Enhancing children's activity in browsing/reading together by the installation of the BrowsReader in the children's room of a library

  • Authors:

  • Jia Liu;Tetsuro Ito;Nana Toyokuni;Keizo Sato;Makoto Nakashima

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems, Oita University, 700 Dannoharu, Oita-shi, Oita 870-1192, Japan;Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems, Oita University, 700 Dannoharu, Oita-shi, Oita 870-1192, Japan;Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems, Oita University, 700 Dannoharu, Oita-shi, Oita 870-1192, Japan;Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems, Oita University, 700 Dannoharu, Oita-shi, Oita 870-1192, Japan;Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems, Oita University, 700 Dannoharu, Oita-shi, Oita 870-1192, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Reading together draws much attention as a societal concern for children not only to yield emotional reaction but also to gradually advance intellectual thinking. We here aim to build a new environment, in which children's browsing and reading of picture books together with families and/or friends is steadily enhanced, by installing the BrowsReader in the children's room of a public library or a kindergarten. The original BrowsReader was a system to assist children in finding and reading picture books. The children, by gathering around the BrowsReader, can browse picture books and then choose and read a book by flipping pages on it. After reproducing each printed, digitized or web picture book as a surrogate picture book consisting of the front-cover image followed by the page images, we first introduce two basic notions: (i) an abstracted bookshelf, which presents the front-cover images of the surrogate picture books in the form where all are linearly arranged, with some of the images bundled in places, and (ii) a unified view, which presents each page of any surrogate picture book in a form that seems like a printed picture book's page. We then specify, based on these notions, the improved version of the BrowsReader which can be installed in each children's room so that children together with families and/or friends can easily browse a large number of surrogate picture books as if they are browsing in the physical bookshelves of the children's room, and can read a wide variety of surrogate picture books as if they are reading ordinary printed picture books on a table. The improvement was carried out in a step by step process based on feedback and results from case studies, and its effects were clarified by seeing whether, in a new environment, the children's activity in browsing/reading together were steadily enhanced when using the BrowsReader.