The nursery rhymes were selected on the basis of familiarity and frequency of use in contemporary collections. Jane created a control process for this in collaboration with Alex so that each rhyme was coded for retrieval purposes. At the same time we were eager to include a sampling of different types from the chapbook collections such as Who Killed Cock Robin to the riddle rhymes such as Humpty Dumpty and As I Was Going to St. Ives. We also searched for songs, games, street cries, and political taunts. Once the list was compiled, we began the process of copying the rhymes into files for use in the site. We made a decision to use at least two sources for the rhymes although, in most instances, we did use as many as four of the primary sources listed below:

Baring-Gould, Sabine. A Book of Nursery Songs and Rhymes. Illus. by Members of the Birmingham Art School under the direction of A. J. Gaskin. London, England: Methuen, 1895.

Baring-Gould, William S. and Cecil Baring-Gould, Eds. The Annotated Mother Goose: Nursery Rhymes Old and New. New York: Bramhall House, 1962.

Halliwell, James Orchard, Comp. Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England. London, England: Frederick Warne and Co., 1853.

Lang, Andrew, Ed. The Nursery Rhyme Book. Illus. by L. Leslie Brooke. London, England: Frederick Warne and Co., 1897.

Opie, Iona and Peter Opie, Comps. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1951.

The actual text was copied with spacing, capitalization, and punctuation adhered to in the process. In order to account for spacing, we used a simple convention of "three-space" indentation. It was interesting to note that most of the rhymes differed primarily in these characteristics rather than in the actual words. Of course, many did alter words and even omitted some portions of a given rhyme.

Each version was copied, followed by the bibliographical citation for the work used and the page and number assigned that rhyme in the sourcebook. We compiled the printed versions of the completed fifty in a notebook for quick access as well as making them available to team members on disk.

In some cases we did include versions from other sources because they represented a specific viewpoint or fracturing of the rhyme. In these instances, we included the additional source.