Enhancing Access To Classic Children’s Literature

Project Gutenberg is a digital library that contains mostly public domain books, including a large number of works that belong to children’s literature. Many of these classic books are offered in a text-only format, which does not make them appealing for children to read. Moreover, stories that were written for children one hundred or more years ago, might not be readily understandable by children today due to diverging vocabularies and experiences. In this poster, we describe ongoing work to enhance the access to this children’s literature repository. Firstly, we attempt to automatically illustrate the children’s literature. Secondly, we link the text to background information to increase understanding and ease of reading. The overall motivation of this work is to make such publicly available books more easily accessible to children by making them more entertaining and engaging.