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Library for Kids Goes Online
Web Site Serves Up Hundreds of Children's Books
 Listen to David Kestenbaum's report.
 Watch a video clip of the library's designers -- kids -- at work.
Axle the Freeway Cat, by Thacher Hurd (Harper & Row Publishers, 1981), is about a lonely cat who meets a new friend in a traffic jam.
See an illustration.
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The Blue Sky, by Andrea Petrlik Huseinovic, is about a little girl who lost her parents. (Contributed to the digital library by the Croatia National Library.)
Image: Croatia National Library
See an illustration.
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The Lewis Carroll classic, Alice in Wonderland (S. Gabriel Sons & Company, 1916).
Image: S. Gabriel Sons & Company
See an illustration.
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Prietita and the Ghost Woman, by Gloria Anzaldua (Children's Book Press, 1995), a story about a girl who seeks out a legendary ghost woman.
Image: Children's Book Press
See an illustration.
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Nov. 18, 2002 --
Imagine a library where books are sorted by color, or shape, or by how they make someone feel. This week, such a library is being made available for free to anyone with an Internet connection. The library, a joint project of the University of Maryland and the Internet Archive, is billed as the world's largest digital library for children.
Every page of Alice in Wonderland and 200 other books have been scanned into the International Children's Digital Library's collection, NPR's David Kestenbaum reports. Eventually, 10,000 texts from 100 cultures are planned. But for the project to be a success, kids will have to enjoy reading from computer screens. The University of Maryland researchers who designed the library have spent a lot of time on this problem, and decided they needed to recruit more researchers -- specifically, those under the age of 10.
University of Maryland Professor Allison Druin says adults are lousy at knowing what kids want. That's why many of the people who work on the project are kids. Some skeptics see Druin's lab as just an elaborate form of day care. But she is serious about treating kids as equals. She tells Kestenbaum it takes patience and an open mind.
"And the important thing is, you always feed everybody the moment they walk in the lab. So it's snack first," she says.
Back in April, Druin, seven kids and a few adult helpers walked into the Library of Congress to look for books. Librarians stacked books they thought kids should read on rolling carts. But the kids had the final say, and were allowed to reject anything they didn't like.
During the design process, the kids made proposals for what the system should do. They voted on ideas. They rated books for the library, and tested out the software they had helped design.
The digital library project is costing more than $5 million. And it's up against a tough reality. People seem to like reading books they can hold in their hands. The digital library will send books to remote corners of the world and to homes where there aren't many books. But if it's poorly designed, kids may not want to use it.
Ben Bederson, project researcher and Druin's husband, has some data on this. It comes from a kid -- his daughter Dana. The other morning Bederson and Dana were reading a book called Axle the Freeway Cat on a test version of the software.
That night, as her father put her to bed and looked for a book to read, Dana asked for Axle.
She said she really wanted to see that cat eating breakfast in his car. And she wanted to read it on her dad's laptop. "We read Axle from start to finish," says Bederson. "And we were hysterical and it was great. Then she said, 'Daddy, I want to read a real book.' And I said, 'Oh... '"
Yet understanding exactly what a child means is often tricky. And Bederson thinks his daughter just wanted to read a different book, one they happened to have on the shelf.
Kids might argue that adults can be a bit opaque as well. Eight-year-old project researcher Carl says he thinks the whole project could have gone a little faster -- if the adults would stop overanalyzing things.
In Depth
 Browse the NPR archives for more stories about the Internet Archive.
Other Resources
• The International Children’s Digital Library
• Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland
• The Internet Archive
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