More than 6 million rows of data from Public Record Office Victoria added to the GLAM Name Index Search
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 Australian GLAM organisations. With a single search, you can find information about individuals across millions of rows of data.
Previous versions of the GLAM Name Index Search included a few datasets from the Public Record Office Victoria that had been shared through government open data portals. However, as I was exploring PROV’s public API recently, I realised that there were many more records that included people’s names.
People’s names appear in a number of different fields in the PROV data – including family_name, description.name, and sams.description.name_of_person. They can also be attached to either ‘items’ or ‘images’. ‘Items’ are individual records, such as files, while ‘images’ relate metadata to a page from a digitised item. This means that an image record can tell you that a person is mentioned on a specific page. Both item and image records can point you to useful information.
By using the API to search for records with values in one of the possible name fields, I compiled a list of series that contain items or images that include people’s names in their metadata.
| series_id | series_title | record_category | number_of_records |
|---|---|---|---|
| 28 | Probate and Administration Files | Item | 2,578,652 |
| 948 | Outward Passengers to Interstate, U.K. and Foreign Ports (Refer to Microfilm Copy VPRS 3506) | Image | 1,661,181 |
| 947 | Inward Overseas Passenger Lists (see Microfiche Copies: VPRS 7666 United Kingdom Ports; VPRS 7667 Foreign Ports; VPRS 13439 New Zealand Ports) | Image | 1,608,515 |
| 7591 | Wills | Item | 933,110 |
| 17379 | Probate and Administration Files (CourtView) | Item | 294,882 |
| 24 | Inquest Deposition Files | Item | 216,768 |
| 14 | Register of Assisted Immigrants from the United Kingdom [refer to microform copy, VPRS 3502] | Image | 173,167 |
| 5357 | Land Selection And Correspondence Files | Item | 136,782 |
| 10010 | Body Cards | Item | 109,968 |
| 4527 | Ward Register (known as Children’s Registers 1864 - 1887) | Image | 55,429 |
| 13579 | Teacher Record Books | Image | 49,106 |
| 515 | Central Register of Male Prisoners | Image | 44,285 |
| 5714 | Land Selection Files, Section 12 Closer Settlement Act 1938 [including obsolete and top numbered Closer Settlement and WW1 Discharged Soldier Settlement files] | Image | 7,721 |
| 516 | Central Register of Female Prisoners | Image | 6,782 |
| 7933 | Non-Issued Probate Applications | Item | 3,301 |
| 5357 | Land Selection And Correspondence Files | Image | 644 |
| 7592 | Wills and Probate and Administration Files | Item | 606 |
| 18110 | Clinical Notes and Patient Files (Receiving House) | Item | 391 |
| 79 | Articles of Clerkship Files | Item | 374 |
| 266 | Inward Registered Correspondence | Item | 275 |
I then looped through each series in this list, saving details of each item or image. Finally, to prepare the data from the GLAM Name Index Search, I excluded some fields that weren’t useful and converted the data files into CSV format. All the details are in a notebook that I’ll add to the GLAM Workbench in coming weeks.
The result is that the GLAM Name Index Search now includes 20 datasets from the Public Record Office Victoria, containing 6,645,269 rows of data! All together, the GLAM Name Index Search includes around 13 million records, so almost half are from PROV.