Iona and Peter Opie's contribution to children's literature began with a volume on the origins of nursery rhymes. A nursery rhyme tells a brief and memorable surrealist story about people, animals, or familiar activities. Most nursery rhymes were not originally composed for children but were fragments of ballads or folk songs, remnants of ancient customs or rituals, simple songs from taverns, and jests or innuendoes. "The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes" contains an alphabetical listing of verses, with the earliest recorded print date, variants, pictorial examples, and notes and comments for each rhyme. Iona and Peter Opie's work included compiling school children's lore and playground rhymes in "The Lore and Language of School Children," and "The People in the Playground." In the process of producing numerous other publications, the Opies compiled a collection of 20,000 titles of children's literature. Following Peter Opie's death, the Bodleian Library in Oxford (England) purchased the Opie collection, which will be microfilmed and indexed by UMI (University Microfilms International). Iona and Peter Opie used their collection and scholarship to give the world a new way of looking at children's literature. (Contains 31 references.) (Author/SWC)