explanatory synthesis essay

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Digital Books for Digital Natives A Tour of Open Access Children’s Digital Literature Collections CYNTHIA HOUSTON

D igital Natives are defined as children born after 1980 who from birth have experienced the digital world as a natural part of their daily lives and regularly access rich

resources in digital format for information and entertainment.1

This generation uses Facebook or MySpace to communicate and socialize with friends. They bookmark favorite websites with Delicious and use Wikipedia to find the answers to all their questions. They would never think to look a word up in a dic- tionary because they have Google at their fingertips. For Digital Natives, the Internet is familiar territory. They read materials on the Internet for school and for leisure, and they turn to the Internet for their information needs more often than traditional reference materials.

The increasing digitization of information means that books and print media are no longer the sole source of reading mate- rials available to Digital Natives. To serve this ever-growing population of readers who expect personalized and relevant information to be instantly available whenever and wherever they need it, books in digital format must be accessible online so they will continue to experience the rich treasure trove of contemporary and historical literary characters, themes, and genres that children and adults have cherished for generations.

More importantly, children’s books in digital format are essential if children’s literature is going to remain a popular form of informa- tional and leisure reading for present and future Digital Natives.

Research conducted with children and computers over the past twenty years clearly shows that children interact with digital information differently than print. As opposed to books, which they have learned to read from left to right and front to back, children approach digital materials nonsequentially, using hyperlinks to move from page to page or topic to topic.2

The rendering of children’s literature in digital format pro- vides opportunities for children to experience the characters, themes, and settings of beloved books in new and exciting ways.

Over the past ten years, collections of freely available digital children’s literature have developed to the point of becoming accessible for all age groups. Today, any teacher, parent, or child with computer access can easily browse and select books from a number of digital collections. Although the age, quality, and quantity of books in these collections vary, they offer a vibrant and significant storehouse of literature intended for children to explore and enjoy.

This article provides a context for the development of children’s digital literature collections by reviewing concepts related to open access, digital design features, and use of digital collections. This article will then describe several significant collections of children’s digital literature, including a review of their scope and contents; search, navigation, and usability features; and targeted user population.

Open Access Access, connectivity, and interactivity are essential for the book format to be relevant in the twenty-first century. The concept

Cynthia Houston, MSLIS, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Library Media Education

program at Western Kentucky University,

Bowling Green, Kentucky.

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Digital Books for Digital Natives of access refers to both the intellectual content contained in children’s literature and children’s ability to view digital content.

The original vision of the Internet was that of a digital world of resources with the potential to level the playing field for the information haves and have-nots. This concept is typically called open access and refers to both the hardware and software used to provide information on the Internet and no-cost access to digital intellectual content.

The open access principle is supported by libraries across the nation and is seen as a crucial factor in ensuring “that Americans can access the information they need—regardless of age, educa- tion, ethnicity, language, income, physical limitations, or geo- graphic barriers—as the digital world continues to evolve.”3

Although the open access principle is widely promoted, support for this information delivery model continues to lag behind other developments in information technology. Of all the fea- tures digital books can provide to Digital Natives, open access to high-quality, freely available children’s literature has been the most troublesome, primarily because an open access business model must depend on grants or endowments for sustainability.

Furthermore, the confusing digital publishing environment, coupled with mandated filtering of Internet content, publishing licenses, copyright restrictions, and the economically-driven digital divide, have all contributed to the uneven growth in open access digital children’s literature.4

As an example, publishers currently have a wide variety of digital books available either by subscription or purchase, but if one tries to read a digital book on a Kindle or iPad, or if one tries to “bor- row” a digital book your library does not have in its collection, he or she will experience the barriers impeding the growth of open access children’s literature collections. According to John Warren,

Certainly, the myriad of e-book devices, proprietary formats,

and access routes to e-books and e-content create confusion

among potential consumers. Most publishers insist on Digital

Rights Management—which is generally disliked by users.

Consumers know that they will not generally be able to lend

an e-book as easily as lending a new hardcover, and they

don’t understand why, if they originally purchase an Amazon

Kindle and later replace it with a Sony Reader, they shouldn’t

be able to access their previously purchased e-books.5

By and large, libraries have embraced the open access phi- losophy and have been working to more quickly digitize their “orphan works” (works published before 1923) and unrestricted materials for public access. Open access digital children’s lit- erature collections, such as the Children’s Literature Collection featured in this article, were first developed for the purpose of preserving and making accessible rich collections of children’s literature titles, which were outdated, no longer circulated, or contained inappropriate content.

Now these types of collections actively serve the information needs of children’s literature scholars, as well as the general

public, by making collections once only physically available in a particular library accessible to users worldwide.

As early as 1997, the potential for digital libraries to serve the needs of young users was recognized by the library community. In that year, the academic journal Library Trends devoted an issue to children and digital libraries, with articles covering policy con- siderations, teaching and learning online, and digital design. In this issue, the authors envisioned digital books as a multisensory literary experience that integrated video and audio media.6

As the Internet increasingly became a publication and infor- mation destination for the world, initiatives developed to create open access digital libraries representing contempo- rary and historical children’s literature across the globe. The International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) is a prime exam- ple of recent open access initiatives.

The ICDL grew from a federally-funded research project in 1999 to a full-fledged collection of quality international children’s materials in 2002.7 In 2005, Library Trends updated the chang- ing landscape of digital libraries with another issue focusing on how children interacted with digital libraries such as the ICDL, clearly illustrating how developed the digital world for children had become in only eight years.8

Digital Libraries and Digital Design Features Currently, most digital children’s literature collections contain digital re-representations of a specific printed book in textual or picture format and do not contain many of the features attrac- tive to Digital Natives. However, digital books created exclu- sively for the Internet and the myriad e-readers and mobile applications currently available online can provide children with more flexibility for interacting with digital information.

Digital resources as a type of media have unique characteristics that affect how both children and adults are able to use them.9 High-quality digital resources are visually rich and contain beautiful pictures, illustrations, or graphic design elements. Often they are filled with a convergence of media types (for example, text, image, spoken word, music, and video), which can convey multiple layers of meaning. Because of text features, visual hyperlinks, and social networking features, digital books can be highly connective, interactive, and nonlinear in their physical, literary, and social structure.

According to Eliza Dresang, high-quality digital books must be made available for children and “must provide the same rel- evance and opportunities for exploration found in the online world, or they will indeed become relics on the trash heap.”10

Along with making books available in digital format to meet the needs of Digital Natives, the entire digital design governing how children interact with these materials must be considered. Children see and experience the world differently than adults. Their ability to use technology differs widely because each child develops skills and abilities at a different rate.

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Digital Books for Digital Natives However, it has not been common to consider these issues in the development of navigation and interface technologies for digital collections. As efforts to digitize children’s literature collections developed into state and federally-funded initiatives, the ques- tion of the web interface became a key part of the puzzle.

Many digital children’s collections are not designed with chil- dren in mind. But when consideration of children as users does become a focus, researchers have found some interesting differ- ences between how children and adults seek information. For example, when exploring children’s book-searching preferences, researchers found that children are more likely to browse for books than they are to systematically search for a title.11 Other studies indicate that children hunt for books on the basis of how the books make them “feel,” such as happy or scared. Also, chil- dren appear to prefer books with a variety of characters.12 Colors and covers also attract children to particular books.13

When children are experiencing web content through a browser, research indicates that they like to personalize their web inter- face, preferring bright colors and graphics, limited advertise- ments, keyword searching with spell checking, and navigation icons that provide a literal representation of the information.14 Age and gender have a great influence over search strate- gies and book choices. Younger children prefer simple and more interactive interfaces whereas older children favor more sophisticated interfaces.15

For example, researchers found that children in grades one through five were able to navigate a hierarchical category struc- ture to browse for books but were unable to use Boolean logic.16 Research also indicates that results lists should be displayed in brief text and be limited to ten to twenty items.17 When chil- dren are viewing specific digital books, research indicates that their behavior is mostly nonlinear, meaning they do not move through the book sequentially.18

Because many digital libraries contain books that originally existed in print, few of them exhibit digital design features attrac- tive to children. However, the book viewers used by some digital collections, such as the International Children’s Digital Library and the Bookpop collection, are excellent examples of how digi- tal book design can be fully incorporated into digital collections.

At first glance, there appears to be an infinite number of websites containing collections of digital children’s literature. However, many of these sites contain only annotations of children’s books or images of historical book covers. The digital collections described in this article are all open access, full-text collections of children’s literature and are representative of the following types of open access digital collections currently available:

■ Collections devoted solely to historical and contemporary children’s literature

■ Collections that contain literature for users of all ages, but have a significant portion of children’s literature

■ Collections that focus on a particular author, theme, or age group

Using Digital Children’s Collections in Your Library Digital children’s literature collections have a wide variety of public and school library uses. Typically, items in digital librar- ies have permalinks—a web address permanently associated with that item. For example, if a library has weeded a children’s book from the physical collection because of age or low circula- tion, or if patrons request additional titles of children’s classics such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a virtual copy can be made accessible from the local library catalog through a hyper- link to the digital content.

Because many of the digital collections have titles that have been translated into different languages, they can be used to meet the needs of a multinational community of library users who would like to experience literature in their home language. As an example, recent immigrants to the United States who speak Swahili can now access a number of different titles, including comic books, from the International Children’s Digital Library.

Digital collections also can be incorporated into library pro- grams. Many digital collections include sophisticated viewers that display digital titles in interesting ways. When a book is displayed for a large group using a video projector, library audiences can enjoy the visual richness of these titles in group programming.

Thanks to a host of national and international digitization ini- tiatives, individual authors, and corporations such as Google, today’s Digital Natives can expect their schools and libraries to provide freely accessible, high-quality content in digital format.

For books to continue to be relevant in the digital age, teachers and librarians must stay current with growing collections of open access digital children’s literature and include these titles in their own collections. &

References

1. John G. Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic Books, 2008): 1.

2. Eliza T. Dresang, Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1999): 21.

3. American Library Association, Access, www.ala.org/ala/ issuesadvocacy/access/index.cfm (accessed Oct. 1, 2010).

4. John W. Warren, “Innovation and the Future of E-Books,” International Journal of the Book 6, no. 1 (2009): 83–94.

5. John W. Warren, “The Progression of Digital Publishing: Innovation and the E-volution of E-books,” International Journal of the Book 7, no. 4 (2010): 39.

6. Pam Sandlian, “Visioning the Future of the Digital Library,” Library Trends 45, no. 4 (1997): 582.

7. “Web Site Provides Cross-Cultural Access to Children’s Books,” Teacher Librarian 30, no. 3 (2003): 55–56.

8. Allison Druin, “Children’s Access and Use of Digital Resources,” Library Trends 54, no. 2 (2005): 173–77.

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Digital Books for Digital Natives 9. Eliza T. Dresang, “The Information-Seeking Behavior of

Youth in the Digital Environment,” Library Trends 54, no. 2 (2005): 178–96.

10. Dresang, Radical Change, xvii. 11. Andrew Large, “Information Seeking on the Web by

Elementary School Students,” in Youth Information-Seeking Behavior: Theories, Models, and Issues, ed. M. K. Chelton and C. Cool (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2004): 293–319.

12. Donna Urschel, “Literature for Kids Online: International Children’s Digital Library Debuts at Library,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 62, no. 1 (2003).

13. Ann Weeks, “The International Children’s Digital Library: Increasing Children’s Access to Books through Technology,” School Library Media Activities Monthly 23 no. 7 (2007): 27–30.

14. Liao K. Reuter and Allison Druin, “Bringing Together Children and Books: An Initial Descriptive Study of Children’s Book Searching and Selection Behavior in a Digital Library,” in Proceedings of the 67th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (Medford, N.J.: Information Today, 2004): 339–48.

15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Andrew Large and Jamshid Beheshti, “Interface Design, Web

Portals, and Children,” Library Trends 54, no. 2 (2005): 318–42. 18. Diana Bilal and Imad Bachir, “Children’s Interaction

with International and Multilingual Digital Libraries I: Understanding Interface System Design Representations,” Information Processing & Management 43, no. 1 (2007): 47–64.

International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL)

By far, the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) (http://en.childrenslibrary.org) is the most popular and accessible collection of digital children’s literature. The collection, launched through an international initiative in 2002, was developed by researchers from the University of Maryland and the Internet Archive with funding from the National Science Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Studies. Currently, the library holds approximately four thousand titles in fifty-four languages.

From its inception, the ICDL has been designed with children as users in mind. Every page is brightly colored, using appealing visual design and graphical icons attractive to young people. There are a number of ways to access titles, such as keyword, language, geographical region, genre, book cover, and color, which reflect the research on how children access literature.

The titles, stored in JPEG format, can be viewed using a variety of e-readers that allow both sequential and nonsequential navigation between pages. Viewers can access individual pages by selecting a thumbnail or by using the “comic” or “spiral” e-readers, which display pages in ways that would be entertaining for children.

A mobile application also has been developed so that users can access the ICDL from cell phones and iPods connected to the Internet. Because of copyright restrictions, none of the titles can be downloaded, but they can be printed as individual pages.

Many titles in the collection are richly illustrated, and these often are highlighted in the “featured books” section of the library. Although the collection does contain items in multiple languages, most titles (3,146) are in English. The number of titles in Persian/Farsi runs a distant second (442), then Mongolian (237), then Spanish (168).

Although the design of the library gives it a contemporary feel, more than half the collection comprises titles published in the 1800s. It does appear, however, that more and more current titles are being added because the second largest number of titles were published in 2006 (846), followed by the 1980s (135) and the 1990s (322). While including their books was once thought to be a threat to the commercial print market, publishers of children’s titles have recently discovered that including their titles in the ICDL increases access to their customers and hence the potential for increasing sales. Called a “feast for children who are bookworms,”* the ICDL is extremely valuable for teachers, librarians, and parents who want to expose children to reading and cultures in many languages.

Literature for Children

Literature for Children (http://palmm.fcla.edu/juv) is a treasure trove of historical children’s literature from select Florida universities, including the Baldwin Library of Children’s Literature at the University of Florida, Florida Atlantic University, Florida State University, and the University of South Florida. The digital collection project was originally funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and contains six hundred titles of British and American children’s literature from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. The core collection is from the Baldwin Library, housed in the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Library. Individual titles can be accessed by browsing all titles or authors using an alphabetical list, or through the full text, author, citation, or title search fields using Boolean operators. Each cover and page of the original book has been scanned into a high-quality image file. Users can access individual pages via a dropdown menu or navigate between pages in a linear fashion using a graphical navigation link. Individual pages can be printed, but it is not possible to download an entire digital book. Listed on the New York Public Library’s “Best of the Web” for children’s resources,

Representative Collections of Digital Children’s Literature

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