Tim Sherratt

Sharing recent updates and work-in-progress

Nov 2020

Beyond the copyright cliff of death

If you’ve done any searching in Trove’s digitised newspapers, you’ve probably noticed that there aren’t many results after 1954. This is basically because of copyright restrictions (though given the complexities of Australia’s copyright system, you can’t be sure that everything published before 1955 is out of copyright). We can visualise the impact of this by looking at the number of newspaper articles in Trove by year.

You can see why I started referring to it as the copyright cliff of death.

But you can also see a little trickle of articles continuing post-1954. The number of newspapers from beyond the copyright cliff of death continues to increase as agreements are made with publishers to put them online. I just checked and there’s now 83 newspapers that have at least some post-1954 articles available. Here’s the top 10 (by number of articles).

If you’d like to browse the full list of post-1954 newspapers, here’s the data as a CSV (spreadsheet) file.

If you’d like to see how I generated this list, have a look at this notebook in the Trove Newspapers section of the GLAM Workbench.

If you’d like to know how I created the chart above, have a look at Visualise the total number of newspaper articles in Trove by year and state. #dhhacks

Questions? Ask away at OzGLAM Help. #dhhacks