Tim Sherratt - Sharing recent updates and work-in-progress

Tim Sherratt

Sharing recent updates and work-in-progress

25 Mar 2021

Some recent GLAM Workbench presentations

I’ve given a couple of talks lately on the GLAM Workbench and some of my other work relating to the construction of online access to GLAM collections. Videos and slides are available for both: From collections as data to collections as inf...
08 Mar 2021

Some GLAM Workbench datasets to explore for Open Data Day

It was Open Data Day on Saturday 6 March – here’s some of the ready-to-go datasets you can find in the GLAM Workbench – there’s something for historians, humanities researchers, teachers & more! First here’s a list of Australian GLAM (tha...
22 Feb 2021

Zotero translator for NAA RecordSearch updated

The recent change of labels from ‘Barcode' to ‘ItemID’ in the National Archives of Australia’s RecordSearch database broke the Zotero translator. I’ve now updated the translator, and the new version has been merged into the Zotero translato...
22 Feb 2021

TroveNewsBot upgraded – now sharing articles published 'on this day'!

@TroveNewsBot has been sharing Trove newspaper articles on Twitter for over 7 years. With its latest upgrade the bot now has an ‘on this day’ function. Every day at AEST9.00am, TroveNewsBot will share an article published on that day in the...
11 Feb 2021

The NAA recently changed field labels in RecordSearch, so that ‘Barcode' is now ‘Item ID’. This required an update to my recordsearch_tools screen scraper. I also had to make a few changes in the RecordSearch section of the GLAM Workbench. #dhhacks

11 Feb 2021

Open access publishing for Australian historians

After some recent investigations of the availability of open access versions of articles published in paywalled Australian history journals, I’ve started a Google doc to capture useful links and information for Australian historians wanting...
11 Feb 2021

Who was linking to Trove newspapers in 2014?

In 2014 I pulled together a sample of web pages that included links back to digitised newspaper articles in Trove and created the ‘Trove Traces’ app. It was interesting, and sometimes disturbing, to see the diversity of sites that made use ...
03 Feb 2021

New! DigitalNZ API Query Builder added to GLAM Workbench

I’ve added an API Query Builder to the DigitalNZ section of the GLAM Workbench. You can use it to learn about the different parameters available from the search API, and experiment with different queries. Just get your API key from DigitalN...
28 Jan 2021

OpenGLAM fireworks! Finding open collections in DigitalNZ

Lately I’ve been updating and expanding the notebooks in the DigitalNZ section of the GLAM Workbench. In particular, I’ve been looking at the usage facet to understand how much of the aggregated content is ‘open’. What do I mean by ‘open’? ...
25 Jan 2021

Easy browsing of Trove newspapers with these keyboard shortcuts!

If you like browsing Trove’s digitised newspapers page by page, you might have found that the current interface is a bit clunky. To move between pages you have to hover over the page number and click on ‘Next’ or ‘Previous’. Wouldn’t it be ...
18 Jan 2021

New dataset and notebooks – twenty years of ABC Radio National

There’s a new GLAM Workbench section for working with data from Trove’s Music & Sound zone! Inside you’ll find out how to harvest all the metadata from ABC Radio National program records – that’s 400,000+ records, from 160 Radio National pr...
14 Jan 2021

Finding non-English newspapers in Trove

There are a growing number of non-English newspapers in Trove, but how do you know what’s there? After trying a few different approaches, I generated a list of 48 newspapers with non-English content. The full details are in this notebook). ...
14 Jan 2021

Open access versions of Australian history articles

Last year I did some analysis of the availability of open access versions of research articles published between 2008 and 2018 in Australian Historical Studies. I’ve now broadened this out to cover all individual articles (with a DOI) acros...
03 Jan 2021

A long thread exploring files in the National Archives of Australia with the access status of ‘closed’. This is the 6th consecutive year I’ve harvested ‘closed’ files on or about 1 January.

03 Jan 2021

More updates from The Real Face of White Australia – running facial detection code over NAA: SP42/1.

03 Jan 2021

16 Dec 2020

GLAM Workbench wins British Library Labs Research Award!

Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians has won the British Library Labs Research Award for 2020. The awards recognise ‘exceptional projects that have used the Library’s digital collections and data’. This...
15 Dec 2020

Want to relive the early days of digital humanities in Australia? I’ve archived the websites created for THATCamp Canberra in 2010, 2011, and 2014. They’re now static sites so search and commenting won’t work, but all the content should be there! #dhhacks

15 Dec 2020

The Invisible Australians website has been given a much needed overhaul, and we’ve brought all our related projects together under the title The real face of White Australia. This includes an updated version of the wall of faces. #dhhacks

15 Dec 2020

The GLAM Workbench as research infrastructure (some basic stats)

Repositories in the GLAM Workbench have been launched on Binder 3,529 times since the start of this year (according to data from the Binder Events log). That’s repository launches, not notebooks. Having launched a repository, users might us...
27 Nov 2020

Earlier this year I gave a seminar for the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) introducing the web archives section of the GLAM Workbench. The seminar is now available online: youtu.be/rVidh_wex…

Here are the slides if you want to follow along. #dhhacks

25 Nov 2020

Harvest text from the Australian Women's Weekly!

The Trove Newspaper & Gazette Harvester has been updated to version 0.4.0. The major change is that if the OCRd text for an article isn’t available through the API, it will be automatically downloaded via the web interface. What does this m...
13 Nov 2020

Beyond the copyright cliff of death

If you’ve done any searching in Trove’s digitised newspapers, you’ve probably noticed that there aren’t many results after 1954. This is basically because of copyright restrictions (though given the complexities of Australia’s copyright sys...
13 Nov 2020

Updated! Find Trove newspapers by place of publication by using this simple interface – just click on the map to find the 10 closest newspapers. Now including newspapers added to Trove since June.

You can also browse the locations of all newspapers across Australia.

The underlying data file is available as a spreadsheet. Feel free to add a comment if you notice any problems. I’m geolocating place names found in newspaper titles, so it’s not always exact.

Questions? Ask away at OzGLAM Help. #dhhacks

26 Oct 2020

I’ve added a new section to the GLAM Workbench for the ANU Archives. The first set of notebooks relates to the Sydney Stock exchange stock and share lists. As the content note describes:

These are large format bound volumes of the official lists that were posted up for the public to see - 3 times a day - forenoon, noon and afternoon - at the close of the trading session in the call room at the Sydney Stock Exchange. The closing prices of stocks and shares were entered in by hand on pre-printed sheets.

The volumes have been digitised, resulting in a collection of 70,000+ high resolution images. You can browse the details of each volume using this notebook.

I’ve been exploring ways of getting useful, machine-readable data out of the images. There’s more information about the processes involved in this repository. I’ve also been working on improving the metadata and have managed to assign a date and session (Morning, Noon, or Afternoon) to each page. We these, we can start to explore the content!

One of the notebooks creates a calendar-like view of the whole collection, showing the number of pages surviving from each trading day. This makes it easy to find the gaps and changes in process. #dhhacks