Digital Archives and Cultural Memory: Discovering Lost Histories in Digitised Australian Children’s Literature 1851–1945

Abstract

The full-text digitisation of literary works can have some unexpected benefits for researchers in and outside of the field of literary studies. While the broader availability and easier distribution of the text is a clear and intended result of digitisation, the preservation of extra-textual material—such as bookplates, inscriptions, advertisements, and marginal notes—is an unintended result that can help to expand our knowledge of literary networks, reading practices, and cultural history. This kind of material was preserved by the Children’s Literature Digital Resources Project (CLDR), whichdigitised nearly 600 works of early Australian children’s literature—including poetry, short stories, novels, and picture books—that were first published during the period 1851-1945. The CLDR resources are available online through AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource (austlit.edu.au)¹. This article will look closely at some of the material found in the CLDR texts, including evidence of the books’ provenance (found in bookplates, book labels, inscriptions, and a handwritten letter), a newspaper clipping, and advertisements. Describing these discoveries can never be as informative as actually showing them, and for this reason, this essay has a companion online resource trail, ‘Digital Traces of Past Lives: Bookplates, Inscriptions, and Ephemera Discovered in Digitised Books,’ that guides readers through the digitised texts². The discoveries are often surprising, moving, and unexpectedly informative. They remind us of the books’ material lives, their previous owners, and their status as physical and cultural artefacts. They can also tell us a little about historical literary and artistic networks in Australia, and the position of children’s book authors and illustrators within those networks. However, in order to make best use of these kinds of serendipitous discoveries, the infrastructure housing digital archives must be able to facilitate the search for this kind of material, as this article will go on to discuss.