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Accessing the International Children's Digital Library.

Article Excerpt
For several nights in a row last summer, my four-year-old son asked me to read him Axle the Freeway Cat. Each night, he raced into my office, climbed onto my lap, and started to press the keys on my laptop computer, eager to find Axle through the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL). Although it always took us a few minutes to find it, we eventually would, and my son would snuggle against me while I read and then lean forward to click the arrow that turned the picture book's virtual pages. Part of the nightly ritual involved his playing with the mouse and various keys so he could manipulate the images in front of him, sometimes by zooming in closer to or backing away from the page on the screen, sometimes by changing the format through which he was viewing the book. My son's evident delight in the online reading experience--and in Thacher Hurd's illustrations and story--was exciting. After a while, however, he stopped asking for it, and one night he said, "Mommy, tonight I want to read a book in my bed."

IN NOVEMBER AND December 2002, the New York Times, USA Today, the Chronicle of Higher Education, National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" program, and many other newspapers, magazines, and media outlets heralded the launch of the International Children's Digital Library, a spanking-new, super-smart, leading-edge online library that would make children's books available "free" on the Internet. Not only would the books be available free of charge, but children could access them from all over the world. Here was a project that brought out the best of the Internet and globalization: it democratically offered books, with their aesthetic and educational values, to children everywhere, regardless of the children's race, class, nationality, or income level.

The ICDL is a joint project of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland and the Internet Archive in San Francisco. The project's mission statement says, "Imagine a world where a comprehensive library of international children's literature is available to all children across the globe," where "the largest bookmobile in history can be made available to children around the world." One can see the beginnings of reaching this goal. Currently, the library holds close to four hundred books. More than twenty-five cultures and twenty languages are represented. The plan is to have ten thousand books within the...

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