“Playing the Archive” book launch

Join the book launch and watch presentations by the editors and by respondents from the worlds of play and archives.

Child climbing in nursery playground (Photo: Phil Meetch for UCL Institute of Education)

This is the book launch for “Playing the Archive: From the Opies to the digital playground” edited by Andrew Burn, John Potter and Kate Cowan from UCL and Julia Bishop from the University of Sheffield. This book, from UCL Press, reﬂects on a major study inspired by the work of citizen scholar folklorists Iona and Peter Opie. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Opies built a vast collection of children’s street and playground games, stories, sayings, rhymes, beliefs and habits as told to them by children all over Britain. These accounts are now held in the Bodleian Libraries and were the focus and inspiration for the new study. New stories and games were gathered from today’s children, and comparisons drawn between play experiences at these two different points in time.

The book explores how the Opie Archive was made publicly available online by the project through digital images, innovative cataloguing and playful digital media interfaces. This event will be particularly useful for researchers, teachers, archivists, playworkers and play advocates.