Digital Libraries

For one of my classes I had to do an annotated bibliography. If you don't know what that is, it is an unpleasant assignment where you compile sources on a topic, give a summary of the article, and critique it. It is rather time consuming. It's also 40% of my grade! Anyway, my professor said we should pick a topic that we would be interested in, especially career-wise, so I picked digital libraries. There are a lot of great sources on the topic, but it took me forever to find a source that gave a good introduction and description of a digital library. I won't bore you with all the details, but I learned a lot and have become a fan of digital libraries. Not just the stuff that is included in a library catalog, such as a college, but a honest to goodness digital library. I do want to share a couple of sources with you though.
One source that I thought was fabulous is the International Children's Library. The reason this site is awesome is that it has about 4500 books in 54 languages. The catalog is arranged by color, size, characters, topic, how it makes you feel, and several others. The collection is filled with children's literature that represents exemplary artistic, historic, and literary qualities. They only include books that are in print form (not created digitally), and these come from all over the world. The library has even taken the time to get permission for copyrighted books. If you have children, you should let them explore the catalog b/c it was created with them in mind and had children input on the site as well. The website is http://en.childrenslibrary.org.

One of the other things I learned while researching is that there are several websites that will allow you to read or download books for free! These books must all be in the public domain, meaning the books are going to be mostly classics written prior to 1899. One of the sites is Project Gutenberg. I'm sure it will be pretty easy to find more if you want to locate others.
By the way, I did get my grade back on this class, and I got an A!!! I was very excited to get that grade. Hopefully my other grade will be just as nice.