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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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,...
@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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
I had to update my sadly-neglected CV, so of course I ended up renovating the whole of my personal website at timsherratt.au. To start with, I migrated my CV from Pages to Markdown. This made it easy to integrate the CV’s content into the s...
The Trove newspapers section of the GLAM Workbench includes a number of notebooks and datasets that document the context and content of the newspaper corpus. I’ve just updated a few of these datasets:
Total number of issues per year for ea...
The recently finished Australian Historical Association conference in Adelaide included a digital history stream sponsored by the Australian Research Data Commons. I’ve listed the details of all the presentations below. I also thought it mi...
A fairly intensive period of work came to an end today as I delivered a workshop on ‘Understanding Trove’ at the Australian Historical Association’s annual conference in Adelaide. In effect, the workshop was also the launch of the Trove Dat...
The Trove Data Guide aims to help researchers understand, access, and use data from Trove. But just because it’s about ‘data’ doesn’t mean you need to be able to code. To understand Trove data and its possibilities for research, you first n...
For this part of the ARDC’s Community Data Lab project, I’ve been focusing in particular on adding a series of researcher pathways to the Trove Data Guide. These pathways link data from Trove to a variety of tools and approaches and include...
