The Baldwin Online Children's Literature Project

by David Welch

Check Out: www.mainlesson.com

While Brian Jacques and JK Rawling may be popular authors of children’s books today, just a few generations ago children were reading books by James Baldwin and Andrew Lang. The Baldwin Online Children’s Literature Project is an effort to preserve such classic children’s literature and make it readily available to people today. Baldwin Online has a database of collected public domain classic literature for children of all ages in a wealth of categories such as: myths, biographies, poetry, games, and fairy tales. This project is similar to the Rosetta Project reviewed earlier. It is a collection of public domain books intended for young readers that is free to access for personal and educational uses. All the books were published before 1923, allowing readers an opportunity to experience popular classics of generations past.

The Rosetta Project puts an emphasis on the art in classic children’s books by scanning and uploading each individual page of the book. This preserves the appearance of the original page layout and art, but unfortunately makes it unable for users to select specific from the pages. Baldwin Online has instead made the monumental effort to transcribe all of the text onto web pages manually. Pictures and illustrations in the books are scanned and included. Students writing reports may find the selectable text more useful because they can use their browser’s “find on this page” function to quickly search for keywords within a page of text. Also, portions of text can be highlighted and copied onto other documents to quote in reports or share with other students.

Baldwin Online gives the unique feature of allowing the user to change the display of the book text. The text size, color, face, the picture format, and many other options can be changed at the user’s discretion. One great advantage of this is that the pages can be modified to take up less space and allow more text to fit on each printed page. Teachers will definitely appreciate the chance to save printer pages and ink.

The large, comprehensive selection of stories makes the site a valuable resource to teachers and parents. Teachers can find and print appropriate reading material for their students without having to purchase hard copies of the books. Students can use Baldwin Project to find reading material and research various topics. The unit studies of selected texts on civilizations such as Greek or Norse are quite useful to students who wish to study those civilizations. There is a vast amount of material concerning folk tales, legends, and mythologies so students who are looking for information on those subjects should begin their research with Baldwin Online.

Users can browse listings of the books by title, author, or genre; although there is no search engine at Baldwin Online to type in specific titles or authors. An alternative approach to finding a specific book or author would be to visit www.SearchLIT.org and use the search engine there by filtering the results by mainlesson.com. This will allow users to search through all the content on Baldwin Online with a more powerful and precise search engine so that they can find what they are looking for faster and more accurately.

For students and teachers who wish to find some inspiration on ideas about what to study or teach, Baldwin Online offers several guides, unit studies and curriculums. For home schooled teachers and students, there are books listed for the Ambleside and Waldorf programs. There is a unit studies guide that groups texts according to civilizations. Also there are various articles and guides about books and authors created to give some spark toward lesson plan ideas to teachers.

Baldwin Online contains text from 278 books and 6348 stories and is constantly growing. You can volunteer to the Baldwin Project by offering to transcribe or format texts from books, or even write articles about the authors featured on Baldwin Online. Baldwin Online Children’s Literature Project does not yet accept donated books. The books chosen to be on the site are determined by the webmaster; however, you can recommend specific titles you would like to see available.