We used to say it when we were kids, “He did it first!”
Well they did. The kids are way ahead of us. At least the folks who know about kids are.
Enter the International Children’s Digital Library, a website partially designed by kids. They state their mission loud and clearly.
Our Mission
We are a library that provides free access to children’s books from around the world. By ensuring access to books from many cultures and in diverse languages, we foster a love of reading, a readiness to learn, and a response to the challenges of world illiteracy.
So Many Ways to Search
In the International Children’s Digital Library, I can search the way a kid would. Big round buttons let me choose from so many options.
- three buttons are about what age the book is for
- two are for make-believe or true books
- six buttons let me choose by the color of the cover
- three buttons are about the kinds of characters
- two more are picture books and chapter books
- three buttons are for short, medium, and long books
- two mark fairy tales/folk tales and award winners
That is so cool. Libraries can be overwhelming with choices. It’s nice to have some paths carved out for me. It’s especially nice when I might not know how to search, or I don’t know how to spell the word I need to find the book I want to read. I can also use a kid-inspired viewer and keep a personalized bookshelf of favorite titles.
Read All About It
Stefanie Olsen, staff writer at CNETnews.com, describes the site and the phenomenon in her article, The ‘millennials’ usher in a new era.
It’s hardly a sophisticated algorithmic index, but it makes perfect sense to children who may not know how to search like an adult or spell a keyword. That is precisely why the University of Maryland, which built the site, continues to invite children to test its software and suggest new designs.
“If there’s only one way to find or read a book, to a child it doesn’t make any sense,” said Allison Druin, associate professor of the university’s College of Information Studies and director of its book project, which was started in November 2002. “Our traditional educational tools limit how children access information to learn or fit us into one way of learning things.”
The library offers an important view into the minds of what some sociologists are calling “the millennials”–a generation of children and teenagers who came of age at the dawn of the millennium.
It’s not when, or why, or how kids will get to the Internet. They’re already there and adding to it. They’re making music videos, building blogs, and teaching their teachers about Internet technology. Consider “Ryan,” who hacked his school’s Internet filter with a Web Proxy to reach a banned website through his home computer while “doing his homework in the school computer lab.”
These are the customers who will be buying our products. They’ll be in the prime 18-24 demographic in less than five years. They won’t be looking in brick and mortar stores. They’ve moved from the malls to the Internet. They don’t read newspapers. They read blogs.
Liz Strauss
