Online Libraries for Children

Online Libraries for Children

Question 1

Children use the Web inside and outside the classroom, and they navigate it to find information for both simple and complex projects. They recognize the Web as a rich source of up-to-date information, hard-to-find information, and compelling images. Research by Dania Bilal (2000) and Jinx Watson (1998) has revealed that children who use the Web have a sense of independence, authority, and control. They are motivated, challenged, and selfconfident. They prefer the Web to print sources due to the vast amount of information available and their ability to search by keyword and browse subject hierarchies quickly. Research conducted for the Pew Internet & American Life Project revealed that both parents and children believe that the Internet helps with learning. While these positive perceptions of the Internet are encouraging, children's success in finding information on the Web is questioned. Given the Web's increasing complexity and the abundance of information available there, it is worth asking how well children handle the challenges of using the Web (Hirsh, 1999, pp.1265-1283).

Researchers from library and information science, educational psychology, sociology, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction have studied children's interaction with the Web. In the field of information science, researchers have investigated children's search strategies, their relative preferences for browsing and searching, their successes and failures, the nature of tasks and success, Web design, and children's navigational skills, relevance judgment, and affective states (feelings, perception, and motivation).

Question 2

A collection of poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning published after six years of invalidism during which Barrett (as she was then) focused her energies on poetic experiment. A poem (1844) is notable for its formal innovation (half-rhymes, metrical irregularity, compound words) and for the range of voices that surface in the collection. There is a mystical, opium-inspired voice in poems ...