An Exploratory Study on a Physical Picture Book Representation System for Preschool Children

This paper describes the developing process and preliminary testing of a physical representation system aimed at supporting preschool children’s picture book search. The authors first conducted named entity recognition (NER) on a corpus of 880 picture book summaries to supplement a metadata schema identified in prior research. They then designed a system using colored stripes and icons to physically represent these metadata elements on book spines. A small-scale experiment (N = 8) comparing search performance between children taught the representation system versus untaught controls was conducted. The results suggest that the representation system can be understood by children and improves recall, precision, and success rates. The findings provide initial evidence that mapping metadata to intuitive physical identifiers could enhance young children’s book search experiences and engagement. Further research with larger samples is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach.