Tim Sherratt

Sharing recent updates and work-in-progress

glamworkbench

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...
05 Sep 2022

Explore Trove's digitised newspapers by place

I’ve updated my map displaying places where Trove digitised newspapers were published or distributed. You can view all the places on single map – zoom in for more markers, and click on a marker for title details and a link back to Trove. If...
01 Sep 2022

Making NSW Postal Directories (and other digitised directories) easier to search with the GLAM Workbench and Datasette

As part of my work on the Everyday Heritage project I’m looking at how we can make better use of digitised collections to explore the everyday experiences woven around places such as Parramatta Road in Sydney. For example, the NSW Postal Di...
29 Aug 2022

Interested in Victorian shipwrecks? Kim Doyle and Mitchell Harrop have added a new notebook to the Heritage Council of Victoria section of the GLAM Workbench exploring shipwrecks in the Victorian Heritage Database: glam-workbench.net/heritage-…

29 Aug 2022

Updates!

25 Aug 2022

Minor update to RecordSearch Data Scraper – now captures ‘institution title’ for agencies if it is present. pypi.org/project/r…

16 Aug 2022

Many thanks to the British Library – sponsors of the GLAM Workbench’s web archives section!

You might have noticed some changes to the web archives section of the GLAM Workbench. I’m very excited to announce that the British Library is now sponsoring the web archives section! Many thanks to the British Library and the UK Web Archi...
15 Aug 2022

New GLAM data to search, visualise and explore using the GLAM Workbench!

There’s lots of GLAM data out there if you know where to look! For the past few years I’ve been harvesting a list of datasets published by Australian galleries, libraries, archives, and museums through open government data portals. I’ve jus...
09 Aug 2022

Zotero now saves links to digitised items in Trove from the NLA catalogue!

I’ve made a small change to the Zotero translator for the National Library of Australia’s catalogue. Now, if there’s a link to a digitised version of the work in Trove, that link will be saved in Zotero’s url field. This makes it quicker an...
01 Aug 2022

View embedded JSON metadata for Trove's digitised books and journals

The metadata for digitised books and journals in Trove can seem a bit sparse, but there’s quite a lot of useful metadata embedded within Trove’s web pages that isn’t displayed to users or made available through the Trove API. This notebook ...
29 Jul 2022

Where did all those NSW articles go? Trove Newspapers Data Dashboard update!

I was looking at my Trove Newspapers Data Dashboard again last night trying to figure out why the number of newspaper articles from NSW seemed to have dropped by more than 700,000 since my harvesting began. It took me a while to figure out,...
28 Jul 2022

Catching up – some recent GLAM Workbench updates!

There’s been lots of small updates to the GLAM Workbench over the last couple of months and I’ve fallen behind in sharing details. So here’s an omnibus list of everything I can remember… Data Weekly harvests of basic Trove newspaper data c...