The International Children's Digital Library: Description and analysis of first use

In this paper we describe the first version of the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL). As a fiveyear research project, its mission is to enable children to access and read an international collection of children’s books through the development of new interface technologies. This paper will describe the need for such research, our work in the context of other digital libraries for children, and an initial analysis of the first seven weeks of the ICDL’s public use on the web.