Entering the Online Library 

You may want to print these instructions before clicking to enter The International Children's Digital Library. That way you can follow along as you work online.

• First you click the open book with the words "Enter the Library" on it.
• Then you click the little caterpillar button and then click the words "click here to enter."
• If you have not already downloaded and installed current Adobe Reader and Java Virtual Machine you'll need to do so before proceding. If you have already done this then the ICDL will load and open on your screen.
• Kids can begin searching for books by categories or from countries around the world. The search engine is intuitive and should prove as much fun for kids to use as the actual finding and reading of the online books the collection holds.

Try this on for fun!

• Search "by categories" and then click "genre."
• From there choose "classics" and the little caterpillar up top loads books in five categories for you to choose from onto the white box next to it.
• Click on the box and it zooms out so you can read the categories and choose what book you'd like to read.
• Choose "Alice in Wonderland" under the "Other" column and the book will zoom in.
• Then you get to pick what type of reader you want to use to read this book. You can tell kids were involved in this design as one of the "readers" is the spiral one. What a fun way to read a book online!
• You click on the right arrow and the stacked pages come up one at a time! (Make sure you also click the "+" sign on the right hand column so pages are big enough for you to read!)
• You continue clicking the right arrow and page after page loads up. The full color page illustrations load up as easily as the text only pages.

You can search by language and we first clicked "english." 111 titles loaded onto the caterpillar. When we did this search we clicked "spanish" and the titles available in spanish came up.

Most books seem to be older editions but we found Molly Bang's "When Sophie Gets Angry, Really, Really Angry" and Jeff Brumbeau's "The Quiltmaker's Gift" (both recent Caldecott Medal winners) as well as perennial favorite Steven Kellogg's "Is Your Mama a Llama?" on the collection.

A wonderful resource available to one and all just for the clicking!