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

Tim Sherratt

Sharing recent updates and work-in-progress

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...
17 Jul 2024

Home renovations at timsherratt.au

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...
09 Jul 2024

Updated datasets describing Trove's digitised newspapers

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...
07 Jul 2024

Digital History stream at the AHA conference

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...
01 Jul 2024

Understanding Trove at the AHA annual conference

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...
21 Jun 2024

Who is the Trove Data Guide for?

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...
18 Jun 2024

Loading locations of Trove's digitised maps into the Gazetteer of Historical Australian Placenames

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...
10 Jun 2024

Instant exhibitions with Trove and CollectionBuilder

You’ve been collecting and annotating items relating to your research project in a Trove List. You’d like to display the contents of your list as an online exhibition for others to explore. But how? One possible approach is now documented i...
03 Jun 2024

Keyword analysis of Trove newspapers with the GLAM Workbench & ATAP

There’s a new draft tutorial in the development version of the Trove Data Guide. It walks through the process of harvesting a collection of digitised newspaper articles from Trove, reshaping the harvest to create sub-collections, and then l...
02 Jun 2024

Running Mirador on GitHub Pages

I’ve just created a GitHub repository template that you can use to get your own Mirador version 3 installation running in minutes. You can also configure it to display local or remote IIIF manifests. I was thinking that it could be useful f...
26 May 2024

Commonwealth Hansard XML repository updates

Hey Australian Hansard fans, I’ve done a complete reharvest of all of the Commonwealth Hansard XML files from 1901 to 1980 from ParlInfo. There’s been lots of improvements/corrections, and most of the file names have changed (they now have ...
24 May 2024

More tools for harvesting Trove newspaper articles

I’ve just added a couple of new notebooks to the Trove Newspaper & Gazette Harvester section of the GLAM Workbench. Using the Trove Harvester as a Python package provides a basic example of using the trove-newspaper-harvester Python package...
21 May 2024

Trove to Tropy via IIIF – documenting data pathways in the Trove Data Guide

Last week I added a notebook to the GLAM Workbench that saves a collection of images from Trove as an IIIF manifest. This week I’ve written a tutorial that shows how you can use the notebook to load the collection data in Tropy – a desktop ...
16 May 2024

Using IIIF to explore Trove's digitised images

I’ve just added a new notebook to the Trove images section of the GLAM Workbench. It helps you save a collection of digitised images as an IIIF manifest. But what does that mean? It means the notebook packages up all the metadata describing...
07 May 2024

Using Pandora's collection of archived websites

There’s a brand new section of the GLAM Workbench to help you use data from Pandora’s collection of archived websites. What’s Pandora? Pandora is an initiative of the National Library of Australia which has been selecting web sites and onli...