Children Digital Libraries and User Interfaces: Proposing a Set of Criteria

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the user interfaces of the most important world`s children digital libraries and consider their conformity with the experts' opinions. This is done with the aim of proposing a set of unique and applicable criteria for Iranian children digital libraries that was not provided by the previous studies. The data for this study were collected by a check list for each of 6 world's most famous children digital libraries. This study applied survey as its methodology. This study showed that the compliance of the children digital libraries with selected criteria totally was 63.43 percent. Among the analyzed criteria, the criterion of "study facilities of retrieved resources" (94.33 percent) and "options for customizing the texts" (3.33 per cent) indicated the highest and lowest level respectively. From the expert's point of view, the option of "show error messages" reached the maximum and "customizing the texts" grasped the minimum levels. Finally, based on the study outcomes, a set of criteria is proposed for children digital library user interfaces. Due to the lack of a known and complete list on the web, some important children digital libraries might be missed. Also, the proposed set of criteria only can be used to evaluate the user interfaces of children digital libraries. Applying a unique set of criteria in designing children's digital Library interfaces could increase the amount of children`s use of such libraries.