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What Children Can Teach Us: Developing Digital Libraries for Children with Children1

At the University of Maryland, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from information studies, computer science, education, art, and psychology worked with seven children (ages seven to eleven) to design a new digital library for children. This partnership led to new approaches for collection development, cataloging (metadata standards), and new technologies for information access and use. The team validated the importance of working with children by analyzing the results of Weblogs, surveys, and lab user studies. This article presents a discussion of the interdisciplinary research landscape that contributes to an understanding of digital libraries for children, examines a case study on the development of the International Children’s Digital Library, and discusses the implications from this research as they relate to new technology design methods with children and new directions for future digital libraries.