There’s a brand new section of the GLAM Workbench to help you use data from Pandora’s collection of archived websites.
What’s Pandora? Pandora is an initiative of the National Library of Australia which has been selecting web sites and onli...
Digitised resources in Trove are sometimes grouped into collections – an album of photographs, a set of posters, a bundle of letters. I’ve just added a notebook to the GLAM Workbench that downloads all the images in a collection at the high...
In my work on the Trove Data Guide I’ve started sketching out a series of research pathways. These are intended as ways of connecting Trove data to tools and questions – providing examples of the steps involved in gathering, preparing, and ...
You probably know that when you select the Download as Image option for a digitised newspaper article in Trove what you get back is not actually an image – it’s an HTML document, in which the original image has been sliced up to try and fi...
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 T...
The Trove Periodicals section of the GLAM Workbench has been updated! Some changes were necessary to make use of version 3 of the Trove API, but I’ve also taken the chance to reorganise things a bit – starting with the name. This section us...
About five years ago I created a collection of full-page editorial cartoons from The Bulletin, harvested from Trove. Through a process that might be politely described as ‘iterative’, I fiddled with an assortment of queries and methods unti...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
In early June I pinned a “nobody’s home” post to my profile and said goodbye to Twitter. After 15 years, I was sad to leave behind friends and colleagues, but glad to get away from the hate, the nazis, and the transphobes. I hadn’t been pos...
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...
