While many students may have an interest in Southeast Asia, locating primary sources on the region's history can often seem a challenging task. This online collection contributes nicely to projects on the region as it offers over 350 written works in English and French that provide first-hand accounts of travel in Southeast Asia, as well as roughly 1,000 images of the region, including photographs, drawings, prints, and maps. The time-frame for these texts is also rich in its breadth as the collection includes works composed between 1550 and the 1920s.

The website is well framed with a multi-page section ("About the Collection") that provides valuable detail on its online holdings and the region that it covers. Useful information on the area's history, geography, on the significance of the travel accounts (and, importantly, the selection criteria for their inclusion), as well as downloadable bibliographies of works in the collection already sorted by the country or author's name are all available here.

The search engine for the site is quite flexible. Users can search for terms in full-text, author, and title fields along with related options for limiting and focusing the search (a subject-heading search would, of course, improve this even further.) A search for "child" in the full-text field results in 297 records, with each providing the number of text matches found for the term within each source. These textual matches can be seen by clicking a "Results Details" link that provides a textual excerpt in which the search term has been located and a link to the digital scan of the exact page itself. Links to the each of the related works' own table of contents and first page are also provided.

Another profitable way to explore the resource is also via the "Browse" page for images and their related keywords, which, with some digging, provide a good number of images related to children. Key topics and themes for exploration here might include costume, dwellings, religion, class and gender, among others.

This collection can be nicely utilized in a study of the ways in which images of the child figure within (and help to convey) the broader themes of European and American writings on a colonized space. For example, one can find a good number of works written on the Philippines via the "Browse" page for images, which include listings under letter "C" for children. A student might explore both the images and the texts in which they are situated, comparing the visual compositions associated with children to the language and meanings conveyed by the written account itself.

In sum, the strengths of this site lie in its depth as a primary source collection, particularly in the temporal range of its assembled works and in its rich assembly of accompanying images as well as their ready availability as a digital resource.

The Japanese Old Photographs of the Bakumastu-Meiji Periods collection housed at the Nagasaki University Library offers a rich assembly of images of Japan, most of which were taken in the latter half of the 19th century. The collection currently holds approximately 6,000 photographs from that period, many of which are hand-tinted. The collection runs rich in its themes and subject matter with a broad assembly of images of landscapes, architecture, religious sites, city and work-site scenes, as well as individual and group portraits of people of all ages.

The site offers a variety of methods by which to search and explore its content. The two most profitable ways to do so are via the "Defining Your Search" tab or via the "Category or Keyword" tab. "Category or Keyword" offers 77 different keywords within broader categories (e.g. "Person," "Urban Facilities," "Manners and Customs"). The keyword of "child" is also offered here and leads to 126 photographs.

"Defining Your Search" can also be useful as it allows one to enter a word that might appear in a photograph's own description. While those texts are somewhat limited, generally running just a few lines to describe a scene and not necessarily accompanying each photo, searches using this method can prove profitable.

For example, while the keywords of "toy" and "game" are not offered on the provided "Category or Keyword" page, a search within the "Defining Your Search" mode produces 52 hits for "toy" and 24 for "game." The search engine thus has a fair amount of flexibility that, with some creativity in approach, can be quite usefully employed.

One may also view each of the 14 photographers’ collections individually. The contingent of photographers whose work resides in the collection includes a majority of Japanese photographers as well as others from England, the U.S., Austria, and the Netherlands. Finally, searches can also be conducted by location, with provided listings not only in Japan but also, to a limited degree, in China, Thailand, and Singapore.

The content of the images related to children is quite useful. While some photographs are more formal in their posed composition than others, a fair number offer a view towards household scenes and daily life. Suzuki Shin-ichi’s image of a "Girl Playing with a Baby" presents a domestic image of a baby being cared for by an older girl, surrounded by a number of toys which she appears to be employing in an effort to entertain the infant (who, it would also appear, may actually have been more interested in the photographer beyond the frame). While this would appear to be a posed studio image, others can be found of children in the fields, city streets, in country schools and the like.

This collection of images can be utilized in explorations of a diverse range of themes. Students might explore the presentations of domestic ideals related to the child in posed scenes such as "A Woman Putting her Child to Bed" and the "Girl Playing with Baby" noted above, as well as others like these that can be found in the collection.

Other lines of exploration might include the elements of material culture, particularly clothing and toys, that can be seen here (see, for example, "Country Children"), as well as the photographs of game-playing and work itself – indeed, sometimes the two seem to overlap (see "Children Playing in a Flume" for fishing as fun).

Limitations to the site do exist. The descriptions often lack dates, locations, and other identifying information. The images themselves are generally small in size and limited in their clarity for powerpoint (or other) reproduction. These limitations do not hamper constructive use of the collection, however, which can be usefully mined in a student’s own survey of the material and further compared with other collections on the topic.

UNICEF—the acronym stands for United Nations Children's Fund—got its initials from its former name "United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund." It now focuses on the state of children's welfare in all countries on a permanent basis, not only in emergency situations. Accordingly, UNICEF's website is much more than just an information portal. It is an active part of UNICEF's work, providing data, involving the public, and raising awareness of important global issues affecting children.

First, the site is a mine of data on children's welfare, with portals for aggregate and country-by-country statistics on child welfare indicators regarding birth, nutrition, education, access to sanitation and disease, to name just a few. Tracking progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) is one of the centerpieces of several United Nations organizations, including UNICEF. A good summary portal is the sidebar link to ChildInfo, which highlights UNICEF's flagship publications, The State of the World's Children and Progress for Children, and also provides quick links to individual statistical indicators as well as data collection initiatives such as Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys / MICS3, household surveys in individual countries.

The site offers an excellent combination of comprehensive presentation of data, explanation of that data, and access through easily downloaded reports, data sets, and attractively presented material in multiple formats. For example, the 2009 The State of the World's Children report mentioned above offers: a download of the entire report; demographic information for the whole world as a spreadsheet document or pdf file; beautiful photographs; and individual charts and graphs. Several other studies are available in this way, through multiple links that allow a user to browse the site by interest areas and still reach all of the important information sources. The site also features a well-organized, user-friendly menu bar similar to an FAQ approach, such as "What We Do," "Why We Do It," "UNICEF People," and others. The graphics are colorful but not cluttered.

The most extraordinary aspect of the website is the extent to which children themselves are featured in photographs, videos, interviews and other media. The range of countries and issues represented is extraordinarily diverse, putting faces to child abuse programs, youth with disabilities, and many other ways in which youth are advocating for causes and helping themselves and others in concrete ways. These contributions are not poster children eliciting donations, but calls to action and testimony to individual determination and constructive effort. Voices of Youth is a section of the site where youth can gather information on the important issues, learn about UNICEF initiatives that address them, and participate in discussion forums and activities related to these causes. There are several sections here and in other places on the site for video contests, participation in leadership forums with world leaders, youth reports on local initiatives, and digital diaries, artwork displays, and the like. Teachers will find a lot of material here with which to stimulate discussion, research and create lesson material in a wide variety of disciplines.

A few examples show how the site supports UNICEF's focus on engaging children directly. The "Child-Friendly Report" Have Fun, Be Safe is about everyday safety and injury prevention, addressing standards of living involving rural cooking over open fires, congested cities where children walk and ride bikes in traffic, addressing the full range of human economic and social conditions. The document's chapters on topics such as burns, falls, traffic safety, and poisoning are available separately in five languages that include comic strips, games and illustrated text—perfect for language instruction that provides more than practice texts. The second example is the Unite for Child Survival, Radio Drama Contest, which emphasizes the wide access of radio over other media and engages children's creativity to reinforce messages about children's health and welfare. Digital Diaries on the Voices of Youth section of the UNICEF site include input from children who would otherwise be unheard and invisible, such as Yemetu youth speak out on water and sanitation.

Teachers of modern history and regional or world geography will find a wealth of primary sources on this site that can contribute to filling in a realistic picture of children's situations and the economic, public health, scientific, social, cultural, and political issues that affect them, as well as initiatives of remarkable creativity that are currently being employed to address them. There is much material to use here for comparison with earlier global development efforts, historical situations that helped create these complex challenges, and much to draw upon for engaging discussion and inviting participation.

The World Images site, a project of California State University, is designed for simplicity of use if not aesthetic elegance. It is a utilitarian database well suited to teachers, professors, or students looking for presentation images licensed for educational use on a comprehensive range of subjects including photography, painting, illustration, and material culture with global geographic representation.

The image collections are arranged as thumbnail panes on the home page, each hyperlinked to a list of portfolios that indicate how many images each contains. The site holds an archive of 72,000 images organized into 867 portfolios, and a tutorial shows how to create Community Portfolios. Users can browse the collection using keywords, artists, topics, titles, regions, or periods in quick or advanced search modes. Search results can be viewed as titles with hyperlinked acquisition numbers, as thumbnail images with titles, or as small or zoomable images with their metadata.

Categories include institutional collections in the database, faculty collections, course materials, and a collection of image portfolios correlated to required history topics in the California Educational Standards for grades 4–10. Since these curricular requirements are fairly common across the U.S., and in world history beyond the U.S., this is a valuable resource for teachers.

World Images is rich in images related to children and youth. The "People and Portraits" portfolio contains three sub-categories on children with a total of 1,094 images, some overlapping. They include Children to 1500 (234), Children 1500-2000 (544), and Children of the World (316).

The first is fairly inclusive geographically, but includes many images from Western traditions. The second is almost entirely European and American, and the third includes North and South American, African, Asian, and European children's photos and a few artworks and artifacts. Much of the third collection is the work of photographer Kathleen Cohen.

The following search terms returned images on children and youth: "children" (1000), "childhood" (80), "girl" (382), "boy" (555 items), "infant" (119), and "family" (858). The metadata provided with each image includes title, artist or maker, historical period, region or country of origin, copyright holder of the image, and/or museum holding the object. The individual object view also shows what other collections include the object, and links to other objects by the same artist or unknown generic maker from that culture. The photographs are labeled with title, year, location, and photographer, but nothing further, though some of the titles are very descriptive.

The information associated with World Images is thus limited, providing no further contextualization, nor are there links to descriptive information on museum sites where some are housed, for example. For this reason, the works of art found through this website are starting points for research about children in history rather than destinations. Some images, however interesting, remain mysterious.

Teachers wanting to illustrate already researched lectures or activities with licensed images will find this site a rich resource, especially if the lack of detailed information on the images is not a problem. Interesting objects from the collection can stimulate fruitful discoveries of available research on the web or from books and articles. For example, an image of an ancient baby bottle led to a trove of online information about infant feeding through the centuries.

Teachers can also create thematic collections that can be used for primary source investigations. A number of art images show punishment of children's misbehavior, for example, and children at play, as well as infant equipment from various times and places. These images can be used as exercises in examining primary sources as if they were "found objects" at a site or in an archive.

World History Sources at the Center for History and New Media has extensive lessons, exercises, and scholarly models for analyzing primary sources, including photographs, that could provide tools for working with the rich sources available on this website. A feature called "You be the Historian" could be adapted to interrogating the images from the World Images collections, and would reveal much about childhood by investigating questions to ask, and suggesting how to find answers.

The vast collection of the Metropolitan Museum is effectively arranged and integrated on the www.metmuseum.org website. Navigation of the site is straightforward, enabling efficient browsing or research. Although no specific essays or exhibits on children and youth are found on the site, several hundred artworks relevant to the topic can be located by searching the Collection Database or the Timeline of Art History (TOAH)—more than sites dedicated to the subject.

The Collection Database of 129,022 objects can be searched as a whole, by subject, by curatorial department, or by exhibit. The collection database search is comprehensive, and returned 3629 entries under "children." Childe Hassam is a distracter in this keyword search, but the search "Children NOT Childe" reduced the return to 319 items. "Boy" returned many distracters, but "girl" returned 954 items, and "infant" returned 252 items. "Toys" returned only 21 items, indicating a limitation of the museum's collection in that area. "Youth" returned 186 works and "young" 1741 items. The biggest drawback of the collection search was that many of the works are associated with placeholder images, although the metadata may help locate images elsewhere. As digitization of the collection proceeds, this may improve.

The TOAH is an unmatched resource for educators. The 6,000 included artworks are organized by three integrated elements: maps, timelines, and thematic essays. World and regional maps correlate artwork to eleven world eras and locate it in ten world regions. Timelines place the artworks in historical context, and include key events, political, stylistic and technological periodization. Eight hundred thematic essays provide historical context for groups of artwork and discuss characteristics, techniques, and significance. The essays reveal connections among civilizations and regions, and provide material for comparative study.

Educators searching for information on children in art can locate artworks featuring children and youth by a search of the TOAH, which seems more rewarding than the database search because all of the works are associated with images, and they are easily placed in context by TOAH's features. The searches are conveniently shown by category, so the user can bring up all relevant artworks, essays, timelines or other occurrences with one click.

A TOAH search of "children" found the term in 23 timelines, 153 thematic essays, and 396 works of art. "Figure, Child" in the Subject Index returned 21 essays and 80 works of art, each shown as a thumbnail image with titles. On the subject of childbirth, 15 artworks can be viewed. Terms such as "girl" (97 works), "boy" (9) and "young" or "youth" (4) returned artworks from across the globe and the eras.

An activity using the 97 artworks under "girl" might compare the relative age connoted by the term in various cultures and periods. Some depict small children, while others are clearly young women. A selection of western European drawings and paintings could focus on the changing definition of girlhood over time or explore symbols and objects associated with girlhood. Some of the artworks show girls in active social roles, playing sports and games, fulfilling ritual roles, or being mourned in funerary works. Some of the works are expressions of girls' work in various societies, such as needlework, preparation of trousseaus, or manual labor at home. In short, the collection can be used to gather ideas about girlhood over time and across cultures. Similar explorations about youth and boys could be made. Educators will find many ways to place childhood in historical context using this website.

The Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art offers a rich collection of images of Asian art and architecture. It is based upon the core collection created by John and Susan Huntington, professors of Asian Art History at The Ohio State University who engaged in over 35 years of field work in Asia. Nearly 300,000 images are held in the full collection, representing religious imagery and architecture (both on site and in museums) from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, China, and Japan. The historical range begins in 2500 B.C.E. and runs through the present day. Roughly 30,000 black and white images along with a limited number of color ones are accessible through an online "Digital Database Collection." Images are available in multiple sizes, with a zoom feature for more detailed views.

A variety of child-related features are presented at the Huntington site. A collection of links to "Online Exhibitions" currently offers valuable material from China, Japan, India, and Tibet. Exhibition themes include pictography and posters from China, modern art and devotional imagery from India, calligraphy and material arts from Japan, and the material icons and imagery of Tibet. While these collections do not address childhood directly, there are occasional iconographic images of children as well as domestic scenes of religious practice.

Other elements of the exhibit collections can be tied to a culture of childhood as well. For example, the exhibit "Literature in Line: Lianhuanhua Picture Stories from China" offers a collection of drawings from picture stories in popular print during the mid-20th century. One useful collection among these includes illustrations from Zhao Hongben and Qian Xiaodai's Monkey Beats the White-boned Demon (1962), based on the classic tale of Journey to the West. This story (available in an English-language translation by Arthur Waley) has been relished by both adults and children in China and continues to be presented globally as both theater and cinema.

The "Digital Database Collection" is another rich resource for the theme of Buddhism and Asian Art. It consists of nearly 30,000 images collected as documentation of Asian sites and architecture by John and Susan Huntington between the years of 1969-1984. Imagery related to the theme of childhood can be located through simple keyword searches. Images of children largely originate from India and include iconographic figures embracing a child as well as visual presentations of "Buddha life scenes." Such images could be usefully tied to textual sources, Buddhist themes, life-stages, allegory and iconography for research projects. Finally, the projects page at the site offers links and teaching resources related to art history, discussion outlines and presentations, as well as a "Visual Encyclopedia of Buddhist Iconography." Though not directly related to childhood as a major theme, these nevertheless offer valuable resources for those interested in exploring the broader context for the imagery of children and childhood.