The NSW State Archives (now part of Museums of History NSW) publishes a series of useful indexes to its collections. The indexes include basic data transcribed from the records, such as names, dates, and places, providing fine-grained access to the collections. But when they’re explored as data, the indexes also suggest new ways of analysing, visualising, and linking sets of records. (For some of the possibilities and challenges of using this sort of data see Missing Links: Data Stories from the Archive of British Settler Colonial Citizenship).

In 2016, I started harvesting the index data from the NSW State Archives website to make each dataset available as an easily downloadable CSV file. In 2019, changes to the website made it impossible to access the complete indexes, so I was unable to update the CSV files. Fortunately the website has changed again, and I’ve been able to reharvest all the indexes, capturing any changes since 2019. There are currently 75 indexes containing 2,481,881 rows of data.

The list below is also available as a CSV file. The complete repository of CSV files is available on GitHub, and the methods used to harvest the data are documented in the GLAM Workbench.

But what’s in all these wonderfully-rich datasets? You can find out using the Index Explorer in the GLAM Workbench. Just select an index from the dropdown list, and the Index Explorer will analyse every column, summarising the contents and building visualisations to help you understand the range of values.

Data from the NSW State Archives Indexes is also included in the GLAM Name Index Search, which helps you find people in 263 different indexes from 10 Australian GLAM organisations.