We all know where to go to access Australia's historic newspapers online - the National Library of Australia's Trove website. This site has deservedly received heaps of praise. It has a good search facility, there is no charge for use of the website and it has an effective means of correcting errors in the optical character recognition (OCR) reading of the newspaper text - … [Read more...] about Australia’s Historic Newspapers Online
New South Wales
The Regime of the Coin Tea Has Come…
"The regime of the coin tea has come", declared 'Sympathiser' in the Brisbane Courier in 1909. This announcement was apt. If you do a search for 'coin tea' on the National Library of Australia's online newspaper database (Trove) you will be struck by how popular this form of fundraising appears to have been in Queensland during the early twentieth century until the outbreak … [Read more...] about The Regime of the Coin Tea Has Come…
Libraries: Warehouses for Dead Books?
The University of Sydney's Fisher Library has joined a growing list of libraries to attract the wrath of borrowers at the suggestion that a large number of books are to be removed from the shelves. Recently libraries at the University of Denver and the University of New South Wales also attracted criticism from borrowers. These protests demonstrate that libraries are … [Read more...] about Libraries: Warehouses for Dead Books?
Sydney University Library: Borrowers Protest
Yesterday students at the University of Sydney organised a mass borrowing of books to protest against proposals by the University's Fisher Library to remove 500,000 books from the shelves and retrench 30 staff. Just two months ago concern was expressed at the removal of a large number of books from the library at University of New South Wales. I wrote about this in a previous … [Read more...] about Sydney University Library: Borrowers Protest
Know Your Database
If you are interested in reading more about digital humanities, check out my other blog at http://stumblingfuture.wordpress.com Over the last week I finally got a chance to try out the tools that Wragge (aka Tim Sherratt) has devised to mine digitised historic Australian newspapers accessed through Trove. This post is about the results of applying his tools. If you want to do … [Read more...] about Know Your Database