In the summer of 2002 work on a bibliography of children and adolescents’ publications dating to the Qajar and Pahlavi eras began with selecting publications, identifying libraries’ collections and designing publication information extraction and identification forms.
The framework for identifying and collecting information was extracting all information about children and adolescents with emphasis on subjects such as art and culture, education, children’s rights, hygiene, labor, clothing, hobbies and games and tens of other subjects. Work first began on publications from 1920-1960 and 1960-1978 and then from the constitutional era to 1920. Topics were divided into “for children and adolescents” and “about children and adolescents.”
Researchers gathered information from publications, newspapers and Yearbooks as reference and secondary sources to fulfill the information needs of the research group writing the “History of Children’s Literature,” series. Later, this data was used to create Iran’s Information Center for Children’s Culture and Literature (Iranak). Our research not only discovered information in children’s magazines, but also from the pages devoted to children in adult periodicals.
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An example of articles in the Pars Azarbaksh information bank software
After a training workshop, the research group began its work with 22 dedicated students in the summer of 2002. Work began in Ahwaz, Isfahan, Tabriz and Shiraz simultaneously. We found 683 publications in Tehran and other cities. This bibliography of articles included descriptive and analytic information and article abstracts, reports, interviews, stories and poems. Photographs, news, and advertisements were also gathered. Our research has produced thousands of pages of information about children’s lives and literature and our work continues as we add new information to the databank.