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While standards for out-of-home care in Australia and other countries emphasise the need to put the physical, emotional, spiritual and social health and wellbeing of children and young people at the centre of service provision, they are being implemented on archival and recordkeeping infrastructure built for previous eras of child protection and welfare. These regimes have been found to foster poor quality recordkeeping, and be incapable of supporting childhood development outcomes. They exclude children and young people from participation in decision-making about their records and continue that exclusion throughout adulthood. Through my Connecting the Disconnected Future Fellowship I have established the Archives and the Rights of the Child research program to tackle this challenge. It involves the development of a participatory recordkeeping design methodology and the modelling of rights based systems to deliver sustainable, dynamic, and integrated archival and recordkeeping infrastructure.