This site is a fine example of how a set of items from disparate sources can, if well catalogued, become a significant resource base. The items are all images and illustrations from early children’s literature from the period before 1890. The resource is the result of a major cooperative effort from a range of partner organisations throughout Europe: Buckinghamshire County Council Library Service; Dublin City Public Libraries, Dublin; Institut für Jugendbuchforschung, Frankfurt; International Youth Library, Munich; Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague; La Baracca: Testoni Ragazzi, Bologna; National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, University of Surrey; and Wandsworth Borough Council Library Service, London. Specialist support for the digitisation of materials was provided by the Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS), based at the University of Hertfordshire, England.
According to the description on the home page the CHILDE project is: “funded under the European Commission’s Culture 2000 programme, that uses web technology to allow wider and more open access to images from collections of early children’s books in Europe”. Essentially the impetus for this was “the creation of a Web site dedicated to the preservation and promotion of early children’s book collections from across Europe”. The name CHILDE is one of those derived acronyms put together from Children’s Historical Literature Disseminated throughout Europe.
The Web site provides a fully searchable database of illustrations that can be interrogated from a number of access points such as author, title, illustrator. It is also possible to search by subject, type of book and literary genre. Each of these has a drop‐down menu of pre‐defined search terms. One of the type of book terms, “chap book”, I did not understand. It is possible to refine a search to a particular collection, again using a drop‐down menu.
Each record that is returned from the search process provides much detail both about the illustration and about the publication in which the illustration is found. On clicking, the illustration is enlarged to almost full‐screen. The standard of cataloguing is high although there are a number of misspellings in some of the entries. There is no indication as to what standard the cataloguing adheres to although a good account of the digitisation process is provided.
The overall design of the Web site is good but there is a variety of font types and sizes used which can disorientate the user. There are the minor faults associated with the design and on occasion some of the links were slow to activate. The database itself functions well but could benefit from a better search screen interface.
The future aim of this project is well summarised and serves as a rallying call for those involved: “The long term importance of this project will be to develop links between these collections, rescuing some from obscurity, and by using twenty‐first century technology, make the history, glory and value of children’s literature in Europe accessible to today’s and future generations.”
