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Find & Connect Open Dataset

This dataset contains information relating to the history of child welfare and institutional ‘care’ in Australia, with a particular focus on the period 1920- 1989. It includes data about: private organisations and government departments that housed children or were otherwise responsible for their ‘care’; the legislation under which these bodies acted; and the types of records that were created to document childhoods in ‘care’, as well as information about where surviving records relating to homes in the database are currently held. The dataset also incorporates digital images for many organisations described in the dataset, as well as publications data for many related information sources. The dataset does not contain copies of archival records, nor does it include information about individuals who provided or spent time in ‘care’.

Find and Connect's data is structured in the Encoded Archival Context for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) XML format, with a few extensions specific to the Online Heritage Resource Manager(OHRM). An explanation of the Find and Connect subtleties can be found in Documentation.

There are two examples of code that processes EAC-CPF files for Find & Connect.

• FACP website application, renders EAC-CPF data.
• Find and Connect search application Faceted search of EAC-CPF data in SOLR, and render Dobjects, such as images.

This dataset has been produced by the University of Melbourne's eScholarship Research Centre, together with the Find & Connect team from the University of Melbourne and Australian Catholic University.

Funding for the Find and Connect web resource has been provided by The Australian Government, through the Department of Social Services, as part of the National Find and Connect Services (https://www.dss.gov.au/our-responsibilities/families-and-children/programs-services/find-and-connect-services-and-projects).

Find and Connect is a response to recommendations of two separate Senate Inquiries into institutional out-of-home-care - Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care (2003 - 2004) & Inquiry into the Implementation of the Recommendations of the Lost Innocents and Forgotten Australians Reports (2008 - 2009), and would not exist at all were it not for the hundreds of people who have had the courage to tell their stories. Thank you to those who have shared their experience so that this chapter of Australia's history can be better understood.

All data produced by The Find & Connect Project is licensed under The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.