Hidden Lives Revealed: A Virtual Archive – Children in Care 1881-1918 is an attractive and well-organized website. It bills itself as an "intriguing encounter with children who were in the care of the Children's Society in late Victorian and early 20th-century Britain."

At its heart is a collection of photographs, case files, and learning materials from one of the many philanthropic societies dedicated to the care of children in Britain at this period. Most of the archive material was previously unavailable to the public, as might be expected with files giving personal details of children who were in care – though of course the anonymity of the children is respected. "No other Internet archive," it asserts, "gives you the opportunity to browse through such unique material – a kind of resource which has the type of information not recorded elsewhere."

Perhaps this is so. In any case, it can claim quite reasonably that it offers something for those studying Victorian history or for university students interested in social work. The Waifs and Strays' Society, later known as the Children's Society, is rather overshadowed in the history books by the Barnardo Homes: further proof, if needed, of the aggressive publicity campaigns that have earned Dr. Barnardo a certain notoriety among historians. 1

A brief History of the Waifs and Strays' Society in a section of the website entitled Articles usefully provides background information. (A link to the website of today's The Children's Society provides further details for those interested.) The Society was founded in London in 1881 by a civil servant and Sunday school teacher named Edward Rudolf.

Rudolf aimed to set up a central home for the poorest and most neglected children cared for by the Church of England. It made a particular point of integrating its homes with the local community, aided by the parish organizations of the Anglican church. Other articles, incidentally, give a short biography of the founder, and introductions to poverty, juvenile delinquency and reformatories during the Victorian era. There is a concise and reasonably up-to-date Bibliography in these areas as well. 2

Photographs is divided into 12 sections, covering such areas as the work, schooling, pets, clothing, illnesses and disabilities, and sporting activities. Each photograph is carefully documented with a date, location, creator, and description. The Homes includes photographs and a detailed description. By 1918 the society had a total of 175 homes. These photographs inevitably look a bit grim now, though the society did have a policy of providing a family atmosphere in homes of around 10 children aged five to 14.

The sample of about 150 Case Files will interest those who want a feel for historical research. Each one contains the detailed application form, including information on family background, health, education, current circumstances, and reasons for application. There is also interesting supplementary material in the form of personal letters, photographs, and school reports. All of these documents are reproduced in the original, and (mercifully) transcribed in print form. They can be browsed by keyword, running from "Abandonment" to "World War I ."

An example under "Running Away" documents a girl who ran away from a home in Croydon, claiming ill treatment and concerns about having her hair cut off because of lice. The file even includes a reproduction of a Christmas card sent by her brother in 1891. Finally, there is a collection of Learning Materials, with exercises to find out "what it was like to be REALLY poor in Victorian and Edwardian times." A sub-section, entitled Rescued from Poverty has, for example, a fact file and questions for students concerning life on the streets and "who would you choose?"

Inevitably with this kind of website, the society responsible gives a positive view of its activities. One might wish to ask further questions such as: whether the laundries and other commercial activities in the homes risked becoming exploitative, the relations between children and those running the homes, and why the photographs suggest that all the girls became maids and the boys soldiers! All the same, the Society is to be commended for providing a very approachable educational site, and for its innovative approach to publicizing its existence.

The Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) provides access through its Collections Search Center to over 2.3 million records, with 290,000 images, video and sound files from Smithsonian museums, archives, and libraries. More than 10 percent relate to children and youth.

The search engine, designed for researchers rather than the casual browser, is powerful and well organized, allowing both quick access to the collections and an overview of types of media. As this image shows, a user can limit the items by clicking + or –. The number of each item appears in parentheses.

Three searches are representative of the material on children and youth. "Children" results in more than 23,000 hits, including photographs and negatives, sculptures, paintings, advertisements, video, sound recordings and texts.

"Boy" returned 16455 documents, "girl" 20221, and "youth" returned 3005. Some of the results are not associated with images but refer to cataloguing data from a museum, library, or collection. Some of the thumbnail images can be magnified, while others cannot.

The terms tested above returned anything titled, tagged, or captioned with one of the keywords, or in the case of books, where the word appears in the table of contents or summaries. Much of the material on children included photographs from the late 1800s to the present, most of which are not associated with much information as to provenance or subject.

Quite a number of the photographs belong to collections of anthropological studies in various parts of the world. Such collections can be researched further under the photographer's name. Such collections would likely appear in books and articles on the subject.

A number of materials are related to soap advertisements – Ivory, Pears, Breck shampoo, and other brands. This material consists of line drawings, advertisements in magazines, trade cards and booklets. Much about the 19th- and 20th-century culture of childhood and motherhood can be learned from these images and texts. A particularly striking advertisement warns the reader that it is very difficult to find anything as pure, and features a stern patriarch leaning over to inspect socks and stacked laundry that his daughter or servant holds timidly.

These ads took it upon themselves to educate mothers on raising their children, as well as capitalizing on images of sublime motherhood embedded in domestic scenes. On the other hand, an embossed paper Pears' advertising card called "You Dirty Boy" features a buxom, no-nonsense woman roughly cleaning the ears of a chagrinned little boy over a basin. Dreamy, out-of-focus images of blond, blue-eyed Breck girls recall ideals of female beauty from only a few decades ago.

Searching large archives using keywords related to children often brings up surprising items. Children, for example, are frequent subjects of outdoor sculpture, being featured as fountains, as symbols of the virtues, and as capricious traditional bronzes, such as the large, multi-figure statue of the game called "Crack the Whip" by J. Seward Johnson, Jr. Other items include paintings of children, sound recordings of children's songs, songs about children, toys, and ethnographic arts from the National Museum of the American Indian, such as a collection of beaded balls that were fashioned by young girls for eligible young men to whom they were betrothed.

The National Museum of African Art website is a colorful destination that showcases a dynamic mixture of historical, traditional, and contemporary African art forms.

The museum and its website cover the entire continent of Africa, so the focus is not on children or youth. There are some valuable resources, but they finding them can be tricky.

Explore the Collection features three sample sub-collections showing the diversity, uses, and symbols of African art. An advanced search allows for sorting by type of object, country, ethnic group, and artist, but there is no keyword search for narrowing to "child" or "childhood." The search engine would be best for browsing by users with prior knowledge of the collection, or if a user wanted to search a particular region or type of artifact.

To locate material on children, explore categories such as "toys and entertainment" (18, including the image of the Zimbabwean toy turtle made from a gourd and woven fiber shown here); "doll" (12) ; "mother and child" (25); and "masks" (120). These bring up objects related to initiation and puberty rituals. "Costume and textile" (142) offers clothing types such as aprons and chest cloths associated with the passage to womanhood.

Unfortunately, many of the images are not very large, even expanded versions (when available). For smaller objects such as dolls, the images are quite detailed. For larger objects, such as clothing and weavings, the images do not allow the user to focus on the elements identified in the written descriptions. In addition, some of the texts are generic, repeating paragraphs for similar objects, such as dolls, game boards, ornaments, and clothing types.

Information and objects related to childhood, though difficult to find, are sprinkled throughout the site. For example, in the podcast and exhibit on the Tuareg, we learn that the highly refined traditions of leatherwork and silversmithing are being passed on to the next generation and are well received in the global marketplace. Other items include masks, aprons, dolls, costumes, and symbolic items that refer to the practice of initiation rites and clothing or ornaments associated with the transition from childhood to adulthood in various parts of Africa.

Radio Africa features an audio story for children, "The Leopard's Drum," and performance of a squirrel story by an Ethiopian musician. The exhibit TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity draws connections between traditional and modern clothing among African youth and how it has become part of the global youth style. Activities for children invite them to participate in discussion, try on virtual clothes, and view images of children in various forms of dress.

Museum activities for children offer records of children's art activities, especially workshops held for public and local schools. There are photo streams of children making masks, learning about textiles, colors, and symbols in African art, or interacting with the exhibits. Playtime has dynamic activities for learning how to make kente cloth, designing beaded decorations and motifs, and a virtual paper doll set on costume.

Another section worthy of note is the Warren M. Robbins Library of African Art, billed as the leading library on the subject in the United States. African Art on the Web leads to additional information on children and youth in museums and websites around the world.

Read.gov is a project of the Library of Congress (LOC) Center for the Book. It offers a cornucopia of approaches to reading and readers through a well-integrated interface.

The centerpiece is a set of 30 beautifully scanned, rare classics with a simple, elegant reading interface. Books are divided into categories for children (23), youth (6), and adults (3). Titles include an 1886 volume A Apple Pie, Mother Goose rhymes and Aesop's fables, and The Rocket Book from 1912 about a janitor's son whose rocket shoots up from an apartment basement through 20 floors.

The book Gobolinks, or Shadow-Pictures for Young and Old portrays ink blots. These images, created by dropping ink onto paper, folding it, and pressing the paper to squeeze ink into shapes, are then interpreted and illustrated with poems. Interpretations such as the washerwomen would give way to features from today's landscapes. An interesting activity would be to cover the poems and titles, interpret the images, and then compare things that have and have not changed.

Well known classics include The Story of the Three Little Pigs, the original 1900 version of The Wizard of Oz, a 1911 version of A Christmas Carol, several illustrated poems by Edgar Allen Poe, The Secret Garden, and a 1908 printing of Uncle Tom's Cabin for Children.

Another section offers 20 Author Webcasts, including Jane Goodall, Chinua Achebe, and Tiki Barber.

Meet the Authors invites youth to write Letters about Literature, a contest that seeks to connect students' lives with the work of authors. Children write letters explaining how a work of literature was meaningful to them and these letters and responses to the writing prompts reveal much about contemporary childhood.

Other resources related to children are River of Words environmental writing and the Poetry Out Loud recitation contests. National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped includes a special list of resources for children in Braille and audio book format.

The Exquisite Corpse is a feature based on a traditional parlor game in which storytellers respond to a prompt and writers contribute to a growing story line whose ending is wide open. The story is developing as a quest adventure featuring telepathic twins searching for their parents, who are apparently in need of rescue. A cast of characters appear and disappear to build a set of clues.

The Exquisite Corpse Adventure educational resource center includes access to the episodes, reading selections, discussion questions and activities, and a feature under construction called "Talk Art!" related to the illustrations. The discussion materials are as rich as the story is complex.

Students of children in history and the culture of childhood will find plenty to analyze here. The classic books are illustrative of bygone landscapes created primarily by adults for children. They reveal time-honored tales as well as dominant and alternative historical narratives. They are readable and revealing. A class assignment, for example, could start with the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz, compare it to the 1939 Hollywood version, and then examine changing illustrations through the 20th century as the book was reprinted time and again.

The content on Art and Life in Africa is primarily the work and scholarship of Christopher D. Roy, Professor of Art History at the University of Iowa. There are rich materials on children, although finding them requires some creative searching.

The site design is not as elegantly organized or aesthetically pleasing as the rich content warrants. There are many broken links, such as the one to the Stanley Collection database. The link to a teacher's forum is also broken. Links to other sites do function.

What the site lacks in quality, however, it makes up in quantity of information. This includes photographs and videos that illustrate the landscape, arts, craft production, and everyday life of a wide variety of groups in the region and more than 60 streaming videos of craft production, dancing, singing and mask performances.

The site includes most countries of sub-Saharan Africa, which are designated on the map in black lettering. A database lists the names of 107 "peoples" (as the site designates these ethnic, clan, or tribal groups) in Africa. Each name links to a chart with information, a map of the territory, and sometimes the multiple countries they inhabit.

Materials on children appear throughout the site, but are not easy to find. The design includes an ALA search engine found only at the bottom of the index page—not on the home page. There is no easy way to navigate among sections of the site. Keyword searches such as "child," "girl," and "boy" yield only two general links, so the search engine apparently excludes a lot of site content. The keyword "doll," for example, which is found in at least a dozen articles, photo captions, and artworks, only returned the main website link.

The best strategy, then, is to browse the site looking in likely places. The beautiful and interesting pictures make this rewarding time spent. Key Moments in Life describes the stages from birth to initiation, marriage, old age and death, including both males and females, using photographs and art. Each is discussed in a paragraph with citation information.

A streaming video shows uninitiated boys in Boni and Lollio making masks out of millet stalks in imitation of the adults' elaborate masks. They play music, weave elaborate masks, and clown for the camera; in the evening they take part in the procession and dance. Watching this video is as interesting for the skill and intensity the boys bring to the process, as for the other children, both boys and girls, who mill around at the performance.

Many of the other videos and photos allow the viewer to catch glimpses of babies wrapped onto their mother's backs and of children and youth participating in daily activities or special occasions. A number of articles by Roy include information about children, the best example being the article on Mossi dolls. The article describes wooden figurines carved by blacksmiths for little girls that simultaneously fulfill the function of babies (biiga) for young caregivers as well as adult female role models.

This project is testament to a lifetime of work among people for whom the scholar Roy had great affection, and into whose lives he was able to gather deep insight. The materials here are based on a CD-ROM of the same name that is available for purchase on the site, but increasingly the CD content is available online.

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.