The International Children's Digital Library: Viewing Digital Books Online

Abstract

Reading books plays an important role in children's cognitive and social development. However, many children do not have access to diverse collections of books due to the limited resources of their community libraries. We have begun to address this issue by creating a large-scale digital archive of children's books, the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL). In this paper we discuss our initial efforts in building the ICDL, concentrating on an informal evaluation of innovative digital book readers.

The International Children’s Digital Library: A Case Study in Designing for a Multilingual, Multicultural, Multigenerational Audience

“…The team visited physical libraries to observe children looking for books, developed a category hierarchy of kid-friendly terms based on these findings, and designed different tools for reading books. 24 Using the Simple interface (figure 1), users can search for books using colorful buttons representing the most popular search categories. The Advanced interface (figure 2), allows users to search for books in a compact, text-link-based interface that contains the entire librarycategory hierarchy.…”

Are Two Heads Better than One? Crowdsourced Translation via a Two-Step Collaboration of Non-Professional Translators and Editors

“…1 Another significant difference is that the HCI studies assume cooperative participants. For instance, Hu et al (2010) recruited volunteers from the International Children's Digital Library (Hourcade et al, 2003) who were all well intentioned and participated out a sense of altruism and to build a good reputation among the other volunteer translators at childrenslibrary.org. Our setup uses anonymous crowd workers hired on Mechanical Turk, whose motivation to participate is financial.…”

Using targeted paraphrasing and monolingual crowdsourcing to improve translation

“…This protocol was tested using translation of children's books between Spanish and German as the task-a specific instance of the problem that originally motivated this line of research, namely the real-world need for a cost-effective way to translate literally thousands of books in the International Children's Digital Library across more than 50 languages [Hourcade et al 2003]. Figure 13 illustrates dramatic improvements in fluency and adequacy (as judged by bilingual evaluators) for the output of the collaborative protocol.…”

“…12 One key application planned for this work is translation of children's books in the International Children's Digital Library [Hourcade et al 2003], which has a substantial base of volunteers willing to help with translation tasks. Exploiting this volunteer base more effectively by going beyond bilingual expertise was, in fact, the original inspiration for this line of research.…”