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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 54| December 2001
The
Argus Online:
A Nineteenth-Century Australian Newspaper Index
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The Argus, published in Melbourne from 1846 to 1957, was one of the major newspapers of the colonial period and continued to circulate in the first half of the twentieth century. A proposal to index a decade of its contents from 1870 to 1879 and to make it available via the Internet has been recently funded by the Australian Research Council. The period to 1869 has already been indexed and the planned online index will be a significant breakthrough in the application of new technology to nineteenth-century newspapers.
The newspaper was widely distributed throughout Australia and respected for the quality of its coverage. The funding application describes it as a national resource for data on the late nineteenth century without peer.
LaTrobe University in Melbourne is responsible for the overall design
and implementation of the project. They will develop the thesaurus and index.
The National Library, in recognition of the national importance of the project,
will develop a delivery platform for the online database.
Marie
Sexton
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au