The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has compiled a large collection of speeches, interviews, press releases etc by Australian prime ministers and made them available through the PM Transcripts site. You can search through the transcripts, and download the underlying XML files using a simple API.
Back in 2016 (and again in 2019), I downloaded all the XML-formatted transcript files and shared them through a GitHub repository to make it easier for researchers to use the collection as a whole.
The boundaries of electorates change over time through redistribution, so they have both a historical and spatial dimension. I’ve never been able to track down a complete set of historical federal electorate boundaries. Perhaps it’s out there somewhere and I’ve just been looking in the wrong places.
However, as I noted in a previous post, I’ve been poking around in the Parliamentary Handbook recently, and noticed that its electorate pages include an option to view maps of the boundaries as they changed over time through redistribution – all the historical versions seemed to be in there!
I’m doing some work at the moment for the RAPID-CDL project, documenting the context of Commonwealth Hansard. As a result I’ve been poking around in various sources of related data, such as the Parliamentary Handbook and Wikidata. I was surprised how much data was now available in the Parliamentary Handbook – not just about parliamentarians, but about parties, elections, electorates, and more. It’s a really rich source for understanding how the composition of the Australian parliament has changed over time.
A few years ago I posted about some of my family history related resources, but things have changed a bit since then so I thought it was time for a Family History Month update.
GLAM Name Index Search The GLAM Name Index Search brings 293 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 across a broad range of records, locations, and periods.
I’ve created a userscript that expands the options available in the ‘Download’ panel of Trove’s newspaper interface. Using it, you can download full newspaper article and page images with one click.
PLEASE NOTE
While this userscript is very handy, it is also very slow to run. Don’t be surprised if it takes 30 seconds or more to prepare your image. During this time the Trove page might appear to freeze.
The Trove Data Guide was released in June 2024, but I always imagined it as a living resource that would continue to expand and develop. I was working on new sections about maps and images when, in February 2025, the NLA cancelled my API access and work ground to a halt. I haven’t been able to make any significant updates since then.
The Trove Data Guide is built using Jupyter Book and the contents are contained in Jupyter notebooks.
It can be pretty hard working on your own most of the time – unsure if what you’re doing is of any value or use. As I said in my keynote at the GLAM Labs Futures conference in Edinburgh recently:
the first half of last year was pretty bleak, and left me wondering whether I should just walk away from all of it – go bushwalking, catch up on gardening, perhaps just be a historian again.
On 24 June I gave a ‘Hacking the archive’ workshop at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh. The workshop was organised by the EFI, the National Library of Scotland, and the IIPC. It preceded the GLAM Labs Futures conference, also held at the EFI.
The workshop was an expanded version of the ‘hacking the library’ session I ran for the State Library of Victoria’s Code Club in September last year.
What’s actually in the National Archives of Australia? And how much of that has been described, digitised, or opened to the public? I’ve made a few attempts at answering these questions over the years by harvesting summary statistics about every series in RecordSearch. I’ve now saved all this data in Zenodo. The dataset description reads:
This dataset contains information and statistics describing record series held by the National Archives of Australia (NAA).
Way back in 2009, I was working in the web content team at the National Archives of Australia (NAA). We’d been doing some pretty interesting work on projects like Mapping Our Anzacs, that brought together map-based finding aids and crowdsourced contributions. So when the NAA was asked to report on ‘emerging technologies for access’ by the Standards for Public Access Working Group of the Council of Australasian Archives and Records Authorities (CAARA) the job ended up with me.
Keynote presented to the GLAM Labs Futures conference, Edinburgh, 26 June 2026. View the full set of slides.
In 2012, I was lucky enough to be a Harold White Fellow at the National Library of Australia, working with data from digitised newspapers available through the Library’s innovative online service, Trove. I think it was the first time one of the fellowships had been awarded to a digital project.
I’d been playing around with Trove data for a couple of years, and had created tools to harvest and visualise searches in the digitised newspapers.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to protect my tools and resources from the relentless onslaught of AI scraper bots. I’ve documented much of the process here in case it’s of use to others (and to remind myself when I inevitably forget what I’ve done).
Over the years, I’ve often made use of cloud services such as Heroku and Google Cloudrun to share my odd assortment of tools and experiments.
While I was in Melbourne during my time as Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the State Library of Victorian LAB, I had a conversation with Paula Bray for the LAB’s podcast series. Paula is the SLV’s Chief Digital Officer, and has long championed the importance of digital innovation in the GLAM sector. It was fun to chat about stuff that I’ve been doing for the last 30 years, any why openness and generosity is important in working with GLAM collections.
The Zotero translator for Libraries Tasmania has been updated, fixing a problem with attaching images of digitised resources. The fix is in the main Zotero repository now, so it should find its way to your computer automatically.
I created the first version of the Libraries Tasmania translator back in 2022 – this post describes what it does. It works across all three sections of the catalogue, including the archives, and names index.
I’m in the process of tying up all the documentation relating to my time as Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the State Library of Victoria LAB. But as I was looking through the list of outputs, I realised I’d never written anything about the interface I created to explore georeferenced maps from the SLV collection.
I also remembered that there were a few improvements I wanted to make to the interface. So instead of spending a few hours writing up a blog post, I’ve spent several days completely overhauling the Georeferenced Maps Explorer.
‘What can I find out about my house?' My work as Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the SLV LAB was inspired by questions like this that librarians at the SLV hear every day. I wanted to explore how the Library’s place-based collections could be used to provide new entry points for discovery and navigation – entry points based not on words, but locations.
At the end of my residency, I pulled all the different collections I’d been working with into a single interface – my place.
Concerned about the loss of built heritage in the 1970s, the Committee for Urban Action photographed streetscapes across urban and regional Victoria. They compiled a remarkable collection of photographs that is now being digitised by the State Library of Victoria. More than 20,000 images are already available online!
The CUA worked systematically, capturing photos street by street, and recording the locations of each set of photographs. This information is used to prepare the title attached to each photo as it’s uploaded to the SLV catalogue.
My 2025 started badly and ended well. In the first few months of the year, battles with the gatekeepers at Trove sent me spiralling into a pretty dark place. But by year’s end I was having fun, working with the wonderful people at the State Library of Victoria. In between I caught up on some overdue project maintenance. Most of this is documented in the 37 blog posts I wrote this year, but here’s a quick summary.
Newspapers are a vital source for local history. That’s why, back in 2014, I created the Trove Places app – a map interface to help people find Trove’s digitised newspapers by their place of publication or distribution. Trove Places has proved very popular, and the State Libraries of South Australia, and Victoria, amongst others, point their users to it to help with their research. I’ve updated the data several times over the years, though the Trove’s new gatekeeping regime will make future updates difficult.
This was the introduction to my talk on the results of my time as Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the State Library of Victoria. My slides, with my full notes are available online, but after a very strange year that has travelled from disappointment to exhilaration, I thought it was worth posting these words separately.
The work that I do, that I’ve been doing for the past 30 years, is focused on helping people find, use, and understand the wonderfully rich collections held by our libraries, archives, and museums – the GLAM sector.