Updates to the web resource

Last month we uploaded new content to the Find & Connect Web Resource to coincide with our annual report to the federal Department of Social Services.

During the twelve month reporting period (July 2015 – June 2016) we have created or updated 1408 entries, including 423 new entries (entries include Children’s Homes, Record holders, Records descriptions).  We glean this information through our own research, and, feedback from Care Leavers, their relatives, advocacy groups, past providers, and Find & Connect Support Services in each state and territory.

The table below shows a break down of new and updated entries across the various jurisdictions (national, states and territories):

A major highlight is a new page titled Historical Background about Child Welfare.

When you are searching for records relating to children placed in institutional ‘care’, it can be helpful to know something about how the child welfare system worked in the relevant state or territory. Every jurisdiction in Australia has its own system – with unique laws, policies, and bureaucracies.

This page provides a brief historical background about the child welfare system in each state and territory in Australia, with links to entries in Find & Connect that have more detailed information.

For more resources and fact sheets about records, see our Information about Records menu page.

Website Statistics

From July 2015 to June 2016, the Find & Connect Web Resource was accessed approximately 280,000 times; with close to a million individual page views recorded by Google analytics.

The ten most popular pages are Look for Photos; Look for Homes; the home page; Search this site; Family Tracing; Content Warning; Information about Records; Searching for Records of a Parent or Grandparent; Look for Records; and, About.

We received about 350 emails via our feedback form on the web resource. Most of the emails are from Care Leavers and their families and supporters. The graph below shows the main topics of interest:

Social Media

We use social media as way of engaging with our audience and increasing our reach.  The Find & Connect web resource blog and twitter feed are increasingly popular.

There have been 1427 ‘click throughs’ from the blog to the web resource. Nicola, Cate and I (from the web resource team) are regular contributors to the blog, and we have had 8 guest authors including Care Leavers, support service staff and historians.

We published 45 blog posts and had 10,727 views from 5,071 visitors in the reporting period.  The top 5 blog posts were:

1. Issue with Search
2. More Photographs unearthed
3. All the little travellers: the children of ‘Morningtown Ride’ (also the most commented on blog post)
4. New Principles for Access to Records
5. Let no child walk this path again…

On twitter, we have increased our followers from 255 to 380, our ‘profile visits’ (clicks on our name, @handle, or profile photo) from 700 to 1362, and our ‘tweet impressions’ (how many times a tweet showed up in people’s feeds and search results) from 54,400 mid last year, to 81,500 around the same time this year. Here are a few of our most popular tweets:

Thank You

We are grateful for all the contributions people have made, and we look forward to another year of engaging with Care Leavers and their supporters on topics that are important to them.

The Find & Connect Web Resource Team is: Antonina Lewis, Cate O’Neill, Nicola Laurent, Peter Tonoli, Rachel Tropea. Chief Investigators: Gavan McCarthy (Archives), Cathy Humphreys (Social Work), Shurlee Swain (History).