This project was funded by the McCoy Seed Fund.

About this site

The ACFC is a UNESCO Australian Memory of the World-registered collection donated to MV in 1999 by Dr June Factor and containing extensive research into the play and folklore of Australian children from the 1950s to the present day. It comprises 537 objects and a large documentary and photographic archive including over 10,000 card files containing children’s rhymes, jokes and games; 40 audio cassettes of songs of recited poems in nine community languages; Victorian Aboriginal childhood play; and series of correspondence with Australian school children recording their play in letters and questionnaires. The collection includes significant research by American Fulbright scholar Dr Dorothy Howard, who visited Australia to document the games and play of children in 1954-55 and was hosted by the University of Melbourne.

At present, it is challenging for researchers to analyse the large ACFC collection as a whole: the current listings of series and items does not realise the collectors’ own cross referencing systems (although they are documented in Emu), nor the many interconnected and shared themes, places and findings that intersect nearly half a century. Existing scans of the card collection and other documents, numbering over 9,000, are stored separately and not linked to individual Emu records. Emu records at document level are currently lacking, and would be generated as part of this project.

This pilot will make use of one of the world’s leading network data management systems. The OHRM creates durable data that can be reused for multiple purposes and that can be harvested by services like Trove.