The Children's Library started -96 with a small site with book reviews and some links for children. Target group were then age 6-app 14. We have between 500 and 700 visitors a day. Many children's libraries and schools has the site as startingpoint on the computers for the children. The site is financed by the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs.

There is no physical library connected to the Children´s Library.

In the work with the site I have invited children to participate. I have a group of children to whom I e-mail regularly. They give me new ideas and criticism of the pages. Most options is about the layout and the book reviews. I also invite myself to library-classes to discuss the content, structure and layout of the Children's Library on the net. Library-classes are groups within the school mostly with children who have chosen library and reading as a subject in school. The classes are led by a librarian.

I also take help from other librarians with special interests and skills.

The children's library on the net consists of several different parts.

Bookreviews
Bookreviews written both by librarians and by children. Children can fill in a form to send in there book reviews. I sometimes do light editing but mostly the bookreviews are well formed. I also work together with schools and library groups in this. The site is supplied with several book reviews every week. Together with the reviews I collect links to other sites with reviews for children.

Childrens own writing
Children's writing. Here children can publish there poems and stories. Very popular. Together with the writing book I collect links about writing and publishing sites.

Links Authors Characters from childrens books Ebooks
Links to authors, electronic book and characters from children's books. Concerning the authors of children's books I also host information about authors. We also offer e-booklending.

Bookchat
The Bookchat is always open but 8 times a year I invited authors to participate. These authors are chosen by children.

Ask the Childrens Library
Ask the Children's Library is a cooperation between children's librarians all over Sweden and Åland in Finland. Many questions are about authors. We give the answer as a link and/or a book title. I save all questions and answers and create a FAQ (frequently asked question) so that we can "recycle" the answers.

Media for Children with Disabilities
You can never inform to much about the different forms of media that we have in the libraries, talking books, videos with sign language for deaf children, tactile books, Braille books and so on. How to find and lend them. We have a synthetic voice that reads the information and some book-reviews are read by children. You will be able to listen to the text by clicking on a speaker icon.

Recources for Childrens Librarians
Pages for Children's Librarians with news, conferences, links, e-mail discussionlist for children ´s library matters, project information a s o. Newsletter about the Children´s Library is available.

Read about the Bookjury
The Bookjury is a nationwide contest about children's favorite books published each year. The contest starts in november and ends in april next year. I am taking care of the information and voting via a form on the net. 42 000 children, age 0-19, voted 2003

Links
The links are chosen to fit young people. The choice of links is based on children´s questions.

Here is what I look for while choosing links:

Swedish sites ? mostly. But I also have some English sites for kids. We also collect links for children with other languages.

Easy to navigate. It must be easy to find the information on the site. Long text or a lot of clicks disqualifies a site even if the site otherwise is good. I always look at the layout. Is it clear. A white background is always the best.

Preferably not frames - at least not on the index/starting-page. The complication is that you cannot link to a single page while using frames. You have to describe the search and "clicks".

Simple language. Everyone benefits from a simple language but a 6 year old kid needs differ of course from those of a 12 year old.

Not to heavy to download. Children (and adults) don´t want to wait.

I try to select a bit more comprehensive sites. Sites with a ever so cute picture of a rabbit and a few lines is not chosen. I prefer few but good and sites rich of information. For the same reason I often choose to link to official organizations, government, associations, companies. An official site is more reliable.

I look at the date for upload and last update. Old pages are OK if the subject is of the kind that don´t change. An experiment-page from 1996 surely is OK today.

Katarina Dorbell
Project manager