International Children's Digital Library Signs Historic Agreement With Google

The International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) (http://www.childrenslibrary.org/), which is the world's largest collection of children's literature available freely on the Internet, has signed an agreement with Google to augment its vast collection of public domain children's literature with public domain titles digitized using Google's state-of-the-art scanning technology. The result will be the addition of potentially thousands of scanned, searchable children's books to the ICDL. As part of the agreement, the ICDL and Google will share their public domain titles making them available via the ICDL and Google's Book Search.

The ICDL joins company with 28 other prestigious Google Book Library Project Partners but unlike these large state-of-the-art library systems, the ICDL is a small innovative non-profit that leverages technology to emphasize the pedagogical and unifying components of children's literature through a user interaction that was designed by children from around the world. And, unlike its other 28 partners, the ICDL owns no books.

"Digitizing books is our single largest expense in providing free exemplary literature to children the world over," said Tim Browne, Director of the International Children's Digital Library. "Our relationship with Google is significant in that it catapults us forward light years in terms of scale. The Google scanning technology is best-of-breed and we are thrilled to have access to the technology as well as Google's existing collections.

The ICDL is the most recent library to partner with Google Book Search.