I’ve been on a bit of a self-archiving binge lately. It started because I needed to cut back some of my web hosting costs, and was looking at ways of bringing together a group of separately hosted Heroku apps onto a single Digital Ocean dro...
In 2012, I was lucky enough to be awarded a Harold White Fellowship by the National Library of Australia. I used my time to explore ways of using Trove’s digitised newspapers as data, and presented my work at a public lecture in May 2012. I...
The socials recently alerted me to an interesting article by Dominique Carlon, Jean Burgess, and Kateryna Kasianenko on the history of community-created Twitter bots. The article explores bot-making within the context of Twitter’s rise and ...
It’s International Archives Week and I’m feeling a bit crook after being double-vaxxed yesterday, so instead of doing something productive, I’m just going to make a list of potentially handy archives-related resources from the Wonderful Wor...
A few years ago, I harvested the details of tweets that included links to Trove. The data has just been sitting on my computer, so I thought I should package it up and share, in case it’s of use to anyone.
The story is that back in 2021, I ...
This is a preprint of my contribution to the publication ‘Building User-Friendly Toolkits and Platforms for Digital Humanities’. It provides a brief overview of the GLAM Workbench. I had to leave a lot out, but hopefully it provides a usefu...
A couple of weeks ago I bid farewell to Trove due to the cancellation of my API keys and the NLA’s lack of transparency around changes to API access. Now it seems I have to wave goodbye to 16+ years of work on RecordSearch, the National Arc...
Over the last few months I’ve been grappling with the cancellation of my Trove API keys by the National Library of Australia. It may seem like a minor technical hiccup from the outside, but it’s had a major personal impact. For the sake of ...
Last week the State Library of Victoria launched SLV LAB, a prototyping and innovation lab that ‘experiment[s] with technology to open access to collections, data and spaces’. The SLV LAB encourages collaboration, and is sharing code, datas...
There’s a brand new GLAM Workbench section to help you work with data from the Public Record Office Victoria!
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been poking around in the PROV’s collection API. The API provides data about PROV’s archival ...
I’ve just updated my introduction to using Jupyter notebooks in the GLAM Workbench so that it runs in Jupyter Lite – that means no more waiting for cloud services to spin up, it all happens in your browser!
All the Jupyter notebooks in GLAM...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
