The International Children's Library is a fairly new online book initiative that I learned about recently. I haven't had too much time to explore it yet, but of course my first search was for "fairy tale." Did anyone ever doubt that it would be?
Good news is that there are some great hits in the 232 search results, some of which are in other languages and not as readily accessible in various countries.
It looks the most like Google Books and Archive.org when it comes to the actual page images--they are actual scans of the pages. And some of the books are under copyright and thus not available anywhere else, but apparently are provided here with permission from what I can see.
For example, see this Schneewittchen from Germany:
However, the navigation is not as intuitive as I like and there are not easy sorting options beyond language choices once you've performed a simple search.
Still, for fun browsing and exploring, it's another resource to add to the list. I hope to see it grow in the years to come...
This is a program based at the University of Maryland, where I got my M.L.S. (and one of the reasons I decided to go there). I did not work directly on the project, but I did work on other projects with two of the faculty investigators.
ReplyDeleteThe navigation is designed for kids, and kids were part of the design team. It's definitely not as intuitive for adults, but kids love it.
And I can assure you that they do not publish anything without permission. They contact publishers and authors/illustrators to obtain donations and copyright permissions. Besides providing books for children in their own languages, this also helps to preserve languages (and folklore!) that are not as widely known.