The challenges encountered in building the InternationalChildren’s Digital Library (ICDL), a freely availableonline library of children’s literature are described. Thesechallenges include selecting and processing books fromdifferent countries, handling and presenting multiplelanguages simultaneously, and addressing cultural differences. Unlike other digital libraries that present content from one or a few languages and cultures, and focuson either adult or child audiences, ICDL must serve amultilingual, multicultural, multigenerational audience.The research is presented as a case study for addressingthese design criteria; current solutions and plans forfuture work are described.

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.

Tabletop and tangible interfaces are often described in terms of their support for shared access to digital resources. However, it is not always the case that collaborators want to share and help one another. In this paper we detail a video-analysis of a series of prototyping sessions with children who used both cardboard objects and an interactive tabletop surface. We show how the material qualities of the digital interface and physical objects affect the kinds of bodily strategies adopted by children to stop others from accessing them. We discuss how children fight for and maintain control of physical versus digital objects in terms of embodied interaction and what this means when designing collaborative applications for shareable interfaces.

This article examines children's responses to self-selected books in a digital library and begins to identify patterns in those responses. As part of a larger longitudinal study, the study presented here is an analysis of 241 book response forms submitted by 12 children from 4 countries: Germany, Honduras, New Zealand, and the United States. The children described most of the books they read as being funny or happy and generally rated them with four or fi ve stars (out of fi ve stars). The most commonly identifi ed types of responses were those expressing like or dislike, summarizing the text, or explaining how the book made the child feel. Two factors were identifi ed that infl uenced response patterns from the study sites: the data collection instrument and adult mediation. This research has implications for library program development related to recreational reading and for changes in the procedures for data collection in this area of research.

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