This week I finally found some articles covering Australian early children's libraries, using Informit search engine. Material includes Western Australia - claiming to have the first children's library in Australia - ACT and Tasmania. Much relieved, I put this aside for reading later and looked for websites and videos.
Thankyou to my fellow student, Rusty, who provided a lovely website for the history of the children's library in Christchurch, New Zealand. I found an intersting site from Brooklyn, New York and Toronto, Canada (see 'Places of Interest') but no Australian sites! Consistent with other mediums, websites were challenging to find - my topic does seem to be relatively obscure.
Not surprisingly, I wasn't able to find videos on my topic. However, there were plenty of videos about comtemporary public children's libraries. These provide a strong contrast to early children's libraries - innovative in their time for the use of child-sized furniture and provision of a supervised, schoolroom-inspired space.
This amazing, Danish public library project trialed interactive, high tech children's services. Children are free to do as they like! My favourite tool is "BibPhone" which children can use to leave a voice message in a traditional book, such as their thoughts on the book, then another child can listen to the messages. And books are shelved according to what children find interesting - I don't know where cataloguing fits in! It looks like a wonderful children's library, and impressive as a public library service as it looks like it would need a considerable budget. In light of the high techology used, it is interesting that some of the library values which inspired the project are unchanged from the past - reading and learning - and some are quite different - inspiration, play and dialogue.
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