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-line tool by installing a Python package, or through the Trove Newspaper Harvester section of the GLAM Workbench.
I’ve just overhauled development of the Python package. The new trove-newspaper-harvester replaces the old troveharvester repository.
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 digitised by the State Library of NSW and made available through Trove. To build the new interfaces I downloaded the text from Trove, indexed it by line, and linked it back to the online page images.
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 issues About 9gb of text The easiest way to explore the harvest is probably this human-readable list. The list of periodicals with OCRd text is also available as a CSV. You can find more details in the Trove journals section of the GLAM Workbench, and download the complete corpus from CloudStor.
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 you want to find newspapers from a particular area, just click on a location using this map to view the 10 closest titles.
You can view or download the dataset used to construct the map.
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 Directories from 1886 to 1908 and 1909 to 1950 have been digitised by the State Library of NSW and made available through Trove. The directories list residences and businesses by name and street location.
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-…
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 Archive for their support – it really makes a difference.
The web archives section was developed in 2020 with the support of the International Internet Preservation Consortium’s Discretionary Funding Programme, in collaboration with the British Library, the National Library of Australia, and the National Library of New Zealand.
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 just updated the harvest and there’s now 463 datasets containing 1,192 files. There’s a human-readable version of the list that you can browse. If you just want the data you can download it as a CSV.
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 and easier to view digitised items – just click on the ‘URL’ label in Zotero to open the link.
It’s also handy if you’re viewing a digitised work in Trove and want to capture the metadata about it.
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 in the GLAM Workbench shows you how you can access it. To make it even easier, I’ve added a new endpoint to my Trove Proxy that returns the metadata in JSON format.
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, but it seems that the search index was rebuilt on 31 May, and that caused some major shifts in the distribution of articles by state, as reported by the main result API.
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 continue, there’s now about three months worth. You can view a summary of the harvested data through the brand new Trove Newspaper Data Dashboard. The Dashboard is generated from a Jupyter notebook and is updated whenever there’s a new data harvest.
I’ve created a Zotero translator for the Libraries Tasmania catalogue. Using it, you can save metadata and digital resources to your own research database with a single click. Libraries Tasmania actually has three catalogues rolled into one – the main library catalogue, the Archives catalogue, and the Names Index. The translator works across all three. Features include:
Select and save items from a page of search results. Save individual items across the full range of formats.
Updated dataset! Harvests of Trove list metadata from 2018, 2020, and 2022 are now available on Zenodo: doi.org/10.5281/z… Another addition to the growing collection of historical Trove data. #GLAMWorkbench
Updated dataset! Details of 2,201,090 unique public tags added to 9,370,614 resources in Trove between August 2008 and July 2022. Useful for exploring folksonomies, and the way people organise and use massive online resources like Trove. doi.org/10.5281/z…
Ok, I’ve created a Zenodo community for datasets documenting changes in the content and structure of Trove. Lots more to add… zenodo.org/communiti…
Coz I love making work for myself, I’ve started pulling datasets out of #GLAMWorkbench code repos & creating new data repos for them. This way they’ll have their own version histories in Zenodo. Here’s the first: github.com/GLAM-Work…
Ahead of my session at #OzHA2022 tomorrow, I’ve updated the NAA section of the #GLAMWorkbench. Come along to find out how to harvest file details, digitsed images, and PDFs, from a search in RecordSearch! github.com/GLAM-Work…
