Enhancing children’s activity in browsing/reading together by the installation of the BrowsReader in the children’s room of a library

Abstract

Reading together draws much attention as a societal concern for children not only to yield emotional reaction but also to gradually advance intellectual thinking. We here aim to build a new environment, in which children’s browsing and reading of picture books together with families and/or friends is steadily enhanced, by installing the BrowsReader in the children’s room of a public library or a kindergarten. The original BrowsReader was a system to assist children in finding and reading picture books. The children, by gathering around the BrowsReader, can browse picture books and then choose and read a book by flipping pages on it. After reproducing each printed, digitized or web picture book as a surrogate picture book consisting of the front-cover image followed by the page images, we first introduce two basic notions: (i) an abstracted bookshelf, which presents the front-cover images of the surrogate picture books in the form where all are linearly arranged, with some of the images bundled in places, and (ii) a unified view, which presents each page of any surrogate picture book in a form that seems like a printed picture book’s page. We then specify, based on these notions, the improved version of the BrowsReader which can be installed in each children’s room so that children together with families and/or friends can easily browse a large number of surrogate picture books as if they are browsing in the physical bookshelves of the children’s room, and can read a wide variety of surrogate picture books as if they are reading ordinary printed picture books on a table. The improvement was carried out in a step by step process based on feedback and results from case studies, and its effects were clarified by seeing whether, in a new environment, the children’s activity in browsing/reading together were steadily enhanced when using the BrowsReader.

Introduction

Reading picture books together with peers or adults motivates children to become active participants in a reading community (Jalongo, 2004). By reading-to-children¹ and also reading picture books together mainly with families younger children experience a range of emotions – e.g. joy, happiness, and sad – by being affected in their cerebral limbic systems (Taira, 2009). These experiences and the experience in reading picture books together with families and/or friends, which accompanies reading-aloud, in succeeding years largely help older children to acquire literacy skills, broaden communication ability, and advance intellectual thinking by developing the frontal association areas within their cerebrums (Arnold and Colburn, 2009, Foorman and Torgesen, 2001, McGee and Morrow, 2005, Taira, 2009).

The children’s room of a public library or a kindergarten is one of the best places for children to find and read picture books of interest together with their families and/or friends (Stooke & McKenzie, 2009). When finding picture books children usually step over toward the bookshelves, pull out some picture books by browsing in bookshelves, and glance through them. After repeating these steps, they eventually find a picture book, which is then brought either to a table to be read or to a counter to be taken home. It can be noted that if the collection in a children’s room is not biased in content and not limited in number, it becomes more attractive and enhances the reading together activity. Unfortunately, mainly due to finance, many small public libraries are unable to collect a large number and/or wide variety of picture books. It also can be noted that children should be able to find picture books of interest by browsing in through the entire collection. In the children’s room of a large public library, however, children face the challenge of finding these books; i.e. they either have to physically browse through multiple bookshelves or search a bibliographic database for keywords.

The problem in the children’s room of a small library described above could be solved by bringing digitized picture books into the existing printed picture book collection (in this case digitized picture books refer to the picture books that have received permission for digitizing and copying from the copyright owners), in addition to web picture books that are the picture books in Digital Ehon,² Digital Okayama Encyclopedia³ (Mitsuyoshi, 2001), the International Children’s Digital Library⁴ (ICDL) (Hourcade et al., 2004), etc., freely accessed via the web. The problem that exists in the children’s room of a large library can be potentially solved by building an environment in which children together can easily browse through a bookshelf that conveniently keeps the entire collection. Note that the adoption of off-the-shelf digital picture books provided by the web stores, e.g. Kindle store⁵ and Barnes & Noble,⁶ exerts a significant influence on the execution of a library budget.

There have been various attempts to solve those problems. One approach seen in the website, Old Picture Book,⁷ produces the web based digitized versions of the great Old Picture Books written by authors such as Kate Greenaway, a popular 19th century writer for children, through the web. Although reading these picture books together can provide an excellent opportunity to teach children many things, supporting children’s browsing to find books of interest is crucial in increasing the amount of reading they do (Reuter, 2007). The study (Druin, Weeks, Massey, & Bederson, 2007) for building ICDL provides kindergartners and grade-schoolers with worldwide digital picture books to read together, and allows them to find these books on a category browser. Eriksson and Lykke-Olesen’s study (2007) also supports children browsing together in a library by providing a large-scale device, where children step on the category buttons in order to select books. Despite the children’s immense enjoyment in playing with those systems, the category buttons may be hard to use for many younger children and those studies do not support children who intend to browse through the bookshelves (Eriksson, Krogh, & Lykke-Olesen, 2007) in a library.

We here propose a method of steadily enhancing the activity of children in browsing/reading together with their families and/or friends by installing the BrowsReader in the children’s room of a library or a kindergarten. Most of these children are kindergartners and the rest are mainly lower graders. The original BrowsReader⁸ (Liu et al., 2007, Liu et al., 2008) was a system designed so that children can gather around it and engage in picture bookshelf browsing and picture book reading. However, it can work for a rather small picture book collection. The BrowsReader presented here has been improved step by step, keeping the design rationale intact, so that it can work in the children’s room, with a large picture book collection, of every public library or kindergarten. The children in such a room can easily browse a large number of picture books as if they are browsing in the physical bookshelves, and can read a wide variety of picture books as if they are reading ordinary printed picture books. The hardware setting is just a computer with a display. A touch-display relatively large in screen size is preferable so that the children together can operate the BrowsReader. The basic notions for the improvement are: (i) an abstracted bookshelf, which presents the front-cover images of many picture books in the form where all are linearly arranged, with some of the images bundled in places, and (ii) a unified view, which presents every page of any picture book in a form that seems like a printed picture book’s page. The goal of the improvement of the BrowsReader thus is to satisfy the following requirements:

• A large number and wide variety of printed, digitized, and web picture books are reproduced as a set of surrogate picture books, where each surrogate picture book consists of the front-cover image followed by the page images of a printed, digitized, or web picture book.

• Children, together with their families and/or friends, can easily browse in an abstracted bookshelf storing a large number of surrogate picture books and have a similar experience to browsing in the physical bookshelves of a children’s room.

• Children, together with their families and/or friends, can read a wide variety of surrogate picture books in a unified view that allows each surrogate picture book to be viewed as if it is an ordinary printed picture book.

• The browsing/reading activity for the surrogate picture books would not infringe upon copyright protection.

We consider that children together with their families and/or friends have read picture books using the BrowsReader in a children’s room when they together spend 2–5 min for flipping the pages of each of these picture books, by supposing that during this time period many kindergartners have enjoyed looking around the pictures and/or hearing the stories and many lower graders, in addition, have become intellectually activated through reading-aloud of the texts. The estimation of the time period is based on the observation of the kindergartners’ reading activity in a children’s room of a kindergarten.

By gathering around the BrowsReader children can easily browse in an abstracted bookshelf and then find surrogate picture books which are of interest. Any found surrogate picture book, which can be moved around, rotated, and enlarged, is read by flipping the pages with the same convenience as with a familiar printed picture book. The children are also free to browse while reading. The BrowsReader is different from an ordinary bibliographic search engine in which the information about the desired picture books is searched for by inputting the keywords or category symbols and is presented on a display. In the BrowsReader all the front-cover images are linearly arranged and then presented in such a way that some of them, which will be of particular interest, are enlarged and the rest are reduced. Further the presence of all the front-cover images is shown all of the time. The BrowsReader is easily customized so that it can be installed in any children’s room, where the main task of the customization is to generate the surrogate picture books for the collection there. Fig. 1, shows an environment built in the children’s room of Oita University library, which is open to the public.

The effect upon the installation of the BrowsReader has been evaluated along with its step by step improvement through five case studies; three of the case studies were conducted in the temporary children’s rooms built in Oita University campus and two in the actual children’s rooms of Oita Prefectural library⁹ and Beppu University’s attached kindergarten.¹⁰ A free-style evaluation study, where children freely used the BrowsReader, was employed so as not to have any long lasting influence on the children’s browsing/reading activity in the future. In the initial three studies, where hundreds of digitized and non-flash-based web picture books and also printed picture books became available, the children’s behavior was observed, and then the children were questioned and interviewed to evaluate the effect of the installation. Through the observation and the answers we confirmed the BrowsReader could be used in an actual situation. In the latter two studies, a relatively large number of digitized, non-flash-based/flash-based web picture books and a fairly large number of printed picture books collected in a children’s room became available on the BrowsReader. The printed, digitized, and web picture books, which were arranged so that they reflected the scheme used to classify the printed picture books, were able to be browsed all together, and any digitized/web picture book be read as if it was an ordinary printed picture book. By analyzing the data of the employed logging system, and questioning and interviewing the librarians and kindergarten teachers who observed the children’s behavior, we collected the evidence showing that the children in the actual children’s rooms were steadily enhanced in browsing/reading together.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Previous studies which have focused on enhancing children’s browsing/reading activity are overviewed in Section 2. Our aim is to steadily enhance the children’s activity in browsing/reading together by installing the BrowsReader in the children’s room of a library or a kindergarten. The original design of the BrowsReader should be improved to work well in any actual situation, and therefore in Section 3 we introduce two basic notions to achieve the desired improvement; an abstracted bookshelf and a unified view. Following that, and then based on these notions, we state the ways in which the improvement is obtained. These are detailed in Section 4. In Section 5 a description is provided to show how the BrowsReader is customized so that it can be installed in each of the children’s rooms. In Section 6 we detail the case studies that were conducted to improve and evaluate the BrowsReader in enhancing browsing/reading together. Finally, Section 7 describes a future research direction to further investigate the effect of the BrowsReader in the children’s activity in reading together.