Trust Territory Photo Archives contains 6,000 images selected from an archive of 52,000 photographs and slides documenting the American period in Micronesia between 1947 and 1988. It provides details on the Trust Territory Photograph Collection and links to information on the Trust Territories today, mostly in the form of government websites.

The Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands comprises three major Micronesian archipelagoes in the Pacific Ocean. These groups of islands, the Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas, came under the control of the United States as a United Nations (UN) strategic trusteeship following World War II. This was one of 11 trusteeships established across the world by the UN at this time covering areas once controlled by defeated powers. The Trust Territory is unusual within an international context because the transitional arrangement remained in effect until 1990. The territories remain strongly tied to the United States, with the islands of the Northern Marianas designated U.S. commonwealth territory, and the other three localities (the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic Of Palau) in compacts of "free association" with the United States, which controls their defense.

The images in the collection are an extensive record of American views of Micronesian peoples, society, and culture and of the interaction between the United States and the Trust Territories. The photographs were mostly taken by those either employed by the government or closely associated with it. While the photographs are extremely diverse, a sense of the focus of the collection can be gained by the "Photo Gallery Displays." This presents nine broadly defined topics from the collection as a useful introduction to the material. They include themes such as "Parades," "Dancing," "Health/Hospitals," and "Architecture." The disadvantage of this function is the lack of any caption to identify or contextualize the photographs, rendering the collection of "Leaders," for example, largely meaningless for anyone not familiar with the politics of the region. The same photographs can be accessed through the search function, however.

The archive contains a large number of photographs of children. Searches of "boy" (94), "girl"(144), "child" (43), "children" (172), "infant" (2), "family" (26), "play" (7), and "school" (529). These results are indicative of good captioning and a well designed database. The images appear as thumbnails linked to a larger version with metadata, and even a means of adding user comments that must be accompanied by a name and/or e-mail address. The search results yielded photographs of children going about their normal lives with their families, in groups in the landscape, creating crafts, and participating in community or national activities.

Although the photographs are captioned and dated, these captions do not provide very much context. By comparing dates, settings, and the type of activity, these photographs of children document a transformation of individual and communal life under the influence of Americans. Images of a child at a well, shelling copra, your girls weaving, or a family preparing breadfruit seem to show a life that was closer to the period before contact. Other images show hospital and school buildings, girl scout troops, a home-made processions for visiting dignitaries and a general regimentation of communal life around nascent nationhood.

One striking difference among the photographs, which are identified with various islands, is the transition from traditional customs of dress for boys and girls to the wearing of European-style dresses and pants for boys. The archive includes many scenes of traditional line dancing in grass or wrapped fabric skirts, flowers and jewelry, in which young girls did not wear bodices. Other images show the girls performing similar dances wearing ruffled dresses with bodices, made from imported cotton fabrics. Girl Scout uniforms, nurses' attire, and formal European dress mark other images, especially of official scenes. The images show that children's dance and song performances were incorporated into national cultural displays, to which flag processions and other symbols were added.

Scholarly interest in the issue of imperialism with reference to the United States has paid less attention to the question of Micronesia than to other locations, such as the Philippines. The advantage of this site is that it provides extensive primary sources related to this issue. For students of world history it provides a visual record of cultural contact in a situation of quasi-colonialism that continued well into the 20th century.

In this regard, Robert Aldrich and John Connell's The Last Colonies 1 is a particularly useful companion to the site for teachers of world history interested in using it in this way. Aldrich and Connell situate Micronesia within a global discussion of territories formally dependent upon metropolitan powers. Given the relative unfamiliarity of many students with this topic and region, teachers may find the following resources useful: Gary Smith, Micronesia: Decolonisation and U.S. Military Interests in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands takes a geopolitical perspective and argues that U.S. control over the islands of Micronesia "was the strategic equivalent to the Soviet Union's control over Eastern Europe." 2 For Smith, local demands for self-determination were sacrificed to U.S. strategic and defense interests. Francis X. Hezel's The New Shape of Old Island Cultures: A Half Century of Social Change in Micronesia 3 explores social history more broadly, is focused on the same period as the site, and makes extensive use of the Photographic Archive.

Decisions of the Superior Courts of New South Wales, 1788-1899 was created to publish records of the superior courts of New South Wales with the goal of recovering the records of colonial law. At present it concentrates on the decisions of the Supreme Courts and other courts of unlimited jurisdiction between 1788 and 1841.

This archival site is challenging to use, but worth the effort. There are several ways to locate information relevant to children. Searches using keywords such as "boy," "girl," "child," "children," and "family," produce a few hits; this should improve as more materials become accessible in digital form.

Interesting material on children is available, though, by browsing the subject index. A range of relevant topics emerge, including "child, failure to support," "children, defendants," and "children, evidence by." Other subjects include Aboriginal affairs, family law, infancy, infanticide, marriage of infants, children and oaths, Orphan School, and schools (and education laws).

"Other features" presents cases and groups of documents, such as Justice Burton's collected documents concerning Aborigines 1797-1840. This includes the key law that resulted in the "Stolen Generation," Original Document 5, "Proclamations &c Black Natives Establishment of Institution for Children Government and General Orders Government House Sydney: 10th December 1814." This law provided for the "civilizing" of the Aboriginal people by placing their children into state-run schools.

Photographs, recollections, legal records and commentary tell this harrowing story. Records document the school/orphanages that housed and educated Aboriginal children, warehousing them in military-style schools where they often lost touch with their identities and families. The schools trained boys for low-skilled work and girls for domestic service. An especially interesting feature is Dawn Magazine, "An introduction to the public face of the Aborigines Welfare Board (1952–1969) and the photos it reproduced."

Two factors about the public use of the site are noteworthy. First, many of the archives on Aboriginal communities are closed for 100 years due to sensitivity about the treatment of indigenous peoples of Australia who were deprived of their rights over their culture, lands, bodies, and children. The site also offers a finding aid for genealogical searches. New South Wales was the staging ground for the settlement of Australia by convicts brought from overcrowded British prisons. Many contemporary Aussies may be able to trace their genealogy back to those original settlers through the site.

This is a site that will increase in usefulness on children and other topics as the archive becomes more complete. In the meantime, dedicated searching will reveal significant material on the laws and implementation of those laws affecting many aspects of the lives of children.

Picture Australia is a pictorial database of Australiana that serves as a clearinghouse for the collections of over 50 institutions throughout Australia and New Zealand. The items available for viewing include paintings, photographs, drawings, prints, posters, sculpture, costume, and weapons drawn from the databases of national and regional libraries, archives, museums, and universities.

While a handful of Aboriginal rock painting images are accessible, primarily the collections focus on post-contact Australia's development as a nation. This self-titled digital "discovery" service yields thousands of images of children and youth of Australia in formal portraits, parades, sporting events, picnics, and just playing from a myriad of sources.

Browsing is presented through fixed tours called "Picture Trails." These are arranged under the headings of Art & Culture, Sports & Physical Education, Geography & Environment, and History & Society on a varied range of topics from advertising to ballet and indigenous dance. Most of the featured historical content focuses on Australian contributions to war efforts abroad. None feature children and as they are not searchable, they are not very useful for teaching children's history.

However, most Trails include an "Educational Value Statement," like this one from "Advertising in Australia." These provides discussion points that teachers might find useful in using a Picture Trail as a launching point to look at what is missing.

Teachers and Students provides basic ideas for lessons and ways to use the database. "My Favorite" images allows you to check images and retrieve them later where you can download selections. This includes a thumbnail and the database text in a simple user-friendly format.

The favorites are per session and cannot be saved, but could still be made into study guides for teaching. For example, there are 1,177 returns for "boy scouts," but only 310 with the added search term "jamboree." Thus there is a base of research material for an investigation of Boy Scout activities around Australia.

Picture Australia is overseen by the National Library of Australia and there in no attempt to define the number of entries included. The weight of this encyclopedic database, the sheer number of returns, can be overwhelming.

Alongside the catalogued historical images within institutions, Picture Australia allows the general public to contribute images to the database via Flickr. Thus a free text keyword search for "children" yields an unmanageable 38,725 images. However, when the advanced search function to exclude Flickr is used, there are 2,735 returns, which then seems low.

A search using the keyword "child" brings 9,155 results and 8,913 with Flickr excluded, still an large number to sift through. Scholars looking to use Picture Australia for research would find searching for usable data frustrating due to the limited advanced search options and the lack of standardization within the data.

The information attached to the images varies widely in usefulness and depth. Due to the absence of standards for data entry and arrangement within records, there is another problem with the free text search. Searching with the keyword "girl" yields 8,222 images (excluding Flickr). Yet this will include all of the instances that "girl" is mentioned in the entry description section.

This can lead to false returns, particularly with results from the State Library of South Australia, which describes all of the items in a particular collection on each associated record, presumably to keep them together "virtually." For example, the "all word" search for "girls playing" has 176 hits, include 43 photographs of the Vardon family album. Yet only three of these pictures show "girls playing" because each family album image contains the same data.

The best way to use this database for children and youth research that yields viable results is to search each institution's database one at a time. This may beg the question, why use it at all. Having all the materials in a central location, though, does simplify the process and can help users identify select institutions to explore more carefully.

A useful site for the study of children in the Pacific Basin is The South Seas, a resource database dedicated to European voyages from 1760 to 1800. Currently in its first phase of development, the site makes accessible online for singular or comparative research the full manuscripts of the journals of James Cook, John Banks, and Sydney Parkinson from the Endeavor voyxage of 1768-1771. Also available are all three volumes of John Hawkesworth's Account of the Voyages undertaken. . . in the Southern Hemisphere. . . (1773). While this is currently a literary resource database only, there are links for future access to the National Library of Australia's (NLA) collections of historical images, rare maps and drawings from this period.

Easily navigable for browsing, the site has all the key headings intuitively placed. It is well indexed and, while basic, functions adequately with manageable returns. Although not part of the historical collection, there are a few maps presented that are particularly interesting as they chart the day-by-day progress of Cook's Endeavor. The South Seas Companion is the main searching page from which you can browse such topics as: Concepts, Parties, Cultural Artifacts, Natural Phenomena, People, Places, Repositories, and Functions. Unfortunately, these are not clickable and one must browse alphabetically within each heading. Thus it is not really browsing and is actually quite time consuming to achieve a real overview using this method. There are four different search menus catering to different research needs, Keyword, Structured, Bibliography and Archival Sources.

South Seas provides primary sources for research on the people encountered on Cook's voyages, by himself, Banks and Parkinson. From the home page keyword search for "child," for example, there are 78 results that include original sketches and journal descriptions of children, their place and function Tahiti and New Zealand. In James Morrison's Account of Tahiti, he describes the rituals associated with the birth of a new child, feeding and touching taboos, and filial obligations and rights.

Because of the way South Seas has designed the keyword search, "child" will also return other results such as, "child-like" and "childish," which typically refer to adult behavior not children's. As well, results for specific terms, such as "boy" actually include all words containing the consecutive letters, including "boys" and "boyer." With 63 returns under the keyword "girl or girls," there is an interesting variety of information indexed with topics ranging from tattooing to cannibalism and the "rites of Venus." Considering the character of these resources written by men on long sea voyages, it should come as no surprise that most of the references to girls are of a sexual nature. As with all texts describing first contact, what the men chose to write about, the judgments they made, and the situations they created is more revealing of their own characters and culture than the one they are "observing."

While South Seas is full of primary references and resources useful for research, it is not geared towards teaching. There are no tools, widgets, or favorites to assist in saving searches, returns or sharing the images or data. This is described as the first phase of a greater project that the NLA is undertaking to create a clearinghouse of resources related to European voyaging in the South Pacific and cross-cultural contact. Yet it is not quite complete as there are several pages in the "About" section still being built. The Cultural Atlas section has maps available to track the path of the voyages, the images section has this message on its homepage: "We aim also to have a multimedia-guide to using South Seas to discover historical images and rare maps online here in early 2004."

Much of the true functionality of this website has yet to be achieved. However, judging from the year of the last updates, a second phase may not be forthcoming.

Timeframes is the image database from the Alexander Turnbull Library, a division of the National Library of New Zealand. The digital collection contains just over 42,000 images, ranging from publications, manuscripts, music, maps, sound recordings, ephemera (including posters, programs advertisements), photographs, cartoons, paintings, drawings and prints. It focuses on the geography, social and natural history of New Zealand, the Pacific and Antarctica from the point of European contact (c. 1642) to the present.

The homepage is user-friendly, yet some items, such as titles and images are not linked, which seems like an odd oversight. They become decorative rather than functional. If you register, the features are much more rewarding. There five top Browse categories organized alphabetically according to Name of people or organizations, Place, Subject, Māori Iwi/Hāpu (Tribe), and Genre of media, style and techniques. Under the A-Z Subject Browse top heading of "children," there are 831 results that include a large variety of sub-categories, from children sewing, to children - tobacco use and children with disabilities. It seems unlikely that all of the images that include children are returned by this search. Another major drawback is that only one search is allowed at a time. Opening multiple windows within the same session to run several searches simultaneously crashes the database.

The basic keyword search for "child" returned over 590 hits, while "youth" only 276. These are quite low considering the size of the database. While incongruously, there were 619 results for "girl" and 705 for "boy," thus these keywords are not consistently cross-referenced with "child." Some of the filtering is a bit generic, but like most research databases, trial and error will reveal how keywords, categories and cross-referencing has been applied by the data masters. Not being able to click on the titles themselves is a flaw throughout the site that can be frustrating. However, Timeframes is in the process of being upgraded with new features, including better search filters and image tagging abilities, which will add to its functionality.

The descriptive text record associated with each image is a part TAPUHI, the database of unpublished (original) manuscript and picture collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library. As much of the Turnbull collection is based on donated materials, it sometimes lacks useful information. For example, the image of film writer/directors Ann and Jane Campion barely includes basic information although these women are certainly around to add to the public record. Similarly, while there are many family and school albums that show candid as well as posed photographs, useful information is at a minimum. There are additional searching capabilities on the TAPUHI database for items that may not yet be online with Timeframes.

With such a variety of media available, a general search sometimes proves to be a bit too expansive. For example, the topic of "child abuse" yields primarily political cartoons. If one is familiar with the current legislation and the debate surrounding it, then these cartoons become valid, but without that context, they seem either disturbing or irrelevant. Narrowing the search by media in the Advanced Search menu can be a little more time consuming, but leads to more easily digestible returns. While the selection of images is in no way comprehensive compared to what is available in the actual collections, the ATL are readily responsive in assisting with researchers' queries. The quality of the images is quite high; most are print ready without any further adjustments.

In keeping with New Zealand's emphasis on biculturalism and adherence to the Treaty of Waitangi, there is information available in English and Māori. Teachers and researchers need to be aware, however, that the language of the database assumes some degree of familiarity with New Zealand culture. "Timeframes includes items of cultural value to Māori people and other New Zealanders. These taonga are carefully selected and carry the mana of their iwi (people), whichever medium may be represented." Definitions of such important cultural concepts as 'taonga' and 'mana' do not follow the disclaimer.

While any database that includes culturally sensitive material, Timeframes itself reveals a contemporary digital New Zealand negotiating its colonial past. In some cases the framework and data reveals continuing issues of perception and memory that affect the Nation as a whole. For example, pictures of Māori children are categorized as ethnographic by default and are not included in the general New Zealand children category.

Timeframes is solely for researching with no mandate for educational programming as such. With typical useful features, such as saved searches, search histories, and a favorite image basket for items to be reviewed or ordered later, teachers or students can create lists of individual items for further research or to share. Ultimately, while there are hundreds of images of children, the database can stand huge improvements on its teaching features and cross-referencing. Otherwise, it is not very functional as a tool for educators.

As a supplement, Matapihi, a database in English and Māori that includes images and information from many New Zealand cultural institutions including Timeframes, can be used to make a more comprehensive search. As well the National Library of New Zealand has general curriculum resources for teachers and students.