ICDL - International Children's Digital Library

This week, I looked at the International Digital Children's Library, a digital collection of international children's books, with the mission of encouraging children to become part of the international community.

Selection Decisions: I noticed while I was searching that this is by no means a complete and thorough collection of all of children's literature. The IDCL's collection development policy specifies that each book digitized must fulfill its mission statement. Therefore, they select books mostly based on content. For example, digitized books must support cultural similarities and differences, promote tolerance and contribute to a child's understanding of diversity and the global society. Since this project is not based in an already existing physical collection, it is very different from many of the other collections I've looked at. The IDCL even allows librarians, authors, and illustrators to contribute books by doing their own scanning and filling out a standardized metadata form.

Metadata: The IDCL has a standardized Metadata form that is filled out for each digitized book. It is very thorough, covering all publication information and physical characteristics of the objects. So, we know that they keep very detailed metadata for their digitized books. Unfortunately, I have been unable to figure out how to access this metadata for specific individual books, so this detracts from a lot of usefulness of these collections.

Object Characteristics: The quality of digital objects varies throughout the IDCL, most likely due to the fact that all digitization for this project is not centralized. However, the bulk of the digital objects are very high quality, allowing for significant zooming. Both pictures and text are clear. Each book is very quick and easy to access.

Intended Audience: This digital library is intended for use by children, ages 3-13 and their educators, specifically teachers, librarians, and parents. The collection is very easy to use, since it's intended for children. Therefore, all the buttons are very intuitive and straightforward.