Tim Sherratt

Sharing recent updates and work-in-progress

glamworkbench

27 Feb 2024

New GLAM Workbench section for working with government publications in Trove

The GLAM Workbench has a brand new section aimed at helping you find and use government publications in Trove. Most of the GLAM Workbench’s existing sections focus on a particular resource format, or are related to one of Trove’s top-level ...
16 Feb 2024

Digital history stream at AHA annual conference in July

This year the annual conference of the Australian Historical Association will include a digital history stream, sponsored by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), and convened by me! The call for papers is available here or through t...
13 Feb 2024

Some recent presentations on the GLAM Workbench and Trove Data Guide

Last week I attended the ARDC Workshop on Repositories & Workspaces where I gave a quick intro to the GLAM Workbench and the Community Data Lab. Then it was off to the ARDC HASS&I Research Data Commons Summer School where I explored some of...
30 Jan 2024

Exploring Trove’s digitised periodicals

While Trove’s digitised newspapers get all the attention, there are many other digitised periodicals to explore. But it’s not easy to find them from the Trove web interface – unlike the newspapers, there’s no list of digitised titles. So to...
15 Jan 2024

The Trove Newspaper Data Dashboard now has an archive!

Since July 2022 I’ve been generating weekly snapshots of the contents of the Trove newspaper corpus. Every Sunday a new version of the Trove Newspaper Data Dashboard is created, highlighting what’s changed over the previous week, and visual...
12 Jan 2024

Customising Datasette-Lite to explore datasets in the GLAM Workbench

As well as tools and code, the GLAM Workbench includes a number of pre-harvested datasets for researchers to play with. But just including a link to a CSV file in GitHub or Zenodo isn’t very useful – it doesn’t help researchers understand w...
04 Jan 2024

What’s going on?

The hardest part of developing tools and resources like the GLAM Workbench is getting information about them to the people who might benefit. The collapse of Twitter has only added to the difficulty, as has the reluctance of GLAM organisati...
04 Jan 2024

Exploring oral histories in Trove

The National Library of Australia holds over 55,000 hours of oral history and folklore recordings dating back to the 1950s. This collection is being made available online, and many recordings can now be listened to using Trove’s audio playe...
03 Jan 2024

Mapping MARC Geographic Area codes to Wikidata

Trove uses codes from the MARC Geographic Areas list to identify locations in metadata records. I couldn’t find any mappings of these codes to other sources of geospatial information, so I fired up OpenRefine and reconciled the geographic a...
03 Jan 2024

National Archives of Australia in 2023 – digitisation of files

In 2023 the National Archives of Australia digitised 416,602 files (down from 575,597 in 2022). This chart shows the number of files digitised per day in 2023. These files were drawn from 1,423 different series, but the vast bulk (81%) were...
02 Jan 2024

Trove newspapers in 2023

I’ve been capturing weekly snapshots of the Trove newspaper corpus for the last couple of years. You can see the latest results in the Trove Newspaper Data Dashboard. Using this data I’ve compiled a quick summary of changes over the last ye...
15 Sep 2023

Trove Data Guide update – accessing data from newspapers and gazettes

I’m continuing to slog away at the Trove Data Guide (part of the ARDC’s HASS Community Data Lab) – dumping everything I know about Trove into a format that I hope will be useful for researchers. I’ve just finished a first pass through the s...
31 Aug 2023

Some important updates for the Trove Newspaper & Gazette Harvester

Version 3 of the Trove API is out, and version 2 is scheduled to be decommissioned in early 2023 – that means I have a lot of code to update! First cab of the rank is the Trove Newspaper & Gazette Harvester with version 0.7.1 now available....
31 Aug 2023

Run GLAM Workbench notebooks on the ARDC’s new Binder service

There are a number of different ways to run the Jupyter notebooks in the GLAM Workbench depending on your needs and technical skills. But the easiest and quickest has always been the public, international Binder service, based in Europe. On...
26 Aug 2023

Trove Query Parser updated!

I’ve just updated the Trove Query Parser to work with version 3 of the Trove API. You just give it the url of a search in Trove’s newspapers, and it translates the search into a set of parameters that the API will understand. So this: parse...
18 Aug 2023

Family history resources in the GLAM Workbench

It’s Family History Month, so I thought a brief post was in order describing some of the family history related resources in the GLAM Workbench. GLAM Name Index Search This is the biggie (in more ways than one). I’ve brought 263 datasets fr...
08 Aug 2023

Exploring the front pages of newspapers (10 years on)

Way back in 2012, I used the brand new Trove API to download the details of 4 million articles published on the front pages of newspapers. I did it for two reasons: first, I wanted to see how the content of front pages changed over time; an...
18 Jul 2023

Trove API Console updates

The Trove API Console provides examples of the Trove API in action that you can run, edit, and share. It’s been online for 9 years now, and I’ve just updated it to use version 3 of the Trove API by default. I’ve also added a new ‘Share’ but...
08 May 2023

Updated harvest of NSW State Archives indexes – more than 2 million rows of data!

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 acces...
24 Mar 2023

A big milestone, Trove contributor data, and the coming of API v3 – recent GLAM Workbench updates

There have been quite a few GLAM Workbench updates over the last month, here’s some notes. (See February’s update for more recent changes…) General developments After many months of work, all thirteen Trove repositories within the GLAM Wor...
17 Feb 2023

Maps, people, lists & more – recent updates to Trove resources in the GLAM Workbench

Once again I’ve gotten a bit behind in noting GLAM Workbench updates, so here’s a quick catch up on some Trove-related changes from the last couple of months. Trove API introduction The section that introduces the Trove API (or APIs!) hasn’...
10 Dec 2022

Recent presentations – Library of Congress Data Jam, Everyday Heritage, Wikidata, and GLAM Workbench!

October and November brought a flurry of presentations from which I’m still recovering. Here’s a few details and links. Library of Congress Data Jam In October, the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud project at the Library of Congress...
22 Sep 2022

Do you want your Trove newspaper articles in bulk? Meet the new Trove Newspaper Harvester Python package!

The Trove Newspaper Harvester has been around in different forms for more than a decade. It helps you download all the articles in a Trove newspaper search, opening up new possibilities for large-scale analysis. You can use it as a command-...
15 Sep 2022

From 48 PDFs to one searchable database – opening up the Tasmanian Post Office Directories with the GLAM Workbench

A few weeks ago I created a new search interface to the NSW Post Office Directories from 1886 to 1950. Since then, I’ve used the same process on the Sydney Telephone Directories from 1926 to 1954. Both of these publications had been digitis...
05 Sep 2022

Fresh harvest of OCRd text from Trove's digitised periodicals – 9gb of text to explore and analyse!

I’ve updated the GLAM Workbench’s harvest of OCRd text from Trove’s digitised periodicals. This is a completely fresh harvest, so should include any corrections made in recent months. It includes: 1,430 periodicals OCRd text from 41,645 is...