Archive and Go Seek: Investigating the Discoverability of Child-Created Work in Archives

This paper investigates the representation and findability of work produced by children in archives, focusing on the research questions: 1) How do researchers locate materials produced by children in archives? 2) What challenges do they encounter, if any? By interviewing several purposively selected juvenilia studies scholars and analyzing the patterns which emerge in their responses, I aim to synthesize the various practical experiences of seeking out children’s creations in the archives. Researchers reading this study could learn different strategies for identifying youth-created materials in archives, based on the experiences of the interviewed scholars. Archivists reading this study could come to understand the importance of archiving children’s work, the obstacles that researchers face when searching for such materials, and perhaps be inspired to develop ways to facilitate the future discoverability of records created by children.