Tim Sherratt - Sharing recent updates and work-in-progress

Tim Sherratt

Sharing recent updates and work-in-progress

11 Apr 2025

Update on Trove data access and my suspended API keys

On 21 February, my Trove API keys were cancelled without warning. A week later, I met with NLA staff and was shocked to be told that downloading ‘content’, such as the text of digitised newspaper articles, was regarded as a breach of the AP...
10 Apr 2025

Using the Public Record Office Victoria's API to build an overview of their collection

Over the past few weeks I’ve been exploring the Public Record Office Victoria’s public API. There’s not a lot of documentation, but there is a lot of data! What’s not immediately obvious is that the API includes information about a variety ...
09 Apr 2025

More than 6 million rows of data from Public Record Office Victoria added to the GLAM Name Index Search

The GLAM Name Index Search now includes more than 6 million rows of data from the Public Record Office Victoria, downloaded using their public API. The GLAM Name Index Search brings together records that include the names of people from 10 ...
09 Apr 2025

Introducing PROVBot – sharing photos from Public Record Office Victoria

With poor old TroveNewsBot killed by the NLA, my Mastodon feed has had less GLAM goodness of late. To try and fill the void I’ve created PROVBot, sharing photos from the Public Record Office Victoria. PROVBot makes use of the Public Record ...
02 Mar 2025

Trove API users beware! – the latest in the saga of my cancelled API keys

After my Trove API keys were cancelled without warning on 21 February, I reluctantly agreed to a meeting with the National Library of Australia. They had provided so little information in their emails, that it seemed to be the only way to f...
24 Feb 2025

15 years of work on Trove threatened by the NLA

See my latest post for an update! On Friday, without warning, I received an email from the National Library of Australia informing me that my Trove API keys had been suspended. This threatens the future of 15 years of work helping people us...
20 Feb 2025

The Primary Source – GLAM collection news and help

I’ve created a new site (or in fact, renovated an old site) to aggregate news from GLAM collections (that’s galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) and help researchers using those collections. It’s called The Primary Source which is a...
20 Feb 2025

National Archives of Australia Digitisation Dashboard

Since March 2021, I’ve been harvesting details of newly-digitised files in the National Archives of Australia to help document long-term changes to online access. A few weeks ago, I summarised the data from 2024, and published annual compil...
19 Feb 2025

Search the content of periodicals uploaded to Trove through the National eDeposit service

I’ve added a notebook to the GLAM Workbench that walks through the steps involved in creating a fully searchable database of content extracted from a periodical uploaded to Trove through the National eDeposit service (NED). Why is this need...
05 Feb 2025

Ten years of data! The files you're not allowed to see in the National Archives of Australia

I’ve created a new dataset containing 10 years of data that can be used to explore the workings of the National Archives of Australia’s access examination system. Australian government records become available for public access after 20 yea...
31 Jan 2025

A Community Data Lab (CDL) wishlist

The ARDC is holding an event on 18 February to begin shaping the next phase of the Community Data Lab. If you’re interested in the development of digital tools and resources to support HASS research, I’d suggest you go along. I worked on th...
27 Jan 2025

Files digitised by the National Archives of Australia in 2024

In 2024, the National Archives of Australia digitised 254,953 files (down from 416,602 in 2023). This chart shows the number of files digitised per day in 2024. The decrease in the total number of files digitised is probably related to the ...
17 Jan 2025

Changes to Trove newspapers in 2024

Every Sunday I harvest information about the number of digitised newspaper articles in Trove. You can view the current results in the Trove Data Dashboard. By compiling all the data from 2024, you can find out what changed last year. 6,241,...
12 Dec 2024

@trovenewsbot has a new home

@trovenewsbot has been around for more than eleven years now – originally sharing Trove newspaper articles on Twitter, and now on the Fediverse. But with the imminent closure of the botsin.space Mastodon instance, I’ve had to find it a new ...
21 Nov 2024

Six more volumes added to the searchable database of Tasmanian Post Office Directories!

A couple of months ago I realised my big, searchable database of Tasmanian Post Office Directories was missing the volume from 1920. It took a bit of work to add it in, as described in this post. Unfortunately, I’d barely finished when I re...
26 Sep 2024

Where's 1920? Missing volume added to Tasmanian Post Office Directories!

Visualisation is a great way to find problems in your data. As part of the Everyday Heritage project, I’m working with a team to document the lives of Tasmania’s Chinese residents in the 19th and early 20th centuries. We’re using a variety ...
23 Sep 2024

Major update for the Trove Newspapers section of the GLAM Workbench

The Trove newspapers section of the GLAM Workbench was updated last week. Over the last year I’ve been gradually updating notebooks to use version 3 of the Trove API, but when version 2 suddenly disappeared a couple of weeks ago I had to hu...
20 Sep 2024

Preserving the history of online collections (my love letter to future historians)

It’s pretty obvious that access to digitised resources, like Trove’s newspapers, has changed the practice of history in Australia. But how? I’m certain that the historiographical implications of the growth and development of online collecti...
19 Sep 2024

Saving Trove's digitised periodicals as PDFs

I was recently contacted by a researcher who wanted to be able to automatically download the issues of a digitised periodical in Trove as PDFs. There was already a notebook in the GLAM Workbench that downloads the issues of a digitised news...
29 Aug 2024

The future (and past) of Historic Hansard

Don’t panic! Historic Hansard is not closing down – on the contrary, I’m planning a major update in the next few months. But as I look to the future, I thought it was a good time to pull together a few threads documenting my adventures with...
27 Aug 2024

Join the Research Data Alliance's new Collections as Data Interest Group!

If you’re interested in opening up GLAM collections for use in research, you might like to join the new Collections as Data Interest Group, part of the Research Data Alliance. According to the group description: This group is aimed at coll...
26 Aug 2024

More datasets added to GLAM Name Index Search – now almost 12 million rows of data!

The GLAM Name Index Search brings datasets from 10 Australian GLAM organisations together into a single search interface. All these datasets index collections by people’s names, so with one search you can find information about individuals ...
22 Aug 2024

New Zotero translators for PROV and Queensland State Archives

Good news for Australian archives users – you can now use Zotero to capture item details and digitised files from the collections of the Public Record Office Victoria and the Queensland State Archives! What is Zotero? According to the Zoter...
16 Aug 2024

Explore Trove's digitised maps

Trove contains thousands of digitised maps from the collections of the National Library of Australia, but they’re not always easy to find because of the way they’re arranged and described. To help you explore these maps I’ve created a new d...
19 Jul 2024

Share your spreadsheet as a searchable online database using Datasette-Lite

HASS researchers often compile data in spreadsheets. Sometimes they want to ‘publish’ this data online in a form that encourages others to use and explore – but how? I’ve just added a simple tool to the GLAM Workbench that helps you constru...