[ 3] Druin, Allison. “What children can teach us: Developing digital libraries for children.” Library Quarterly 75, no. 1 (2005): 20-41.

[ 4] Druin, Allison. “Cooperative Inquiry: Developing New Technologies for Children With Children.” Working paper, CHI 1999, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1999.

color search works. But we get very few questions from children. Of course they are likely to have less access and ability to contact us, but still, the lack of questions from children is striking. This is backed up by our lab observations of first-time users of the library. Children are just much more accepting than adults. They are more likely to use the interface without question, and interestingly, they are also more likely to start reading whatever book they stumble upon.

[ 5] Druin, Allison et al. “The International Children’s Digital Library: Description and Analysis of First Use.” First Monday 8, no. 5 (2003) < www.first-monday.org/ISSUES/ issue8_5/druin/index. html.>

November + December 2008

[ 6] Druin, Allison et al. “Children’s Interests and Concerns When Using the International Children’s Digital Library: A Four-Country Case Study.” Working paper, JCDL 2007, Vancouver, Canada, 2007.

older children start thinking about more abstract issues [ 3].

We worked closely with children throughout the design, implementation, and deployment of the ICDL through a process called Cooperative Inquiry [ 4]. We have children come to our lab regularly and work with us as design partners. For the ICDL, we went further and even had the “kidsteam” children visit libraries to observe and interview other children as they used the library. Our intergenerational efforts responded to these concerns, resulting in the current interface. Children can search not only for traditional genres, but also other search parameters such as the color of the book cover, how the books make you feel, and more.

An ICDL weblog analysis confirms the academic research with practice. For example, our youngest users (indicated by self-reporting during an optional registration process) search more for the categories “rainbow,” “real animal characters,” and “make believe books,” Twenty-year-old users, on the other hand, search more for the categories “short books,” “award winning,” and “true books.”

We also know from our early observations that children often select books (and start their reading process) by flipping through the pages to get a sense of how long it is, and what kind of pictures are in it. We observed them reading in every imaginable physical location—in chairs, on desks, on floors, under

desks—occasionally, upside down. When talking with these kids, we discovered that sometimes they just want different physical experiences.

Therefore we built different ways to read the book. We always start by showing an overview of the book by initially displaying thumbnails of every page (that are magnified on mouse-over). The book can then be read in order or starting at any page by clicking on it. My daughter’s favorite ICDL book is Axle the Freeway Cat, and strange as this may seem to a logically oriented adult, she always reads it by first looking at the picture of Axle eating breakfast in the car. Then, laughing, she begins again at the beginning of the book. We also implemented a spiral book reader that presents the pages in a more playful manner: They flow across the screen in a spiral (but the form still supports reading by presenting the current page very large in the center). An early study of these book readers [ 5], confirmed by recent weblog analysis, shows that kids like all the book-reader styles—and the match isn’t usually by kid, but rather by mood. That is, sometimes a child prefers the simple page-at-a-time book reader, and sometimes he or she prefers the animated spiral reader.

Another interesting trend we see is that there are a fair number of questions from adults about very specific features of the ICDL website—about issues such as exactly how the book-cover-

Challenges and Opportunities of
Thinking Worldwide

Where the ICDL really gets interesting is when we start to look at how it affects the children who use it, and what the challenges and implications are of deploying a technology like this for such a basic activity as reading. These questions get even more complex when we think about its use in the developing world.

Let’s start by looking at how children use the ICDL. We ran a longitudinal four-year study observing how 12 children used the ICDL in Germany, Honduras, New Zealand, and the U.S. [ 6]. The children read at least one ICDL book per month, created drawings and book reviews about those books, and participated in an interview with an ICDL researcher (along with their teachers and librarians) once per year. To reduce technical challenges, we gave the children Tablet PCs with a version of the ICDL running locally. This enabled them to have consistent