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7.5 Types of case study 167

THE INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN'S DIGITAL LIBRARY
The International Children's Digital Library (ICDL, http://www.
childrenslibrary.org) is an online repository of thousands of books from around
the world. Built “to help young people understand the value of tolerance and
respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas” (Druin et al., 2007), the
ICDL provides interfaces specifically designed to support children in searching
for and reading books. Search tools support strategies that children might use
for finding books (such as the color of the cover, the types of character, or
the length of the book) and several reader tools support a variety of reading
strategies (Druin et al., 2007).
The ICDL's ambitious goals of serving a diverse group of children from all
over the world presented a challenge and an opportunity. By studying how children
in different countries with different economic and social backgrounds, used the
ICDL, the research team hoped to gain a better understanding of how children in
varied settings would interact with the ICDL. As both the interface and content are
multilingual, they could examine the use of this single tool in diverse contexts, in
order to understand how usage patterns differ across cultural boundaries.
The resulting multiple-case study involved students in four distinct
geographical locations: Munich, Germany; Le Ceiba, Honduras; Wellington,
New Zealand; and Chicago, USA. Three 8-year-old children participated in
each location, along with parents, teachers, and administrators. Data collected
over the course of 4 years included open-ended interviews with both children
and adult participants, drawings that children made to illustrate their ideas
about libraries, and book reviews that the children wrote. Grounded theory and
content analysis approaches (see Chapter 11) were used to analyze the 152
interviews, 236 drawings, and 301 book reviews that were collected over the
course of the study.
Although there were multiple participants at each site, data analysis focused
on understanding how use patterns and responses differ across these varied
circumstances. As the individual children were not the units of analysis, this
case study can be seen as a holistic case, multiple-case study. The four groups
can be seen as theoretical replications, with their varied backgrounds providing
opportunities to examine how observed phenomena differ across cultures.
As differences between the groups were largely attributable to preexisting
cultural differences, the results of this study demonstrate the likely outcome
of theoretical replication. All children seemed to appreciate the digital library
and the range of books that they read over time increased. Children in all four
locations found books in languages that they did not know to be difficult or
frustrating and they all liked the search tools but preferred to read physical
books. They all valued libraries and children in all groups became more
interested in learning about different cultures. Differences in responses may
have been due to specific differences in circumstances. Compared to children

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