This essay examines the rationale behind the National Collection of Children’s Books (NCCB) project, funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC), which began in December 2013 and ended in December 2015. Attention then turns to the strengths and weaknesses of the finished project to discuss how its potential value to researchers is seriously undermined by largely avoidable conceptual and methodological flaws. The aim of the IRC is to “fund excellent research within, and between, all disciplines, and in doing so to enhance Ireland’s international reputation as a centre for research and learning.”[1] In many ways, the NCCB project was timely, as the study of children’s literature has flourished in Ireland, as elsewhere, over the last twenty years. Children’s books regularly feature on the curricula of undergraduate courses in English offered by Irish universities. The country’s first master’s program in Children’s Literature was established in 1997 in St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, and the College awarded its first doctorate in Children’s Literature in 2001. The Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature (ISSCL), founded in 2002, has organized conferences and symposia, and has published a series of edited collections of essays to disseminate national and international research in the field.[2] In 2011, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) launched an M.Phil. in Children’s Literature, supported by the bequest of more than 10,000 children’s books left to the College in 2005 by Mary “Paul” Pollard. The number of postgraduate students undertaking doctoral research on children’s literature in Irish institutions is constantly rising. In 2013, in recognition of the value of the study of children’s literature in its own right, and in conjunction with other disciplines both nationally and internationally, Dr. Keith O’Sullivan, at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Rathmines, alongside Dr. Pádraic Whyte, at TCD, received an Irish Research Council Interdisciplinary Research Project Grant of over €350,000 to establish a National Collection of Children’s Books.

In December 2013, a briefing from the Communications Office of TCD explained the rationale behind the NCCB:

At present, no central resource exists for research in children’s books in Ireland. This project will gather and consolidate information from a range of catalogues and listings, allow researchers to search all collections simultaneously, provide overviews of the research potential of each collection, and present detailed accounts of and digital images from significant children’s texts.

The Communications Office also set out the project’s primary aim: “The national collection database will provide a solid foundation from which scholars, both Irish and international, may conduct advanced research in children’s literature.”[3]

That same month, a team of five researchers attached to the School of English in TCD, supported by the Long Room Hub—the Arts and Humanities Research Institute of TCD—began work on the NCCB project. The team confined their attention to the holdings of children’s books in five institutions in Dublin: Trinity College; the National Library of Ireland; the Church of Ireland College of Education, Rathmines; St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra; and Pearse Street Library. A symposium to publicize progress was held in April 2015, and a website dedicated to the project was launched in September 2015. That website contains background information about the NCCB, but its two major features are a catalog of over 250,000 books in over ninety languages held by the participating libraries in May 2014, and a database of images and descriptions of some of those books. To mark the launch, an exhibition entitled “Come Closer: The Darker Side of Children’s Books” was held in Pearse Street Library from September to November 2015. In addition, a collection of essays, Children’s Literature Collections: Approaches to Research, edited by the two principal investigators, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan later this year.[4]

The symposium and exhibition were certainly valuable methods of disseminating and stimulating research, but they have been and gone. The collection of essays will be more durable, but collections of essays do not require funding of the type awarded by the Irish Research Council, which stipulated that value for money was a crucial criterion in the assessment of 2013 grant applications.[5] Consequently, it is clear that the main outputs of the NCCB project are the catalog and database available through the online platform. That platform is attractively designed and easy to navigate, but, as will be demonstrated, its conceptual, practical, and methodological problems impact negatively on its usefulness. Most obviously, the decision to limit the project to just five Dublin libraries immediately problematizes its designation as a national collection of children’s books. Not only are institutional and public libraries outside the capital completely ignored, but even the John Manning Collection of almost 400 children’s books by English and Irish authors, primarily published between 1870 and 1920, and held in University College Dublin, is not included. Copies of the works included in the NCCB catalog are not available through the online platform, so it is difficult to justify the project’s designation as a collection. Far from being a national collection of children’s books, the NCCB is a limited resource consisting of a less-than-comprehensive online catalog and a modest database of images and descriptions of less than one percent of apparently randomly selected titles listed in that catalog.

The online NCCB catalog has some attractive features but also some significant drawbacks. It allows researchers to enter a search term under the heading of title, author, subject, publisher, or under all four fields. While these options are helpful, the inability to search using the term “illustrator” is a disadvantage, because as Kimberley Reynolds points out, “From the days when illustrations had to be coloured in by hand to today’s lavishly illustrated picture books, one ambition of children’s publishers has been to make books as colourful and attractive as possible.”[6] The NCCB catalog does, however, offer the facility to search the holdings of one or all of the institutions involved in the project. Searches can be further refined by selecting a special collection within the holdings of a particular institution and/or by specifying a particular date or date range between 1537 and 2014. The results page offers further options, including “language,” “period,” “illustrations,” “subject,” and “region,” for refining the search.

This flexibility is undoubtedly useful, but a few searches of the catalog reveal that a less helpful flexibility has been adopted in the designation of what constitutes a children’s book. Is it a book primarily intended for child readers? Is it a book addressed to adults that might also appeal or be available to children? Is it a book about education that children are never likely to read? Is it a book with no obvious connection with childhood but that has been previously erroneously categorized as a children’s text in an existing library catalog? These questions, which are fundamental to the study of children’s literature, appear not to have been addressed during the compilation of the catalog, which includes entries that fall into all of these categories. Critics of children’s literature have offered often conflicting definitions of their field of study. Perry Nodelman uses the phrase “children’s literature” to refer to the body of texts written “for young people by adults” and “produced by professional publishing houses.”[7] M.O. Grenby, however, points out that children “have consumed, and continue to consume, a huge variety of material” that was not expressly written for them, while Kimberley Reynolds similarly argues that “there is no clearly identifiable body of children’s literature any more than there is something that could be called ‘adults’ literature.”[8] Indeed, M. Sarah Smedman identifies Gulliver’s Travels, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and Robinson Crusoe as books written for adults but “read for pleasure by children” for over two-and-a-half centuries.[9]

Given the critical consensus that children’s literature is extremely difficult to define, it would be unreasonable to expect the NCCB team to have come up with a definition that would be acceptable to all researchers working in the field. Nevertheless, the lack of discussion of what constitutes a children’s book anywhere on the NCCB site is a serious omission, particularly as this and related questions have been considered not only by scholars of children’s literature but also by the compilers of national or large-scale children’s book collections. For example, William W. Armstrong reports that in 1998, when the Louisiana State University (LSU) libraries began to plan the creation of a German Language Children’s Literature Collection, the project team had to clarify their goals: “How would this collection be used? What books should we select, and by what criteria should we select them?”[10] In answering these questions, the LSU team considered the needs of the prospective users of the proposed collection, and they compared and evaluated information available in existing bibliographies, databases, and library catalogs. Anne Bingham, meanwhile, outlines the procedures involved in “[b]uilding a collection of American Indian Children’s Literature Collection at the University of Washington libraries.”[11] The first step was to identify relevant titles, and this was achieved through consultation of various materials, including the OCLC WorldCat database,[12] the Children’s Catalog—a guide published by H.W. Wilson for reading material for young people based on over twenty selected American library lists—book reviews, and several other bibliographic sources. Tellingly, the teams involved in both projects drew on a variety of sources to ensure not only that the titles included in the collections were indeed children’s books but also that those collections were as comprehensive as possible.

Unfortunately, the NCCB team did not take similar measures to ensure the reliability of the data included in their online catalog. Use of the various search option reveals that the vast majority of entries in that catalog refer to books that were primarily addressed to children. However, searches also reveal the problematic inclusion of books that belong to various other categories and genres. For example, a search using the date range 1540-1565 yields one result, Seminarium et plantarium fructiferarum praesertim arborum quae post hortos conseri solent, published in Paris in 1540, but there is no indication of why or how this Latin treatise on fruit trees can be regarded as a children’s book.

Two Dublin editions of Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education with a View to the Principles and Conduct of Women of Rank and Fortune and various editions of her Cheap Repository Tracts are included in the NCCB catalog, even though these books were addressed to adults. More recent critical works that deal partly with children’s literature, such as The Fire i’ the Flint: Essays on the Creative Imagination (2009), edited by Mary Shine Thompson, are also included. A note on the NCCB website explains that the records displayed on the NCCB catalog are based on the information and catalogs supplied by the five host institutions.[13] It appears that the NCCB team did not check the information provided by the participating libraries and so included works questionably or incorrectly categorized as children’s books in their own online catalog. This replication of errors is perhaps understandable, given that the NCCB team had just two years to create and upload the inter-institutional mega-catalog and that only one member of the team had a qualification in library studies. Nevertheless, a faulty catalog cannot be regarded as a solid foundation for advanced research into children’s literature.

Thus, the NCCB’s reliance on information and catalogs supplied by the five Dublin institutions results in confusing anomalies and unfortunate omissions. For example, the NCCB catalog lists one copy of Mary Leadbeater’s Tales for Cottagers: Accommodated to the Present Condition of the Irish Peasantry (1814), which is part of the Schoolbook Collection held in the Church of Ireland College of Education. It may well be that this two-volume work—originally written, as the title suggests, for impoverished Irish adult readers—was at some stage used as a schoolbook, but the NCCB provides no evidence to support that suggestion. Furthermore, print copies of the book held in Trinity College and the National Library are not listed, presumably because the catalogs of those libraries do not list Leadbeater’s collection as a children’s book. By contrast, Leadbeater’s Extracts and Original Anecdotes for the Improvement of Youth (1794) was unquestionably addressed to young readers, but it is not included in the NCCB catalog, even though Trinity College and the National Library both hold copies. The copy held by Trinity College Dublin is part of the Pollard Collection, but that collection has not yet been completely cataloged, and Leadbeater’s book is one of those that have still to be processed.[14] This delay in cataloguing a special collection held by one of the participating institutions is reflected in the omission of a significant Irish children’s book from the NCCB’s catalog. Additional inconsistencies arise with other searches for works by Irish authors. A title search for The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel originally addressed to adults, yields a total of forty-two results. The first is an edition published by the Educational Company in Dublin in the 1920s, while the next nine results refer to editions that seem to have been primarily addressed to adults. None of the remaining thirty-one results, which include Roald Dahl’s The Vicar of Nibbleswicke (1992) and twenty works by the English author, Priscilla Wakefield (1751-1832), were written by Goldsmith. Enclosing the search term within quotation marks eliminates the false hits, but no indication is given that this procedure should be adopted.

Confusion in search results is not limited to eighteenth-century writers and works, as is evident in the case of one of the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising, who is variously listed as Patrick H. Pearse, Padraic Pearse, Pádraic Mac Piarais, Padraig Mac Piarais, and Phádraic Mac Piarais in the NCCB catalog. Using any of these author names as a search term provides a unique set of results. The eleven titles provided for Padraig Pearse were all written by Pearse or are translations of his work, although at least one, Bodach an Chóta Lachtna (1906), is arguably not a children’s book. That may explain why copies held by Pearse Street Library, Trinity College, and the National Library are not listed. The thirteen works provided for an author search of the NCCB catalog for Patrick H. Pearse include only one of the results listed for Padraig Pearse, while the remaining twelve are all works written by other authors, including Hans Christian Anderson, Canon Sheehan, Rev. J. Turner, Miss (Mary R.) Stockdale, and François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon. Neither set of results includes Ós Cionn na Farraige (1936), which is attributed to Pádraig Mac Piarais, with one copy identified in the library of St. Patrick’s College. No reference is made, however, to copies held in Trinity College or the National Library. A search using double quotation marks for “Íosagán, agus sgéalta eile,” Pearse’s best-known work of fiction, yields three results for copies held by the Church of Ireland College of Education and one held by Trinity College. However, not one of the fourteen copies held in the National Library show up in the results, although four of these are included in the NCCB catalog, incorrectly transposed and coded as Áosagán: agus scéalta eile. In this case, as with other cases where search results are incomplete and inaccurate, errors cannot be solely attributed to faulty cataloguing by participating institutions. Instead, this type of error highlights malfunctions and faulty programming within the NCCB catalog itself, and a lack of discernment in its compilation.

While the catalog includes records of the print holdings of the five participating Dublin libraries, the neglect of digital and microform holdings further limits the usefulness of the NCCB project. However, with such holdings, too, there are anomalies. For example, one of the results provided by a search between 1645 and 1669 is a microform version of the first London edition of William Walker’s Some Improvements to the Art of Teaching, especially in the first grounding of a young scholar in grammar learning: shewing a way to bring a scholar to variety and elegancy in writing Latin (1669) held by the National Library. Trinity College has a digitized version of this edition and a 1972 facsimile reprint of it, but neither of these resources are listed in the catalog.

Overall, then, the value of the NCCB catalog as a resource for scholars interested in children’s literature is seriously undermined by its limitations. The confusion concerning the definition of what constitutes a children’s book is perhaps the most serious drawback. As outlined above, various searches provide results that include books addressed to adults, such as educational tracts, agricultural treatises, novels, and collections of critical essays. In addition, author and title searches routinely yield conflicting and confusing results. In a number of cases, the results are inaccurate because they do not include all copies of a book available in the participating libraries. Some of these problems seem to have arisen because the NCCB team relied on information and catalogs provided by the five institutions. If a book was correctly or incorrectly categorized as juvenile literature by one institution, its holdings of that book are included in the NCCB catalog, but the holdings of the other institutions, which categorize the book differently, have not been listed. Indeed, this is acknowledged on the NCCB website in the case of Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, or Little Female Academy, first published in London in 1749: “The earliest Dublin edition was also printed in 1749 and can be found in the National Library, but is not included in the NCCB catalog as the book was not tagged as children’s literature in the National Library’s records.”[15] Because of problems including faulty tagging by the participating libraries and glitches in the NCCB catalog itself, search results are unreliable. As a result, the catalog cannot be regarded as a world-class academic resource.

The database of images and short accounts (on average ca. 400 words) of a selection of books included in the catalog is arguably a more useful resource for scholars, largely because it deals with a more manageable number of texts with which members of the NCCB team are clearly familiar. When it was launched in September 2015, the database covered just thirty-nine texts, but by late November 2015 that number had risen to 261, and by completion of the project the final tally amounted to 512, as stated on the website. Confusingly, though, selecting the language option reveals that the collection covers 497 English-language works, 21 Irish-language works and three Latin texts, indicating that the final total is actually 521.

Regardless of the actual total, the late flurry of activity suggests that at least half the entries were produced in a hurry, when little time was available to research and write the kind of detailed accounts promised by the Communications Office in TCD two years earlier. Titles of full-length works are not italicized in any of the entries. Nevertheless, some of the brief descriptions of works included in the database provide some useful bibliographic and contextual information as well as outlines of the contents of textbooks and plot summaries for works of fiction.

In common with the catalog, the NCCB database provides researchers with a variety of flexible search options, including subject keywords, such as “geography” and “history.” The entries on school books are generally informative and insightful, but would be enhanced by some more detailed information on when exactly they were used in schools or featured on school curricula. Despite this caveat, these descriptions are valuable because they implicitly challenge the tendency of critics of children’s literature to exclude school books from their field of study. However, no rationale is provided for the selection of the works included in the database, and it is jarring to find that Soundings, described by the novelist Joseph O’Connor as “the only textbook you’d ever read for pleasure,” does not feature.[16] This poetry anthology, which was compiled by Augustine Martin in 1969 and featured on the secondary school syllabus for the next twenty-six years, went on to become a bestseller when it was reissued in 2010. Given its longevity and popularity, its omission from the database seems inexplicable, particularly as lesser-known anthologies, such as The Ideal Book of Poetry (1915) and The Land of Poetry (ca. 1945), are included.

Similar problems arise in relation to the criteria used for the selection of works of children’s fiction included in the database. Too often, scant, if any, attention is paid to existing critical evaluations of works that are described as “important” or “significant,” and while plot summaries are provided, no information is given on print runs, sales figures, or estimated readership.[17] At other times, descriptions of works of fiction written for children omit important contextual and bibliographic detail that is readily available. For example, in the description of The Contrast: or, Poverty and Riches, it would have been useful to refer to Rolf and Magda Loeber’s discussion of the Parks’s Juvenile Library series, published by Joseph Parks in Dundalk between 1797 and 1819.[18] The NCCB description reveals that the book tells the story of a wealthy man and a basket-maker banished to a remote island, but there is no mention of the radical undertones of this well-known fable, nor acknowledgment that it featured in such children’s books as Ann Fisher’s The Pleasing Instructor (1756) and the first volume of Thomas Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton (1783). This is all the more surprising as the third edition of Fisher’s The Pleasing Instructor from 1760 is another of the titles included in the database, and an image of the first contents page shows that “The Basket Maker: A Peruvian Tale,” which had previously appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine, can be found on page nineteen.

In another example, the description of Bridget Larkins: The Fishwife (ca. 1875?) provides no publication history of this cautionary tale about the dangers of alcohol written by Mrs. S. C. Hall. The story appears to have been first published in London in the 1850 edition of The Soul’s Welfare, a magazine described by its compiler as “the herald of sobriety, peace and virtue” and reprinted in 1856 as issue 89 in the Ipswich Temperance tract series.[19] In the case of both The Contrast and Bridget Larkins, accounts of the publication history of stories that were originally directed at adults would enhance the quality of the NCCB descriptions of editions adapted for children, which are included in the database on the basis of being significant works of children’s literature. Such accounts would go some way towards indicating that members of the NCCB team were at least aware of the difficulties, outlined above, of classifying what constitutes a children’s book.

In at least one other case, the brevity of the description and the limited number of images provided undermine the usefulness of a text included in the NCCB database. The description of an 1881 facsimile London edition of a 1766 edition of The History of Goody Two Shoes runs to just over 350 words, and six images of the cover and pages from the book are provided.[20] By comparison, the description of an earlier edition of the book in the online Hockcliffe Project, hosted by De Montfort University, is over 3500 words long.[21] The full text of the edition included in the NCCB database has been digitized by Google and is freely available online, not only though Google but also through Hathi Trust. In other words, a scholar would not have to travel to Dublin to see this edition of Goody Two Shoes, which suggests that it might have been more useful to include a book that is not freely available worldwide in the NCCB database, particularly when only a fraction of the children’s books available in Dublin feature in that resource.

On a more positive note, it is heartening that children’s books in the Irish language are included in the database, particularly as the website states that “The additional database focuses on English-language texts of interest to the NCCB’s English literature [sic] scholars.”[22] Clicking on the language option reveals that there are twenty-one books in Irish in the database. However, eight of these, including Máiréad Ní Ghráda’s Real Geography for Fifth Standard (1958) and Mary Purcell’s From God We Come (1967), are written in English. It is unfortunate that glitches similar to those besetting the online catalog also undermine the reliability of the database. While the descriptions of the thirteen Irish- or dual-language books are comprehensive and informative, it would have been helpful to provide English translations so that national and international scholars who lack fluency in the Irish language could access these useful summaries. Such scholars have no way of knowing that the Irish-language account of Jimín Mháire Thadhg provides interesting contextual and critical information that is not included in the more cursory summary of Jimeen, a 1984 English-language version of Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha’s 1921 Irish-language classic.

In a recent edition of Breac, Sonia Howell and Matthew Wilkins argue that “there may be a general reluctance on the part of ‘traditional’ humanities scholars to engage in conversations relating to digital tools and methodologies due to a perceived lack of the vocabulary necessary to do so.”[23] On the evidence provided by the NCCB project, “traditional” humanities scholars may also be reluctant to embrace digital tools and methodologies because they do not always work efficiently and are difficult to maintain. The NCCB was an ambitious venture, and the online catalog and database contain useful information, but the flaws besetting them impact negatively on the value of the project for national and international scholars. The term of the project has ended, leaving little if any opportunity to amend, correct, or update the online resource, which seems unlikely to enhance Ireland’s international reputation as a center for research and learning, given that similar, if more ambitious and comprehensive, international resources are carefully revised and maintained. The WorldCat database, which contains the world’s largest network of library content and services, is updated monthly; the Copac catalog, which provides access to the catalogs of approximately ninety major UK and Irish libraries, is currently undergoing a major redevelopment that involves the use of relational database software for the first time. Smaller catalogs, including that of Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books in the United Kingdom, and the Osborne Collection of Children’s Books in Toronto, are similarly updated and developed on a regular basis.

A note on the NCCB website explains that “the NCCB project is the first step towards a more comprehensive detailing of collections of children’s books in libraries throughout Ireland.”[24] This effective acknowledgement that the initial aim of establishing a central, national register has not been achieved raises questions about the feasibility of the project from the outset and the Irish Research Council’s decision to continue funding such ambitious digital projects. In 2011, the IRC awarded a research grant to another digitization project entitled “An Electronic Edition of the Loebers’ Guide to Irish Fiction.” That digital platform went live in December 2012, developed major problems, crashed in 2013, was re-launched in 2014, and has since disappeared again. By contrast, the hard copy volume of A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650-1900 remains in print and, according to the WorldCat catalog, readily available in libraries worldwide. There seems little point in IRC funding being awarded to short-term digital projects that either are not fit for purpose or quickly become obsolete.

Although flawed, the NCCB project may well prove instructive, less in terms of its value as a resource for national and international research into children’s literature than for the insights it can provide into the challenges involved in developing, funding, maintaining and developing a reliable academic online resource—issues of great interest to scholars involved in the Digital Humanities.[25] In terms of development, the NCCB project highlights the need for clarity in defining key terms, comprehensiveness in setting out the rationale behind digital projects, and rigor in outlining the principles underpinning the selection of sources and materials to be used in the compilation of resources created as part of those projects. As regards funding, the criterion of value for money needs to be realistically assessed when the project is being evaluated, and should be reviewed during the term of the project. As part of this process, the impact and longevity of earlier projects should be considered before an award is made. Because funding is usually allocated for a limited period, it is linked to the issues of maintenance and development, which should also be realistically assessed before a project goes ahead. If all these considerations had been taken into account, the NCCB project might well have achieved its aims.