the day; a navigation tool bar including helpful dropdown menus and links for first-time visitors, information aobut the Foundation; information about the library and Foundation's mission, current research and policies, people involved in building, maintaining, and funding the library, and news releases; literary news & notes, and; a contribution link. The main page does not include a search bar; searching is available through clicking on the "Read Books" dropdown menu or "The Library" link (for Simple Search).


The Simple Search offers a variety of searching options that are definitely geared toward children and how they might want to look for a particular book. Users can choose what language they want to view the search page/options (16 language choices, including English), and each search option is accompanied by an representative icon. Options include: color of cover (rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, blue); age range (3-5; 6-9; 10-13); make-believe books, true books; length of book (short, medium, long); recently added books; award-winning books; fairy tales & folk tales; type of characters (kid characters, real animal characters, imaginary creatures); picture books; and chapter books. The "more choices" link gives users more searchable categories: more cover colors f(purple, pink, black, white, gray, brown); mood (happy, sad); rating (3-star, 4-star, 5-star); literary format (short story, series, plays, comic books); and genre (action/adventure, poems/songs/rhymes, mythology/folk tales, fantasy/science fiction, funny/humorous, scary/horror).

In both the simple and "more choices" search, users can search for books by language (this option offers an extensive list of the world's languages) and by keyword (again, in a wide variety of languages).

Advanced Searching offers keyword search, plus comprehensive faceted searching by audience (age, language, publication date, date addded to lbirary collections); appearance (cover colors, format, length, shape); content (continents, countries, other places, characters, time periods [when]); type (true v. make believe, genre, feeling, rating); subject (culture & society [how people live], entertainment, history, people & relationships, places, science & nature, tools & machines, animals).

All simple & advanced search options can be combined in any way order to yield as specific a result as a user may want. Other stand-alone search options include a basic keyword search (with language option) and searching by counry. The library's extensive search options indicate a recognition of how children might respond to literature differently from adults, and desire to facilitate access to the resources by making it as simple and and intuitive as possible for children.

Once a user has found a book, he or she can click on the book title to find out more about that book, i.e. what the book is called, who wrote it, what language it is in, what it is about, and more. For some books, information about the book is in more than one language and is indicated by a language pulldown menu. Most books can be read using any of four Book Readers, though all but one of them requires downloading a plug-in. Again, icons are used to indicate to users how to turn to the next page or go back a page, increase page size, and select a preference for single or continuous facing page view.

In light of the global aspect of this library and the variations among people with respect to display, browsers, computer specs, etc., the Library's help page provides much valuable information on how best to view the materials available on the site -- this includes information on which book readers might work best, how to display foreign characters, selecting a book or interface language, simple and advances searching, registering for a library account, and creating a personal bookshelf.

The "Fast Facts" link from the main page's "About Library" pulldown menu includes some interesting user statistics regarding searching and browsing history, user information, registered user preferences, and more. I really appreciated that this information was so transparent; given the library's international scope, it's interesting to see what people in other countries are looking for and how they are searching.

Overall, this digital library is an impressive effort to collect children's literature for as international an audience as possible. The global reaches of a project like this are astounding and it is evident that the Foundation is looking to be as inclusive as possible. The search features are more of a combination of searching and browsing, especially with the faceted searching that is available, and the addition of visual cues (icons, images, etc.) help facilitate children's access to the materials.