Building virtual spaces for children in the digital branch

Kimura, Camden

Dubroy, M. (2010). Building virtual spaces for children in the digital branch. Australian Library Journal, 59(4), 211-223. doi:10.1080/00049670.2010.10736027

Summary: In this article, Dubroy explores the different studies and literature that has been published in the past decade about children and digital branches. She also provides her own comparison study of five digital branches for children using David Lee King’s framework for the necessary elements of a digital branch (his framework for a good digital branch being staff, collection, community, and building [Dubroy, 2010, p. 220]). She finds both in the literature and in her own study that it is difficult to create a digital space that appeals to all children; children have varying needs at different ages and there is no “one size fits all” digital branch for children (Dubroy, 2010, p. 220-221). She also finds that the five different children’s virtual branches she examined all have King’s elements “to varying degrees”, however I noticed many of the libraries she looked at were missing the “community” element as not all of them invited user-to-user interaction (Dubroy, 2010, p. 220). However, the scale of her study was very small (only five digital branches) so it is impossible to say whether this lack of community interaction is/was a trend with all children’s digital branches or if it is just happens to be that the children’s digital branches she looked at that do not have good community interaction.

Evaluation: This article provides a good literature review. She uses many articles and studies to compare what children want out of digital branches and what is generally available. Her comparison study is interesting, but ultimately too small to carry much weight. Further studies would be necessary to pick up real trends. (I realize that this article was written in 2010 though so it is likely that there have been further studies in the ensuing five years.) Still, it is a good introduction to an interesting topic; how can libraries serve children with digital branches? Furthermore, how can libraries get kids to use digital branches? Is it “if you build it, they will come”? Children have different cognitive and emotional needs from adults and libraries that create digital branches for children must be cognizant of their young users.

The library in which I work does not have a digital branch for children; digital services/resources for them are folded into the general, all-ages resources page. If children have never visited our library website before, they will need help from a parent or librarian/staff member to navigate the resources page to get the digital services that would be appropriate and useful for their ages. Since I don’t have a lot of experience introducing child users to the digital services, I have no idea whether or not a digital branch of children would be used. Certainly it might be helpful to have all the children’s resources listed on a page of their own for ease of access, but I’m not sure an entire digital branch would be used by children. This is a question I had about the digital branches that Dubroy examined; most of them were visually appealing and looked useful, but were they actually being used? This is key information that Dubroy was missing in her comparison. To weigh whether or not it would be worth my library’s time and money to create a digital branch, it would be good to see in articles such as this whether digital branches are actually being used.