I spend a lot of my time trying to highlight the wealth of resources available through Trove – whether that’s 25,000 digitised Parliamentary Papers, 6,000 oral histories you can listen to online, or 3,471 full-page editorial cartoons from The Bulletin. Most recently I’ve been working on digitised periodicals, developing a new section for the Trove Data Guide. But as I was harvesting data about the 900 periodicals and 37,000 issues that had so far been digitised, I wondered about periodicals that were born digital – in particular, those that had been submitted to the National Library by publishers and authors through the National eDeposit Scheme (NED). It turns out, there’s a lot more than I realised.

I’ve added a new notebook to the Trove Periodicals section of the GLAM Workbench that harvests data about NED periodicals, and created a new dataset with lists of titles and issues. You can also explore the harvested data using Datasette-Lite. But here’s a quick overview.

There are at least 7,973 born-digital periodicals contributed through NED, comprising a total of 156,151 issues!

One of the 428 issues of the Palm Island Voice

What are they? Here’s the twenty titles with the most issues.

These are born-digital, so they’re not images and OCRd text like the digitised periodicals and newspapers. Most of them are PDFs as we can see from the metadata.

Not all NED periodicals can be viewed online. Publishers submitting periodicals through NED can place restrictions on access, specifying that that the publications can only be viewed on-site in a library. The three access categories are:

• Unrestricted – you can view online and download
• View Only – you can view online but not download
• Onsite Only – you can only view when onsite at the designated libraries

Fortunately, the vast majority are Unrestricted.

One of the most important things about the digitised newspaper corpus is its diversity – it’s not just the metropolitan dailies, but many local, community, political, and religious newspapers as well. While local newspapers might be dying out in their traditional form, electronic publications are popping up. Look at the titles in the list above – the Apollo Bay News, the Palm Island Voice – while current historians mine the digitised newspapers for fragments of everyday life, future historians will be grateful for what’s being captured and preserved by NED.

But wait there’s more! Since 1996, the Australian Web Archive (previously Pandora) has been capturing online periodicals. My next task is to harvest some details of these as well.