Monday, April 19, 2010

Australian Newspapers

An update on Australian Newspapers out of the National Library of Australia.
Completed digitisation of the Sydney Morning Herald from available microfilm and issues from 1831 to 1954 are now available in the service. There are 3500 missing issues which have been sourced and digitised from hard copies in storage. The digitised missing issues will be made available in July 2010.

The first issue of the Queenslander was made available last month and issues from 1866 to 1939 are now being made available in the service as they pass quality control procedures.

The first regional title to be made available in the service is the Camperdown Chronicle. This title has been digitised and contributed by the State Library of Victoria. Issues from 1877 to 1954 are being made available.

All the features of the Australian Newspapers service (blue standalone version http://newspapers.nla.gov.au) including the advanced search have now been replicated in Trove (green version http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper

The blue version will be taken down in the next few weeks and a redirect on the url will be placed on the green version. You are encouraged to begin using the Trove green version of newspapers if you haven’t already. This will be a single instance of Australian Newspapers where you can search across just newspapers, or choose to search across other resources as well (http://trove.nla.gov.au). The ‘cite this’ url’s are persistent identifiers so if you have used them they will resolve to the Trove version and still work.

The only difference between Trove Australian Newspapers and current Australian Newspapers is that:

Blue version searches original and corrected text, but not tags and comments.

Trove searches original and corrected text AND comments AND tags together. This means search results and search ranking is different to AN.

View Text correction ranking

In Trove in the user profile the user can see where they are in the overall text correction ranking profile. This is a new feature. The existing monthly hall of fame and top correctors still also appear on the home page as in blue version.

Enhancement work

From May to July 2010 enhancements will be undertaken to Australian Newspapers which will include many of the suggestions made by the public when feedback was called for in 2008 and 2009.


The number of people regularly undertaking text correction activity is steadily growing. More than 12,000 lines have now been corrected. The top 5 correctors were invited to an Australia Day Awards Ceremony at the National Library in January where they received a medal, certificate and special behind the scenes tour. They have together corrected 1 million lines of text. Read more about it here: http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/news_and_events/media_releases/

No comments: