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RESEARCH COMMUNITIES >  CHILDREN'S LITERATURE >  CLDR
 
CHILDREN'S LITERATURE DIGITAL RESOURCES PROJECT

About CLDR

The Australian Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) project was funded by Australian Research Council Linkage Equipment Infrastructure and Facilities grants from 2008 to 2010. CLDR forms a key outcome of the AustLit Children’s Literature Research Community and contributes a significant number of resources to the AustLit Full Text collection. Led by Queensland University of Technology in partnership with The University of Queensland and the University of Sydney, the project digitised a selection of early Australian children’s literature, both popular and rare. Many of the items selected for digitisation were kindly supplied by the National Library of Australia, while others were from the library collections of the State Library Victoria, Monash University, The University of Queensland, Deakin University, and Queensland University of Technology.

Scope & Purpose

Children’s Literature Digital Resources incorporates primary texts published from white settlement to 1945, including children’s and young adult fiction, poetry, short stories, and picture books. This collection is supported by selected secondary material.

The purpose of the project is to provide a centralised access point for information about Australian children's literature and writers and a growing body of full-text primary resources. Four key aims of the project are:

  • To establish an important digital facility for research, teaching, and information provision around Australian children’s literature;
  • To provide access to a wide range of high-quality full-text data, both primary and secondary resources;
  • To provide access to essential library and research information infrastructure and facilities for established and emerging researchers in the fields of Humanities and Education;
  • To enable research while preserving important heritage material.

The completed project is used as a valuable research tool by students, schools, researchers, and academics across a range of disciplines.

Read more about the CLDR project and its aims in 'Present and Active: Digital Publishing in a Post-Print Age' by Professors Kerry Mallan and Annette Patterson.

AustLit Full Text

The Children’s Literature Digital Resources collection contains texts digitised for AustLit through cooperation with various Australian libraries. The collection includes children’s and young adult fiction, poetry, picture books, short stories, and critical articles relating to relevant primary texts.

Authors of primary sources include Irene Cheyne, E. W. Cole, Richard Rowe, Lillian M. Pyke, and Dorothy Wall.

Secondary sources include critical works by Clare Bradford, Heather Scutter, Kerry White, Sharyn Pearce, and Marcie Muir.

These full-text materials are keyword searchable (both within individual texts and across the CLDR corpus) and can be downloaded for research purposes. An example search may be "bush fire", resulting in over 100 items that contain "bush fire" in the full text.

  • Click here for access to AustLit CLDR Full Text resources.
  • Click here for a sample text.

Below is an instructional video on searching AustLit CLDR full text. Click here for a PDF version of these instructions.

Digital Research Tools and Publications

Internet Publications

As well as digitising primary and secondary material, the project locates and provides pathways to existing online resources or internet publications to enhance AustLit's Children's Literature subset. These resources include both primary and secondary texts.

  • Click here for access to all the full-text material in the Children's Literature subset.
  • Click here for a sample.

Federated Searching & Search Results

The Federated Search is an alternative to the default Quick Search on the AustLit home page. Selecting the Federated Search option currently activates a search across AustLit Full Text, as well as the following external databases: AusStage, Picture Australia, People Australia, Australasian Digital Theses, Internet Archive, Books and Collectibles, and Google Book Search.

For example, a search for the author Dorothy Wall delivers results that include not only AustLit works, agents, and full text, but also images of the author from Picture Australia, as well as Wikipedia and Google Book Search entries:

Results retrieved in a Federated Search can also be exported and formatted via the ‘EXPORT/FORMAT ON SCREEN AS’ option. This allows results to be exported into reference management software such as RefWorks and Endnote, or to be interpreted as a timeline and map. Maps can display locations according to subject, composition, or setting, and a timeline will display results according to publication date:

Further information on Federated Searching is available at http://www.austlit.edu.au/aus-e-lit or a video tutorial is available here.

Compound Objects & AustLit Trails

A Compound Object is a part of the AustLit Toolkit and allows researchers to collect, organise, and describe relevant resources. Compound Objects are, therefore, sites where connections between resources can be made and a thorough history of a resource can be displayed, from author biographies to publications, translations, adaptations, and reviews of the resource. It is a tool that creates ‘Trails’ about resources.

A number of Learning Trails have been created to support the CLDR project. They recommend ways in which the CLDR collection could be used by teachers. The Learning Trails listed below are intended to suggest ways in which the early texts from the CLDR site could be used in conjunction with contemporary texts and other resources in English classes or how they could be used to create deep learning experiences through which to enhance History, SOSE, Art, and/or Media lessons. Teachers may wish to use extracts or illustrations from some of the texts in order to address, for instance, point of view or visual representations. Tertiary students could also use them as a useful starting point for their particular research.

The nested Trail 'Australia's Engagement with War', for instance, consists of three linked Learning Trails: 'The Anzac Tradition', 'The Roles of Women in War', and 'The Conscription Debate'. In examining representations of Australians at war in both the CLDR texts and contemporary texts the Trails are guided by the overarching maxim "Some things change; some things stay the same". Learning Trails developed for CLDR currently include:

Other possibilities for Learning Trails using the texts from the CLDR site include:

  • Constructing National Identities
  • Representations of Gender
  • Representations of Children and Childhood
  • Bushrangers and Goldrushes
  • Anthropomorphic Native Australian Animals
  • Notions of Good Manners and Hygiene
  • Paratextual Details of Early Children’s Texts
  • Advertising in Early Australian Children’s Literature
  • Art and Illustration in the CLDR Collection

The Trails may be used as models only, in English classes, or to create deep learning experiences through which to enhance History, SOSE, Art, and/or Media lessons. Teachers may wish to use extracts or illustrations from some of the texts in order to address, for instance, point of view or visual representations.

For further information on Trails and Compound Objects, please contact Research Assistant Dr Cherie Allan [cherie.allan@qut.edu.au] or Aus-e-Lit Project Manager Dr Roger Osborne [r.osborne@uq.edu.au], or watch the video tutorial here.

Project Team

Chief Investigators:

Project Officer & Research Assistant:

Research Assistants:

To provide feedback or to request further information, please contact Amy Cross (Project Officer) [amy.cross@qut.edu.au] or Dr Michelle Dicinoski (Research Assistant) [m.dicinoski@qut.edu.au].

Publication Details

The Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) is a separately published work within AustLit.
AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource 2004-

This work is published Under Creative Commons License: Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia:

You are free to copy, distribute, adapt and transmit this work on the condition that you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). You may not use this work for commercial purposes without permission from the copyright holder. For further information see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/au/

Cataloguing-in-Publication Details

Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR)

Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN - 978-0-9750867-8-0
1. Children’s fiction, Australian -- Bibliography.
2. Children’s fiction, Australian -- History and criticism
3. Children’s fiction, Australian -- Collections
I. Mallan, Kerry.
II. Patterson, Annette.
III. Borchert, Martin.
IV. Young, Carolyn