best of trove

Making the best use of Trove

Ben Pratten

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Trove is…

• National Library’s discovery service about Australia and for Australians

• Almost 2000 organisations and over 300 million items– Not just libraries! (National Museum of Australia,

research repositories, Monument Australia, Dairy Australia, Powerhouse Museum, ABC Radio National, etc, etc, etc!)

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Trove is not just newspapers

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Cribb & Foote Department Store window display of Silktex StockingsIpswich, 1920s. Picture reproduced courtesy of Picture Ipswich. http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/182302129

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Memorandum and articles of association. http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/8462463

Pins, petticoats and ploughs : Cribb & Foote, universal providers to Ipswich and district from 1849 to 1977 by Keith Jarrott.http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/8407970

Address to shareholders delivered by the Chairman of Directors ... at the annual general meeting of shareholders of the Company, Cribb & Foote Limited. http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/23208540

Advertising fan of English countryside for Cribb & Foote, Ipswich, 1931. Image courtesy of Picture Ipswich

http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/180656525

Ipswich in the 20th century by Robin Buchananhttp://trove.nla.gov.au/work/169778266

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Queensland Times (Ipswich)(QLD. : 1909-1954) Saturday 13 November 1937. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article124599567

John Clarke Foote (1822-1895)John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, ca. 1870, http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/36899035

Benjamin Cribb (1807-1874)Australian Dictionary of Biographyhttp://nla.gov.au/nla.party-1466179

More notable collections in Trove

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The Australian Women’s Weekly

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ABC Radio National

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PANDORA Web Archive

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Oral History recordings

• Sir Jack Brabham

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General Trove tips

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Jackie French

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Digitised Newspapers

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Text correcting

Why correct text?

• Text created through OCR is searched by Trove• OCR is not always accurate• Correcting the text improves accuracy of the

text• Every correction improves search results for all

users

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Community involvement

• 121 million lines corrected• Over 100,000 users• Range from 1 correction to 2 million +

corrections

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Community involvement

• Text correction is free• No need to register• Registered users can:

– See their correction history– Appear in the Hall of Fame

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What to do

• Fix the OCR text so it matches what was published

• Match the line of text to the same line on the image

• Correcting names of people, places, organisations and dates are the most useful corrections

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What not to do

• Add text not in the original newspaper• Change the text from what was originally

published• Move text so that it does not match the line it

was originally in

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Power searching in the Digitised Newspapers

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Numbers

• 123+ Million articles• 12+ Million pages• 660+ titles

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Start broad, then refine

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Make friends with quotation marks• Phrase search

– Put search terms in quotation markse.g. “Tom Smith”

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Near search

• Put search terms in quotation marks, then use the tilde to specify a numbere.g. “Tom Smith”~2

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Tom Smith

“Tom Smith” and “Tom Smith” ~2

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“Tom Smith”~2

“Tom Smith”

Get Boolean• OR search

– Search for articles containing either terme.g. “tom smith” OR “T E Smith”

• AND search– Search for articles containing all terms

e.g. (“tom smith” OR “T E Smith”) AND brenede

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(“T E Smith” OR “Tom Smith”) AND brenede

“Tom Smith” AND brenede

Finding common words as names

• Near search– Use an honorific with the name

e.g. “Mr White”~1– Can add additional terms, such as place

names

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White

“mr white”~1

Use a date

• date:[yyyy TO yyyy]– Search between two years

e.g. Gallipoli date:[1914 TO 1929]

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Go wild*

• *– Wildcard, search matches all words starting with

the characters before the ‘*’e.g. Chin* matches China, Chinese, Chinaman etc.

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Other Trove features

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‘Cite this’

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Comments

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Tags

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Lists

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http://trove.nla.gov.au/list?id=43805

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http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn6216779

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List making

• 6690 Trove users• 32,453 public lists• 525,591 items

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all Lists

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Beyond Trove…

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http://dhistory.org/querypic/

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http://dhistory.org/querypic/create

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http://wraggelabs.com/shed/headline-roulette/

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http://wraggelabs.com/shed/headline-roulette/cats/

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https://twitter.com/TroveNewsBot

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http://trovenewsbot.tumblr.com/

Treasure Explorer

Keeping up to date

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RSS

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Coming Soon

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News

@TroveAustralia

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@nlagovau

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Facebook

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Blogs

Questions?

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