The Baldwin Online Children's Literature Project is essentially a miniature Project Gutenberg for children's literature, offering full‐text online versions of classic children's texts. The site's focus initially is texts that are in the public domain in the USA – that is, texts first published in the USA before 1923. While the texts must be published in the USA, British books are included if the work was published in the USA, as are some texts originally published in other languages and subsequently translated into English and published in the USA.
Lisa Ripperton, the site's author, selects all texts to be published based on four criteria: the text must be in the public domain in the USA, the e‐text must be based on a printed text, the work must be in English, and the text must be a classic for children. The first three criteria are easy enough; however, the fourth is more problematic. As Ripperton herself says, “this is a subjective criterion, but when I see the same book mentioned over and over again in the sources I have come to know and trust, then I know the book is a classic”. She includes a list of about 25 books she uses as sources, most of them from the early to mid‐twentieth century, only a few from the latter half of it; the most recent is from 1999. Ripperton has no formal qualifications in children's literature – she is a home schooling parent, and aligns these online selections with the Waldorf and Ambleside curricula which she has used with her own children. She also emphasises that she has a life‐long love for children's books, but has been discouraged by the (as she sees it) decline in the quality of children's literature since the so‐called Golden Age (roughly the second half of the nineteenth century). Ripperton also has a side business of publishing paperback versions of many of the texts that are included in The Baldwin Online Children's Literature Project, and, in what is either shameless self‐promotion or a real desire to be helpful, includes links for purchasing these modern reprints of the books if they are available.
The texts themselves are accessible through a number of different links on the site: by author, by title, by genre, and by subgenre. The front page of the site is attractive and easy to navigate, but the “second‐level” interior pages do not incorporate the principles of good web design. For example, when one clicks on the Authors link, one is taken to a huge list of all the authors included on the site – not an intermediate page with a list of the letters of the alphabet, for example, or even a page with internal anchors for each letter of the alphabet. All the second‐level content pages have this same problem: clicking on the top‐level links takes you to a difficult to navigate list with all the content on a single page, rather than breaking the content up into smaller, more manageable chunks. Once one actually clicks through to a particular text, this problem disappears: a table of contents for the book appears, with each chapter linked to take the user through to the text. The table of contents remains visible in the left‐hand menu bar even when one is looking at a particular chapter, so the reader does not have to click back to the main table of contents menu and then click on the next chapter, but instead can click directly on the link for the next chapter to the left.
Besides the actual texts themselves, Ripperton offers several other types of content on her site. Most of them seem to be aimed at parents who are home schooling their children and has a definite ideological slant: Ripperton seems to share the common nostalgic view of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. As mentioned above, some of the stories are linked to the Ambleside and Waldorf curricula; others have been grouped according to topics that might be covered in a home school situation. While all of these groupings are helpful, the perspectives offered by the literature included on the site are severely limited – after all, the most recent book included was published over 80 years ago! Many of the actual texts available through The Baldwin Online Children's Literature Project are available through Project Gutenberg and other online projects, or in physical form in libraries. However, the site does perform the valuable service of making lesser‐known and out‐of‐print books available to a wide audience. Ripperton's additional content may not be useful to anyone except those home schooling, and some may prefer to use another online resource that is not a front for a private publishing company.
