Files digitised by the National Archives of Australia in 2024
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 completion of the NAA’s five year project to digitise Second World War service records. Thanks to $10 million in government funding, the NAA has digitised more than a million service records since 2019. In 2023, 81% of records digitised were from series containing service records. This has dropped to around 40% in 2024. Here’s the total number of files digitised per year since February 2021.
The files digitised in 2024 came from 1,439 different series. Here’s the top twenty series by number of items digitised in 2024. You’ll see that as well as war records, many photos, patents, and immigration records were digitised.
| series | series_title | total |
|---|---|---|
| A9301 | RAAF Personnel files of Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) and other ranks, 1921-1948 | 56,635 |
| B883 | Second Australian Imperial Force Personnel Dossiers, 1939-1947 | 39,163 |
| A6135 | Photographic colour transparencies positives, daily single number series with ‘K’ [Colour Transparencies] prefix | 15,569 |
| A13150 | Specifications, examiners reports and correspondence relating to the Registration of Victorian Patents - Second system | 13,519 |
| A714 | Books of duplicate certificates of naturalization A(1)[Individual person] series | 13,384 |
| A1500 | Photographic colour transparencies [positives], single number series with ‘K’ [Colour] prefix | 11,533 |
| A7109 | “Dead” card index of Registered Aliens | 10,618 |
| A705 | Correspondence files, multiple number (Melbourne) series (Primary numbers 1-323) | 9,568 |
| A13149 | Applications for Registration of Victorian Patents - Second system | 8,843 |
| A9300 | RAAF Officers Personnel files, 1921-1948 | 6,371 |
| D3481 | Photographs (black and white, colour) of buildings, installations, sites, etc | 5,054 |
| A11708 | Applications for Registration of Queensland Trade Marks | 4,159 |
| SP388/1 | Personal documents of British Assisted Migrants | 3,395 |
| D879 | Duplicates of negatives, annual single number series with D prefix (and progressive alpha infix A - K from 1948-1957) | 3,253 |
| B6286 | Telstra Historical Collection | 2,955 |
| D1423 | Original plans (negatives), single number series with alpha prefix denoting discipline | 2,616 |
| D1989 | Application forms, medical examination documents and related papers of British and Foreign Immigrants (including Ex Service) in receipt of free and assisted passages, chronological order of ship arrival. | 2,403 |
| D1901 | Loveday Internment Camp internees files, single number series with variable alpha prefix | 2,305 |
| PP9/5 | Medical examination forms (form 47A) for non-British migrants, single number series | 2,250 |
| A6510 | Classified prints of photographs relating mainly to Papua and New Guinea | 2,242 |
This data was compiled from weekly harvests of RecordSearch’s list of recently digitised files. These weekly harvests are saved in the naa-recently-digitised GitHub repository. The harvesting method is documented in the GLAM Workbench.
I’ve also compiled these weekly harvests into annual datasets published through Zenodo. 