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Robert Hindley: Hello and welcome to Family History for Beginners. My name is Robert, and I'm one of the Family History reference librarians here at the National Library of Australia. Family history can be a fascinating, gratifying and instructive process, though it could also be frustrating when you hit a research brick wall or not know where else you can search for information. Today's session aims to provide you with all the necessary tools and information to start your research and uncover your family's unique story. I'll show you how to get started with your family history, eResources and the collections available at the Library and how to access these records as well as research tips.
Getting Started With Your Research.
Identify what you already know. A good place to start your research is identify what you know about your ancestors. Here are some questions to get you started. What was your ancestor's full name? Did he or she immigrate from non-English speaking countries such as China, Germany, or Norway? Did they anglicise their first or last name? Do you know your ancestor's birth, death, and marriage dates? Do you know which language, social, or nation group a previous generation of your ancestors belonged to? Did they live on a mission, reserve, or pastoral station? Did you know the name of the town your ancestor grew up in? Did they serve in any wars? What religion did your ancestor belong to? Capture what you know.
Once you have identified what you know, then you can start to capture details using a pedigree or ancestral chart. We have charts freely available to download or print from our Getting started section in our Family History Research Guide. Alternatively, you may like to contact your local historical society. There are some excellent First Nations family tree chart templates that can be downloaded from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies known as AIATSIS.
A systematic approach, working backwards from yourself is the easiest way to trace your ancestry. It's best to work from the known to the unknown, one generation back at a time. Start by writing down your full name, date, and place of birth, followed by your parents' full names, dates, and places of birth. Then your grandparents' dates and places of birth on your mother's side, then their father's side, and so forth. If you're not sure about an ancestor's details, simply leave the form blank. Avoid guessing and supplying incorrect information. Remember to keep any information about a living person private.
Start Your Research.
Look over your family history tree chart to work out what gaps need to be filled. Choose an ancestor to discover more about them. Our individual research form, available to download or from the getting started section in our Family History Research Guide, can help with this. Plan what records to access and where to locate them. Records created at the time your ancestor was alive will be the most reliable. You may discover your great-grandfather's first job hidden in an electoral roll or your great-grandmother's passenger arrival to Australia, your ancestor's baptism record or even uncover that missing piece of the puzzle in a newspaper article that solves that family mystery.
Family members can often provide stories, memories, photos, or memorabilia about a deceased family member. Birth, death, and marriage certificates can often provide more information about an ancestor and include things like birth, death and marriage dates, place of registration, family members, age, occupation, and much more.
Libraries and archives can hold an array of documents and records in a variety of formats including online, print and microform. I'll shortly talk about what records the National Library holds, but would also encourage you to take a look at the National Archives of Australia website along with other state libraries, state archives, and local library websites to discover what family history resources they hold. These institutions would generally hold collections unique to their area. So if your ancestor lived in a particular state, then search the corresponding state library and archives. Family history databases can contain a range of digitised records and indexes searchable by your ancestor's name. Contact your local library to find out if they subscribe to any of these databases.
Ask for Help.
When you have hit that research brick wall. There are places that can help. Family history societies have expert knowledge in different aspects of family history and offer ongoing research support. Many societies provide workshops and hold local collections or indexes relevant to their area. Search online or contact your local shire council to find a society near you.
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies, IATSAS, Family History Unit provides family history research assistance for First Nations people, particularly families affected by the Stalin generation. Visit the IATSAS family history page for more information.
For extensive or ongoing family history research, you might like to hire a private professional researcher. You can find a list of researchers on our website. You can find our Family History Research Guide under the Using the Library, then Research tools and resources located at the top of our home page. Our Ask A Librarian reference service provides research assistance at any stage of your family history research.
When submitting your family history inquiry, include as much information as possible such as full names, approximate birth, death, and marriage dates, town lived, spouse or family members, and what information you are seeking. You can also chat to us over the phone, mail us a letter, or simply visit us and talk to one of our librarians in the Library reading room.
Now that we have covered how to start your family history, let's talk about resources available at the Library.
Resources available at the National Library.
Next to the Ask a Librarian link, you will notice a Join the Login page. To be eligible for a Library login, you must live in Australia and supply an Australian postcode, email, and phone number. You don't need a Library login to search the Library catalogue, but you will need a Library login to view any physical material in our reading rooms or to access our licenced databases at home. I'll explain how to access these databases later on in the talk.
To sign up, click on Join the Library. You can fill in the online registration form. Getting a National Library login is free. It means even if you live interstate or can't get to the National Library in person, you can still access a huge amount of information, resources, and collections.
Before I talk about how to search the Library's catalogue, I'll direct you to our comprehensive Family History Research Guide. You can find the guide by Googling National Library of Australia Family History. Or if you're already on our website, you can scroll to the top of our home page and select Using the library link. Then click on the Research tools and resources title.
To view the Family History Research Guide, click on the thumbnail image. This is the easiest way to find records in our collection relating to family history. Some records you can access from home, but other records are only available here in the Library reading room. If you do come across a record that you can't access from home, then submit an Ask a Librarian inquiry requesting a lookup. Alternatively, contact your state, territory or local library to find out if they hold this record.
If I scroll down, you will see popular family history topics such as Australian birth, death, and marriage records, Australian electoral rolls, indigenous Australian family history, convicts, and Australian immigration and shipping, Chinese Australian family history, and much more. Take time to have a good look around these research guides as they include a wealth of information.
The Family History Research Guide has multiple pages identified on the left. I've already chatted about the Getting started page, but you may like to take a look at our Resources page, which includes a PDF index to resources only available in the reading room. Other libraries list the websites to state and territory archive, Societies show state and territory family history societies. Research services lists the professional researchers and family history blogs. You may find particularly helpful at two most common family history question blogs available on our Library webpage. In these two blogs, we cover how to find your birth certificate and the time you are born, getting started with your First Nations family history, accessing electoral rolls and post office directories, how to find burial records and inquest records, as well as using maps for family history research.
Let's go back to the research tools and resources by hitting the back arrow button. On the right side, you'll also notice the main research guide page. Click on this link to view a list of all the Library research guides. The guides are arranged alphabetically and you can use the drop-down button under the Explore Our Research Guides to browse by category. The family history and genealogy category, indigenous Australia, newspapers and maps could be of interest. This page also gives you the option to access the Library's eResources page, videos, which include past family history webinars. Webinars can also be accessed from the learning page under the Using the Library at the top of the toolbar or by googling the NLA YouTube channel.
Let's go back to the Library's home page. To find what you're looking for in the Library, start with Search our collections on the home page. The National Library allows you to search across three pathways at the same time; the catalogue, eResources and finding aids. This means that you conduct a wide search across the Library's physical and digital collections, as well as eResources such as online journals and databases. It's an excellent starting point for any research project.
Alternatively, you can choose to search in just one of these three pathways. Enter a search term into the Search our collections box and click on the red search button. For example, if you want information, we hold on a particular convict ship, type in the name of the ship. For example, Earl Grey convict ship. Results will be sorted by relevance and arranged by catalogue, online articles and eBooks, online journals and finding aids.
The search results will appear in three different pathways. Under catalogue, you'll see physical printed items and digitised images in the Library collection. Under online articles and e-books, you'll find full text online articles. Under Finding aids, there are results from descriptive lists of large archival special collections. Scroll through the list to find the item you're after.
When you see something that interests you, click on it for more details. The catalogue is where you'll find books, pictures, maps, all history, interviews, manuscripts and more. You can search the catalogue to find out if we hold a published family history by typing in the surname, followed by search term, family history or genealogy. Both terms are interchangeable and all depend on how the book has been catalogued. For example, if I was searching for any published family histories for the Williamson family, type in search term, Williamson family history or Williamson genealogy. If you don't find the name you're looking for, don't despair. The Library also holds an index of published family histories in Australia that lists a large number of family names.
The Australian Family Histories: a bibliography and index by Ralph Reid is one that we often refer to. You can also find this book at state and territory libraries as well as many public libraries across Australia. You also might like to do a similar search for any published local histories or indexes using the name of the town again, followed by the word family history or genealogy. For example, Newcastle genealogy or Newcastle family history. You can then filter results using the options on the right-hand side such as the location, published, or year dates.
If you click on an entry at the top of the catalogue record, there are two buttons, a request button, which means you can request to view the item in the reading room. Now, most family history books at the Library will not be available online. But if you live close to Canberra, you could submit a request for the book through the Library catalogue using your Library login to then view the book in the Library reading room. Alternatively, you can search Trove to find out if a library closer to you holds this book. I'll show you later how to search Trove.
The second button, order a copy, will take you to our copies direct form to order a copy of an item. If a book is in copyright, there may be limits on how many pages in the book we can copy for you. You can always contact your local library to organise an interlobby loan and another library that holds this book may be able to send the book there for you to use. There is a cost for this service. Please contact your local library for more details.
For more catalogue search tips, watch our How to Search the Catalogue video located on our getting started page. Let's go back to the home page.
EResources.
EResources include online digital items that the National Library has licenced for you to access. Here you'll find full-text journals, newspapers, eBooks, dictionaries and other databases. eResources or electronic resources are databases. All the Library databases are listed via eResources page. You can access this page from the National Library Home page. It is nice and easy to spot on the right-hand side of the screen. When you get to this page, you'll have to accept the terms and conditions.
To access a list of databases, click on the browse eResources tab in the middle of the page. Databases will either be free, licenced, or on-site. Databases that are freely accessible websites will be identified with a world icon. Licenced databases will be identified with a key symbol. And on-site databases identified with a National Library of Australia building icon. You can access any licenced databases from home by logging in with your Library login at the top of this page with the yellow banner.
The on-site restricted databases can only be accessed in the Library reading rooms. If there is a particular database you would like searched, submit a request via the Ask a Librarian service or contact your state territory or local library to find out if they have the database you're after.
You'll notice on the eResources page that databases are listed by category. If you click on the genealogy category, you will notice on the left side of the screen it will subdivide the databases. This is handy if you were searching for ancestors from a particular state or territory. For example, if I knew that my ancestors from Victoria, then I'll click on the Victorian option. It automatically lists all the Victorian family history databases and indexes. You'll be able to access all the databases listed in the genealogy in the reading room.
Anyone searching First Nations family history, you might like to explore the Indigenous Australia category to find out what databases we hold. Websites listed here such as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the State Library of New South Wales Australian Indigenous Index could be of interest.
Popular family history databases include Ancestry Library Edition and Findmypast. These databases can only be accessed onsite in the Library reading rooms, but many public libraries and historical societies subscribe to these databases.
Trove.
The Trove website includes digitised historical newspapers, pictures, manuscripts, oral histories, maps, books, and archive websites. It brings together the catalogue records of over 900 plus Australian libraries, archives and museums, big and small. It makes their collections searchable through one easy portal. But it's much more than just a search engine because it brings together so much Australian content and makes it available online, and it's completely free.
You can start with a simple name search. If I type in Edward Lee, for a broad search it brings up over 20,000 results. Search results are arranged by different content zones. Explore newspapers for articles or even archive web pages for family trees published on old websites. To narrow your search results, you could place the name in quotation marks followed by the town your ancestor lived in. For example, "Edward Lee" + Ballarat. Using this technique, we are now down to 2000 search results instead of the 20,000 results.
For family historians, however, Trove is most famous for newspapers from 1803 to 1954. Some later issues of newspapers such as the Canberra Times have been made available with the permission of the publisher. There are two ways of finding newspapers on Trove, searching and browsing. The method you choose would depend on the amount of information you have already.
Let's start with browsing. Use this option when you know exactly where the information you want has been published. For example, if I was after a death notice for George Wilson published in Bendigo Independent on July 1905. The other way to find articles in Trove such as obituaries is by searching. Let's go back to the main Trove page. If we still use the example of George Wilson in quotation marks followed with the word Bendigo and click on the search results example, "George Wilson" + Bendigo, click the See or Newspapers and Gazettes results. Go to the Refine your results filter option located on the right side and tick the relevant boxes such as Victoria or the Family Notices option located under the category, then decade and year. You can then click on each article to view.
You'll notice that once you open up the article, there are options located on the left side of the page, which will allow you to print or download a copy of the article. For more search tips, I would suggest watching short videos on the Trove Help page as well as the How to Research on Trove blog found on the research page.
I mentioned earlier that you could search Trove to find if another library holds a particular book you're after. Let's search for example for a family history topic such as How to Write your Family History and use the drop-down button to select Books and libraries option. Click on the title, then scroll down and select Borrow to find the libraries listed by state and territory. If the libraries listed here are not close to you, then as I mentioned earlier, you may like to organise an interlibrary loan through your local library.
For anyone who's planning to publish their family history in a book, the National Library would love a copy to have in the collection for others to see. For more information, visit our Legal deposit page.
Newspapers.
Newspapers can be a fantastic way to discover an array of information about an ancestor. You can search for birth, death and marriage notices, employment or business details, discover residential addresses, find out if someone served in the war, court cases, immigration, and property purchases. Newspapers can also provide a great social history about the area and time they lived. And newspaper collections include digitised historic and modern newspapers accessible online as well as newspapers in microform and paper formats. You may like to check out our Australian newspapers and overseas newspapers research guides for more information.
You can find out what we hold in our catalogue. Searches can be made by title or place of publication. If the name of a newspaper is known, search by title such as Ballarat Courier and use the drop-down button to select the title field and limit search to newspapers. Click on the Find button. You will notice results can be refined using options located on the right-hand side such as the decade.
To locate newspapers published by town, city, state, or country if the titles are not known, type in the area followed by the word newspaper. For example, Perth newspapers or Western Australian newspapers, and use the drop-down button to select newspapers. Click on Find. You will find results can be limited using options located on the right side. You can even select newspapers in different languages.
I spoke earlier about digitised Australian newspapers in Trove. I mentioned that the majority of these newspapers go up to the end of 1954, but for digitised newspapers after this state, you may like to explore our eResources page. Let's go back to the eResources portal. Select the newspapers and media category. Once again, click on the plus sign. A list appears on the left side of the screen and again is arranged geographically. If I click on the Australia section and scroll down this list, it'll list all databases alphabetically.
One particular website I'll mention is the Ryerson Index. This is free to access. The Ryerson Index is an index to death notices appearing in current Australian newspapers and includes some funeral notices, probate notices and obituaries. The index covers mostly new South Wales newspapers, although some newspapers from other states are included.
A popular database for family historians is the Sydney Morning Herald Archives, 1955 to 1995, and Sydney Morning Herald and The Age Library Edition, which covers both papers from 2006 right up to the current issues. This is handy if you are searching for Sydney Morning Herald articles after the Trove cut-off of 1954. To access this database from home, you'll need a Library login.
For anyone with British or Irish ancestry, the following newspaper databases found under the Overseas section could be of interest: British Library Newspapers, 1732 to 1950. Irish Newspaper Archive, 1763 to current. The Times Digital Archive, 1785 to 2019. The Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855-2016. The Sunday Times Digital Archive, 1822 to 2021. Gail NewsVault allows users to simultaneously search or browse across these UK newspaper databases.
Birth, death, and marriage records.
Birth, death, and marriage records are a basic and vital part of any family history research. They can provide important details about your ancestor, such as full name, birthplace, dates, age, occupation, spouse name, and family members. Historical death certificates for New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria will even identify where the deceased was born and how long they've been living in the colony. You never know if a hidden but important piece of information will be on a birth, death, or marriage certificate. A library does not hold any birth, death or marriage certificates. Certificates can only be purchased from the state or territory birth, death and marriage registry office where the event occurred. Search online to find the appropriate website.
The National Library and state Libraries do hold historical BDM indexes to help you find registration details. Check out our Australian birth, death and marriages research guide for more information.
Shipping.
Passenger records can be a very useful source of information for family history research. Records could include the passenger's full name, date of arrival, name of ship, age, occupation, country of origin, and marital status of the passenger. A wealth of information for any family historian, however, early records could be limited in content and may be confined to the family name and just an initial with no given names or a title such as Mr. or Mrs, and no other information. This of course makes it difficult to confirm if a passenger record is the person you are searching for.
There is a vast array of shipping and immigration records available. Before you start your research, it's best to have an understanding of how these records are arranged. Prior to 1924, the administration and recording of shipping and passenger arrivals was the responsibility of each Australian colony or state. The surviving original records are now held in each state archive or state public records office. You can find some records digitised on these state archive websites or search family history databases such as Ancestry and Findmypast to find passenger lists. Search our Australian shipping and passenger research guide for more information.
From 1924, immigration became the responsibility of the Commonwealth government. And as a result, all subsequent records relating to immigration, passenger arrivals, departure records, and naturalisation are housed at the National Archives of Australia. Contact the Archives to access these records.
Electoral rolls.
Electoral rolls can be a great way to find out more about your ancestor. Family historians can find out the residential address of a person and help locate other family members living at the address for a certain year. Find out the profession of a person on an electoral roll can be valuable information. Know your ancestor's trade or occupation could explain the location of an address. They could have moved according to the type of work or could live close to their workplace or business. Finding out the occupation could also prompt further investigation into their business or company records.
Australian Commonwealth electoral rolls up to 2008 can be accessed from the National Library or any state or territory library. You can find a list of the Library's electoral roll holdings by state and territory, which are available from the Australian electoral rolls research guide. You'll be pleased to know some Australian electoral rolls have been digitised and can be accessed via the Ancestry and Findmypast databases. Each database will provide different years so you can do a Google search to find out the years digitised for each state and territory. Contact your local library to find out if they subscribe to these databases.
The current electoral roll can only be viewed at a national or state office for the Australian Electoral Commission located in the Capital Cities. Visit their website for address information.
Research tips.
Here are some tips for you to consider as you piece together your family history puzzle. Use primary sources and cross-reference your information. Don't fall into a trap of believing every family history story you hear or every published family tree you see online. A good researcher always backs up their family history with supporting primary documents. A record created at the time you're a researching will be the most reliable, such as birth certificates, passenger arrival records, electoral rolls, naturalisation records, court documents, newspapers, jail records and so forth.
Primary documents can also be used to cross-reference your information. Instead of relying on one piece of information, look for multiple sources so that you can confirm the same details. This helps you verify your ancestor's identity, find any inconsistencies, or maybe provide you with new information. If birth, death or marriage dates don't add up or you suspect the person you're researching could be someone with the same name, then use another document to confirm details.
Consider name variations. If you're having problems finding information about an ancestor, you may like to consider if they had a nickname, whether they're better known by their nickname. For example, if you had a Margaret in the family, were they better known as Peggy? Did your ancestor have a stage name? Have you searched for records using married and maiden name? Could your ancestor's name be spelt a different way? For example, the surname Thompson could have been spelt Thompson or Thompsen. Like so many immigrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, names may have been incorrectly transcribed, and there were different spelling variations in how names were recorded.
Names can also give a clue about your ancestor's heritage. Given names or middle names can often be a clue in connecting families in the tree. Your grandmother may have been named after her grandmother or may have been her mother's maiden name.
Expand your research.
If you were getting no results from an ancestor, then start to expand your research. By this I mean try different search techniques when exploring indexes and databases, as well as checking a wider range of records. For instance, instead of searching indexes and databases with the full name of your ancestor, you could try just searching by their last name and limiting your search to a particular town or date range. This will bring up a larger search result, but could identify ancestors for spelling errors or variations, which is quite common with non-English names.
Expand your research to other family members or a spouse. This approach may help you find further information about your ancestor indirectly. You may find by searching for another family member or spouse will include clues to their location, which can help locate record you are after.
Another suggestion is to expand your search geographically. Your ancestors may have travelled between states or colonies for various reasons. They could have been a convict transported to different settlements, crew member who jumped ship, or may have tried their lucky New South Wales in Victoria Goldfields. Think about the social history or the time and place you're researching. Discovering what was happening at the time your ancestor was alive can help you better understand your ancestor. Were they away serving in any wars? Did natural disasters, such as floods or fire, destroy local archive records? Influenza outbreaks and communities may of course temporary closures to church services, so baptism records may not accurately reflect the year of birth. It was common from married female ancestors to be identified by their husband's name in the newspaper. For example, in the newspaper, they could have been noted as Mrs. Edward Lindsay.
Another consideration is the economics of an area may have had an impact on your ancestor's movements. Did your ancestor move towns to follow the work? You can use a number of resources to explore your ancestor's social history from census, electoral rolls, church records, directories, to maps.
Newspapers, however, can be the quickest way to find a wealth of information, not only about your ancestor, but about local and national events. Cite or reference your documents. Cite, note, or even take a photo with your phone, digital camera on records you find and resources searched. Keeping a research log allows you to keep track of records that you've searched and records that you plan to search. Note details of the item including any collection or index titles, page numbers, microfiche, film numbers, URL or website addresses, and where you found the item, whether it be from a library, archives, website, database, or other source. Make a note of any unsuccessful searches to avoid searching the same resource twice.
I hope that this Family History for Beginners webinar has been helpful to you. If you'll like more information about the Library's family history resources, I recommend viewing our Family History Research Guide. This is a great starting point for you to find out what we hold.
Now, if you can't find what you need, if you have a specific question, our Ask a Librarian reference service provides research assistance at any stage of your family history research. When submitting your family history inquiry, remember to include as much information as possible, such as full names, approximate birth, death, and marriage dates, town lived in, spouse or family members, and what information you're seeking. Thanks for attending this session and good luck with your family history research.
Welcome to our webinar on Chinese-Australian family history. My name is Bing.
And my name is Leisa. We are reference librarians here at the National Library.
We would like to start by acknowledging Australia's First Nations Peoples, The First Australians, as the traditional owners and custodians of this land
and give respects to the elders, past and present, and through them to all Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
You may be joining us because you've heard the family stories of a Chinese ancestor in Australia or you've come across a document of a descendant with a Chinese name.
Perhaps you've recently discovered a photograph of an ancestor, or even taken a DNA test, or simply
just want to learn more about your Asian roots in Australia. Whatever your reason, we hope this webinar will get
you started on researching your Chinese ancestors in Australia.
Like any good family history research, you should start with yourself and work backwards.
It is best to work from the known to the unknown. Start by writing your name, your full name, date and place of birth
followed by your parent's full name, date and place of birth. Then your grandparents, full name, place of birth and so forth.
You might like to watch our five minute webinar and how to start your family history. For more information, visit our Getting Started
page found on our Family History Research Guide. To identify your Chinese ancestors
in Australia and you will need their names. This can be the most challenging part of your research
if your ancestors arrived before the 1950s. Like so many immigrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, names
may have been incorrectly transcribed and there were so many different spelling variations in how names were recorded.
Chinese names usually comprise two or three Chinese characters, sometimes four.
A family name goes before given name. Chinese migrants may swap their names around to suit Western conventions.
But if you are having no luck with finding official records using their names, try searching under their first names.
Your Chinese ancestor could have also anglicised their first or family name.
So, keeping the record of different name variations, is important.
It is not uncommon to find Chinese personal names having an 'Ah' or 'A'
in Australian records such as Ah Chin or Ah Foon. This prefix doesn't have a meaning.
It's added before a given name in spoken language to express familiarity. It is a very informal way to address a person;
just like using a nickname. However, the prefix was often entered into documentation
and, in some cases, combined with a given name to become one word.
Children are normally given their father's family name, but a Chinese married woman may have kept their maiden name.
To successfully check your family back to China you will also need to identify your ancestors Chinese names
and the villages they originally came from. This can be difficult, but we will talk about some of the resources
that might be helpful later in the presentation. Once you've identified or collected all the possible names
your ancestors may have used, you can start searching for records, deciding what records to access and where to locate them.
Records created at the time your ancestor was alive will be the most reliable.
Our Family History Research Guide will provide you with a good starting point on what we hold and what resources you can access.
State and Territory Libraries also hold a range of family history resources.
Before we delve into useful resources. Let us provide you with an overview of early Chinese migration to Australia
to give you a better context of why and how your ancestors may have arrived in Australia.
The first people from China to settle in Australia were probably a very small group of settlers and domestic servants.
Mak Sai Ying is the first documented Chinese immigrant to Australia.
Although it is believed Chinese immigration may have occurred much earlier.
Born in Canton, the now Guangdong province of China, Mak Sai Ying,
who was also known as John Shying and a few other names, arrived
in New South Wales about the ship, Laurel, in 1818.
In the late 1840s, Chinese laborers were transported to Australia on indentured
labour contracts by British Merchant under the, so-called, Coolie Trade
as a response to a labor shortage in Australia. The ship Nimrod brought in the first group
of 120 Chinese laborers from Amoy, now known as Xiamen on the 2nd of October, 1848.
After that, more and more ships carrying Chinese laborers arrived at different Australian ports.
Amoy, or Xiamen, is located on the south-eastern coast of China in the Fujian province,
or Hokkein, as it was previously known. From 1845, it was a major departure
port for transporting Chinese laborers overseas. So, those earliest Chinese migrants were generally from Hokkien.
From 1848 to the early 1850s, over 3000 Chinese workers were transported
to Australia to boost the labor force here. On arrival they were hired to work in pastoral
properties and rural areas. From 1852, the shipment of Chinese
laborers was shifted to ports in other areas such as Canton, Macao and Hong Kong.
Therefore, most Chinese migrants who arrived in 1850 and 1860s
for the gold rush were from Canton and the now Guandong Province.
This is an 1853 map of China held at the National Library. Canton is in South China, borders Hong Kong and Macao.
The capital city of this province is also known as Canton. But most migrants came from villages in districts
such as Sze Yup, that are outside the city.
The majority of Chinese migrants returned to their home villages by the 1880s after the Gold Rush.
By the time of Australian Federation, there were about 30,000 Chinese
in Australia. The number of Chinese arrivals arrivals declined significantly in the first half of the 20th century
and in 1947 the Chinese population numbered some 12,000.
Perhaps the record that most people want to discover is the name of the ship their ancestors arrived on and when it arrived.
Uncovering the reasons why your descendants migrated to Australia can often just be as fascinating.
Did they arrive to try their luck in the New South Wales or Victorian Goldfields? Were they part of the indentured Amoy laborers
who worked on pastoral stations in the late 1840s to the early 1850s?
Did they arrive as a crew member on board a ship? Passenger records can be very useful,
can be a very useful source of information for family history research. Records could include the
passengers full name date, place of arrival, name of ship, age, occupation,
country of origin, marital status, a wealth of information for any family historian.
However, early records could be limited to the content and may be confined to the family name and just an initial with no given name or title such a
Mr. or Mrs. with no other information. This, of course, can make it difficult to confirm
if the passenger record is the person you're searching for. As with any original historical record, mistakes occurred.
This was even more prevalent in passengers from non-English speaking backgrounds. Names could have been misheard due to a transcriber
not being familiar with Chinese names or pieces of information could have been misheard.
Passengers sometimes provide aliases and did not always know their age
or were not truthful for various reasons: to avoid law or military enlistment.
As Bing mentioned earlier, it was customary for Chinese immigrants to provide their name first, followed by their given names.
So document takers could have recorded the passengers under their first name instead of their family name.
There is a vast array of shipping and immigration records available.
Before you start your research, it is best to have an understanding of how these records are arranged.
Prior to 1924, the administration record recording of shipping and passenger arrivals was the responsibility of Australian colonies or state.
The surviving original records are now held at the State Archives or Public Records Office
and are arranged by passenger type, such as an assisted passenger:
this is this was when the passenger's fare was paid for by the government or by an employee or a family member.
Or perhaps they were an unassisted passenger who paid their own fare.
Or they could have arrived as a crew member on board a ship. These are just a few passenger record types.
Some state archives, such as the Public Records Office of Victoria and the State Records Office of South Australia,
have digitised historical passenger records and have made them freely available on their websites.
Family history databases such as Ancestry and Find My Past have also digitised various Australian passenger arrival records.
You can access these databases on site within the National Library building, or you may want to contact your local library to find out
if they subscribe to these databases. From 1924,
immigration became the responsibility of the Commonwealth Government. As a result, all subsequent records relating to immigration,
passenger arrivals, departure records and naturalisation records are housed at the National Archives of Australia.
The National Archives of Australia has published an excellent online guides. These detailed guides focus on records that would be of most interest
to family historians and researchers of Chinese-Australian history.
There is also an abundance of records relating to entry departure, island registration, student records
and other travel documentation that was passed to Chinese-Australians during the colonial period through to the 20th century.
These can be highly useful as they may contain Chinese and English names as well as birthplaces or district of origin.
Before citizenship began in Australia, on 26th January 1949, immigrants
from non-British countries could apply for naturalisation. It was not compulsory, but it did offer incentives
such as the right to vote and purchase land. Immigrants needed to be in the country
for at least five years before they could apply to be naturalised. Naturalisation
records often provide a wealth of information for family historians tracing their Chinese-Australian roots.
Generally, records include the full name, date and namer of ship, country of origin, age and occupation.
Naturalisation records from 1904 become a Commonwealth responsibility and records are held at the National Archives.
Pre-1904 naturalisation records for Victoria and South Australia, also held in the National Archives.
You may like to do a name search via our catalog for any digitised records.
Records created before 1904 in New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania
are housed by the State Archives. For those whose ancestors were in New South Wales, the Chinese
Naturalisation Database, New South Wales 1857 to 1887, hosted by La Trobe University, is part of the Chinese Heritage
of Australian Federation Project, may be useful. The university's Chinese-Australian page
brings together many useful databases and indexes, including a list of indentured Chinese labourers in prior
years identified in New South Wales 1828 to 1856. Explore their resources page to find out more.
Certificates of Exemption from the Dictation Test is a wonderful resource for anyone searching for Chinese immigrants.
From 1904 to 1959, these certificate were issued to Chinese people who departed Australia
and wanted to return without having to take a dictation test. Once the certificate was issued,
the immigrants had three years to return to Australia, not only will the certificates contain a person's particulars,
but will also include a photograph and fingerprint. Certificates are held at the National Archive of Australia.
Some are digitised. Here's an example of a certificates for Florrie Lee Hang Gong,
found on their website. You can access an online index to Victorian certificates
through the Chinese-Australian family historians of Victoria. Birth dates and marriage records are a vital part of any family history research.
They can provide important details about your ancestor, such as a full name birthplace, date, age, occupation,
spouse, name and family members. Historical death certificates for New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria
will even identify where the deceased was born and how long they had been living in the colony.
You never know if a hidden but important piece of information will be on a birth, death or marriage certificate.
Certificates can be purchased from the relevant state or territory births, deaths and marriage registry office.
Search online to find websites. The National Library and State Libraries
hold historical births, deaths and marriage indexes.. Check out our Australian birth, death and marriage
research guide for more information. In addition to birth, deaths and marriage records, cemetery records, tombstones
and burial plots can often provide additional details and may be inscribed in Chinese language within Australia.
Dr. Kok Hu Jin is well known for his dedication to transcribing
and interpreting Chinese language inscriptions on monuments and cemetery headstones.
He has published a series of work which includes histories, Chinese cemetery maps, indexes and names,
birth and death dates, birth places and ancestral villages. His publications are held by many libraries
and collecting institutions throughout Australia and many of his indexes are freely available online through the Chinese in Australia page
found on the Family Search website.
Electoral rolls can be a great way to find out more about your ancestors.
You can find out the residential address of a person and help locate other family members living at the same address for a certain year.
You can also find out the occupation of a person which may prompt further investigation into business or company records.
As mentioned earlier, Chinese immigrants needed to be naturalised before they could vote or be listed on any records.
The voter also needed to be over 21. The age was lowered to 18 in 1973.
Let's have a look at an example of an electoral roll. Australian Commonwealth Electoral Rolls up to 2008 are available
from the National Library and State and Territory Libraries. Some electoral rolls have been digitised and accessible via Ancestry
and my past databases each providing different years. As mentioned earlier,
you can access these databases on site in the National Library or contact your local library to find out if they subscribe to these databases.
Post office directories can be useful as an alternative for electoral rolls,
especially if your Chinese ancestors were not naturalised or able to vote.
They were published annually and included a list of people by town streets, name, occupation and business.
We hold directories in print, microfiche and electronic format. You can find a list of directories by state and territory on "Our family
history resources" guide, available from our Family History Research Guide.
We have digitised the New South Wales Wise's Post Office directories from 1887 to 1950 and have them
freely accessible from home through Trove. Your State Library may also have directories in their collection.
Newspapers can be a fantastic way to discover an array of information about an ancestor.
You can search for a birth, death and marriage notice, employment or business details, discover residential addresses, find out
if someone served in the war, court cases, immigration and property purchases.
Newspapers can also provide a great social history about the area in the time that they lived.
This interview, published in the Adelaide Observer on the 7th of April 1888
with successful Chinese merchant Way Lee, explores topics such as Chinese migration, family structures, the poll tax,
the Chinese labor market in Australia, and his public negotiations to supply Chinese laborers
to the Daly River plantation in the Northern Territory. The Chinese Wesleyan Mission Minister in Adelaide, Reverend
Hargreaves, acts as an interpreter for this interview. It is a great reflection of issues and topics surrounding Chinese immigrants,
such as the poll tax that was imposed on Chinese immigrants upon their arrival to Australia.
Our newspaper collections include historic and modern newspapers, accessible online, as well as newspapers in microfilm and paper formats.
You may like to check out our Australian newspapers and overseas newspapers research guide for more information.
We not only hold mainstream Australian newspapers, but also multiple runs of Chinese community newspapers, which we'll go into later.
You can find out what we hold in our catalogue. Searches can be made
by title or place of publication. If the name of a newspaper is known, search by title.
Such as "Ballarat Courier" and use the drop down button to select the title field and limit search such as to newspapers.
Click on the find button. You will notice results can be refined, using options located on the right side of the
screen, such as decade. To locate newspapers if a title is not known,
type in a town city, state or country, followed by the word "newspapers", for example, "Perth newspapers" or "Western
Australian newspapers", and use the drop down button to select newspapers.
Then click on the find button. You will find results can be limited using options like on the right side.
You can even select newspapers in different languages. One of our fantastic resources for family history research is Trove.
You can search the books and libraries category to try to find out if a library closer to you holds a newspaper title that you're after.
For example, I searched for a Darwin newspaper but didn't know the title. You could simply type "Darwin newspaper" into the books and library category
and click on Find, limit the decade that you're after and select the relevant record and scroll down
to find a list of libraries in Australia that hold this title. Trove has also digitised newspapers.
Begin with a simple name search such as "Anne Chung Gon" or "Anne Chung Gon + Launceston".
Watch our short "Getting started on Trove" video on the Trove help page for search tips.
The Chinese communities in Australia started to publish newspapers of their own voices in the 1890s.
Some early Chinese language newspapers included the Chinese Australian Herald,
the first major Chinese newspaper in Australia, which was published between 1894 and 1923 in Sydney.
The Tung Wah newspapers, which was also published in Sydney and Melbourne's first major Chinese newspaper.
The Chinese Times,, which runs from 1902 to 1922. There's a wealth of information about the individual
and collective lives of Chinese immigrants in these newspapers. Trove offers access to a
digitised version of these earliest Chinese language newspapers. It allows you to browse the newspapers online and search within the newspapers.
Unlike many traditional Western newspapers, they are less likely to publish family notices,
but occasionally death notices were placed in these newspapers to notify the community of the death of a person,
especially when the person was a notable member of the community. Major Chinese newspapers like the Tung Wah
Times were active community organisations. They spoke for the community, organised fundraising activities
to support their ancestral homeland in China and performed all kind of social functions to assist the community in various ways.
You will find numerous business notices, shipping timetables, local news articles and various community notices
containing information on people's names and villages of origin.
You will be pleased to know that the Tung Wah Times has been indexed in English,
which allows you to search without knowing the Chinese language. The Tung Wah newspaper index is also available through
Latrobe University website.
Chinese Australians have served in Australia Defence Forces and made noteworthy contributions during conflicts such as the Boer War,
World War One, World War Two, Korean and Vietnam Wars. While there is a long record of Australians with Chinese ancestry
serving in defence forces, even prior to the 20th century, at a time when Australian born children of Chinese settlers
facing significant racial intolerance, persecution and social exclusion.
Although the presence of Chinese-Australians throughout Australia may not be as well known
to the general Australian public, websites such as World War Two Chinese Australian Soldiers Honour Roll created by the Chinese Museum
and the Chinese Anzacs published by the Australian War Memorial, honours these servicemen and women.
Defence service records can be accessed from the National Archives of Australia. Simply visit their website and type in the name of the serviceman
or woman into the record search box. You may even find a record that you're after
is digitised and freely available online. Due to the prejudice some Chinese-Australians faced
when trying to enlist, they may have anglicised their names or used the family name of their mother
if they were European. This is the reason why it can be useful to keep a list of name variation
for your ancestors to keep in mind as you search.
There are a number of wonderful works that capture the Chinese-Australians' wartime. Search of books and libraries category in Trove to find a library closer to you
that holds these books or similar ones. The National Library is a great place to start your family history research
not only because we provide access to the many archival records mentioned earlier, but also because of our strong, published
and unpublished collections that help you gain a better understanding of the Chinese community, their shared memories,
and the cultural and historical context that may influence your research.
The library has an excellent collection of published family histories and secondary sources created by scholars,
historians and Chinese Australian genealogy organisations. For example, the multi-volume Cantonese Students Record
by Dr. Su Mingxian. In the early 20th century, young Chinese were allowed to come to Australia and to study.
Most who came were children or relatives of people already living in Australia and were mostly Cantonese.
These books to cover biographical information of each student, their family connections in Australia, copies of original records
such as students, passports and indexes of the students. This is the first volume of the set focusing on students
coming from the Zhongshan District of Cannton. The Library also offers a range of resources
about ancestral homelands of Chinese immigrants, including local gazetteers, journals, newspapers and maps.
You may also be interested in exploring the Library's Chinese oral history and manuscripts collections.
They provide a unique insight into the lives and experiences of Chinese-Australian people.
Our oral history collection includes interviews with family members of a number of first generation migrants.
One such interview is with Joyce Lee, who was born in 1916.
She was the daughter of Jin Jiang Henry, the late business owner of Henry and Company.
In her interview, she shared memories of her father, who first mined for tin in Wellborough, in Tasmania,
and established his wholesale and retail fruit and vegetable business.
The story of businessmen within William Liu, born in 1893, is just another example.
He describes his return to Australia in 1909 from Hong Kong. He speaks of his studies.
The white Australian policy and his involvement with community matters around Melbourne.
This oral history interview and its transcript is digitised and available on Trove.
Voice of William Liu: Now back to my 1912 to 1914 years in Melbourne.
It was very like, very much like I was back in my father's relatives' Taisin Village.
T.A.I.S.I.N. village. There [Melbourne], you could say I had lead a peasant's life,
a village peasant's life very much as if I was born there. I went there, couldn't speak English.
Within months, I suppose, a year or so, I began to feel, you know, one of them.
And so much so., and the dialect that I learned in Taisan
was mostly spoken in Melbourne in the Chinese community.
So, I was in my element. Our manuscript collection contain valuable materials
such as personal papers, correspondence, diaries and more.
The Letterbooks of Cheok Hong Cheong, include seven volumes of letters by the Chinese missionary.
He was born in China in about 1853 and came to Ballarat in the 1850s
with his father, who was also a missionary.
The Library's pictures collection, comprising photographs, prints, drawing, paintings,
postcards and objects, much of it digitised, documents the various aspects of the lives of Chinese-Australians.
You can find historical images of buildings such as the Chinese boarding house owned by William A Sac, in Gulgong,
New South Wales 1872, and John Aloo's Chinese restaurant in Ballarat.
Different Chinese huts and, of course, Chinatowns.
You can also find images that document events such as the Chinese parade in 1901, a Chinese funeral
and a puppet show to celebrate the Chinese New Year. There are also portrait photographs of many
Chinese migrants.
As a case study will explore the family history of Chee Dock and Mary Nomchong, pictured here in 1930.
Chee Dock Ng and Boo Jung Gew married in 1887 in Hong Kong.
This was Chee Dock's second marriage. His eldest son, George, was the son of his first wife who died in China.
We hold a photograph of Boo Jung's wedding dress seen here modelled by her daughter, Ellen, who was also known as 'Nell',
shortly after their marriage. The newlyweds arrived in Australia and settled in Braidwood in New South Wales in 1887.
Priorto this, Che Dock had been living in California and came to Australia to join his brother Shoon Foon, born in 1877.
His brother was a storekeeper on the Mongarlowe Goldfields, located just outside of Braidwood and encouraged Chee Dock's move to Australia.
Chee Dock agreed and the two brothers soon became business partners in Mongarlowe. Chee Dock was naturalised in 1882.
The original record is held at the State Records of New South Wales, but we had copies of New South Wales naturalisation certificates
in microform format as part of the State Records of New South Wales Archives Resource Collection.
As you can see, his family name was documented as Dock and his first name as Chee.
Chee Dock had returned to China in 1886 to marry Boo Jung.
Like his brother, Shoon Foon, Chee Dock anglicised, his surname from Ng to Nomchong.
His wife, Boo Jung, echoed this and changed her name to Mary Nomchong.
The Nomchong names means 'Southern Prosperity', and it's believed that this was the name of the business
which Shoon Foon later adopted as his surname.
Chee Dock took over the Mongarlowe store later and sold the business after his brother died and established a store in Braidwood.
According to articles found on our archive websites, in Trove, this store remained in the Nomchong family until 1980.
You can discover listings for the store in Wallace Street in Wise's New South Wales Post Office Directories up
until the 1950s. We hold a photograph of the business taken in 1940.
Those of you who know Braidwood will recognise this building on the corner of Wallace Street.
The sign reads and M. Nomchong and, according to this 1930 article, the company owners were Mary and Chee Dock and their children: Paul,
Leopold and Mary M Nomchong.
Chee Dock and Mary had 14 children in Braidwood, raising 13 children into adulthood.
Chee Docks son, George, from his first marriage, remained in China with his grandparents for many years and reunited
with his family in Australia as an adult. Although Chee Dock was naturalised in 1882,
George was not exempt from the Immigration Act 1901. Consequently, George was deported back to China.
A fantastic 2014 blog by Kate Bagnall titled 'Celestial City: Misunderstanding
of the Administration of Immigration Restriction', available in the archived website section in Trove outlines
how Chee Dock made a request to the Australian Government that his son be allowed back into the country
and even present a large petition signed by the residents of Braidwood, asking for a special consideration to be given.
George was eventually issued with a certificate exemption from the dictation test in 1913,
which was extended several times. He remained in Australia until his death in 1970.
The Dr. Su Mingxian books mentioned by Bing earlier revealed an article on Chee Dock held in the Cantonese Student Archives.
According to this article, Chee Dock had applied for a Chinese student passport visa in 1921 for his grandson, Thomas Nomchong,
who was George's son. From these documents, Bing was able to determine that Chee Dock's
original Chinese family name was, in fact, Wu. In addition to this, Bing uncovered the family originate from the small
village of Wenlou in the Xinhui district of Guangdong, China. An unexpected but invaluable find.
Chee Dock and Mary's individual death notices demonstrate how much they would love the respect in the community.
Even in 1977, the Braidwood Historical Society celebrated the centenary of Chee's arrival to the town
by organising a community dinner on the 19th of November 1977.
They presented each guest with a souvenir booklet entitled 'The Centenary of Nomchong Family in Braidwood,
1877 to 1977'. There is a wonderful full page article in the Tallaganda
Times on the 23rd November 1977 about the dinner.
The article provides a write up about the Nomchong's family arrival to Australia and their history in Braidwood.
Undeniably, this Chinese immigrant family was embraced by the town and, enriched the community by sharing their cultural heritage.
This is just one story across Australia. We would be interested in hearing your family's immigrant stories.
For more information, visit our collecting Chinese or Australian Stories page.
We have really only be able to scratch the surface, but we hope that this has been helpful to anyone
getting started. If you need help moving forward, there are a number
of excellent associations with a great deal of expertise such as Chinese-Australian Family Historians of Victoria,
Australian-Chinese Community Association of New South Wales, Chinese-Australian Historical Society.
We also have our own Ask a Librarian service. While we can't do extensive, ongoing research for you,
we can provide research assistance if you hit a brick wall. Happy researching.
CITATION LIST:
Citation list (in order of appearance):
· Foelsche, P. (1873). Chinese wood-carter, Darwin, North Australia. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-141834954
· (1895). [Portrait of unidentified Chinese fruit and vegetable hawker with baskets of produce]. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-140626205
· (1907). Portrait of Maud Shing, Canterbury, N.S.W., 1907. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-147021636
· Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate. issuing body. (). A group of young women from the Chinese Youth Group and a girl standing in front of the N.S.W. Railway Institute, Sydney, New South Wales, October 1943 from http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-462437807
· Certificates of Exemption from Dictation Test and Hand print - NAA - https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=7461127
· Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate. issuing body. (). Members of the Chinese Youth Group having a formal dinner, Sydney, New South Wales, October 1943 http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-462438116
· (1818, February 28). The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (NSW : 1803 - 1842), p. 4. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page493698
· (1848, July 29). The Moreton Bay Courier (Brisbane, Qld. : 1846 - 1861), p. 2. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page541146 Williams, S. Wells. & Atwood, John M.
· (1853). Map of the Chinese Empire : compiled from native & foreign authorities. https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1992690410
· Grosse, Frederick. (1873). Arrival of Chinese immigrants in Little Bourke Street. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-136140335
· Shipping Records: Public Records Office of Victoria: https://prov.vic.gov.au/explore-collection/explore-topic/passenger-records-and-immigration Ah See - Naturalisation record - https://records-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/fulldisplay?context=L&vid=61SRA&lang=en_US&docid=INDEX1423102
· NLA collection of cemetery records by Dr. Hu Jin Kok: https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Search/Home?lookfor=Hu+Jin+Kok&type=author&limit%5B%5D=&submit=Find
· (1909). Wise's New South Wales post office directory. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-522689844
· (1888, April 7). Adelaide Observer (SA : 1843 - 1904), p. 26. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page18928849
· Guang yi hua bao - The Chinese Australian Herald (Sydney, NSW: 1894-1923) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-title704
· Chinese Times (Melbourne, Vic: 1902-1922): http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-title705
· Tung Wah Times (Sydney, NSW : 1901 - 1936): http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-title1184
· Kennedy, Alastair. (2012). Chinese Anzacs : Australians of Chinese descent in the defence forces 1885-1919. [O'Connor, A.C.T : A. Kennedy]
· Chiu, Edmond. & Soh-Lim, Adil. & Museum of Chinese Australian History. (2021). For honour and country : Victorian Chinese Australians in World War II. Melbourne, VIC : Museum of Chinese Australian History
· NLA collection of works by Su Mingxian: https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Search/Home?lookfor=Su+Mingxian&type=author&limit%5B%5D=&submit=Find
· Lee, Joyce Therese. & Giese, Diana. (2000). Joyce Lee interviewed by Diana Giese in the Chinese Australian Oral History Partnership collection.
· Liu, William J. L. & De Berg, Hazel. (1978). William Liu interviewed by Hazel de Berg. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-222787139
· Cheong, Cheok Hong. (1897). Letterbooks of Cheok Hong Cheong,.
· Bayliss, Charles. & Merlin, Beaufoy. & American & Australasian Photographic Company (Sydney, N.S.W.). (1872). Chinese boarding house owned by William A. Sac, Gulgong, New South Wales, ca. 1872. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-147977283
· Gill, Samuel Thomas. & James J. Blundell & Co. (Melbourne, Vic.). (1855). John Alloo's Chinese Restaurant, main road, Ballaarat. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-135291710
· (1901). Chinese dragon on parade in Melbourne, 1901. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-140811868
· (1890). Chinese funeral, Innisfail, Queensland, 1890-1910. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-137088403
· Fairfax Corporation. (1935). Chinese puppets for the Chinese New Year, New South Wales, 8 February 1935. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-160384610
· Tesla Studios. ([18--?]). Portrait of Quong Tart. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-136718152
· (1930). Chinese Australian in his market garden, Northern Territory, ca. 1930. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-137943943
· (1945). Dragon Ball, Sydney, ca. 1945. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-147022814
· ([194-?]). Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Chee Dock Nomchong. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-136763383
· (1877). Portrait of Nell Nomchong, an early Braidwood settler, wearing her mother's wedding frock, 1877. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-136763054
· (1889, February 6). The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal (NSW : 1888 - 1954), p. 3. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page10960596
· (1940). The Nomchong store, Braidwood, New South Wales, ca. 1940. https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-137358816
· (1919). Group portrait of the Nomchong family, ca. 1919. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-147019395
Hello, my name is Susannah Helman. I'm Rare Books and Music Curator at the National Library
of Australia. As we begin I acknowledge Australia's first nations peoples as the
traditional owners and custodians of this land, I give my respect to the elders past and present
and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Today I'm talking about some of the Library's earliest books. Everyone knows that libraries
have books, the National Library of Australia is no different. We hold millions of them. The
Library has a rich rare books collection. It is strongest in Australian books from the late
18th century onwards as you would expect from the National Library of Australia.
Yet the Library also has a great collection of early printed books, particularly those printed
in Britain and Europe and it has collections that can tell the early history of the book,
particularly in the west, the transition between manuscript books, books that were written by hand
to printed books in which words are printed with type and illustrations are also printed,
usually through techniques such as woodcuts and copperplate engravings.
Now I'm going to show you some of the stars of our early collections.
We have a small but interesting collection of medieval European
manuscripts, both religious and secular, that show, many of them in fragmentary form,
the kinds of books produced in Europe in the medieval and early modern period.
Between the 10th and 16th centuries European manuscripts and books evolved and changed. Works
of science and religion coexisted. The rise of universities in around 1200 led to an explosion of
manuscript works and the growth of a secular book industry beyond the walls of religious houses.
Styles and standards of writing and illumination varied by location, cost and use as well as by
the skill of scribe and artist. The invention of movable type in
Europe in the mid-15th century had a profound effect on how books were produced and used.
Many medieval manuscripts were broken up and recycled in the bindings of printed books.
This is the oldest manuscript in the Library's collection,
it comes from a Breviary, the service or prayer book used by those in holy orders. Of English
origin the writing is Caroline or Carolingian miniscule, a rounded script that flourished
during the reign of Charlemagne who lived from around 742 to 814, Holy Roman Emperor.
The script was widely used throughout Europe for centuries and favoured for its legibility.
Some of these letters however are formed in ways more characteristic of earlier British
or technically Insular manuscripts. You can also see neumes, musical notation.
The parchment's dark colour may have been caused by chemical damage.
Most medieval manuscripts were written on prepared animal skin
called vellum or parchment. These terms are often used interchangeably today although to
be strictly correct parchment refers to sheep and goatskin and vellum to the finer calf skin.
This leaf with its gash sewn up makes its animal origins clear. As the holes made by thread
are stretched the sewing was most likely done by the parchment-maker while the skin was supple and
still being prepared rather than during any later repair. The thread is still in place. The text is
from one of the great works of medieval theology, the sentences by Peter Lombard, Bishop of Paris.
This important cartulary, a compendium of historical and business records,
is one of five such volumes to survive from the English Benedictine Abbey at Chertsey in Surrey.
Dissolved by King Henry VIII in 1537 Chertsey Abbey was one of over 800 religious houses
whose lands and possessions were appropriated by the King after he broke from Rome and established
his own Church of England. This volume dates from the Abbey's prime during the rule of Abbot John
of Rutherwick, an expert administrator. It is effectively the Abbey's record of its history
including copies of documents and charters. In the hands of two or more scribes it records the
Abbot's acts and the Abbey's property interests. Some earlier accounts, the only extant examples,
were used in the original binding making this cartulary particularly significant.
The Library has a substantial collection of early English legal documents. This example shows they
were not all boring to look at. It is written on the flesh or smoother side of the parchment. It is
a contract called an Indenture or chirograph. Two copies would have been written out,
one above the other. Before being cut chirographum, or a variation thereof,
meaning autograph was written as a security measure.
This is a book of hours dating from around 1450 and made in the southern Netherlands,
probably for the English market. Books of hours were prayer books for private devotion and were
very popular in Europe from the 13th century. This example was no doubt made for an English patron,
possibly in Bruges or Ghent, then centres of illuminated manuscript production.
Annotations within the volume show that it has been used by English speakers.
It is often considered our most splendid book of hours but it has obviously been well loved
before that. It has inscriptions and many of the borders are worn.
This illumination called an historiated initial as seen within a letter was cut
from a large antiphonal a volume used by medieval and Renaissance choirs. Cathedrals and monasteries
usually had a set of 12 to 14 antiphonals spanning the church year, each with a small
number of illuminations. The musical notation was so large it could be seen from a distance.
This illumination shows the 4th century St Martin of Tours who served as a Roman soldier in Amiens.
Beside him is the beggar with whom Martin shared his cloak and who he later dreamed was Jesus. The
image appears within a letter O, the first letter of the Magnificat, song of Mary, sung on the
Feast of St Martin, the 11th of November which begins "O beatum virum!", "Oh blessed man!"
The Library's oldest printed item dates from 1162. It was printed in China,
a Chinese translation of a Sanskrit Buddhist scripture.
Books published before 1501 are called incunabula. That word means swaddling
clothes or cradle in Latin. That means that they come from the earliest years of printing.
They are often studied separately from books that appeared afterwards.
Johannes Gutenberg's Bible, the first major work printed with moveable type, appeared
in the mid-1450s. Its printing was a pivotal moment in the history of the book. Also called
the 42-line Bible it was the first major book printed with movable metal type in Europe. The
type used echoes that of contemporary manuscripts. In its blue and red splitch running titles at the
top of each page for the names of the book of the Bible, it resembles those of 13th century Bibles.
About 180 Gutenberg Bibles were printed on both vellum and paper yet only around 48 survive,
23 complete. While the main text is printed the red and blue letters and highlighting were done
by hand. Some copies of the Gutenberg Bible were elaborately illuminated after printing.
Our leaf is on the modest end of the scale.
This renowned and significant early work on witchcraft,
Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, was published widely until the 17th century.
It has often been seen retrospectively as a manual for the Inquisition in its quest to rid
Europe of witchcraft. The margin notes in this early Latin copy show it has been much used.
The Nuremberg Chronicle is one of the earliest and most ambitious printed books. It is known
for its extraordinary woodcuts which reflect new information gained by voyages of discovery
and the coexistence of Christian and Ptolemaic thinking at this time. A fusion
of Biblical history and geography the book outlines history from the creation to 1493.
This very rare printed book of hours was printed in Paris for an English entrepreneur.
It shows how decades after Gutenberg's printed Bible there was still a demand for books of hours
and how early printed books emulated earlier manuscript forms. Paris publishers,
most of whom worked near Notre Dame Cathedral on the le de la Cit
used a combination of woodcut and metal cut prints for the illustrations.
This book tells of the life and suffering of Christ.
Its artist, Albrecht Durer, is commonly regarded as the most important artist of
the northern Renaissance. His specialty was printmaking, particularly woodcuts and he
was ambitious and innovative in his work. Few copies of this popular book survive intact.
To time travel a century or two I'm going to end with two early works printed in Australia.
The first is this, the earliest surviving work printed in Australia.
It was discovered in a collection in Canada and given to the people of Australia by the
Government of Canada. It advertises a long evening's entertainment at Sydney's theatre.
A play, Nicholas Rowe's Tragedy of Jane Shaw, a farce and a dance. The performers were convicts
and organised the performance themselves. The second is the earliest illustrated book printed
in Australia. This is John Lewin's extremely rare Birds of New South Wales from 1813.
To find out more about our collections you can find more information on our website,
online catalogue and keep an eye on our social media channels, blogs and events.
We have pages on our website about our medieval manuscripts including digitised images of our
holdings, thanks to the generous support of donors to the 2014 Annual Appeal. Alternatively you can
get a library card, search our catalogue and call up an item to view in our Reading Room.
We look forward to seeing you in person, online or both. Thank you for watching.
Hello and welcome to this learning webinar about the Indian Emigration Passes to Fiji
as held in the National Library of Australia s collection and freely available online.
The National Library of Australia acknowledges Australia s First Nations Peoples, the first Australians, as the traditional owners and custodians of this land
and gives respect to the elders past and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
We also acknowledge the National Archives of Fiji as custodians of the original records
and we thank them for making this collection available to researchers around the world.
Hello, my name is Judith, I m a reference librarian here at the National Library Reader
Services Team. Joining us is my colleague, Jack. Hello everyone, I m Jack and together with Judith
we ll be taking you through this presentation today. Today we ll be looking specifically at how to find the records for the Indian labourers who travelled
to Fiji in the period 1879 to 1916. We ll start with a brief overview of the indentured labour
system, what it was and its legacy to Fiji. Next we ll take a look at the records themselves,
what records exist, what they describe and where to find them. Last, we ll look at all
important access information, we ll talk you through how to access these records for your research purposes with some case studies. But let s start with the historical context
for these records. When we started looking at this topic the thing that struck me the most was
that these records don t exist in a vacuum, these records with real names and real faces to history
and it is a history that can be a little bit confronting at times. For example, later in the session we ll look at the record for Daulat who was a two-and-a-half
year old son of indentured labourers and Daulat is just one name out of 60,965 men,
women and children who travelled from India to Fiji under the indentured labourer system.
So the labourers are often known by the term girmityas which comes from girmit. It s a borrowing from the English word agreement which was used
to designate the indentured labour system. Once we understand who these records talk
about it links us to an understanding of what they experienced, what their lives looked like
and takes them from a name in the record to a lived reality. For example a paper presented to the Indian History Congress in 2001 gives this description of living conditions.
The coolies were accommodated in long sheds, partitioned into 10 feet by 7 feet cubicles
within which the system of indentured labour was practised on the old slave states.
Other accounts talk about the brutality of the work, the homesickness for a country and family left beyond and the difficulty of finding a place in a deeply segregated colonial society.
All of this is crucial information for those researching family history, colonial history and indentured labour. But we ll start, what actually is indentured labour?
So the short simplified answer is that a reliance of indentured labour can be traced back to the
abolition of slavery in the British Empire, back in the 1830s so the loss of a plentiful supply of
slaves led to a labour shortage on largescale sugar, coffee, tea, cocoa, rice and rubber
plantations. So to counteract this the powers that be tapped into existing indentured labour systems
and indebted labour systems to source workers. India as you can imagine was an extremely
convenient source for cheap labour so workers were recruited under both the indentured and free labour system but under the indentured labour system workers were contracted to travel to the
plantations and work for a set number of years. In the case of emigration to Fiji the fixed term
was five years, the answer to overseers and estate managers and beyond the less
than luxurious conditions that we ve already mentioned workers could be criminally prosecuted
if they left the estate. They then had to pay their own way back to India after they d worked
their five years so there was a possible free passage after 10 years of industrious service.
There was meant to be a quota of women brought to the plantation but numbers were usually far below target and we now know that women were particularly oppressed
under the system and faced incredible hardship. But despite those conditions many girmitiyas
stayed in Fiji where they developed a unique culture, society and they played a vital role in Fijian history. The past was never forgotten however and
you ll find many girmitiyas and families continue to maintain or reconnect with their Indian roots.
So why were these records particularly important, Jack? So these records are widely acknowledged to be so
important because they re one of the only sources that really document indentured labour in Fiji.
In fact in 2011 the combined records of Indian indentured labourers of Fiji,
Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago were placed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
The original documents themselves are held in the National Archives of Fiji. These were created and maintained by the British administration during the colonial period.
They document many elements surrounding the indentured labour system. Later the records
were microfilmed and given to a small number of libraries and archives around the world to enable people to consult their collection. Family history researchers in particular made
heavy uses of these passes to trace family back to India and in many cases they were able to
reconnect with the original villagers and even family of their indentured ancestors. So in this
way the records are a unique resource that is able to connect people through time and distance.
Are there other relevant records that the Library or any other institution holds?
There are. So the National Archives in the UK hold many relevant records, not just indentured labour
in Fiji but also other colonies. The Fiji Archives also hold other material including the official
government records. Birth, death and marriage records are also held by the Fiji Registry of
Births, Deaths and Marriages. Finally the National Library of Australia also holds some relevant
records from the British administration and these are part of the Australian Joint Copying Project.
The relevant material comes from the Colonial Office series and mainly covers administrative
matters including information about ships and voyages. These are also available online.
You might like to look at our AJCP learning webinar and finding aids if you are interested in these documents. We should also mention just keep in mind
that when you are looking through these records and searching for this content the language
used is very much of the period so some of it may be offensive from a modern perspective.
Now I know the National Library has long supported researchers using this collection by providing
access in our reading rooms and through our copying, lending and reference services
however recognising the importance of the collection and particularly its heavy use amongst the Fijian, Indian and other communities
the Library has digitised a complete collection of over 60,000 passes and other related collections
so these are now freely and fully available online from anywhere in the world.
I do remember before they were digitised we had a family of dedicated researchers who came to visit
us from interstate and they were here for must have been almost two weeks from open to close
poring through the thousands of different frames under microfilm, thousands of different passes.
One evening there was a shout of jubilation in the reading rooms when they d managed to discover the passes they were looking for but having this material online really does simplify
access and makes it much easier for everybody to track down their indentured ancestors.
Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully a few more shouts in living rooms when they discover more records.
Before we show you how to access the digitised records we will quickly run through the different series and what information they hold. So there are 17 separately listed items in our catalogue
as you can see here but these can be grouped into a smaller number of more important categories
so these are the General Register of Indian Immigrants, 1879 to 1916, Repatriation Registers,
Death Registers, Plantations Registers and finally the emigration passes themselves which are the
most important due to their detail and because the pass number serves as a unique identifier.
Now you did have to explain to me what we meant by unique identifier in this case, Jack.
Well it works like the number on your passport or your driver s licence number. So like a registration number? Exactly, you ll see it popping up on
other records and even things on marriage and birth certificates. It s almost like a shorthand way of identifying a person. The first type of record that we mentioned
was the General Register. Could you explain a little bit more about that? Absolutely. So the General Register, it has two main parts. There s the list of ships
carrying indentured labourers and then there will be the full list of indentured labourers
within each ship. These are ordered by pass number and you ll see that the names are arranged by male, female, boy, girl and infants. Within these the names are arranged by alphabetical order.
Early records include the name, father s name, age, sex, vessel, date of arrival, name,
cost of passage, employer and remarks. Later records contain more information. This example from Book 9 includes columns for extension order,
re-indentures, marriage, death, return to India and others. So it s important to note that many
of these columns are incomplete and may not be comprehensive. For example repatriation or a death
may not be included here but there s still a wonderful amount of information in this register.
Great. The next one we mentioned was repatriation registers. Now these come under a variety of names
such as the Alphabetical List of Fiji Born Indians Repatriated to India, 20 December 1924 to 30,
August 1930 or Nominal Roles of Indians Repatriated to India, 1916 to 1947.
For example here is one on pages from the Nominal Roles. It s important to note that these records,
it wasn t just those who were born in India who were repatriated, descendants of original indentured labourers are also listed
and could have been given passage. So free passage was available once certain conditions had been met
including number of years worked and time spent in Fiji. Travellers mostly returned on the same
ships that were bringing labourers out to Fiji so the information recorded typically includes name,
father s name, pass number, ship of return or ship of arrival and sometimes caste.
There are also several volumes of death registers of indentured Indian emigrants working on plantations. These are generally organised chronologically but there
are some that are arranged by plantation instead. Details are generally fewer than
those found in other series but typically you can find pass number, the ship name, the date of indenture, plantation, employer, date of death and the cause of death as well.
Finally we have the plantation registers. Now these are another digitised collection that can provide essential detail about an indentured ancestor.
Not all the registers have survived unfortunately and some are very incomplete but each plantation
should have an entry with a list of indentured labourers working on the property. Details supplied are normally the pass number, name, ship of arrival, sex, age, date of indenture, term,
pass number, relations and sometimes details related to repatriation or death. These can be
really useful to trace who your ancestors were working with and other personal connections.
So it sounds like all of these different records do have slightly different information on them
and it looks like there s some overlap but unique things in every one.
So they would be fairly interconnected and that would give us some options on how to
cross-reference them, wouldn t it? Yeah, exactly. Alright in that case let s move on to the emigration passes themselves.
These are generally the most sought after documents for those researching your family history. As we mentioned earlier the pass number is an important detail that was used in other
areas. The passes contain the most genealogical information from all the records and were also
more systematically recorded. If possible this is the record you should try to locate. There
are separate passes for men, women, boys, girls, infant boys and infant girls. These are split into
different sections for each ship, the men are recorded first then the women then the children
then the infants. As with the general register it is by alphabetical order within these groups.
Judith, do we have any more information about how these passes were filled out? Did it happen in India? In Fiji? Well actually a little bit of both so these passes
were filled out before embarkation at one of the immigration depots in India. The depot s surgeon
was responsible for correctly filling out the details. The passes were then given to the Master
of Transport to compare with the ship s lists and this is where they were given a ship s number.
Once the vessel had arrived in Fiji the passes were returned to the labourers and assigned a pass number from the General Register that we mentioned before.
That sounds like a lot of recordkeeping but are there mistakes in the passes? Yes so one crucial point here is that the Depot Surgeon was responsible for transcribing personal
and place names so spelling mistakes and errors are common, particularly when you have a language
or cultural disconnect. There is a lack of consistency even within passes on the same ship.
So the information recorded remained almost identical over the years. This is
an example from the first arrival of indentured labourers that were on board Leonidas in 1879.
The pass number is right at the top, number one in this case. Listed below are many other fields,
for example we have a ship s name, the ship s number, the location of the depot, the date, the depot number, the caste, father s name, age, the zilla which is
a kind of county subdivision, Pergunnah5 which was a smaller division of a zilla, the village,
occupation, name of next of kin, if married, to whom, marks and a range of signatures.
Here is an example of a pass of the Sutlej in 1916 so this was the last group of indentured
labourers to emigrate. Note the fingerprints that appear on the right-hand side of passes from the
later voyages. Some of the terminology has also changed slightly but the recorded information
is very similar. So Jack, it seems like the pass number is the most important
in terms of following the records but are any of the other numbers useful on here?
Absolutely. So some of the other numbers can also be used for tracing family members.
Let s just have a look at the depot numbers in a little bit more detail. We ll start let s have a look at this pass, 1332. See the section where it has the name of next of
kin? It says mother of 786. As these were filled out in the depot it is important to know that the
786 in this case refers to depot number 786 and not pass number 786. Now the depot numbers can
be difficult to find as they re not in order but in most cases they will be in the same voyage.
We've done some digging beforehand and we ve found some with a depot number 786 and this is with the
pass number 13542. Checking this pass we can see that the relation is confirmed with the text,
son of 785. We can imagine the mother waiting with her son as the forms are filled out one
after the other and this explains the close depot numbers. Sometimes you ll find a whole section of your family undertaking the same trip with these consecutive depot numbers.
So as you can see there are many types of records but the most important for tracing family
are the emigration passes so these are a rich source of genealogical information and
can provide you a direct link back to a location or family in India. Now we ve given you the background and overview of the records, we want to show you how to access
them and use them for your research. Using a case study of a family we will show you what
indexes are available through different websites and how to use these to search the passes. Next,
how our research guide lets you browse the passes including demonstrating how to download images and
find permanent links. Then we ll show you how to access some of the other resources we mentioned
earlier before touching on using civil registration records to locate pass numbers.
So as we mentioned, particularly if you are new to this research, one of the best places to start
when researching passes is on our research guide. As well as background information
about the records, the arrangements and how we can help you, you will see some important
links so on the right-hand side you can see the link to girmit.org website and to the National
Archives of Fiji. So the Girmit website provides a searchable index of indentured labourers that was
put together using data from the National Archives of Fiji who also provide the same data as a pdf.
So if I click the link to open up the Girmit page you will see that it is a work in progress and has
not yet been finished so it means that the records indexed only run from A to M however
this is still an extremely important resource and if your ancestor s names fall into this range it should be your first step. Let s have a look at a common name, Daulat.
So I ve gone into the D section and you can see up the top here there is a search bar.
Now I can start typing to see a full list of results or if you have doubts about the spelling
used as Judith mentioned earlier I can also scroll down until I find the relevant section.
In this case I will use a search and we ll see that there are quite a few results for the same
name. So this means that if your ancestor s name has quite a few results you may need to
search through several different passes to verify that it is the pass that you are looking for.
Let's have a look at Daulat, son of Ramcharan who came out on board The
Sangola so the pass number here is 37082. Okay, let s come back to our research guide
now that we know the pass number. On the left-hand side of the screen you can see some subheadings
and as we now know the pass number we can go straight to Access by Pass so if you click on that and then scroll down until you find the right range.
So we re looking for 36318 to 37171. Right so click the View Online Link to go into the viewer.
So you can see the pass number noted at the top of that form.
Using the side bar at the top scroll across so we can get closer to the page number that we
re looking for or rather the pass number that we re looking for which is 37082.
Just keep going a little bit further and once we get close we can just use the arrows to go page by page to the right pass.
So we will get there, 37082 and here we go. Here's the genealogical information
that we can now use to trace the family back to India as well.
I m just going to pause us there for a second cause we did want to talk about how to download an
image of this one. So now that we have the pass, on the left-hand side of the screen you ll see
that there is a download icon. If we click this you ll see there are several different options
and we have different formats, a jpeg and a pdf. Just note that if you do choose the jpeg
it will be a compressed file and you will need to unzip this before you can view the image.
Now the other important thing is that if you click all images here
this will include the passes for everybody that came out on board that ship. If you
re only interested in a single pass, Daulat s pass in this instance, click current and this
means that when you download you will only download this single image for this pass.
But hang on, what if we only want to link back to this record rather than download the whole thing?
Absolutely so you also have the option to use it like if I click on a sight icon now
you ll see that we have the work and image options again. The work once again will be for the whole
shipload and will include all the passes and it will take you to the beginning of that sequence.
If we choose image you ll see that this image identifier will take us directly
to this pass every time and this is a stable permanent link that you can use in your records
that you ll always come back to this record. That's fantastic. So looking at the pass
it s mentioned here that his father is listed as next of kin and that Daulat is only two-and-a-half
years old so could we assume in that case that he came out with a family member?
I think it s a pretty good assumption and it s possibly the father as this is who has been listed by the Depot Surgeon. Let s return to the research guide and have a
look at how we would search. We ve assumed that the ship and the date are the same
and so we can click through the records until we find possible matches.
But if we wanted to go through more quickly we could always use the General Register that we talked about earlier so you ll find a link to the General Register in the Other
Further Resources tab. If you follow the link through to the Viewer once we find the resource,
just over there, click through into the Viewer
and when browsing the collection you're looking for the appropriate date range so we re looking for The Sangola that departed in February 1908 so the date range for that would be
Collection Book 7. Once that loads just up the top here you can see it s listed as arriving in March.
So we now need to look through to see where the relevant section starts.
Again you can use that top taskbar to scroll through
and we re looking for The Sangola, February 1908.
We should have him here
and here we are. We ve found a pass number 36580.
Wonderful so that was a great tip, Judith, cause this way we didn t need to click through every individual pass, we could just go through the register.
Let s go back to our research guide and we ll select Access by Pass Number again to find this
pass, just here. Once again it s pass number 36580 so we ll go back to the research guide,
Access by Pass Number so same voyage that we were looking at before, here we are.
So we need to click through until we find 36580. Alright, almost there.
Here we are, we ve found it. Okay so let s compare the details with Daulat s pass.
It looks like we have a match, we ve got the same caste, the same district, the same thana and the same village. Yeah, what s really interesting here as
well is that there s a wife listed with the depot number as well so this is another great piece of
information that can lead you to another search. We won t go through the whole process again,
as you can see it takes a little bit of clicking through but we do recommend that
it would be easier to go back to the General Register at this point to find the pass number.
We have done the research beforehand and we found that it s pass number 37048.
Alternatively if you think the spelling might be inaccurate you could also browse through
the passes looking for a depot number. These are unfortunately not listed in the General Register.
Let s just note the ships did make many voyages and so you may need
to look through quite a number of ships if all you have is the ship name and no date.
Let s go back to our research guide and have a look at the Access by Ship for a little bit
more information so we ve got Access by Ships Name. Imagine that we were looking for someone
and we only know that they came aboard The Ganges. If we look at the relevant section
here you ll see that it made seven trips so this could involve quite a lengthy search if you had
no other information. It is possible but if there are other documents what might help
this is where you try and take a shortcut. We talked about the number appearing on some other documents earlier, could these be helpful locating the passes?
Oh absolutely so an approach that can provide breakthrough information in some cases uses
the Fijian civil registration records so these are marriages or birth certificates.
So if a girmitya was married according to the ordinances of the Colony of Fiji
a number of details had to be included with the registered number such as the pass number, the
name of ship, plantation where they were assigned and sometimes the pass number you will also find
on the birth certificates if a child s born to girmityas. So as you mentioned before the pass numbers was a shorthand way of identifying the parents. Please note that to get a copy of these
certificates you will need to contact the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages back in Fiji.
We have a link to the Registry on the research guide itself just up here.
This brings us to the end of the presentation today about using the Indian Emigration Passes to Fiji. We ve covered the background to the indentured labour system.
How the records are arranged and what information they have. Then we showed you how you can access these resources online.
The case study we presented should have provided a good indication of the nuts and bolts of using this collection
and how you can trace your family through them. Of course if you get stuck and need some tips or advice don t hesitate to reach out to us through our Ask a Librarian service.
We hope you ve enjoyed the presentation and have come away with some new information.
Hello, my name Leisa and I'm Ella and we’re reference librarians here at the National Library
of Australia. Have you ever wanted to start your family history, but you just don’t where to begin?
It may surprise you to learn that you can start your family tree right from your loungeroom or
wherever you like. Let us show you step-by-step and if you get stuck, we’re always here to help.
A good place to start your research is identify what you know about your ancestors.
Here are some questions to get you started: What was your great grandfather’s full name?
Did he immigrate from non-English speaking country such as China,
Germany or Norway? Did he anglicise his first or last name?
Do you know your grandparent’s birth, death and marriage dates?
Do you know which language, social or nation group a previous generation of
your descendants belonged to? Did they live on a mission, reserve or pastoral station?
Did you know the name of the town your parents grew up in?
Did your grandparents serve in any wars? What religion did your grandmother belong to?
Once you have identified what you know then you can start to capture details
using a pedigree or ancestral chart. We have charts freely available to
download or print from our ‘Getting Started’ section in our Family History research guide.
Alternatively, you may like to contact your local historical society. There are some excellent
First Nations family tree chart templates that can be downloaded from the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (known as AIATSIS) website.
A systematic approach, working backwards from yourself is the easiest way to trace
your ancestry. It is best to work from the known to the unknown, one generation back at a time.
Start by writing down your full name, date and place of birth, followed by your parent’s full
names, dates and places of birth, then your grandparent’s dates and places of birth on your
mother’s side then father’s side and so forth. If you are not sure about an ancestor’s details,
then simply leave the form blank. Avoid guessing and supplying incorrect information.
Remember to keep any information, about a living person, private.
Look over your family history tree chart to work out what gaps need to be filled.
Choose an ancestor to discover more about. Plan what records to access and where to locate them.
Records created at the time your ancestor was alive will be the most reliable.
You may discover your great grandfather’s first job hidden in an electoral roll,
or your great-grandmother’s passenger arrival to Australia, your ancestor’s baptism record, or
even uncover that missing piece of the puzzle in a newspaper article that solves that family mystery.
Family members can often provide stories, memories, photos or memorabilia about a deceased
family member. You may find someone else in the family has already started the family history
or holds documents useful to your research. Birth, death and marriage certificates
can often provide more information about an ancestor and could include things like birth,
death and marriage dates, place of registration, family members, age,
occupation and much more. Certificates can be purchased from relevant state or territory Birth,
Death or Marriage Registry Offices. We have more information about this on our website.
Libraries and Archives can hold an array of documents and records in a variety of formats
including online, print and microform. Search National,
State and local Libraries and Archives websites to discover family history resources they hold.
Family History databases can contain a range of digitised records and indexes searchable by
your ancestor’s name. Contact your local library to find out if they subscribe to any databases.
When you have hit that research brick wall, there are places that can help.
Family history societies have expert knowledge in
different aspects of family history and offer ongoing research support.
Many societies provide workshops and hold local collections or indexes relevant to their area.
Search online or contact your local shire council to find a society near you.
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) Family History
Unit provides family history research assistance for First Nations people particularly families
affected by the stolen generation. Visit the AIATSIS family history page for more information.
For extensive or ongoing family history research, you might like to hire a private
professional researcher. You can find a list of researchers on our website.
You can find our Family History research guide
under the ‘Using the Library’ then ‘Research tools and resources’ located at the top of our homepage.
Our 'Ask a Librarian' reference service provides research assistance at any stage of your family history research.
So, if you have a family history question, you can get in touch with us by filling out the
Ask a Librarian online form. You can also chat to us over the phone, mail us a letter or simple visit us
and talk to one our friendly librarians in the reading room. Good luck and happy researching!
R: Hi, my name is Rowan Henderson and I'm a Senior Adviser in the Curatorial at Collection
Research section of the National Library of Australia. I'm joined by Philip Jackson, Program
Manager in Curatorial and Collection Research. Welcome to this discovery video in which Philip
and I will explore the PROMPT collection at the Library. Philip has worked for the Library's
Australian Printed Collections for the last 10 years and he will be sharing some of the
PROMPT collection highlights in this video. The rich culture of Australia's First Nations
people has included performance for tens of thousands of years. The National Library of
Australia acknowledges these First Australians as the traditional owners and custodians of
this land. We give respect to the elders past and present and through them to all Australian
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. So what is the PROMPT collection? The PROMPT
collection is a collection of collections that relate to the performing arts in Australia
from the 1880s until the present. It's a part of the Library's ephemera collection, held
in a special stack area. And what's ephemera? Ephemera is printed material that is usually
created for a particular purpose and not intended to be kept. In the Library we use the guide
that it s usually less than five pages long. It s mostly printed on paper but can also
include objects like hats, shirts and badges. It's often printed on flimsy material and
can be difficult to conserve. As the PROMPT collection relates to the performing
arts it mainly contains programs but may also include subscription, brochures, flyers, invitations
and tickets. Because of their size posters are stored separately, and magazines in the
Library's serials collection. The PROMPT collection is vast, it currently
contains 5,269 collections and uses over 300m of shelving. It documents a huge range of
topics such as prominent individuals in the performing arts, organisations and groups,
venues and performances and it covers genres such as pop, rock and folk music, opera, circus,
actors of stage and film, comedians, orchestras, theatre companies and performing art schools.
The people and places covered might be known in Australia and around the world or they
could be completely local and unknown elsewhere. The performers might not even be Australian
but if they performed in Australia they could be in the collection.
Why does the Library collect performing arts ephemera? The Library collects this material
so that the Australian community can now and in the future discover, learn and create new
knowledge. The Library's role is to develop and maintain a library collection including
a comprehensive collection relating to Australia and the Australian people. The Library collects
ephemera to document life in Australia, what has happened, where it was and who was involved.
In this case the collection documents the performing arts, to show what has been performed
and created in Australia at any point in time, by whom and where.
How does the Library collect it? The Library actively looks for ephemera to collect but
also relies on the public and collectors to let us know what is available. We also work
with other libraries so that they collect material relevant to their state or territory
while we collect items of national interest. If you re a collector and would like to offer
items to the Library for this collection you can do so through our website.
So how can you find out what is in the PROMPT collection? The Library has created a handy
new finding aid which lists all the collections under headings such as individuals, performances
and events, subjects and venues. You can explore it by searching our catalogue for the Guide
to the Australian Performing Arts Programs and Ephemera PROMPT Collections in the National
Library of Australia. If you're interested in donating ephemera
to our collection it would be appreciated if you could check our lists first to make
sure we don t already hold the same material. It s also important to remember that there
is other material in the Library s collection relating to the performing arts that is not
in the PROMPT collection. This material could be found in the manuscripts, pictures and
oral histories collections as well as in the Library s extensive collection of books. You
can search our catalogue to discover these other collections.
Now Philip is going to take us through some of the highlights of the PROMPT collection.
P: PROMPT is a theatrical term relating to an offstage reminder for an actor or singer
of the lines that they have forgotten and although it isn t exactly an acronym it may
have been something of an in joke to adopt this term for the National Library s collections
of programs and other performing arts memorabilia. Our collection is arranged into mini collections
by subject or topic which may be the name of a performer or performing arts company.
The collections range all the way through the alphabet. We have things from A to Z,
from Abba to Charles Zwar who was an Australian songwriter, composer, lyricist, pianist, music
director who mainly worked in England from the 1930s to the 1960s. He did the music for
All Square which is included in this program here and his name is in one of the chequerboards
on the front of the program. There may be earlier items but mainly the
collection consists of material from the 1880s onwards. In the performing arts exhibition
that we've got on at the moment there s a thing by Bland Holt who s one of our most
important early performers and impresarios. That exhibition shines a spotlight on the
National Library s performing arts collections. There are PROMPT files for Australians who
have achieved great fame overseas such as Dame Nellie Melba. In the show there's the
1902 ticket from Melbourne which is her home town where she got her name from and this
is a program from the first world war, a charity concert for Polish refugees.
As well as having achieved great fame overseas in London Peach Melba was named after her
by the great chef, Escoffier. In America there was even a packet of cigars named after her.
So this is a Flor de Melba cigar box, a thing which is probably not a very appropriate thing
for a singer. Other performers who feature prominently and on stage are Robert Helpmann
and he actually danced in this memorial matinee for Anna Pavlova. He did a duet with a Russian
ballerina from Swan Lake and at the other end of his career there s the program for
his state funeral where you can find a eulogy delivered by Don Dunstan, the former State
Premier of South Australia and a strong supporter of the arts.
Barry Humphries was another Australian who achieved great fame overseas. These are some
items from the PROMPT collection relating to an exhibition of her frocks. Cate Blanchett,
for her we cover her stage performances rather than her work as a film actor. So Kylie Minogue,
we concentrate on her live performances rather than her recorded sound which is really looked
after by the National Film and Sound Archive. So this is a program for Cate Blanchett from
a performance in New York with David Wenham and this is from Kylie Minogue's 1991 tour.
Opera PROMPT files include Dame Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge. Dame Joan also had some
food named after her. This is a menu from a restaurant in Wellington and there's a spinach
fettuccine named after her as well as the dessert at the end of the menu which is called
La Stupenda which was her nickname. As well as programs we have all sorts of material
so there were also some stamps issued to honour Dame Joan a few years ago as well.
There are other opera companies in the collection as well as Opera Australia, the big company
so there s the Pinchgut Opera which is a smaller opera company that concentrates mainly on
baroque music so this is a program of work from 1778 which they performed for a rare
time in Sydney in 2015. Ballet programs, we have things from Ballet
Russe who were one of the first big ballet companies to tour Australia in 1936. The Borovansky
Ballet Borovansky came from overseas but stayed in Australia for a long time and did much
to establish Australian ballet. Australian Ballet, we've got programs here on display
from the early 1960s and then 2000. This is a program honouring Graeme Murphy. There are
things from Bangarra as well, the Aboriginal dance company. In the exhibition there s a
full size copy of the poster for this program, Praying Mantis Dreaming with a wonderful part
by Libby Blayney and then there s a much more recent program there for Skin which is a program
by Bangarra that examines family kinship. Australian theatre has a huge range of material
in the PROMPT collection. We've only got one program here on display which is the Bell
Shakespeare Company s first production of Hamlet in 1991. The Tivoli Theatre was a big
circuit. It was linked to JC Williamson who was known as The Firm. They were a huge company
that was set up in 1882 and they ran theatre pretty much in Australia until 1976.
These two programs here are from 1939 and they brought in people like Anna May Wong
who was an actress from Hollywood and the Mills brothers who were African American singers.
The Tivoli also in the 1940s and 50s were a lot more risque than you might expect from
that conservative period. There are programs with chorus girls and can-can dancers and
that sort of thing. We've got musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar.
There's a program from 1972 with a ticket. Instead of Phantom of the Opera well we do
have that as well, we've got Phantoad of The Opera which was a Brisbane parody of it from
1991. Wicked, a modern play and of course Tim Minchin's Matilda on display in the
On Stage exhibition. There's material related to traditional circuses
such as Ashton's who were established in 1932 and this particular program has a little caption
on it "Col and I went in 1967 and it was a very good show " so programs can be mementos
of a performance with a personal touch. More recently a more modern circus is Circus
Oz. This is a program from their seasons in the early 1990s. Circus Oz don't include any
animals in their circus but there are animals in the performing arts collections such as
Topsy who was a performing horse who could count, identify colours, play cards, do magic
tricks. Topsy toured eastern Australia performing mainly in the Gold Coast region in the early
1950s. This little item indicates that she gave command performances for horse lovers
like Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip in 1952, '54 and the Queen Mother in 1958.
There are also performing arts events for festivals, Adelaide Festival. That's from
the first one in 1960 and then there's the Garden of Earthly Delights from the Adelaide
Fringe Festival from only a few years ago and the National Folk Festival. There's a
poster from that in the On Stage exhibition and in the PROMPT collection there s a media
kit for the 50th anniversary of the festival in 2016 so the festival started in 1967.
The PROMPT collection contains a huge range of highly significant, evocative, beautiful
and fascinating material and whatever your personal interests may be there is probably
something in it that will amuse or entertain you.
Hello, my name is Gareth.
I'm a digital preservation coordinator
here at the National Library of Australia.
The National Library of Australia
acknowledges Australia's first nations peoples,
the first Australians, as the traditional owners
and custodians of this land
and gives respect to the elders, past and present.
And through them, to all Australian Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander people.
One of the most challenging aspects
of digital preservation is not the actual work
but surprisingly, it's explaining what it is to people.
Think of it as the digital equivalent
of physical conservation.
So the library has books, manuscripts, artworks,
and many other objects.
And they might require treatment from time to time,
if covers or spines are damaged
or there's rips and tears in paper.
The library has a dedicated team
to treat these physical items, to keep them stable
and accessible to users.
Likewise, the library has a growing collection
of born-digital publications, images, and personal archives.
And you might not think it, but digital objects
in my opinion, are even more fragile
and require a lot more attention
and treatment to help keep them stable and accessible.
My background is in linguistics and Mandarin Chinese,
so it even comes as a surprise to me
that I've ended up here in digital preservation.
More so because I didn't even know the difference
between a JPEG, or a PNG file, or an MP3 and MP4,
so how did I possibly end up here?
Well, I was given an opportunity to define a few terms
for a project that has become quite a significant area
of work, both here at the library
and in the field of digital preservation itself.
This one little opportunity has opened my mind
to the importance of digital preservation.
What we do is a balance of practical work, future planning,
and applied research to look after and ensure access
to the libraries growing digital collections.
But before we can do any of that, the most important thing
is to get content off "carriers"
as they come into the library, and into "manage storage"
so that we do not lose the content.
And what I mean by physical carriers
is CDs, DVDs, hard drives, etc.
Fortunately, this is a shared responsibility
across the library and that frees up our time to focus
on other important digital preservation work.
There are some pretty straightforward questions
that guide digital preservation.
And in fact, these are questions
that you can ask at home as well.
Which file formats exist in these digital collections?
Can the library provide access to the content
of these file formats
to users with the software that it has?
Do we need additional software, or professional software?
Will the library be able to continue to provide access
to the content of these formats in the future?
And if not, what do we need to do about it now?
The practical and applied research
that we do go hand in hand.
Our digital preservation system, "Preservica",
produces reports on the 2 million files it currently holds.
We analyze these reports weekly
to determine whether the library holds new file formats,
whether there are any corrupted files,
or any other issues that we need to be aware of.
That involves a lot of research
into understanding the file formats that we have,
known issues that these file formats might have,
and the software that supports them.
So if I may paint a picture of what this looks like,
cast your mind back to The Matrix movie.
Can you see that green screen full of binary code
and other symbols raining down?
Well, my monitors look a bit like that too,
they're just not green.
And to stress how cool the work is,
we are time travelers.
We are always jumping between earlier operating systems
to run old applications from the years past.
So just the other week, I was in PC-Write from 1983
in an old DOS 3 environment.
The library holds approximately three petabytes
of digital content.
And that's around 15 billion files.
I should say that this number
doesn't include all the backups either.
Three petabytes of digital content
would be around the same as 3000 one-terabyte hard drives.
Or if we were to convert that to the average storage size
of a phone today, which is around 256 gigabytes,
we would have just under 12,000 phones of data.
It's amusing to remember, at least to me, that 10 years ago
we weren't talking in terabytes, but now we all are.
It's only a matter of time
before we're talking about petabytes at home as well.
Some people might not realize
that digital content that we create requires
active management to ensure their longevity.
And a big part of this is looking after storage.
So what are some of the typical challenges?
The volume of the digital content we create is huge.
We are taking more photos and videos,
creating more documents, than ever before.
And the file sizes are getting bigger.
Yes, storage might be relatively cheap,
but what are you going to do about the quality
of your own own collections?
Are you deleting what you don't want to keep?
And are we really backing up our content?
The impression I get when talking to friends and family
is that they're not backing up their content,
so precious photos and videos are stored solely
on a mobile phone, or on the computer, and nothing else.
Now I might talk a bit about the rise
of the convenient cloud storage.
Yes, this is great.
Be warned, those providers are not responsible
if your content is lost or become corrupted.
So you need to do your own backups as well.
And whilst we're talking about backups, hard drives,
they fail just like any other physical carrier.
So the best practice is to replace your backup hard drives
with new ones once every five years,
or if you notice any performance issues sooner.
The library has a large number
of all of the common carriers
you have around your homes today in its collections.
So I'm talking about CDs, DVDs, USB sticks,
hard drives, among others.
The library also has a large number of legacy carriers too.
And I daresay many viewers will have these
around their homes as well.
They include three and a half inch
and five and a quarter inch floppy discs.
The library also has some other rare carriers as well
including jazz discs, zip discs, and SyQuest cartridges.
As I've stressed before,
we ideally only access these carriers once
to transfer the content to manage storage.
Some carriers can be processed by us and colleagues
on everyday computers.
The three and a half inch floppy discs can be processed
on everyday computers with the help of a USB floppy drive.
Other carriers, however,
such as the five and a quarter inch floppys,
require legacy computer setups
or professional equipment,
depending on the flavor of the floppy discs.
This is the perfect opportunity
to tell everyone one simple message:
get your content off those physical carriers
that might be hiding around your house, garage,
and put it all into one managed storage.
And that's typically your computer.
If you don't, those carriers will eventually fail
and whatever content is upon it will be lost as well.
So let's make it fun,
let's create a digital preservation project at home.
Round up all of the carriers you have and assess
what kind of content they contain
or might contain, if possible.
And determine which carriers you want to process.
Now, it's time to transfer the content.
Some carrier types will be easy to process yourself,
whilst others might require assistance.
Fortunately, some of the carriers
at a greater risk of failure, are the ones
that are the easiest to process.
So let's do them first.
And they are the CDs, DVDs, USB sticks,
and all of the other small hard drives
that you have around the place.
Now what about the three and a half-inch floppy discs
and zip drives?
If you don't have a computer
with a three and a half-inch floppy drive
or a zip drive to assist you,
there are plenty of USB three and a half-inch floppy drives
and zip drives available online that you can purchase.
You can plug these into any Windows computer
via a USB port.
Or a Mac computer,
depending on the disc format.
Gets a bit trickier with older carriers
such as the five and a quarter-inch floppy discs.
And I'd say that most people wouldn't have access
to a working five and a quarter-inch drive.
There are professionals who can transfer the content
from these carriers for a fee, so it's worth considering.
Now that you have all the content that you wish to keep
off those carriers and onto your managed storage,
it's time to do an analysis of your own collection.
Go back to the guiding questions I talked about
at the beginning, and do your best to answer them.
It's best to think of your phone and any memory card
as being physical carriers, because they are.
These are carriers that can and will fail, without warning.
So it is best to back up or transfer the content
to your managed storage.
Remember, that's your computer.
I've heard of so many people losing all
of their precious photos and videos
because they've lost their phone,
or their phone has suddenly stopped working, or is damaged.
These are photos and videos
that they will never be able to get back.
So please, teach yourself how to back up your phone,
ask the people around you how to do it if you're unsure.
Most of the time, all you need is a USB cable
and a computer.
There are also cloud storage services
like iCloud, OneDrive, Google drive,
that automatically back up the photos
and videos you take to cloud storage.
However, you will need to do a bit of research to make sure
that this is set up in the right way for you
and you need to be aware
of the risks involved in using such services.
And lastly, my
top tips for looking after your digital content.
if you want your digital content to last,
you will need to actively manage it.
You can't just stick it in a hard drive,
put it in the cupboard, and expect it to last.
Keep your computer organized.
So I'm talking about consistent folder and file names;
perhaps ordered by year and project.
Don't forget to delete what you do not want to keep.
We also need a good backup system.
I would recommend that you buy two external hard drives
for backing up your main computer.
One could be connected to the computer
for automatic backups, whilst the other
could periodically back up your computer
and be stored at your work or some other location.
You might also want to consider
that convenient cloud storage option as well,
in addition to your backups.
You should refresh your backup hard drives every five years.
So just remember, like CDs and other physical carriers,
your hard drive does fail.
So it is good to buy new ones every five years.
Think about the file formats you have
in your collection and the software needed to access them.
If you have older file formats,
and with little software support,
you might want to consider moving the content
to a different file format.
I: Thank you for joining us for today’s webinar with Trove and the National Library of Australia. I’m Rochelle –
R: And I'm Romi, hello.
I: And we work in Trove Partnerships for Trove Collaborative Services. This webinar aims to introduce you to searching Trove. The National Library of Australia acknowledges Australia’s first nations peoples, the first Australians as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and give respect to the elders past and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
So what is Trove? Trove can be split into two parts. The first is that it is an online service developed by the National Library of Australia which brings together records describing items from collections in many different libraries and other institutions. Trove does not manage or hold any other items but if you are looking for a resource Trove can help you locate it if it is held by one of the hundreds of Australian libraries and institutions we are partnered with.
The second part is the digitised record part, the newspapers, photos and much more that you can see, read and search for on Trove. That’s a really basic description and Trove is a huge resource and is getting bigger every day. We can’t cover everything today but we are aiming to give you all a basic introduction to searching on Trove and are hoping to do more webinars in the future. This is what the Trove homepage looks like.
So let’s get started and today as mentioned we will be introducing you to searching Trove from basic searches through to searches with a little more detail. Roney, do you want to start us off?
R: Yes, thanks very much. Let’s get started with doing a basic search. Trove has proven to be popular for doing family history research so let’s use that as an example to search with. I’m looking for a Jean Robertson who was a race car driver in the 1930s. Let’s use this information in our search. So on the Trove homepage go to the search field and enter the name. We’re doing a basic search so we’ll leave the category menu alone and select the green magnifying glass button to start searching across all Trove categories. Trove will then generate a search results list for Jean Robertson and variations for every category. The category options are available along the top row and vertically in the same order.
You’ll see that this vertical list offers newspapers and gazettes, magazines and newsletters etc just like the top row. From here it’s up to you where you want to go. The newspapers and gazettes category tends to be popular for a lot of family history research because they’re digitised and accessible immediately but if you’d like to preview the offerings first have a look at the vertical list. Sure enough there are articles that feature Jean Robertson and this list is showing the top three results. I want to see all of them now so I will select the See All button at the bottom right of the category. Now note that this button and the newspapers button back at the top row, they direct you to the same content. So for example if I wanted to see all the results for images I can select from the top row or go down to its equivalent in the vertical list and then select the See All button. Every category that has search results will have this button.
So let’s go back up to newspapers and gazettes and I will select the See All button. So here are all the newspapers and gazettes results for Jean Robertson and variations of the name. There are about 189,000 results available and you can sort them by relevance or date order with this dropdown menu. Now I’d rather not look through 180,000 results for the Jean Robertson whom I want so I’m going to narrow down this list by adding another search term. Let’s go back to the search field. You’ll remember that Jean Robertson was a race car driver so I’ll try adding the word, race. When I hit the magnifying glass button for a new search with these terms it has narrowed down the quantity by about a third but we can narrow down this list even more by using the Refine Your Results column on the right-hand side. As you can see there are sections that have a lot of offerings and to see them all you select Show More.
Every box that you check can narrow down your results by criteria such as type of item, place of publication, the publication title and even the date. The Jean Robertson I’m looking for was alive in the 1930s so I’ll narrow down my results by selecting Newspaper. I will choose a date range. So note that every time you select a checkbox the other options disappear. You cannot make multiple selections per most criteria in basic searches. It is possible to do this in advanced searching but that is something that we’ll explore in another webinar. So if you want to explore other options you will need to uncheck and start again.
So now I’ve been narrowed down to about 13,000 results, more specifically for Jean Robertson and race in the newspaper format and in this date range. You’ll also see that the new selections I made can be seen up here in the form of tags and you can remember them if you want by selecting the X. Now it’s just a matter of selecting what articles interest me. There are search results that span over quite a few pages and I can see each page by selecting from the page numbers along the bottom of the list but let’s go back up to the top now, we’ll stick with the first page.
Let's find an article that applies to our search. Let’s try this one. Here is my first selection with Jean Robertson highlighted in the original newspaper and its digitised text in the transcript column.
I: It’s also important to note here that the National Library of Australia focuses on digitising newspapers published before 1954 on the general understanding that they are out of copyright. So generally on Trove only newspaper content that is published up to and including 1954 is available digitally. You’ll find that some newspaper titles published after 1955 are available. That’s due to individual agreements that were made with the publisher. If you need content published after 1954 it’s still possible to find on Trove, just not in immediate digitised form. If you contact Trove support we can put you in the right direction.
Now these are the results in newspaper gazettes. What if I want to find a name in another category like magazines?
R: Yes, no problem, we can do that. So let’s go back to our search results page. Now remember that the keyword to be used can be applied to all Trove categories here. There’s no need to start a brand new search. So we’ve retained Jean Robertson and race and from here I can choose to see the results for Jean Robertson in images even or unpublished items but sticking with your suggestion, Rochelle, let’s select the magazines and newsletters category. It looks like I'm lucky here too. Let’s try this one.
Now when I select a magazine article I’ll be directed firstly to the record for the entire publication, select the read button to see your options. It turns out that there is an option that’s digitised which I’ll select and here is the magazine with instances of Jean Robertson and race highlighted. Note that this magazine here looks similar to the newspaper viewer. These blue boxes indicate the page numbers where the highlighted search terms appear in the magazine. You can scroll down and select the page that you want to see but remembering that our initial search found Jean Robertson on page 49 so we’re already where we need to be.
I’ll use my mouse to move around the original page by clicking and holding down as I move around and find the highlighted words and I can magnify in and out as necessary. So there’s race, let’s find Jean Robertson. There she is, Jean Robertson. Now to see the transcription text for this article I will select the text icon on the left-hand side. Now I’d like to find where Jean Robertson is mentioned here. If the transcript text is long I can scroll down until I find it or I can just do a word find command to locate the name. Generally you can do this by using the control and F keys on your keyboard and this will bring up the word find command box and I will enter Jean and see where that goes. Great. So here is where Jean appears in the transcript column and I can just press escape to get out of the word find command.
I: That’s great. Is it possible to download something when you find it? It’d be great to keep a copy.
R: Absolutely. There are a lot of digitised items in Trove that can be downloaded and if it is an option it will appear in the Trove viewer. Trove’s newspaper articles, for example, are one of the popular categories for downloading so I’ll use that to demonstrate. Let’s go back to our original search results and let’s select the newspapers and gazettes category and I’ll just choose the first available article. Now on the left-hand side there is an icon of a piece of paper with a downward-pointing arrow on it and that is the download button. When you select it choose whether you want to download the article or a whole page or the entire issue. Now if you choose page or issue, PDF will be the only format available. But I’ll choose to download the article which will give me more options.
Now text format will generate the article in a new browser tab. Text will generate the article in a new browser tab ready for use according to the options of your browser or computer. Image and PDF formats will have size options and you can select them before doing the download. The you just select the green view button and your image will be generated in a new browser tab ready for you to use. So a reminder that items on Trove are only downloadable if they are viewable in a Trove viewer such as the newspaper viewer I just demonstrated with and if they have the download icon available. If Trove directs you to view an item on an external website of a holding organisation such as a library or a gallery, if that site offers downloading it might have different methods to do it and I can show you examples of this while searching for an image.
So let’s start a new search from the Trove homepage. I’m going to search for the New South Wales town, Brewarrina, and I’ll look at the images, maps and artefacts category, magnifying glass button and images, maps and artefacts. There are lots of results here in many different formats available at various institutions and organisations such as maps at the National Library, photos from the Australian National University and here’s a photograph from the State Library of South Australia.
Now if you select the photo and select view you’ll see that that library is listed as its viewing option. Now when you select it you will be directed out of Trove and to the item record at the State Library of South Australia’s website and they will have their own download method. This library will also have their own conditions for access to the content. If you need assistance you’ll need to contact this library.
So let’s go back to our Trove search results to find images that I can download. You’ll notice that although these are search results for items matching Brewarrina they’re not all necessarily digitised or even accessible. This might be because the holding organisation hasn’t digitised the item yet or there’s a cultural safety consideration or the holding organisation only permits access to its own members or students. So I'm going to narrow down the results in the Refine Your Results column and in the access section I will select online free access.
Now understandably images are popular amongst family history researchers and particularly maps and a lot of them are available for free download in high resolution. So I will select a Brewarrina map. Let’s try this one. I’ll select the view option and here it is, in an image viewer. Here is the download button and it turns out that this map’s available in JPEG and TIF format and once you’ve selected you just press the Start Download or Download button. It’s that easy. So we’ve covered searching for a name and keyword in newspapers, magazines and images and how to download too. Rochelle, what else can people search for on Trove?
I: People can also search Trove in languages other than English and we do have some amazing resources in a number of languages. So like any search we’ll start in the search box and enter our search term. In this case I'm going to use Yuma which is Gamilaraay, a first nation language from New South Wales, word for hello. Like any other search you can pick your category and either go down or up the top and today let's have a look at books and libraries. We can see that some results come up and again I’m going to look at Refine Your Results on the side here. A good one to look for when you’re doing language is Language. They’re the different languages there and this lets you filter for items in the language. It may be joint English in the language or purely the language you click on or perhaps multiple languages but a significant part should be the language you pick.
In this case let’s go Gamilaraay, there we go into results. So if I open the first one here you can see it goes through and I might click Reid and yeah, it’s digitised. Again highlighted. You can see that it goes through different vocab words and there is a lot in Gamilaraay.
R: Rochelle, I also see that your search also accommodates the spelling of Gamilaraay with a G and K so you’re safe to try different versions.
I: Yes. Thanks, will do. I’ll pass back to you.
R: Well we hope that this introduction to Trove searching has been helpful to you. If you would like more information about searching and using Trove we recommend visiting the help page. This is a great starting point for you to find answers to a lot of questions. So just go to any Trove page and select the help link at the top right corner. The help sections contain a wide range of content that can answer your questions about using Trove from step-by-step searching instructions to managing your Trove account. Chances are that your question can be answered straight away and you can get on with your Trove research.
I: This is also the place you go for help by making specific and advanced searches, information on first Australian content and how to use the Trove viewer for the item that you’re looking at. There’s also information about buying items, getting copies, copyright and help with using Trove on your computer system.
R: Now if you can’t find what you need, if you have a specific question about using Trove or would like assistance with your research select the About tab at the top right corner of Trove pages. Go to the Contact Us section to select the type of enquiry you have.
I: This section is helpful if you are doing family history research and you don’t know where to start, if you have a problem while using Trove or even if you have an interesting Trove experience that you’d like to share.
R: Thanks very much for joining us and we wish you success with your Trove research.
I: Thanks for joining us and good luck with your searching.
Hello, my name is Aaron and I'm the Digital Education Co-ordinator at the National Library of Australia
The National Library of Australia acknowledges Australia's first nations peoples,
the First Australians, as the traditional owners and custodians of this land
and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present, and through them to all Australian
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The National Library of Australia's collection
is rich and varied. One of the ways we work to connect our national collection to a
national audience is through our online teacher resource, the Digital Classroom.
The Digital Classroom launched in October 2015 and since its birth it has reached over a million users
and it receives consistent positive feedback from teachers across the country and across the world.
The Digital Classroom is designed not to be a platform that has a start or a finish nor is it
designed to be a repository for prescriptive lesson plans that teachers must follow,
it s designed to be a resource and an information repository for teachers so that they can have the
confidence and the tools to bring the national collection held by the National Library
into their classrooms. We at the National Library are the experts in our collection
but teachers are the experts in their classroom. Because the Library's collection is so rich and
varied the Digital Classroom covers a wide range of curriculum topics
for a number of year levels from science, health, history, English all the way through to PE.
I'm going to present to you today the latest edition to the Digital Classroom,
the Asia-Pacific World, a three-part resource exploring three distinct societies in the
Asia-Pacific region during 700 to 1867 CE. The Asia-Pacific World module on the Digital
Classroom is for teachers who are teaching or preparing to teach Year 8 history. The Asia-Pacific
World is the second of three depth studies in the Year 8 history curriculum.
Through depth studies students explore the major empires that existed in the Asia-Pacific
region during the early modern period with a particular focus on the Angkor/Khmer Empire
who ruled the area now comprised of modern day Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar
between 802 and 1431 CE, Japan under the succession of military governments ruled by
the Shoguns from 794 until the Meiji Revolution and the restoration of the monarchy in 1867 and
finally Polynesian expansion across the Pacific. This topic looks at the movement of peoples
throughout the Polynesia Triangle and explores the cultures of the societies that flourished there.
For Year 8 history the focus is all about the study of history from the end of the
ancient period to the beginning of the modern period, circa 650 to 1750 CE. That s when major
civilisations around the world began to encounter each other. It was during this time that the world
started to become a more interconnected place and dare I say it, a smaller one.
For students who are undertaking the Asia- Pacific depth study, exploration of the Khmer,
Japanese and Polynesian societies in this period is guided by the following inquiry questions.
How did societies change from the end of the ancient period to the beginning of the modern age?
What key beliefs emerged and how did they influence societies?
What were the causes and effects of contact between societies in this period?
What significant people, groups or ideas from this period have influenced the world today?
These key inquiry questions are the guides, the scaffolds that we use to
build each Digital Classroom module and the Asia Pacific World module is no exception.
Throughout all the modules on the Digital Classroom students will engage with a
rich variety of sources drawn from the National Library's collection.
They will be challenged to draw on their own knowledge and understanding and come to their own
conclusions about the changes from the end of the ancient world to the beginning of the modern age.
Through using and interpreting primary and secondary sources students will develop their
historical knowledge and understanding as well as their source analysis skills.
Now let s have a look at the modules. You could find the Digital Classroom in a number of ways.
You can do a quick search, NLA Digital Classroom and use the results here or you can visit the
Library's home page, nla dot gov dot au. You can find the Digital Classroom in the carousel here
or you can follow the dropdown banners and follow the links to the Digital Classroom.
The structure of each Digital Classroom module is consistent so it doesn t matter which one you
re visiting, you can always find the information you re after. Each module includes a page showing
curriculum links which explicitly point out which parts of the depth study will be covered.
You can follow each link to the ACARA site to see more information and further elaborations.
The Angkor/Khmer module aims to give a broad overview about the Empire and the
time in which it existed. It will ask students to evaluate what we do know about this time period
but it will also get them to ask about what we don t know about this time period. General
capabilities and cross-curriculum priorities are also woven into each module so each address
not only the primary learning area, in this case history, but also critical and creative thinking,
literacy, intercultural understanding and sutaibnltiy. For example the final theme in
the Khmer Empire digital classroom looks at the theory around environmental degradation
as a factor leading to the decline of the empire. Each Digital Classroom module also includes a set
of introductory questions or activities. The introductory activities are a method
of enabling teachers to lead their students into the subject matter gently without jumping in cold.
These gentle introductory activities are helpful to gauge existing knowledge and help students to
place the knowledge they already have in context with the topic they re about to learn about.
Mystery often surrounds life in the Khmer Empire.
No physical printed records remain of this time period. This is due to the
climate. Lots of writings, be they personal letters, government records, things like that
were written on leaves, rice paper and even a type of leather called vellum. In a climate such
as Cambodia s these organic materials break down very quickly and over the centuries none remain.
To illustrate life in Angkor this module draws on the Library s marvellous
Yves Coffin Collection. This collection contains over 1,300 images of Balinese,
Cham, Javanese, Khmer and Thai art, architecture and sculpture. This collection of evocative
black and white photographs shows the ruins of Angkor during the 1950s and 60s. Yves Coffin
was a keen photographer and a member of the French Consular services stationed in southeast
Asia from the 1950s through to the 1970s. All the images featured on the Digital Classroom
have been digitised by the National Library and are fully available through our catalogue.
They can be downloaded and used in the classroom to accompany lessons, perhaps a source analysis
activity in which students try to unravel a scene and look for clues to life in Angkor at that time.
Let s have a look at the Japanese module now. You can see the Japanese module also has curriculum
links and introductory activities but we re going to have a look at the themes here. Each
Digital Classroom module has a theme section. Each theme is based loosely around the main curriculum
points. You can see those reflected here in the Japanese themes. So the curriculum points for
the Japanese depth study are looking at the way of life in Shogunate Japan including social, cultural
and economic features, the role of the Tokugawa Shogunate in imposing a feudal system in Japan
and theories about the decline of the shogunate including modernisation and westernisation.
By thematically compartmentalising an often complex topic such as Japan s relation with the
outside world during the "Sakoku" or closed country period teachers can dip in and out of the Digital
Classroom as their time and lessons allows. The Digital Classroom is not a set of chronological
lesson plans that must be followed one after the other but instead it s a repository of information
and resources to help put important cultural items held in the National Library's collection
in context with the time period and events of the theme that their students are learning about.
The Japanese Digital Classroom module draws on the Library s extensive collection of
wood block prints, particularly the cloth collection of Kuchi-e or frontispiece images.
Like the Coffin collection in the Angkor module many of these images have been fully
digitised in all their colourful glory and by following the links in the module
they are accessible in the Trove viewer for closer inspection, downloading or printing.
Images like this can get students thinking about the consequences of change during this time. This
image here paints an interesting picture that could be used to get students thinking about
Japan's relationship to the west. It shows a scene where a bride and a groom are perhaps meeting for
the first time. The bride and her entourage wear western-style clothing and the potential groom,
a member of the imperial household or the aristocracy, wears a western military uniform
but all around are symbols of traditional Japan, bonsai trees, tea ceremonies, the three ladies
in traditional kimono seated on the floor, even down to the symbols and motifs on the wall and
upholstery. We can see here the chrysanthemum motif, a symbol of Japan's imperial family on
the chairs and curtains, perhaps giving some clues to the status of the people in the room.
What would it mean if the Emperor and his family embraced the West and its ideals? How would it
sit with forces loyal to the former Shoguns who, for the most part, derided the West for so long?
Let's now have a look at the third and final module in the Asia-Pacific World resource.
The Polynesian Expansion module is the latest and final edition to the Asia- Pacific World resource.
It looks at the spread of peoples across the Pacific and their way of life and culture
before the arrival of multitudes of European explorers in the mid-1700s.
Each of these topics within the Polynesian module have been written by academics from
the Australian National University who specialise in the Pacific and Polynesian
region. Using essays the Polynesian Digital Classroom module can offer precise exploration
of specific topics within the depth study. For instance this essay investigates the relationship
and environmental impact of Polynesian societies on the islands where they settled.
This one, Ancient rituals and religious practices across the Pacific
where this module explores the theories and consequences
of the movement of Polynesia's early settlers. Finally like all other Digital Classroom modules
we can see here concluding activities. These activities are a series of reflective activities
and questions that give students an opportunity to consolidate their knowledge. These activities
can be used whether or not the teacher has drawn on the rest of the Digital Classroom.
They re also not prescriptive and we are very happy if teachers want to use these
as inspiration for other activities or learning opportunities. We want the Digital Classroom to
be a resource that inspires teachers to bring the national collection into their classroom.
For more information subscribe to the National Library's e-news - you can find the link in the
description to keep updated about new Digital Classroom modules and other goings-on around
the Library. If you have any questions about the Digital Classroom or the Library in general
please use our Ask a Librarian service. You can find a link to this on our home page
or you can use the link that is also in the description.
Thanks for watching.
R: Hi, my name is Rowan Henderson and I'm a Senior Adviser in the Curatorial at Collection
Research section of the National Library of Australia. I'm joined by Philip Jackson, Program
Manager in Curatorial and Collection Research. Welcome to this discovery video in which Philip
and I will explore the PROMPT collection at the Library. Philip has worked for the Library's
Australian Printed Collections for the last 10 years and he will be sharing some of the
PROMPT collection highlights in this video. The rich culture of Australia's First Nations
people has included performance for tens of thousands of years. The National Library of
Australia acknowledges these First Australians as the traditional owners and custodians of
this land. We give respect to the elders past and present and through them to all Australian
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. So what is the PROMPT collection? The PROMPT
collection is a collection of collections that relate to the performing arts in Australia
from the 1880s until the present. It's a part of the Library's ephemera collection, held
in a special stack area. And what's ephemera? Ephemera is printed material that is usually
created for a particular purpose and not intended to be kept. In the Library we use the guide
that it s usually less than five pages long. It s mostly printed on paper but can also
include objects like hats, shirts and badges. It's often printed on flimsy material and
can be difficult to conserve. As the PROMPT collection relates to the performing
arts it mainly contains programs but may also include subscription, brochures, flyers, invitations
and tickets. Because of their size posters are stored separately, and magazines in the
Library's serials collection. The PROMPT collection is vast, it currently
contains 5,269 collections and uses over 300m of shelving. It documents a huge range of
topics such as prominent individuals in the performing arts, organisations and groups,
venues and performances and it covers genres such as pop, rock and folk music, opera, circus,
actors of stage and film, comedians, orchestras, theatre companies and performing art schools.
The people and places covered might be known in Australia and around the world or they
could be completely local and unknown elsewhere. The performers might not even be Australian
but if they performed in Australia they could be in the collection.
Why does the Library collect performing arts ephemera? The Library collects this material
so that the Australian community can now and in the future discover, learn and create new
knowledge. The Library's role is to develop and maintain a library collection including
a comprehensive collection relating to Australia and the Australian people. The Library collects
ephemera to document life in Australia, what has happened, where it was and who was involved.
In this case the collection documents the performing arts, to show what has been performed
and created in Australia at any point in time, by whom and where.
How does the Library collect it? The Library actively looks for ephemera to collect but
also relies on the public and collectors to let us know what is available. We also work
with other libraries so that they collect material relevant to their state or territory
while we collect items of national interest. If you re a collector and would like to offer
items to the Library for this collection you can do so through our website.
So how can you find out what is in the PROMPT collection? The Library has created a handy
new finding aid which lists all the collections under headings such as individuals, performances
and events, subjects and venues. You can explore it by searching our catalogue for the Guide
to the Australian Performing Arts Programs and Ephemera PROMPT Collections in the National
Library of Australia. If you're interested in donating ephemera
to our collection it would be appreciated if you could check our lists first to make
sure we don t already hold the same material. It s also important to remember that there
is other material in the Library s collection relating to the performing arts that is not
in the PROMPT collection. This material could be found in the manuscripts, pictures and
oral histories collections as well as in the Library s extensive collection of books. You
can search our catalogue to discover these other collections.
Now Philip is going to take us through some of the highlights of the PROMPT collection.
P: PROMPT is a theatrical term relating to an offstage reminder for an actor or singer
of the lines that they have forgotten and although it isn t exactly an acronym it may
have been something of an in joke to adopt this term for the National Library s collections
of programs and other performing arts memorabilia. Our collection is arranged into mini collections
by subject or topic which may be the name of a performer or performing arts company.
The collections range all the way through the alphabet. We have things from A to Z,
from Abba to Charles Zwar who was an Australian songwriter, composer, lyricist, pianist, music
director who mainly worked in England from the 1930s to the 1960s. He did the music for
All Square which is included in this program here and his name is in one of the chequerboards
on the front of the program. There may be earlier items but mainly the
collection consists of material from the 1880s onwards. In the performing arts exhibition
that we've got on at the moment there s a thing by Bland Holt who s one of our most
important early performers and impresarios. That exhibition shines a spotlight on the
National Library s performing arts collections. There are PROMPT files for Australians who
have achieved great fame overseas such as Dame Nellie Melba. In the show there's the
1902 ticket from Melbourne which is her home town where she got her name from and this
is a program from the first world war, a charity concert for Polish refugees.
As well as having achieved great fame overseas in London Peach Melba was named after her
by the great chef, Escoffier. In America there was even a packet of cigars named after her.
So this is a Flor de Melba cigar box, a thing which is probably not a very appropriate thing
for a singer. Other performers who feature prominently and on stage are Robert Helpmann
and he actually danced in this memorial matinee for Anna Pavlova. He did a duet with a Russian
ballerina from Swan Lake and at the other end of his career there s the program for
his state funeral where you can find a eulogy delivered by Don Dunstan, the former State
Premier of South Australia and a strong supporter of the arts.
Barry Humphries was another Australian who achieved great fame overseas. These are some
items from the PROMPT collection relating to an exhibition of her frocks. Cate Blanchett,
for her we cover her stage performances rather than her work as a film actor. So Kylie Minogue,
we concentrate on her live performances rather than her recorded sound which is really looked
after by the National Film and Sound Archive. So this is a program for Cate Blanchett from
a performance in New York with David Wenham and this is from Kylie Minogue's 1991 tour.
Opera PROMPT files include Dame Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge. Dame Joan also had some
food named after her. This is a menu from a restaurant in Wellington and there's a spinach
fettuccine named after her as well as the dessert at the end of the menu which is called
La Stupenda which was her nickname. As well as programs we have all sorts of material
so there were also some stamps issued to honour Dame Joan a few years ago as well.
There are other opera companies in the collection as well as Opera Australia, the big company
so there s the Pinchgut Opera which is a smaller opera company that concentrates mainly on
baroque music so this is a program of work from 1778 which they performed for a rare
time in Sydney in 2015. Ballet programs, we have things from Ballet
Russe who were one of the first big ballet companies to tour Australia in 1936. The Borovansky
Ballet Borovansky came from overseas but stayed in Australia for a long time and did much
to establish Australian ballet. Australian Ballet, we've got programs here on display
from the early 1960s and then 2000. This is a program honouring Graeme Murphy. There are
things from Bangarra as well, the Aboriginal dance company. In the exhibition there s a
full size copy of the poster for this program, Praying Mantis Dreaming with a wonderful part
by Libby Blayney and then there s a much more recent program there for Skin which is a program
by Bangarra that examines family kinship. Australian theatre has a huge range of material
in the PROMPT collection. We've only got one program here on display which is the Bell
Shakespeare Company s first production of Hamlet in 1991. The Tivoli Theatre was a big
circuit. It was linked to JC Williamson who was known as The Firm. They were a huge company
that was set up in 1882 and they ran theatre pretty much in Australia until 1976.
These two programs here are from 1939 and they brought in people like Anna May Wong
who was an actress from Hollywood and the Mills brothers who were African American singers.
The Tivoli also in the 1940s and 50s were a lot more risque than you might expect from
that conservative period. There are programs with chorus girls and can-can dancers and
that sort of thing. We've got musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar.
There's a program from 1972 with a ticket. Instead of Phantom of the Opera well we do
have that as well, we've got Phantoad of The Opera which was a Brisbane parody of it from
1991. Wicked, a modern play and of course Tim Minchin's Matilda on display in the
On Stage exhibition. There's material related to traditional circuses
such as Ashton's who were established in 1932 and this particular program has a little caption
on it "Col and I went in 1967 and it was a very good show " so programs can be mementos
of a performance with a personal touch. More recently a more modern circus is Circus
Oz. This is a program from their seasons in the early 1990s. Circus Oz don't include any
animals in their circus but there are animals in the performing arts collections such as
Topsy who was a performing horse who could count, identify colours, play cards, do magic
tricks. Topsy toured eastern Australia performing mainly in the Gold Coast region in the early
1950s. This little item indicates that she gave command performances for horse lovers
like Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip in 1952, '54 and the Queen Mother in 1958.
There are also performing arts events for festivals, Adelaide Festival. That's from
the first one in 1960 and then there's the Garden of Earthly Delights from the Adelaide
Fringe Festival from only a few years ago and the National Folk Festival. There's a
poster from that in the On Stage exhibition and in the PROMPT collection there s a media
kit for the 50th anniversary of the festival in 2016 so the festival started in 1967.
The PROMPT collection contains a huge range of highly significant, evocative, beautiful
and fascinating material and whatever your personal interests may be there is probably
something in it that will amuse or entertain you.
Hi, I’m Jessica Coates from the Rights Management Team in the National Library of Australia.
The National Library has an amazing collection of published and unpublished materials
but in order to access and use these materials you need to understand your
legal rights and obligations in relation to them. I’m here today to talk to you
about one important part of this, copyright. At first I’d like to say that the National
Library of Australia acknowledges Australia’s first nations people, the First Australians as
the traditional owners and custodians of this land and gives respect to their elders past
and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
So what is copyright? Copyright is an area of law which gives creators
rights to control how others can make use of their creations. It lets them make decisions about how
their works are copied, published, performed, sold or even just distributed to others.
Copyright exists to encourage people to create. The logic is that allowing people
to control how others will use their creative works, at least for a period, will encourage
people to create more material and to share their creations with others which is good for us all.
In Australia copyright is governed by the federal Copyright Act 1968 meaning the
same rules apply across Australia. It doesn’t matter if the material was created overseas,
as long as you’re using the material here in Australia, Australian law applies.
Copyright is extremely broad and covers all types of materials from buildings to computers
to Tweets. This includes almost all library materials including literary works such as
books and letters, dramatic works like plays, artistic works like paintings or
photographs and musical composition. It also applies to films and sound recordings like movies,
oral histories or even just home videos. These materials are protected automatically as soon
as they’re created even if they aren’t published and even if there’s no copyright notice or date.
It doesn’t matter if the work is professional or amateur or commercial or private,
the same rules apply. To a quick doodle on a napkin or an oil painting or a CGI monster.
For works covered by copyright you will usually need the creator’s legal permission if you want
to use it even for non-commercial uses like just posting it to a blog or sharing it
with someone else. Libraries won’t usually be able to give you that permission themselves,
this is because copyright is separate from physical ownership so even if the Library
owns a manuscript or a drawing, for example, it won’t usually own the copyright in them
but we’ll help you understand your rights and obligations to use the material as much as we can.
So when can you use copyright material?
Copyright is extremely broad but the good news is that it does have limits.
For example copyright doesn’t stop you from making use of ideas or information contained in a work,
just the actual work itself. So while you can’t copy the exact sentence or picture
that’s been created you can build on the ideas and knowledge the work contains. This is essential for
all innovation and growth of human knowledge. Also copyright only allows a set amount of time.
Once copyright ends the material is out of copyright and is said to have entered the
public domain. It can then generally be freely used in any way you like subject
to other rights such as indigenous, cultural and intellectual property or just privacy.
This is an essential part of the copyright bargain,
creators get to control their works but only for a limited amount of time.
If copyright lasted forever people wouldn’t be able to build on the knowledge of the past and
copyright would become a barrier to innovation or cultural growth instead of encouraging it.
While copyright doesn’t last forever it can last a very long time.
For most works in Australia the copyright term is the life of the author plus 70 years. As such
even very old works can still be protected by copyright. But the good news is that even
while a work is protected by copyright there are some things you can do without permission. These
are called exceptions. Exceptions protect uses that are in the public interest like education,
research or accessibility. They’re an essential part of the copyright ecosystem and ensure that
copyright doesn’t become a burden on daily life or important human rights like freedom of speech.
Without them we’d end up with absurd results like kids needing to get copyright permissions to do
their homework. I’ll tell more about exceptions later but it is important to remember that even
if the material you want to use is covered by copyright and your use doesn’t fall within
an exception it doesn’t mean you can’t do it, just that you will have to get permission from
the copyright owner. I’ll talk more about how the Library can help you with that later too.
So now some myths about copyright. Copyright is extremely complex and this means that things that
people think they know about copyright is often not true. For example one of the most common
myths about copyright is that it doesn’t apply to private or non-commercial uses. Unfortunately
this is not always the case. While there are exceptions that do allow for our use in some
circumstances like recording TV to watch later or transferring your music to a digital device
there is no general rule that says use is okay just because they’re private or non-commercial.
You will still need permission from the copyright owner for a non-commercial use most of the time
unless your use is covered by an exception. People also often think that you don’t need
permission to use copyright material if your use is fair. This is because the US has an exception
that allows general fair use of copyright material but Australian copyright law doesn’t go this far.
One of the exceptions I mentioned earlier does allow fair dealings but only if
they are one of a list of permitted purposes set out in the Copyright Act.
These include research and study, criticism and review, parody and satire, reporting the news,
judicial advice or accessibility. You can find out more about fair dealings and other exceptions from
the Australian Libraries and Archives Copyright Coalition or the Australian Copyright Council.
Similarly many people believe that as long as you’re only using 10% of a work or a small part,
your use is okay. While there is a rule under Australian law that lets you use an
insubstantial part of copyright work it only applies to amounts that are less than 10% and
can be very hard to apply. You can’t usually rely on it for things like quotes, clips or samples.
Luckily you can quote material without permission under the fair dealings exceptions and copying
10% would usually be covered by that but remember it has to be for one of those specified purposes
like research and study. If you just want to quote a work for artistic effect, for example
in a blog or a remix work or even a book, you will usually need permission from the copyright owner.
It's also very common on the internet for people to use copyright material like background music in
a video and then to credit the author. While this is always a good idea to attribute the
creator of the material that you’re using and is actually a legal requirement under Australian law,
this doesn’t replace permission. You will still infringe copyright if you don’t have
permission or a relevant exception even if you say no infringement intended.
Finally as we said before copyright in Australia does last a very long
time. Many people believe that you can use copyright material once the author has died
but some materials will be protected for more than 150 years after they’re made.
It’s usually best to assume something is still in copyright for at least 100 years
unless you know for sure that this isn’t the case. The good news, though,
is that some materials do have shorter copyright terms. For instance anonymous works or works where
you don’t know anything about the author will have a copyright term of 70 years from creation
or publication and government works only have a copyright term of 50 years. But if you don’t know
much about the work or its creator it’s best to assume it is still covered by copyright.
Don’t worry, we’ll do our best to help you work out if and how you can make sure of it anyway.
Because copyright applies to most library materials and to most uses you want to make
of those materials it’s important to consider copyright whenever you want
to use our collections. If you just want to look at or read material onsite at a library
you don't usually have to worry about copyright but if you want to make a copy
or have the Library make a copy for you or even just use the Library material in some
downstream way like publishing it as part of your research you do need to think about copyright.
Luckily there are specific exceptions of the Copyright Act that give you the right
to use material for purposes like research even without permission from the copyright
owner. Similar exceptions also allow the Library to supply material to you if you can’t
make it onsite ‘though this is only in certain circumstances and if you comply with set rules.
You will usually be able to copy small parts of copyright work for research purposes without
permission. This includes photocopying the material and taking photographs with
your own device. You can usually find signs near the Library photocopiers or
at the desk that will give you more information about when you can copy material and how much.
If you want to copy more than a small amount of material or want the Library to copy the material
and send it to you, you will generally need to talk to the Library to find out if any permissions
are required. Access to some of our materials, especially special collections such as manuscripts
and oral histories, may also be restricted for reasons other than copyright such as
privacy or cultural sensitivity. Other works like electronic materials might be limited by licence
so it’s important to check before copying any more than a small part of our material.
The first step to obtain information about using National Library materials is to check the entry
in the catalogue or on Trove. There you’ll be able to find basic information about their author and
publisher and their copyright status including whether they’re available to access to copy.
In the National Library this information is determined by an algorithm based on
information we have in our catalogue. So it’s intended as an estimate and may not be accurate.
If we don’t have enough information or if the rights are particularly complex sometimes it
will come back uncertain. You shouldn’t rely on it instead of formal legal advice
but it can give you a good indicator of how you can use the material.
A lot of our collection is in the public domain and doesn’t have any other restrictions on access.
If there’s a digital copy of these kind of materials online you can often download
them straight from our website and get them immediately but if the copyright status is
unclear or restrictions apply or if you want to do something complex like publishing the material
you will normally need to go to Ask a Librarian on our website. There you can ask a question
about using the material or put in a request for the Library to supply a copy to you.
Once you tell us exactly what you want to use and how you want to use it
we’ll usually be able to tell you if your use is allowed or if permission is needed.
If permission is required it will usually be up to you to contact the copyright owner yourself
but the Library will help you as much as we can with the information we have.
Once you do have permission for your use we can supply the material for you.
We will usually ask you to comply with a few conditions of use like respecting
the moral rights of the creator. You will have to credit them as the creator whenever you use
the material and you musn’t treat the work in a derogatory way. These are legal requirements
under the Copyright Act and can’t be waived. If you’re publishing the material or using it in a
public way we will also usually ask you to credit the Library as the source of the material.
This helps others to know where they can find the original if they want to make use of it
themselves and generally helps us to increase knowledge of and access to our collections.
To find out more about using copyright in the Library’s collection go to our website,
Copyright in Library Collections. You can find it via the Copyright link at the bottom of each page
of our website. By clicking on that link you’ll be taken to our copyright portal which includes
a direct link to Copyright in Library Collections as well as other useful copyright information.
There are also some great resources on Australian copyright law online. Two good places to start are
the Australian Libraries and Archives Copyright Coalition and the Australian Copyright Council.
Thanks so much for joining me today to find out more about copyright in the National Collection.
The Library’s strongest purpose is to make sure that all Australians can access and use
our material and knowing how to navigate copyright is an important part of that.
If you do have any questions or are just not quite sure about anything about copyright please do
get in touch with our Ask a Librarian service and we’ll see what we can do to help you out.
Hello and welcome to this learning webinar about the Indian Emigration Passes to Fiji
as held in the National Library of Australia s collection and freely available online.
The National Library of Australia acknowledges Australia s First Nations Peoples,
the first Australians, as the traditional owners and custodians of this land
and gives respect to the elders past and present
and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
We also acknowledge the National Archives of Fiji as custodians of the original records
and we thank them for making this collection available to researchers around the world.
Hello, my name is Judith, I m a reference librarian here at the National Library Reader
Services Team. Joining us is my colleague, Jack. Hello everyone, I m Jack and together with Judith
we ll be taking you through this presentation today.
Today we ll be looking specifically at how to find the records for the Indian labourers who travelled
to Fiji in the period 1879 to 1916. We ll start with a brief overview of the indentured labour
system, what it was and its legacy to Fiji. Next we ll take a look at the records themselves,
what records exist, what they describe and where to find them. Last, we ll look at all
important access information, we ll talk you through how to access these records for your
research purposes with some case studies. But let s start with the historical context
for these records. When we started looking at this topic the thing that struck me the most was
that these records don t exist in a vacuum, these records with real names and real faces to history
and it is a history that can be a little bit confronting at times.
For example, later in the session we ll look at the record for Daulat who was a two-and-a-half
year old son of indentured labourers and Daulat is just one name out of 60,965 men,
women and children who travelled from India to Fiji under the indentured labourer system.
So the labourers are often known by the term girmityas
which comes from girmit. It s a borrowing from the English word agreement which was used
to designate the indentured labour system. Once we understand who these records talk
about it links us to an understanding of what they experienced, what their lives looked like
and takes them from a name in the record to a lived reality. For example a paper presented to
the Indian History Congress in 2001 gives this description of living conditions.
The coolies were accommodated in long sheds, partitioned into 10 feet by 7 feet cubicles
within which the system of indentured labour was practised on the old slave states.
Other accounts talk about the brutality of the work, the homesickness for a country and
family left beyond and the difficulty of finding a place in a deeply segregated colonial society.
All of this is crucial information for those researching family history,
colonial history and indentured labour. But we ll start, what actually is indentured labour?
So the short simplified answer is that a reliance of indentured labour can be traced back to the
abolition of slavery in the British Empire, back in the 1830s so the loss of a plentiful supply of
slaves led to a labour shortage on largescale sugar, coffee, tea, cocoa, rice and rubber
plantations. So to counteract this the powers that be tapped into existing indentured labour systems
and indebted labour systems to source workers. India as you can imagine was an extremely
convenient source for cheap labour so workers were recruited under both the indentured and
free labour system but under the indentured labour system workers were contracted to travel to the
plantations and work for a set number of years. In the case of emigration to Fiji the fixed term
was five years, the answer to overseers and estate managers and beyond the less
than luxurious conditions that we ve already mentioned workers could be criminally prosecuted
if they left the estate. They then had to pay their own way back to India after they d worked
their five years so there was a possible free passage after 10 years of industrious service.
There was meant to be a quota of women brought to the plantation
but numbers were usually far below target and we now know that women were particularly oppressed
under the system and faced incredible hardship. But despite those conditions many girmitiyas
stayed in Fiji where they developed a unique culture,
society and they played a vital role in Fijian history. The past was never forgotten however and
you ll find many girmitiyas and families continue to maintain or reconnect with their Indian roots.
So why were these records particularly important, Jack?
So these records are widely acknowledged to be so
important because they re one of the only sources that really document indentured labour in Fiji.
In fact in 2011 the combined records of Indian indentured labourers of Fiji,
Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago were placed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
The original documents themselves are held in the National Archives of Fiji.
These were created and maintained by the British administration during the colonial period.
They document many elements surrounding the indentured labour system. Later the records
were microfilmed and given to a small number of libraries and archives around the world
to enable people to consult their collection. Family history researchers in particular made
heavy uses of these passes to trace family back to India and in many cases they were able to
reconnect with the original villagers and even family of their indentured ancestors. So in this
way the records are a unique resource that is able to connect people through time and distance.
Are there other relevant records that the Library or any other institution holds?
There are. So the National Archives in the UK hold many relevant records, not just indentured labour
in Fiji but also other colonies. The Fiji Archives also hold other material including the official
government records. Birth, death and marriage records are also held by the Fiji Registry of
Births, Deaths and Marriages. Finally the National Library of Australia also holds some relevant
records from the British administration and these are part of the Australian Joint Copying Project.
The relevant material comes from the Colonial Office series and mainly covers administrative
matters including information about ships and voyages. These are also available online.
You might like to look at our AJCP learning webinar and finding aids if
you are interested in these documents. We should also mention just keep in mind
that when you are looking through these records and searching for this content the language
used is very much of the period so some of it may be offensive from a modern perspective.
Now I know the National Library has long supported researchers using this collection by providing
access in our reading rooms and through our copying, lending and reference services
however recognising the importance of the collection
and particularly its heavy use amongst the Fijian, Indian and other communities
the Library has digitised a complete collection of over 60,000 passes and other related collections
so these are now freely and fully available online from anywhere in the world.
I do remember before they were digitised we had a family of dedicated researchers who came to visit
us from interstate and they were here for must have been almost two weeks from open to close
poring through the thousands of different frames under microfilm, thousands of different passes.
One evening there was a shout of jubilation in the reading rooms when they d managed to discover
the passes they were looking for but having this material online really does simplify
access and makes it much easier for everybody to track down their indentured ancestors.
Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully a few more shouts in living rooms when they discover more records.
Before we show you how to access the digitised records we will quickly run through the different
series and what information they hold. So there are 17 separately listed items in our catalogue
as you can see here but these can be grouped into a smaller number of more important categories
so these are the General Register of Indian Immigrants, 1879 to 1916, Repatriation Registers,
Death Registers, Plantations Registers and finally the emigration passes themselves which are the
most important due to their detail and because the pass number serves as a unique identifier.
Now you did have to explain to me what we meant by unique identifier in this case, Jack.
Well it works like the number on your passport or your driver s licence number.
So like a registration number? Exactly, you ll see it popping up on
other records and even things on marriage and birth certificates. It s almost like
a shorthand way of identifying a person. The first type of record that we mentioned
was the General Register. Could you explain a little bit more about that?
Absolutely. So the General Register, it has two main parts. There s the list of ships
carrying indentured labourers and then there will be the full list of indentured labourers
within each ship. These are ordered by pass number and you ll see that the names are arranged by
male, female, boy, girl and infants. Within these the names are arranged by alphabetical order.
Early records include the name, father s name, age, sex, vessel, date of arrival, name,
cost of passage, employer and remarks. Later records contain
more information. This example from Book 9 includes columns for extension order,
re-indentures, marriage, death, return to India and others. So it s important to note that many
of these columns are incomplete and may not be comprehensive. For example repatriation or a death
may not be included here but there s still a wonderful amount of information in this register.
Great. The next one we mentioned was repatriation registers. Now these come under a variety of names
such as the Alphabetical List of Fiji Born Indians Repatriated to India, 20 December 1924 to 30,
August 1930 or Nominal Roles of Indians Repatriated to India, 1916 to 1947.
For example here is one on pages from the Nominal Roles. It s important to note that these records,
it wasn t just those who were born in India who were repatriated,
descendants of original indentured labourers are also listed
and could have been given passage. So free passage was available once certain conditions had been met
including number of years worked and time spent in Fiji. Travellers mostly returned on the same
ships that were bringing labourers out to Fiji so the information recorded typically includes name,
father s name, pass number, ship of return or ship of arrival and sometimes caste.
There are also several volumes of death registers of indentured Indian
emigrants working on plantations. These are generally organised chronologically but there
are some that are arranged by plantation instead. Details are generally fewer than
those found in other series but typically you can find pass number, the ship name,
the date of indenture, plantation, employer, date of death and the cause of death as well.
Finally we have the plantation registers. Now these are another digitised collection
that can provide essential detail about an indentured ancestor.
Not all the registers have survived unfortunately and some are very incomplete but each plantation
should have an entry with a list of indentured labourers working on the property. Details
supplied are normally the pass number, name, ship of arrival, sex, age, date of indenture, term,
pass number, relations and sometimes details related to repatriation or death. These can be
really useful to trace who your ancestors were working with and other personal connections.
So it sounds like all of these different records do have slightly different information on them
and it looks like there s some overlap but unique things in every one.
So they would be fairly interconnected and that would give us some options on how to
cross-reference them, wouldn t it? Yeah, exactly.
Alright in that case let s move on to the emigration passes themselves.
These are generally the most sought after documents for those researching your family
history. As we mentioned earlier the pass number is an important detail that was used in other
areas. The passes contain the most genealogical information from all the records and were also
more systematically recorded. If possible this is the record you should try to locate. There
are separate passes for men, women, boys, girls, infant boys and infant girls. These are split into
different sections for each ship, the men are recorded first then the women then the children
then the infants. As with the general register it is by alphabetical order within these groups.
Judith, do we have any more information about how these passes
were filled out? Did it happen in India? In Fiji? Well actually a little bit of both so these passes
were filled out before embarkation at one of the immigration depots in India. The depot s surgeon
was responsible for correctly filling out the details. The passes were then given to the Master
of Transport to compare with the ship s lists and this is where they were given a ship s number.
Once the vessel had arrived in Fiji the passes were returned to the labourers and
assigned a pass number from the General Register that we mentioned before.
That sounds like a lot of recordkeeping but are there mistakes in the passes?
Yes so one crucial point here is that the Depot Surgeon was responsible for transcribing personal
and place names so spelling mistakes and errors are common, particularly when you have a language
or cultural disconnect. There is a lack of consistency even within passes on the same ship.
So the information recorded remained almost identical over the years. This is
an example from the first arrival of indentured labourers that were on board Leonidas in 1879.
The pass number is right at the top, number one in this case. Listed below are many other fields,
for example we have a ship s name, the ship s number, the location of the depot,
the date, the depot number, the caste, father s name, age, the zilla which is
a kind of county subdivision, Pergunnah5 which was a smaller division of a zilla, the village,
occupation, name of next of kin, if married, to whom, marks and a range of signatures.
Here is an example of a pass of the Sutlej in 1916 so this was the last group of indentured
labourers to emigrate. Note the fingerprints that appear on the right-hand side of passes from the
later voyages. Some of the terminology has also changed slightly but the recorded information
is very similar. So Jack, it seems like the pass number is the most important
in terms of following the records but are any of the other numbers useful on here?
Absolutely. So some of the other numbers can also be used for tracing family members.
Let s just have a look at the depot numbers in a little bit more detail.
We ll start let s have a look at this pass, 1332. See the section where it has the name of next of
kin? It says mother of 786. As these were filled out in the depot it is important to know that the
786 in this case refers to depot number 786 and not pass number 786. Now the depot numbers can
be difficult to find as they re not in order but in most cases they will be in the same voyage.
We've done some digging beforehand and we ve found some with a depot number 786 and this is with the
pass number 13542. Checking this pass we can see that the relation is confirmed with the text,
son of 785. We can imagine the mother waiting with her son as the forms are filled out one
after the other and this explains the close depot numbers. Sometimes you ll find a whole
section of your family undertaking the same trip with these consecutive depot numbers.
So as you can see there are many types of records but the most important for tracing family
are the emigration passes so these are a rich source of genealogical information and
can provide you a direct link back to a location or family in India.
Now we ve given you the background and overview of the records, we want to show you how to access
them and use them for your research. Using a case study of a family we will show you what
indexes are available through different websites and how to use these to search the passes. Next,
how our research guide lets you browse the passes including demonstrating how to download images and
find permanent links. Then we ll show you how to access some of the other resources we mentioned
earlier before touching on using civil registration records to locate pass numbers.
So as we mentioned, particularly if you are new to this research, one of the best places to start
when researching passes is on our research guide. As well as background information
about the records, the arrangements and how we can help you, you will see some important
links so on the right-hand side you can see the link to girmit.org website and to the National
Archives of Fiji. So the Girmit website provides a searchable index of indentured labourers that was
put together using data from the National Archives of Fiji who also provide the same data as a pdf.
So if I click the link to open up the Girmit page you will see that it is a work in progress and has
not yet been finished so it means that the records indexed only run from A to M however
this is still an extremely important resource and if your ancestor s names
fall into this range it should be your first step. Let s have a look at a common name, Daulat.
So I ve gone into the D section and you can see up the top here there is a search bar.
Now I can start typing to see a full list of results or if you have doubts about the spelling
used as Judith mentioned earlier I can also scroll down until I find the relevant section.
In this case I will use a search and we ll see that there are quite a few results for the same
name. So this means that if your ancestor s name has quite a few results you may need to
search through several different passes to verify that it is the pass that you are looking for.
Let's have a look at Daulat, son of Ramcharan who came out on board The
Sangola so the pass number here is 37082. Okay, let s come back to our research guide
now that we know the pass number. On the left-hand side of the screen you can see some subheadings
and as we now know the pass number we can go straight to Access by Pass
so if you click on that and then scroll down until you find the right range.
So we re looking for 36318 to 37171. Right so click the View Online Link to go into the viewer.
So you can see the pass number noted at the top of that form.
Using the side bar at the top scroll across so we can get closer to the page number that we
re looking for or rather the pass number that we re looking for which is 37082.
Just keep going a little bit further
and once we get close we can just use the arrows to go page by page to the right pass.
So we will get there, 37082 and here we go. Here's the genealogical information
that we can now use to trace the family back to India as well.
I m just going to pause us there for a second cause we did want to talk about how to download an
image of this one. So now that we have the pass, on the left-hand side of the screen you ll see
that there is a download icon. If we click this you ll see there are several different options
and we have different formats, a jpeg and a pdf. Just note that if you do choose the jpeg
it will be a compressed file and you will need to unzip this before you can view the image.
Now the other important thing is that if you click all images here
this will include the passes for everybody that came out on board that ship. If you
re only interested in a single pass, Daulat s pass in this instance, click current and this
means that when you download you will only download this single image for this pass.
But hang on, what if we only want to link back to this record rather than download the whole thing?
Absolutely so you also have the option to use it like if I click on a sight icon now
you ll see that we have the work and image options again. The work once again will be for the whole
shipload and will include all the passes and it will take you to the beginning of that sequence.
If we choose image you ll see that this image identifier will take us directly
to this pass every time and this is a stable permanent link that you can use in your records
that you ll always come back to this record. That's fantastic. So looking at the pass
it s mentioned here that his father is listed as next of kin and that Daulat is only two-and-a-half
years old so could we assume in that case that he came out with a family member?
I think it s a pretty good assumption and it s possibly the father as this is who
has been listed by the Depot Surgeon. Let s return to the research guide and have a
look at how we would search. We ve assumed that the ship and the date are the same
and so we can click through the records until we find possible matches.
But if we wanted to go through more quickly we could always use the General Register
that we talked about earlier so you ll find a link to the General Register in the Other
Further Resources tab. If you follow the link through to the Viewer once we find the resource,
just over there, click through into the Viewer
and when browsing the collection you're looking for the appropriate date range
so we re looking for The Sangola that departed in February 1908 so the date range for that would be
Collection Book 7. Once that loads just up the top here you can see it s listed as arriving in March.
So we now need to look through to see where the relevant section starts.
Again you can use that top taskbar to scroll through
and we re looking for The Sangola, February 1908.
We should have him here
and here we are. We ve found a pass number 36580.
Wonderful so that was a great tip, Judith, cause this way we didn t need to
click through every individual pass, we could just go through the register.
Let s go back to our research guide and we ll select Access by Pass Number again to find this
pass, just here. Once again it s pass number 36580 so we ll go back to the research guide,
Access by Pass Number so same voyage that we were looking at before, here we are.
So we need to click through until we find 36580. Alright, almost there.
Here we are, we ve found it. Okay so let s compare the details with Daulat s pass.
It looks like we have a match, we ve got the same caste, the same district,
the same thana and the same village. Yeah, what s really interesting here as
well is that there s a wife listed with the depot number as well so this is another great piece of
information that can lead you to another search. We won t go through the whole process again,
as you can see it takes a little bit of clicking through but we do recommend that
it would be easier to go back to the General Register at this point to find the pass number.
We have done the research beforehand and we found that it s pass number 37048.
Alternatively if you think the spelling might be inaccurate you could also browse through
the passes looking for a depot number. These are unfortunately not listed in the General Register.
Let s just note the ships did make many voyages and so you may need
to look through quite a number of ships if all you have is the ship name and no date.
Let s go back to our research guide and have a look at the Access by Ship for a little bit
more information so we ve got Access by Ships Name. Imagine that we were looking for someone
and we only know that they came aboard The Ganges. If we look at the relevant section
here you ll see that it made seven trips so this could involve quite a lengthy search if you had
no other information. It is possible but if there are other documents what might help
this is where you try and take a shortcut. We talked about the number appearing on
some other documents earlier, could these be helpful locating the passes?
Oh absolutely so an approach that can provide breakthrough information in some cases uses
the Fijian civil registration records so these are marriages or birth certificates.
So if a girmitya was married according to the ordinances of the Colony of Fiji
a number of details had to be included with the registered number such as the pass number, the
name of ship, plantation where they were assigned and sometimes the pass number you will also find
on the birth certificates if a child s born to girmityas. So as you mentioned before the pass
numbers was a shorthand way of identifying the parents. Please note that to get a copy of these
certificates you will need to contact the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages back in Fiji.
We have a link to the Registry on the research guide itself just up here.
This brings us to the end of the presentation today about using the Indian Emigration Passes
to Fiji. We ve covered the background to the indentured labour system.
How the records are arranged and what information they have.
Then we showed you how you can access these resources online.
The case study we presented should have provided a
good indication of the nuts and bolts of using this collection
and how you can trace your family through them. Of course if you get stuck and need some tips
or advice don t hesitate to reach out to us through our Ask a Librarian service.
We hope you ve enjoyed the presentation and have come away with some new information.
8 Transcribed by audio.net.au
hello my name is gareth i'm a digital
preservation coordinator here at the
national library of australia the
national library of australia
acknowledges australia's first nations
peoples their first australians as the
traditional owners and custodians of
this land and gives respect to the
elders past and present and threw them
to all australian aboriginal and torres
strait islander people
one of the most challenging aspects of
digital preservation is not the actual
work but surprisingly it's explaining
what it is to people
think of it as as a digital equivalent
of physical conservation so the library
has books manuscripts artworks and many
other objects
and they might require treatment from
time to time if covers or spines are
damaged or there's rips and tears in
paper
the library has a dedicated team to
treat these physical items to keep them
stable and accessible to users
likewise the library has a growing
collection of born digital publications
images and personal archives
and you might not think it but digital
objects in my opinion are even more
fragile and require a lot more attention
and treatment to help keep them stable
and accessible
my background is in linguistics and
mandarin chinese so it even comes as a
surprise to me that i've ended up here
in digital preservation
more so because i didn't even know the
difference between a jpeg or a png file
or an mp3 and mp4
so how did i possibly end up here
well i was given an opportunity to
define a few terms for a project that
has become quite a significant area of
work both here at the library
and in the field of digital preservation
itself
this one little opportunity has opened
my mind to the importance of digital
preservation
what we do is a balance of practical
work future planning and applied
research to look after and ensure access
to the library's growing digital
collections
but before we can do any of that the
most important thing is to get content
off carriers
as they come into the library and into
manage storage
so that we do not lose the content
and what i've been what i mean by
physical carriers
is cds dvds hard drives etc
fortunately this is a shared
responsibility across the library and
that frees up our time to focus on other
important digital preservation work
there are some pretty straightforward
questions that guide digital
preservation and in fact these are
questions that you can ask at home as
well
which file formats exist in these
digital collections can the library
provide access to the content of these
of these file formats to users with the
software that it has
do we need additional software or
professional software
will the library be able to continue to
provide access to the content of these
formats in the future and if not what do
we need to do about it now
the practical and applied research that
we do go hand in hand
our digital preservation system
preservica produces reports on the two
million files it currently holds we
analyze these these reports weekly to
determine whether the library holds new
file formats whether there are any
corrupted files or any other issues that
we need to be aware of that involves a
lot of research into understanding the
file formats that we have
known issues that these file formats
might have and the software that
supports them
so if i may paint a picture of what this
looks like
cast your mind back to the matrix movie
can you see that green screen full of
binary code and other symbols raining
down
well my monitors look a bit like that
too they're just not green
and to stress how cool the work is we
are time travelers we are always jumping
between earlier operating systems to run
old applications from the years past
so just the other week i was in pc right
from 1983 in an old dos 3 environment
the library holds approximately three
petabytes of digital content and that's
around 15 billion
files i should say that this number
doesn't include all the backups either
three petabytes of digital content would
be around the same as three thousand one
terabyte hard drives
or if we were to convert that to the
average storage size of a phone today
which is around 256 gigabytes
we would have just under 12 000 phones
of data
it's amusing to remember at least to me
that 10 years ago we weren't talking in
terabytes but now we all are
it's only a matter of time before we're
talking about petabytes at home as well
some people might not realize that
digital content that we create requires
active management to ensure their
longevity and a big part of this is
looking after storage
so what are some of the typical
challenges
the volume of the digital content we
create is huge we are taking more photos
and videos creating more documents than
ever before and the file sizes are
getting bigger
yes
storage might be relatively cheap but
what are you going to do about the
quality of your own collections
are you deleting what you don't want to
keep
and are we really backing up our content
the impression i get when talking to
friends and family is that they're not
backing up their content so precious
photos and videos are stored solely on a
mobile phone or on the computer and
nothing else
now i might talk a bit about the rise of
the convenient cloud storage yes this is
great
be warned those providers are not
responsible if your content is lost or
become corrupted so you need to do your
own backups as well
and whilst we're talking about backups
hard drives
they fail just like any other physical
carrier so the best practice is to
replace your backup hard drives with new
ones once every five years or if you
notice any performance issues sooner
the library has a large number of all of
the common carriers you have around your
homes today in its collections
so i'm talking about cds dvds usb sticks
hard drives among others
the library also has a large number of
legacy carriers too and i dare say many
viewers will have these around their
homes as well
they include three and a half inch and
five and a quarter inch floppy disks
the library also has some other rare
carriers as well including jazz discs
zip discs and side quest
cartridges as i've stressed before we
ideally only access these carriers once
to transfer the content to manage
storage
some carriers can be processed by us and
colleagues on everyday computers
the three and a half inch floppy disks
can be processed on everyday computers
with the help of a usb floppy drive
other carriers however such as the five
and a quarter inch floppies require
legacy computer setups or professional
equipment depending on the flavor of the
floppy disks
this is the perfect opportunity to tell
everyone one simple message get your
content off those physical carriers that
might be hiding around your house and
garage and put it all into one managed
storage and that's typically your
computer
if you don't those carriers will
eventually fail and whatever content is
on it will be lost as well
so let's make it fun let's create a
digital preservation project at home
round up all of the carriers you have
and assess what kind of content they
contain or might contain if possible
and determine which carriers you want to
process
now it's time to transfer the content
some carrier types will be easy to
process yourself whilst others might
require assistance
fortunately some of the carriers at a
greater risk of failure are the ones
that are the easiest to process so let's
do them first
and they are the cds dvds usb sticks and
all of the other small hard drives that
you have around the place
now what about the three and a half inch
floppy disks and zip drives
if you don't have a computer with a
three and a half inch floppy drive or a
zip drive to assist you there are plenty
of usb 3.5 inch floppy drives and zip
drives available online that you can
purchase
you can plug these into any windows
computer via a usb port or a mac
computer depending on the disk format
gets a bit trickier with older carriers
such as the five and a quarter inch
floppy disks and i'd say that most
people wouldn't have access to a working
five and a quarter inch drive
there are professionals who can transfer
the content from these carriers for a
fee so it's worth considering
now that you have all the content that
you wish to keep off those carriers and
onto your managed storage it's time to
do an analysis of your own collection
go back to the guiding questions i
talked about at the beginning and do
your best to answer them
it's best to think of your phone and any
memory card as being physical carriers
because they are
these are carriers that can and will
fail without warning so it is best to
back up
or transfer the content to your managed
storage remember that's your computer
i've heard of so many people losing all
of their precious photos and videos
because they've lost their phone or
their phone has suddenly stopped working
or is damaged
these are photos and videos that they
will never be able to get back so please
teach yourself how to back up your phone
ask the people around you how to do it
if you're unsure
most of the time all you need is a usb
cable and a computer
there are also cloud storage services
like icloud onedrive google drive
that automatically back up the photos
and videos you take to cloud storage
however you will need to do a bit of
research to make sure that this
is set up in the right way for you and
you need to be aware of the risks
involved in using such services
and lastly my
top tips for looking after your digital
content
if you want your digital content to last
you will need to actively manage it you
can't just stick it in a hard drive put
it in the cupboard and
expect it to last
keep your computer organized so i'm
talking about consistent folder and file
names
perhaps ordered by year and project
don't forget to delete what you do not
want to keep
we also need a good backup system
i would recommend that you buy two
external hard drives for backing up your
main computer
one could be connected to the computer
for automatic backups
whilst the other could periodically back
up your computer and be stored at your
work or some other location
you might also want to consider that
convenient cloud storage option as as
well in addition to your backups
you should refresh your backup hard
drives every five years
so just remember
like cds and other physical carriers
your hard drive does fail
so it is good to to buy new ones every
five years
think about the file formats you have in
your collection and the software needed
to access them if you have older file
formats and with little software support
you might want to consider moving the
content to a different file format
This webinar is also available with Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Korean subtitles. To access these subtitles please view in YouTube and select in the Closed Captions menu.
Hi everyone, welcome to the Asian Language Collections Learning webinar.
My name is Bing.
I'm a reference librarian and coordinator of Asian collections in the reader services team here at the National Library.
I'm joined by my colleague, Rika
who is also a reference librarian here.
She has a wealth of experience working with our Asian language collections and in particular the Japanese collection.
We would like to start by acknowledging Australian First Nations peoples.
The First Australians, as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and gives respects to the elders past and present, and through them
to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Today, we are going to talk about the Library's amazing Asian language collections.
We will start by giving you an overview of the Asian collections and explain to you what is available and after that we will show you how to find and access them
Today's session is of particular interest to those of you who are interested in published works of Asian countries and the Library's
rich holding of the Asian language publications created by Australian Asian communities here in Australia.
So firstly, let's begin with a brief overview of our Asian language collections.
Until the outbreak of the Second World War, the library took small interest in the documentary heritage of Asian countries. In the 1950s, the importance of understanding its Asian neighbours and Asian studies was gradually recognized.
It was under Sir Harold White, Australia's first National Librarian that systematic collecting of publications from and about Asia began.
During the 1960s and 70s, a number of privately formed collections relating to Asia work wired.
Among them, there were the library of the famous French orientalist, George Coedès, on the history and culture of Indochina, the Braga collection of over 7000 books and conflict on the Portuguese in Asia.
The Beyer collection on the Philippines, which contains about 3000 items and the rich holdings of the London Missionary Society collection in Chinese language, which includes rare and original items of China's Taiping rebellion in the mid 18th century to name just a few.
These formed collections add valuable retrospective holdings to our Asian collections.
On the other hand, we have purchased contemporary research material from and about Asia from publishers and book dealers.
Today, the Library houses the largest resource on Asia in Australia with holdings of over half a million volumes.
The Asian collections emphasize East and Southeast Asia.
Our script language collections include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Lao, Cambodian, and Burmese collections.
We collect books, journals, magazines, government publications, newspapers, maps, pictures, ephemera and many other materials.
We also subscribe to some online databases.
The fact that the Asian collections have only been developed since the 1950s has partly dictated the nature of these collections.
The strength of the collections is in contemporary materials from the 19th century onwards, with emphasis on the social sciences.
The subject of the modern history, politics and government current affairs, society, and culture are well covered.
Our holdings of modern history in Asia cover most of the significant times and events.
If you'd like to learn about Meiji Restoration, the rise of the Chinese communists, the Sino-Japanese War,
the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the impact of the Cold War in Asia;
material to support your interest is extensive.
Our contemporary holdings are as rich.
The collection offers abundant resources to support exploration of topics such as North-South Korean relations, the political movements in Thailand,
Korean pop culture,
The LGBTQ and gender studies in Japan,
Indigenous people in Taiwan,
Economic development,
Government policies,
Social movements and arts in Asian countries.
Then this goes on.
One of the Library's collecting priorities is Australian material.
We hold a significant collection of publications about Australia and by Australian authors published in these Asian countries.
With contemporary material being the main focus, we also have wonderful old and rare items in the collections.
An example is now a beautiful Japanese woodblock print collection.
We have hundreds of the prints published in the 19th and early 20th century in Japan.
Most of them are digitized and made available via Trove.
I'd like to show you this print which is called:
Shinasadame kaika no hana
This was printed in 1879.
The woodblock prints from the late 19th century shows the rapid social changes in Japan.
This may look like a scene from a kabuki play, but it's not.
This print depicts people comparing traditional Japanese goods with those newly introduced after the opening of this country as if they were kabuki actors.
Look at the two men in the middle.
One of them is wearing a traditional Cape.
The other is wearing a Victorian style coat.
Like them, we can see a traditional sandal and a shoe.
A Japanese style umbrella and Western style one
This man is holding new banknotes in one hand and a bag of a Edo era silver coins in the other.
We know from this print that the end of the 19th century was a time of mixing the traditional with new from the West.
The Library's woodblock print collection is an invaluable resource for the study of art as well as social sciences.
The Library not only holds a wonderful collection of material collected from these Asian countries.
We have also been collecting material documenting the lives and activities of Asian communities here in Australia for decades.
The legal deposit requirement under the Copyright Act 1968 has also enabled Library to collect a good collection of published works in Asian languages, such as newspapers, magazines,
community newsletters, reports, yearbooks and a lot more.
Take out the Chinese language newspapers, for example. We hold over 100 Chinese Australian newspapers published across different states and territories in Australia from the earliest ones started in the
1850s to many current titles.
An example of the early Chinese newspaper is this one.
A supplement to Chinese Australian Herald.
This broadsheets was published in 1897 with an illustration of the Diamond Jubilee Charity Carnival which was held in honour of Queen Victoria at the Sydney Agricultural Grounds.
A special feature of that carnival was the Chinese procession. About 600 Chinese participated in this event. They came from all parts of Sydney and suburbs.
Through this picture,
we could imagine the liveliness of this scene.
They wore celestial costumes borrowed from the Chinese community at Bendigo.
At the head of the procession, there was a huge dragon, 150 feet long,
which needed 80 Chinese people to carry.
There were also lion danc,e the Emperor's carriages, the Chinese flags and banners.
These broadsheets vividly documents his first time in the colony of New South Wales
that such a Chinese display had taken place.
We also have many current newspapers such as the Australian Chinese Daily, the Chinese Melbourne Daily and the Australian Chinese Times.
They, all together, provide a great array of information about the individual and collective lives of Chinese people in Australia.
So, no matter if you are a student of Asian studies, migrants from Asia who would like to read books in your languages,
descendant of Asian migrants interested in discovering family history stories, or if you are just curious about Asia;
there's something for you in this collection.
We have talked you through a broad overview of what is in the Asian language collection and some example of the collection highlights.
This takes us to our next point.
How to find and access these materials.
Let's bring up the library homepage:
N - L - A dot G - O - V dot A - U
Before jumping over to our catalogue search, I would suggest you apply for National Library card if you haven't got one.
To get a library card is very simple.
You scroll down a little bit and click the get a library card just below the catalogue search.
Getting a library card is free.
You don't need a library card to search our catalogue, but you will need to log in with your library card to request items or access our subscribed databases from home.
If you can't make it to the Library, you can choose to have the card posted to you.
Let's go back to the home page from here.
This is our catalogue search.
Most of the collections are discoverable by our online catalogue.
You can use this search box to start your search or you can click on this catalogue button on the right to go straight to the catalogue page.
Our catalogue allows you to search using English, Asian scripts and Romanised form.
The searching methods are similar, though, you search by keyword, subject of interest, title, publication or name of author.
The best way is to start with the more general term and then you can refine result in a variety of different ways.
Our example today is Chinese history.
You can start off type in Chinese history or history China here in the search bar.
After clicking the "find" button, you'll be able to see a list of catalogue records relating to the keyword.
On the right hand side of the page there are a few limiters which can be used to narrow search.
As you can see, we have items of different formats.
You can click on the "more" to expand the list.
So our history of China we hold resources in the range of formats including books, microform, journals, pictures, audio and so on.
Other options include eResources - which I will come back to later -
Then author, subject area,
If you click the "more" to extend the subject list, you will see history related subject terms which allowed you to refine your search,
for example by only look at Chinese history in a certain period of time or different aspect of the history.
Then we have series, decades, language of publication, publishers and place of publication.
So, we have got different ways of narrowing down a very broad search.
I'm going to choose "Chinese" here to limit the results to Chinese language publications only.
Here we still have over 30,000 items.
Before we refine the search further,
let's click on the title to have a look at one of the cattle records to give you a sense of how to understand the information in it.
This is a book titled "Bei jiang tong shi - a complete history of China North Borderland."
So you can click on the title to go to the record page. The first line is the Romanised form of the title, the second line contains the Chinese title.
This is a book published in 2003 and it is in Chinese.
You can see the title, author, edition, publisher are described both in Romanised form and the Chinese script.
Scroll down to the bottom.
You can tell that we have a print copy of this book and if requested it will be available in the Main Reading Room of the Library building.
Now let's go back to the search page.
If you are residing some distance from Canberra and would like to read our E books
or view our digitised collections from home, you can use the eResources options here to find online items.
There are two sources of eResources listed here.
We have items included in our subscribed database and NLA digital material which are generally old materials that are digitised and available freely online.
If we go for the subscribed database, leads will bring up a list of ebooks relating to the history of China that we subscribe from other databases.
To access them, you go into the record and use the online links to access them.
While in the Library building, we can access all of the eResources.
If you access the book from home, you will need to log in to use the databases.
We can, of course choose to view NLA digital materials.
So instead of the"subscribed database" we choose "NLA digital material."
The small images on the left of the title also indicates the image has been digitis ed.
We have 322 items
including pictures, books,
maps and manuscripts items.
You can click on the title to go to the catalogue records for more information on the title.
Or you can simply click on the image to view the digitised item.
For example, this is a poster of Mao published in 1970, which was during the Chinese Cultural Revolution period.
It depicts Mao Zedong above a group of soldiers from the Peoples Liberation Army, each of them holding a Little Red Book.
Which is a selection of Mao's sayings. The caption reads "The Chinese People's Liberation Army is the Great School of Mao Zedong Thought."
It is more than 50 years since the poster was created, but it's still so colorful and vivid.
It is a good item recording the history of China at the time
or it could be a wonderful piece to study Chinese art or artists as well.
As we mentioned earlier, you can't only search in English, but also Asian scripts and sit under their Romanised form.
The following sessions would be most relevant to those who know the languages and would like to locate specific items.
For example, I enter this word in the search bar, which means economics in Korean.
This search returns 460 results.
It means that there are 460 records that include this particular Korean wide in their catalogue records such as title, editor and publisher fields.
Again, we can use the limiters on the right hand side to narrow search, or you can use the entries in the catalogue record to bring up similar items.
If you know the title or author name in Asian scripts, this is a good way to search records.
Finally, let's move to search with Romanised form.
This is particularly useful in locating items by their titles and authors in our Chinese and Japanese collections.
For Japanese items, romanization is used to convert the pronunciation of scripts into Roman characters.
Transliteration of what requires correct pronunciation of the words.
The Japanese Romanisation system used at the library is themodified Hepburn system.
To enter our transcript, transliterated such phrase, divide it into "tango" units and "joshi" units which cannot be decomposed any further.
For example, if you are interested in education after the Second World War, you can use the words "sengokyoiku"
If I type it as one word.
No records hit.
However, dividing the world into minimal units.
I have 128 results.
As you see in the record,
The word 'kyouiku" includes a macron. However, you can ignore it when you type
because the catalogue will bring all records that include the word with and without macron.
As Rika said, using Romanisation to search titles and authors in our catalogue is the best way to identify Chinese items.
So, I will explain a little bit more about the Chinese Romanisation.
As the Chinese characters have simplified and traditional forms and our cataloguing rule is to transcribe which whichever form appears
on the book, then describe the title, author and imprinting Romanisation.
Therefore, using the simplified or traditional character to search will only give you parts of the relevant results,
and searching by correctRomanisation form it's more precise and comprehensive.
For Chinese collections, the Romanisation form we use in catalogue records is Pinyin, but we separate the Pinyin of each character with the space.
Except for persons giving names and place names.
For example, if I'm looking for a journal titled "Chinese Art" or "Zhongguo yi shu", I will enter "Zhongguo", which is China.
And since China is a name of a country or place, I connect the two syllabus, Zhong and Guo together, leaving no space in the middle.
And then "yi shu" separately.
And here it is
This is a journal called "Zhongguo yi shu"
If you are looking for books written by an author, for example, Mao Zedong, or about him.
The authorised form of the name Mao Zedong looks like this. Mao, family name, goes first and then you connect the given names, Zedong together.
Yeah, that's all about the Chinese Romanisation.
So much for the search of the catalog.
I'd like to draw your attention to the final part of the session.
Our eResources portal.
We have talked about the Trove's digital collections and subscribed ebooks, which can be found on our catalogue and there are lot more online resources
we are offering via the eResources portal.
Let's go back to the Library homepage by clicking the Library icon on the
top left corner of the page.
You will be able to find the eResources link here.
Just next to the search bar and the Trove portal.
Click on the E resources.
There will be a license agreement detailing the use conditions.
If you are happy with the terms and conditions, click "accept."
The portal works best when you log in first
See this yellow banner on top of the page. Log in using your library card number and your family name.
After logging you can use this search bar to look up resources, but I would suggest go to the browser resources tab.
This is the part where you really get
a sense of what is available.
If you look down the left hand side of this menu, you will notice there is a list of subjects.
We want to look at the Asia Pacific database.
So just click the plus sign next to Asia Pacific and you can then see Asian studies.
Click on it.
The Asian studies related databases will come up in the panel on the right.
You can scroll down to browse.
The databases, used the A-Z alphabet or the search bar to search databases
if you have a name in mind.
Some of the popular databases include China Academic Journals or sometimes referred to as CNKI.
This resource indexes thousands of research level Chinese language journals.
We also subscribe to the Chinese national newspaper, the People's Daily.
Another database which may be of interest is PressReader.
Press reader provides access to over 7000 newspapers, magazines and periodicals in 60 languages from more than 120 countries.
This is the home page of PressReader
You can use the countries and languages option to find the publication of interest.
To find Chinese publications, you select the language and hit "Done".
Here are the titles in Chinese available.
I'm sure you will find some good reads in PressReader .
We have come to the end of our webinar today.
We hope everybody gets some ideas about the Library's
Asian language collections.
We also encourage you to take a look at our getting started page and some other learning videos on our website.
If you need help, you can always turn to our Ask a Librarian service for assistance.
Thanks for watching.
Stuart: Hello, my name is Stuart Baines and I'm the Assistant Director of Education and
Public Programs at the National Library of Australia. Welcome to this discovery video
in which we will explore the EA Chrome Collection. A rich and diverse collection full of pictures,
manuscripts and objects telling some of the fascinating stories of Australia's aeronautical history
The E.A. Crome Collection documents the stories of people who navigated Australia's
skies in the golden era of aviation. In those early days of flight, without GPS or radar,
successfully navigating across this wide country came down to the pilots ability
to read the land or the skies. The geographic landmarks and celestial bodies of this continent
have guided travellers long before the first plane took to the skies. The first people of Australia
have trusted the land and sky to point them safely to their destination for generations and have
repaid this guidance with caring for the land and preserving its knowledge for generations to come.
The National Library of Australia acknowledges Australia's first peoples,
the first Australians, as the traditional owners and custodians of this land,
and we acknowledge them as the first navigators of the continent. We pay our respects to their
elders past and present, and through them to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Ernest Alfred Chrome was born in Sydney in 1902. He became fascinated by aviation in 1919
when he witnessed the arrival of a Vickers Vimy in Sydney, piloted by Ross and Keith Smith,
who had just completed the first flight from England to Australia. From then on, he began
collecting aviation material. In 1928, Chrome met Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm.
His collection is especially rich in material relating to the career of these two men.
The library acquired a substantial quantity of Chrome's collection in 1966, including
photographs, manuscripts, and objects relating to aviation. The Library also interviewed Chrome as
part of its oral history project, in which he describes his collecting and some interesting
stories behind some of the objects.
Audio recording of E.A. Crome: Today they are finding-
by people who have been interested in the air and collectors. They're finding rare envelopes
or cards or even pamphlets that have been thrown out of balloons, aeroplanes, and from this they're
finding records of people and events that have been long since forgotten. But now
they're beginning to find the very important links that create the story of aviation.
Stuart: Chrome continued to make donations to the Library for the rest of his life,
and after his death in 1987, the Library received what remained of his collection.
During his lifetime, Crome also donated around 20,000 items to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
Along with music, manuscripts and books relating to his other lifelong interest:
violin making. The collection held by the Library spans a range of formats including 250 books,
magazines and pamphlets. Flight log books including those of the crew of the first
transatlantic flight in 1928. There are 1145 photographs depicting early aviators and planes.
Many of Australia's early aeronauts were pilots during the First World War. While the
collection does hold images and objects relating to military pilots and aircraft, it is primarily
focused on civil aviation, with the bulk of the collection consisting of around 30,000, yes,
30,000 aero philatelic items. For those of you who don't work in a library, that's items relating
to airmail and other civilian flight related ephemera including menus, photos, and leaflets.
One of the great things about the National Library is that our objects and collections are free
and available for anyone to come in and view them. All you need is a library card.
One of the other great things about the National Library is that we understand not everyone lives
in Canberra or can get here easily. To that end, we have digitised a huge amount of our collection
and have made it freely available online. You can access these collections wherever you are.
You don't even need a library card. The Chrome Collection is no exception.
With almost two and a half thousand digitised items.
I'm going to show you how to find out more about this collection, how to located it in the catalogue and
along the way look at some of the standout moments from Australia's aviation history. Locating
the collection is a simple matter of finding your way to the National Library's website.
Opening our catalogue and doing a search for EA Crome . If you're looking to browse the whole
collection, you can work your way through the 127 pages of results. However, if you're only looking
to see what's available digitally, you can use the narrow search buttons. Along the side here
and limit to all online. It doesn't narrow down the pages too much,
but you can at least know all results are viewable online. Now, if you're looking for
photographic material, you can scroll through the pages, but I would suggest using this result.
This is the catalogue entry for the formed photographic collection.
Clicking through you can get an overview of what you might find inside using the link down
the bottom. You can open the trove viewer and click browse this collection. You now
have all digitised photos at your fingertips to scroll through with a short description of each.
Once you find one you think you might be interested in, just click the thumbnail and you'll
get the full image in high definition. I like to look at this one here, so I'll click through,
and we can now see the gorgeous de Havilland Comet Grosvenor House , the winner of the MacRobertson
Air Race in 1934. The air race took place as part of the Melbourne Centenary celebrations
organised by the Lord Mayor of Melbourne and with the prize of 15,000 teams vied to fly
from RAF Mildenhall in East Anglia to Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne in the fastest time possible.
Grosvenor House took out the trophy with a flight time of 71 hours.
The 2nd place winner. A team from the Netherlands flying in Douglas DC-2 "Uiver"
made the trip in 90 hours and 13 minutes. Despite an unexpected stormy stop in Albury.
You can read more about that side adventure on our Digital Classroom. The links below in the
description. The pilots of Grosvenor House Flight Lieutenant Charles William Anderson
Scott and captain Tom Campbell Black not only took home the prize money, but a spectacular trophy.
The Chrome Collection holds one of the few photographic records of this trophy.
The trophy is reported to have been melted down to aid the Red Cross Fund during the war in 1941.
Using the Trove newspaper archives, you can see one of the other existing photos of the trophy
in an article reporting the plans to melt it down.
There are too many photographs in the collection for me to go through all of them today,
but if aviation is your thing, there should be enough here to keep you busy for days.
The current collection is rich in manuscript material. This is defined as items,
usually handwritten that are not published or made commercially available. Items, including personal
correspondence, play scripts and the like. The main groups of manuscripts in the Chrome
collection consists of papers and memorabilia are some of Australia's early aviators. Records
of Australian National Airways, Imperial Airways Limited and other airlines and aircraft logbooks
between 1925 and 1940. It is important to note here that of the manuscript collection
only the logbooks and the arrow philately items are digitised. Among the most important items,
digitised and notes exchanged between the crew of the first Trans Pacific flight in 1928,
the log kept by Charles Ulm on the flight of the Southern Cross from Richmond to Wyndham in 1929,
ending with a forced landing at Coffee Royal and the log of the Southern Cross on the 1st
East West crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in 1930. The digitalization of the aircraft and engine logs
were made possible through the generous financial support of Dick and Pip Smith Foundation.
To find these notes and all the other manuscript material in the collection,
we can once again search for EA Crome in our catalogue and use the narrow search format
function to limit to manuscripts. And here the first result, we can see the papers of Ernest
and Vertie Chrome. Clicking through this record will open up a finding aid. These guides make
it easier to navigate through large collections. This finding aid was published with the assistance
of the EA Chrome Trust. Here you can see we have several logbooks listed in series, one
each one of these is a whole logbook with many pages in them. You can scroll down
here or in the contest list here to find what interests you and then click through
I mentioned in the Southern Cross on the 1st Trans Pacific flight. Just a moment ago.
Here are a collection of notes passed between the cockpit and the cabin during the nine-day flight.
Clicking the icon will bring up images of the pages. Then you can click on an image to see
it up close. Here we can see the optimism of the crew as they neared the end of their journey.
He can use the next or previous links along the top to scroll sequentially
or use the browser. This collection link along the top to jump back to the overview and browse. You
can follow the breadcrumbs to get back to the guide and continue browse. This finding aid
also includes the aero-philately collection full of airmail paraphernalia, postcards,
and stamps. This first album here also has a few early photos in it, including this image
of W.A. Heart, the first person to qualify for an aviator's certificate in Australia in 1911.
And on the next page, two photos of Harry Houdini. Yes, they're going over Niagara Falls in a barrel
illusionist Houdini, who made three flights in Australia in 1910 at Diggers Rest near Melbourne
in a single engine Voisin biplane. The rest of the album is more in line with philately collecting
postcards, souvenir material autographs, flight covers. It does also have objects
connected to one of the most unusual eras in world aviation history: the age of the airship.
From 1908 to 1939, Zeppelins or German airships carried passengers mail and cargo around the
world. The post marks and stamps were highly prized by collectors and revenue from postage
financed much of the operating costs. This water-resistant mail pouch from
LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin , which would be thrown from the moving airship close to the receiving post office,
has instructions in four languages for the finder:
"Please deliver the contents of this post bag immediately to the next post office."
Attached to the pouch, the long, striped cloth tail to increase its visibility. The collection
also includes the parachute used to drop mailbags from the infamous LZ 129 Hindenburg . Chrome made
no distinction between collecting items that a library might archive, or a museum might archive
as a quirk of this collecting, the Library has a number of objects and artefacts relating to
some of Australia's early aviation exploits, including this a suitcase. It might make sense
that a suitcase is related to air travel, but this one isn't famous for carrying luggage.
The inscription carved on the front tells you all you need to know about these objects history:
Bag used to transfer oil in Southern Cross Jubilee Airmail Tasman Flight 15 May 1935. C Kingsford Smith
PG. Taylor, John SW Stannage. In 1935 Charles Kingsford Smith was again in
the news for his exploits; flying a now ageing Southern Cross on a promotional trans-Tasman mail
run. Eight hundred kilometres into the journey a chunk of metal broke off from the centre engine
and shattered the starboard propeller.The crew turned back to Australia; a flight of 10 hours
into a headwind. The plane began to lose altitude and cargo was jettisoned to lighten the craft, but
the engine struggled.Two hours into the emergency flight back, the port engine began losing oil.
Notes passed in the cabin show the crews concern "1220 port engine giving out. May
not last an hour." In a now famous act of bravery, the Southern Cross co-pilot,
Bill Taylor, walked out along the starboard wing to collect the disabled engine's oil in a thermos
which then emptied into the leather suitcase held by John Stannage, the radio operator.
He walked out along the wing and filled and emptied the thermos six times
and then reversed the operation on the portside, filling the haemorrhaging portside engine
from the contents of the suitcase. The next note passed among the crew reads
"1256. sunlight. still in the air. Bill hero. Climbed out and got oil for dud motor."
Followed by. "Bill's the world's greatest hero. He transferred about one gallon of oil,
hope to see land in about 10 minutes now. " As it approached the coast,
the Southern Cross was escorted to Mascot airport in Sydney, where it landed safely. This would be her last flight.
What a remarkable story and the nerve. And what better way to preserve the
memory of the event than to carve your name into the suitcase that helped save the day.
Ernest Crome acquired the suitcase and notes for his collection,
and they were among the first objects donated to the Library by Crome in 1966.
Before I leave you to explore the collection for yourself, I do want to mention the legacy
of E.A. Crome. After his death, Crome left a bequest to the National Library of Australia.
The EA Crome Trust Fund was to be used to continue documenting the Australian aviation industry and
to maintain his collection. The EA Crome Aviation Project is currently 2368 images strong of the
modern Australian aviation industry, showing modern aircraft terminals, maintenance and the process of
modern air travel. The project also extends to collecting oral history recordings of people
who work in the aviation industry. It's worth noting that these modern recordings unfortunately
are not available digitally as they are bound by access restrictions imposed by the interviewee
but historic recordings of Crome himself talking about his collection are available online.
As I've said, this collection is vast. Within it, it includes just about every type of material the
Library collects: photographic, material, paintings, manuscripts, books, magazines,
audio maps, the list goes on. While it's not possible to show you everything that is online
in this collection today, I hope I have sparked your interest in discovering more about it.
If you have further questions about items within the collection or need help accessing it,
don't forget you can submit an Ask a Librarian request on our website.
Our reference librarians can work with you to help you find what you're after.
Thanks for watching.
Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar on tracing the history of your house. My name
is Ella and I am a reference librarian here at the National Library of Australia.
I'm joined by Sue, who is not only also a reference librarian here at the Library, but
one of our most experienced and knowledgeable colleagues.
The National Library of Australia acknowledges Australia First Nations peoples, the first
Australians, as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and gives respect
to the elders past and present, and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander people. As Sue well knows, some of the most common
questions we receive throughout ask a librarian service relate to people wanting to find information
about the history of a house. The reasons behind these enquiries vary; there
are those who are generally curious, those who have recently moved into a
new home, and even those who were renovating on an existing property and wanting their
extension to be sympathetic to their houses, original design, the list goes on.
Recently, we even had a question from a person wanting to know more about their house as
they think it might be haunted by previous residents.
And while we can't strictly help with the supernatural, we can help by showing you the
different ways to learn more about your house, no matter your motivation.
For those who have already tried family history research, I should warn you that a house history
search maybe almost as convoluted as a lengthy family history search, but there are ways
of finding answers. Australian houses don't go back centuries
and unlike family history, you should be able to get to the starting point.
Today, we'll be covering a number of ways to approach the research of your house as history.
Including the physical house styles, the social history of the area, and finally, how to find
out who might have been living in your house. In Australia, houses from colonial times onward
have followed fashions and showed particular styles over the years. This is generally true
for the whole of Australia, allowing for some regional variations.
Ella has been looking into the architectural trends.
It may seem obvious, but when starting out researching the history of your house, the
first step is to look. Start with what you know and what is right
there in front of you. Walk around your house, inside and out and
spend time studying it. Consider it from different angles. Think about
how it's different spaces interact with each other.
Look at your house is physical characteristics. What type of roof does it have? What shapes
or the windows? What building materials have been used? What kind of paint?
How does the garden interact with the man-made, if at all?
By getting to know your house in this manner, you will undoubtedly begin to uncover clues
about its history. It's also a good way to ease into your research
as the only resource you require for this initial study as time and make sure you take
photographs and notes to they'll be really useful to reference throughout your journey
to becoming a house historian. Once you've done this looking, you can then
go about identifying what style your house is in.
We'll now go through some of the key styles we see in Australian houses and how you can
identify them. It's important to note that we can't cover
every single Australian housing style in today's session. However, this list will be a great
place to start your research and quickly before we begin.
I also want to highlight that the photographs I'll be showing you today are all from the
National Library's collection. Once we've looked through them all, I'll make
sure to explain how you too can go about finding this kind of photographic material for your
own research. All right Sue, so the first house we're going
to be looking at today with this photograph from the Wes Stacey Collection is an example
of a colonial style house. Typical features of a colonial style house
are: symmetrical design, a corrugated iron roof, brick chimney stacks, external shutters,
wrap around verandas and multi-paned sash windows.
And what jumps out at you when we're looking at this photograph here in terms of those
features? Well, this is Entally House from the Wes Stacey Collection
and it's a lovely old house in Tasmania and it obviously has the shuttered
windows and the brick chimney stacks. And in this case they've included the veranda
all the way around the original colonial houses may not have had that veranda because it was
coming back from England, and they didn't necessarily have that, but once they got to
Australia and wanted to keep out the heat, obviously they they wanted to keep out the
heat and the dirt and the mess from outside. Yeah, it's that classic colonial aversion
to the dirt and the sun and yeah, everything Australian.
Yes, yeah. So if your house is in the colonial style,
it was likely to be built in the early to mid 19th century.
So we'll now go into the second house and this is a Victorian style residence, and this
is also from the Wes Stacey Archive and some typical features of the Victorian style house
are: cast iron or lacework, terrace housing a steep pitched roof.
chimney stacks, stained glass, windows and curve verandas.
So what can you see in this photograph? That jumps out at you, this one immediately.
It's the wrought iron, the veranda, the railing around the top.
Not so much the pitched the steep roof on this particular one, but the the thing that
makes it Victorian is the the wrought iron. Yeah and the veranda.
It's so intricate.
So I don't know if we can see if there's any stained glass, but I bet there is
Yeah me too. It's a beautiful photograph from the collection.
Yeah, well, Wes Stacey was an architectural photographer and he... anything that stood out
to him as being typical of that style that you can find quite a lot in that collection.
So if your house is in the Victorian style, it was likely built in the mid to late 19th century
All right, we'll go on to our third house photograph. And here we have an example of a Federation
style house. Some of the features of Federation style house
include: a terra cotta tiled roof. asymmetrical rooflines, gable and motifs,
leadlight windows, high ceilings
red-brown brickwork and a decorative timber veranda.
So what can you see in this photograph here that jumps out as federations so?
Well, the roofline. The roof line is amazing on this one. Its striking, really striking.
This is obviously a high-end federation. Yeah if if if the the house is sort of
like a regional home in a different area
or it didn't have... the person didn't have as much money building it
they would maybe not have as many little finials and gables and so on, but there would be some
decorative element, especially on the roof and also the fretwork around the front of
the the veranda. Yeah, it's beautiful.
Yeah, it's. And we can also see the start into the side
of the image of that decorative timber veranda. And when you look at the full shot of this
image, it's a really wide panning panorama and you can see that they've chosen to build
that veranda overlooking a really beautiful view. And and why wouldn't you?
So if you identify that you're researching a Federation style house, it was likely to have
been built from approximately 1890 to 1920. So next we look at a California bungalow and
this is a photograph taken by Harold Cazneaux. And some of the features of the California bungalow are:
a single story with double or triple low- gabled roof painted with battens. Wide eaves with
exposed rafters, stained glass windows, thick masonry veranda piers or pillars
rough rendered walls, enclosed front porches,
and terracotta shingles or a tiled roof. So what can you see in this appropriately
sepia-toned California bungalow image? So the closed front porch there is is the
obvious pointer to the to the style instead of the veranda like we had in the previous ones.
They've got the enclosed front porch again, keeping out the heat of Australia.
Yeah, with those thick walls as well and we can see to the right of the image as well
that rough rendering, which they often did with horsehair to give it a bit of a bit of
texture and to help it stick And a bit of brickwork for
for more texture at the front there. Yeah.
At the front there yeah that decorative brickwork. Absolutely, and we can actually see the two
inhabitants of this house standing on the porch. If you look very very closely which
is a lovely detail.
So if your house is in the California bungalow style, it was likely built around 1910 to
1930. All right on to the next, and we've got Art
Deco here. So some of the features of an Art Deco house:
are a flat roof, steel frame porthole windows, curved glass,
zigzags and geometric shapes, clean lines and glass bricks. So what can you see in this
photograph? It's very grand, isn't.
That curved wall, you know it looks like it's about to sail off in the sunset. Absolutely.
And the palm tree, they love the palm trees as well.
Yeah, very tropical. Yeah, and we've got that curved glass window
up there as well, yeah? Yeah, and we've got that curved glass window
The little details around this sort of little balcony thing. User that's exactly.
The balcony yeah, that zigzag shape yes and we we do know that you know there is a variation
of the Art Deco house that is called "The Steamliner" so very much fits in with this grand house
here from the Newcastle Morning Herald and Minors Advocate Archive.
So if your house is in the Art Deco style, it was likely built around the 1930s.
All right, we'll move on now to the post War House. A bit of a classic bit nostalgic.
And some of the features of a post-war house are: that it's simple,
has little embellishments, set well back from the street,
has metal casement windows and weatherboard cladding, but also brickwork.
So what can we see in this photograph from the Newcastle Morning Herald and Minors Advocate
Archive? Well, this one is the the brick one, but
weatherboard is, also, as you say, typical and and sort of
the hip roof it has here. This is the post war...
you know they're not going up into the roof and having a lot of high roofs like they did
back in in the Federation time.
Much more pared back. Yeah and yeah they took looked after their gardens
obviously too. Because this is the post-war austerity type, you know they they were coming back
and their houses were important to them, just like
my grandma's house. Yeah, absolutely. And it was when we were
researching for this webinar today. I did say this is sort of the most nostalgic house
style for me because this is, you know this is Nana's house.
Yeah, and you'll hate me for saying this because it is a bit of a unicorn of a situation, but
with this image as well and the title of this image is "Home of Mrs Ramsay, 9 Greenwich Road,
Greenwich Lower North Shore, Sydney 1956." So, this is an image not only of that house
style, but if you happen to live at that address.
You've got it. You have an image of your specific house, and there even is a little Mrs Ramsay
in that lower left corner tending to her garden. Could be... could be I liked.
Could be. Yes, could be.
Yes could. Yeah, I think so.
Yeah. But that that is very unusual.
Very very rare.
Yes yeah yeah. So if your house is in the post-war style
was likely built from 1945 to 1965. All right, we'll move on now to something
very different. We've got our modern style house.
So features of a modern style house include: that they were open plan with built in joinery,
large windows, a connection to the outdoors, and they were made out of a range of materials.
So brick, metal, glass, tiles and timber. So we've got this photograph here, taken by
Frank Hurley, and what are some of the features that jump out at you from this image?
It's immediately modern. Yes, obviously modern with the great
big windows. And not big.... sort of pane windows that they've got
the more interesting little architectural features, and the one on the side
there's sort of set in a little bit, and you can just imagine what it must be furnished
like inside. Beautiful.
My favorite style of house. I'm not ashamed to admit and I really love that boxy form
that they've got too. That's mirrored in the actual form of the building
and then the windows as well. There's that lovely repetition.
Great.
So if your house is in the modern style, it was likely built around the 1950s to the 1970s.
And finally! Wouldn't feel right not to give an honourable
mention to a uniquely Australian style of house. We're looking now at a photograph of
a Queenslander. So some of the features of the Queenslander are:
that they're a single detached house with a corrugated iron roof.
Their high set and they have that characteristic veranda which is often wrap around. But as
we can see in this case with this photograph taken by Greg Power. Not always.
So what can we see here, Sue that characterises the Queenslander?
Well, it looks like double story with some of them they may have been open underneath
to keep out the floodwaters, the ants. I'm not a Queenslander,
but I believe that was and to keep the air circulating through, yeah.
Whereas in later times they then could have enclosed it in, but but yeah, they're beautiful,
aren't they? With the with the veranda and
the columns. Yes, and I think this photograph really encapsulates
the fact that houses change overtime. So while you might have a house that you can identify
as an architectural style, there might be add-ons so that bottom story might not have
been there. But we can still use other features of the
Queenslander to identify this house as a Queenslander. Yeah, I think if you're living in a
Queenslander, you probably know. You probably....
you're probably aware ...have some upkeep to to deal.
with. But just in case. So these houses, the
Queenslanders started being built in the mid 19th century.
Thanks Ella. So what are some of the resources
you used to find these houses and how should we go around and go about looking for them
ourselves? There are a range of resources you can access,
both online and in person that can help you learn more about Australian house styles.
You can use these to first identify the style of your house and then delve deeper into understanding
the context in which it was designed and built. Don't worry about writing these links and
titles down, as we'll list them in the description box below this video.
For example, the National Trust has a great online publication that outlines Australian
housing styles, complete with wonderful illustrations of not only the facade of different houses,
but also illustrations to help you identify buildings including doors, windows, fences,
and roofs. So we've got the page up now, Sue. And I'll just show you so this is from the
National Trust and you can see it has these wonderful illustrations of all the different
house styles. And not only that, but also all the architectural
details relevant to each housing style, so doors, windows, fences.
Really helpful for people not only wanting to learn the history of their house, but also
again, if they're doing renovations, trying to keep everything sympathetic with that original design
That Victorian roof!
So beautiful. And the elaborate fireplacewith all the tiling around it.
Yeah, really beautiful, so that's definitely a resource to check out.
And there are also often state and territory specific documents you can find online, such
as this one from the Heritage Council of Victoria, and I've also got that up on the page. It's titled
"What house is that?" This is a wonderful document that outlines
housing styles specific to Victoria, such as the Queen Anne.
Well, there will be in other parts of Australia as well, but that's a a wonderful picture
of what it looks.
Like and I'll Scroll down 'cause I know you have a lovely story about one of these housing
styles. So this guide actually has it. It's incredibly
detailed. So not only does it list all the features, but it includes swatches of the
different paint colors that the houses would have been painted in.
So I'll go down to our post war. Where are we?
Our post-war house here. Yes, it's our "everyone's nan's house"
Yes! Everyone's nan's house. Including mine!
So if you scroll up, you can see that it was a a brick house.
But they were also weatherboard. Oh, actually, is that weatherboard or brick. It could be either,
but but the house I'm thinking of
where we lived it was cement brick and it was this blue colour. It was painted that
pale blue colour and it was exactly that style and you can just see from the picture where the
rooms were the lounge room, the bedrooms and yeah yes.
So nostalgic for you. Yeah, wonderful great.
So it's definitely worth looking at what information is up for offer from your local and state
heritage bodies. And along with these official websites, there
are also of course a wealth of unofficial websites written by architectural loving individuals.
And now I've mentioned online resources. I'm very happy to tell you
to go to the books! I might be a little biased working here at
the Library, but there is a wealth of illustrative and informative books that have been published
on Australian house styles. For example, there are books that give an
overview of numerous housing styles in the one publication, such as this book on Australian
house styles by Maisie Stapleton and Ian Stapleton and I really love the hand colored illustrations
in this book. It's a personal favorite of mine.
There are also authors who have chosen to focus on one particular style or time period.
Those that focus more on interiors and feature beautiful photographs, and even those that
are more text heavy and details based. And while talking about books, I should also
mention there are also publications dedicated to teaching readers how to become house historians
more broadly, such as this one by the National Trust.
These are very useful in providing clear steps to go about undertaking your research.
These books are all from the National Library Collection, though you'll certainly be able
to find similar publications in a library near you.
But if you are indeed planning to visit the Llibrary, and we welcome you to visit and look
at this material yourself, I suggest you take a look at our recent getting started webinar,
which also features Sue! You promised to teach us a bit about how to
find these images for ourselves. Yeah great, I sure did. So, as you know, the
National Library's picture collection is both large and diverse.
Specific to house imagery, we even have several names collections that may be of interest
to researchers. These include the Wes Stacey Archive architectural
photographs and the Harold Cazneaux collection. To show you how to look for house photographs
for yourself, I'll jump into our catalog. I'll bring up the catalog page here.
All right, so the first step is to limit your search to picture so we can see this ad limits
bar here. We're going to go down and select picture.
All right, I'm now going to type in my search terms. I'm going to do a simple subject search.
And I like to start broader so that I get a better understanding of exactly what is
in the collection. Even if you get a lot of results, you can
then filter down from there, so start broad to make sure you capture everything.
So we can see I've searching for Victorian house and I've selected the limit of picture.
Now I'm going to click find. Great so you can see I've got a long list
of results here. To find images that I can freely access and
view online from home, I'm now going to go to this narrow search bar to the right of
the page. And select all online.
So that'll give me a list of results that has images that I can access from home.
So I'm going to click on to one of the records clicking the title.
"Victorian style house with picket fence, Evandale TAS by Wes Stacey "from that Wes Stacey collection
that we've drawn upon so much today. So from here say if you're wanting to download
this picture for your own research purposes, all you have to do is click on the picture.
That'll take you through to its trove record. And then to the left of this page there's
this little page icon with a downward pointing arrow, which is the download button, and you
can click that and follow the prompts to download it.
So I'll go back into the catalogue record and something else I wanted to highlight
was the way in which from individual catalogue records, you can then find other relevant
material for your research. So say you're specifically interested in the Wes Stace y
Collection. You can click on this link here that says Wes Stacey next to the author
and, if you click on it, it will bring up all of
the results of images taken by Wes Stacey and I know you mentioned the Wes Stacey photographs
not just homes but buildings as well
Yeah, buildings, stately homes, barns and
shearing sheds.
Yeah, anything he thought was of aesthetic value. Yeah, amazing and something else you
can do from the catalogue record and I'll go back into that individual record now is that
we have something called subject headings here in the catalogue record listed and they're links.
So say you were specifically looking into Evandale TAS. You could click on this first
subject heading link. And it would show you I've just got the one today!
but if there were others relating to evendale, they would all be listed there.
So a really good way to filter down your search, but also broaden it at the same time to make
sure you collect everything in the one search. And that's how you too can go about finding
images of houses in the Library collection to help with your house history research.
All right Sue! Now we have a good idea of how to go about identifying the style of your
house. How can we then delve deeper and learn more about the history of the town it's in?
After looking at the architectural details of your house inside and out, you may have
pinpointed your house style and the general time it would have been built.
Then you can research the history of your suburb or town to find what style of houses
are common or typical for the area. This can point to a particular time when the town experienced
a growth. or an influx of new residents.
You might find out why there was a growth in a certain decade, for example, if it
was related to a new industry in the area, or when a railway station was built.
Perhaps the former owner of your house was employed in this industry. I'll give a couple
of examples of this in a moment, but to start with, try looking for a book or website showing
the history of your town, which will help in this research.
One way to find if there is a published history of your town is to use the
National Library catalogue, type in the name of your town or suburb and
add the word "history". So I'll do that here. I'm going to search for Glebe.
And as I said, I'll add the word "history" . And in this case I want to limit it to books.
To a book and then we'll click on find and we'll get a list of the books about historic
Glebe. There's lots.
Yeah, some of them will be about schools and churches and so on. And as you scroll down you'll see we've got a pictorial
history and the one we're going to look at today here is "Grandeur and Grit, a history
of Glebe" and Max Solling has written quite a
few different histories of Australian areas and I've got it here.
The history of grandeur and grip. The history of bleed and as you can see it's very substantial.
It goes right back to when it was first gazetted and named as a parish and you can see here
Chapter 6 is: "The business of building the suburb" and here we've got. Whoops, that's
OK. We've got pictures of terrace h ouses in in Glebe. So that shows you a
a lot of things that's going on in Glebe and all the historical people associated with
it as well.
Some histories, maybe centenary celebration booklets, which can often give names of council
members and other prominent citizens, as well as advertising for local businesses.
That meal that I've got one here about Gunnedah centenary and these books also may have photographs
showing buildings and streets then and now, such as this one.
Here we've got the Main St in Gunnedah as it was then and as it was when the book was published.
So Sue, can you expand on some of the reasons why it might be helpful to know more about
your town or suburb more broadly? Yes, one of the books we have
here is a history of Georgetown, which is in northern Tasmania.
It's said to be the third oldest European settlement named in 1811, so you might expect
there would be a lot of colonial style. and Victorian style houses. And there are
a few notable colonial examples. But the main settlement in northern Tasmania was moved
downriver to Launceston, I believe due to a lack of fresh water.
So Georgetown only has a few old colonial buildings, some cottages, churches and hotels.
As we can see on the picture we have on the screen.
There are no elaborate Victorian or federation examples. There was a period of little activity,
so while Georgetown has a long history for many years it only had a very small population.
It was used during the summer as a holiday destination and there were some larger holiday
houses built by the well to do, but for many years it was mainly a coastal town.
Low Head, just north of the town, had a pilot station and a lighthouse. This was
an important part of Australia's maritime history, but as I say there was not a large
permanent population. The book on the history of Georgetown,
although published in 1980, does not cover the later population boost in the mid
20th century, but we can confirm the main points with newspaper reports now on Trove
and other sources. In the 1950s, the Commonwealth and state governments
pushed to get industry and jobs to Tasmania. A major project was developing hydroelectricity
as they did in the Snowy Mountains, which made it more viable for large manufacturing
companies to use Tasmania as as a base and here you can see Tarraleah in 1959 where a hydro
electric company was busy And what a wonderful photograph with
that worker in the lower left hand corner working away.
And this, combined with the deepwater harbour in nearby Bell Bay, nearby to Georgetown.
Was more attractive to industry... was made more
Georgetown more attractive to industry and in this case it was for an aluminium company
then known as Comalco. All this meant that in the 1950s and 60s there
was a large influx of people and they would need to find somewhere to live.
In Tasmania, there was a Housing Commission which took a lot of took on a lot of building
work. As well as this, there were some workers who purchased
blocks of land made available at very reasonable prices to owner builders.
And we've got a
photograph of those workers. Yes, that's from the Mercury that post-war style.
And with the bulldozer out front. So in Georgetown, many houses fit the post war, austerity style
and the residents would have been factory workers.
Factory managers and executive staff actually
lived a bit closer to the water with nice views and a bit more stylishly.
This image from the Hobart Mercury is from
an article type entitled "Georgetown Grows Up" featuring pictures of the town in 1953.
As the population rose from 350 to nearly 2000 in three years.
That's incredible. An incredible jump. Exactly, yeah, in other towns there may have
been different reasons for an influx of new residents.
If you live in a former gold mining town, you might find that there are a lot of houses
from that built in that boom time. In country areas, farming and other industries
may have ensured a relatively constant population for many years, perhaps with a boost in population
when railway station was built in the town. Here we're looking at Yass, a town in
New South Wales. Gazetted in 1837 but with buildings in the
Main Street that looked much older than Georgetown's mid-century buildings.
Yass, has a long agricultural history well known for the production of merino wool. It
also had a number of flour mills. The Yass railway junction was connected with
yes in 1892, so a house in Yass could have a much longer history than one in the earlier
established Georgetown. Wow, it really is valuable to learn that broader
town history for context. So then how do we go about learning about
the individuals who lived in a specific house?
Well, now we'll get down to the nitty gritty
part of searching the records. We have a handy guide here at the library and I'll jump straight
to our FAQ: "How do I find the history of my house?"
You'll notice here that we have listed resources from the different states and territories.
This is because like birth, death and marriage registries, title deeds for buildings are
the responsibility for each state. Here we have given links to research guides,
for example from state libraries and state archives. You can find extra help for each
state in these. As well as links to the land registries or
title offices. As an example, I'll use the guide here to
the State Records Authority of New South Wales and I'll just open that link and go here to
the House and Property guide from the State Records Office.
You can see in their table of contents the different things that they can give you, uh,
including Department of the Valuer General they used to
value when, when there was a deceased estate they would go in and value or the the.
All the objects within the House would be amazing.
All the objects wow. All objects wow.
You can learn a bit about that from their webinar here that they've got there.
Right? The one we might be interested here is records
relating to occupants. Because you're asking about how do we find who lived there? Yeah,
and it will depend on...
I've just clicked on that. On when our house was built in what date you're looking
at, so the earlier ones are going to be census musters and guides.
You might be able to use electoral rolls. Sands Directory is a street directory, and
we'll talk about those later, and you can see also, there's the Land Registry services,
which will give you the the title holders and the
the leaseholders over the years this is not held by libraries or archives. This this is
like the the births, deaths and marriages. This is for title records and you will
Yeah, great, it's wonderful. Have to pay for.
So it's each state or territory that's responsible for those, rather than a cultural institution.
Each step, yeah. Exactly, and so if we go back to our guide
here we can choose one of those, and I'm going to choose the one in WA which is called Landgate
So I'll open that one up and show you some
examples from the deeds that you can get there so he will look under for buyers, sellers
and owners.
Order a title or survey. Yeah, and then we got click down here again
and then you can see historical records. This tells you what you can expect from historical
records. For example, you can find out when the property
when the block came into being. If a mortgage was associated with the title, and that would
indicate perhaps if there was building on the land or improvement.
And and it will give you the names of the people who owned that piece of land
throughout time, and the when it changed hands.
And that's kind of.
Of like that golden nugget for your house history researcher, isn't it?
Exactly, yeah, so they do have some samples here so I can show you a sample of a certificate
of title. And here we have when it loads up, we've got
this Patrick McGovern was a....
had this piece of land in the Cockburn Sound location and it was a huge
parcel of land, and if you scroll down, I think it tells you here how many acres it
was on... twelve chains, forty-five links and etc etc. Because
this is a a very old historic it, it was first done in 1883 and you can see where it was
located here. Its historic yeah, what a wonderful document.
Its yeah what a wonderful document. They usually have the old ones. Had these
little maps on them and here it's got the transfer of land
in 1902, so it will tell you that as well. 1902!
And I love that in this case this example as well when it was transferred to Edward William.
a Fremantle gentleman and it was transferred at 3:00 PM on the 9th of May,
yeah. On the 9th day of May.
Yeah, it's very detailed.
It's very detailed.
You need to know these things.
You may have noticed if I just close this one now scrolling down the page a bit and
I mentioned it earlier that there is a cost involved.
So depending on the state you're you're living in, there might be different costs, and in
fact in the New South Wales Land Titles Registry Office, they will
direct you to a broker, they don't do the searches themselves. You need to go to a broker
and they've got a list of people that can help you with that on their website.
Oh wow.
Right?
Right, and also if it looks like if your house has been extended or the land divided at some
point, you can apply to your local council for that type of record too. They'll have records
of planning permission and the people who applied for the Planning Commission along
with the building information like if they had to add extra sewerage lines or something
like that. But there will be a fee from that for that
Council search as well. And say I wasn't in the position to spend
money doing this kind of research. What are some of the other resources I could access
that are freely available.
Well, let's look at a few different options. So directories, maps and newspapers, so I'll
just close these windows and go back to our
catalogue is what I want. And start with post office directories. So
post office directories were produced in all states. Their were fore-runners to telephone
directories as well as a basic street directory. If you live in a city or in a suburb, you
should be able to search a post office directory to help you find the homeowner in a certain
year. Some issues do cover country areas, but these
are not as detailed as the city directories. Your state library will have directories,
just search for post office directory in their catalogue.
There are few different publishers some are available online, others through state library
catalog or other websites such as the City of Sydney Archives which has the Sands directories
online in the National Library collection, we can use an example from the Wise's NSW
Post Office directory. So I'm going to search for that now.
Why is it whoops? I better do it correctly. Wise's
New South Wales... Directory, you could just search for post
office directory. You would eventually come up with it.
But you know a specific title. In this case, yes.
Yeah, yeah, there are different publishers and Wise's was one of them. So we... look...there's
obviously different ones here, but we'll look at the first one and we can just click straight
on the image to go to the
online version. Because it's been digitised
It has been digitised. You can then click on browse this collection, but there
is no quick search. It's not like a newspaper search. You will have to click on it and search
like a book. So if we're going to choose.
1911 and the street, we're going to look for is Albion Street in Annandale.
Wonderful lucky if you're a viewer today and. Wonderful lucky if you're a viewer today.
And you live in Albion Street, so it's a row of terraced houses between Nelson St and Susan
St, and there's the map on the screen there. Living on that street.
Living on that. To show you where it.
Is great, so you've got that identified. The house that we're gonna be look.
Yes, now as I say in this case you can't just search it, so you're going to have to look
for the street index, and there's a lot of preamble in the directories with advertising
and so on. So we're going to look for the street directory.
Street index which is. This one.
Great I think. If I can get it up on the screen, we can see
the street index and if we scroll down a little bit, we're looking for Albion Street.
There we go. And Albion Street is here. Albion Street,
Annandale. It's on page 105. So then you just have to scroll down to.
Page 105 this is where you flex those house historian muscle and.
Yes, you just have to be patient. There we go, there's page 105 and you can
see Annandale is here and tells you where all the council chambers are.
And we're looking for the for the street, the part of the street of Albion Street which
is in between Nelson St and Susan St. OK, and it's on the left hand side, yeah?
So useful to know again, that context of the suburb.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So we've got Nelson St here we've got Susan St here and we've
got number 18 is Victor J Midson lived there in 1911. The reason you do need to it is helpful
to know where the streets are is because
not all directories will have the the house number, especially the the outer suburbs and
the and the older ones. They won't necessarily have a number, so you're
going to have to count up the number of blocks in between the streets to find out where your
house was.
Then you can go back to the... your family history
understanding and search for Victor Midson. Or you could even go back to the catalogue and
see if there's a map of the area. And see if we can find a map of.
Annandale, now I've lost the catalogue.
So you're just opening up the catalogue again. The catalog let's go back to the catalogue.
There we go, we go back to the catalogue. Let's look for Annandale.
And this time we're going to limit it to maps only.
And there's maps. And here they all are the maps of Annandale.
So many of these have been digitised too. There have been a lot have been digitised
as well, and in this case we're going to look at a plan of North Annandale.
And if we scroll, how do we are we have to, oh, we can scroll in. Yeah, the maps are very
actually they're very...tight? I don't know. They're very dense with information, there's a lot of data on this.
And you can scroll in really well so you can see here we've got Nelson St here.
Very dense with information. There's a lot of data on this, yes.
Susan St here. Yeah, and that's the place that we would be looking for. Number 18. But
here in this 1890 map, the house is not
built and it's still even part of. It is still the water reserve.
There, so it's more a parcel of land rather than a house.
Yeah, it's a part of it, so the houses built before 1911, but after 1890 so it helps you
to narrow the gap. Yeah, yeah, so you can see when it was was built.
Yeah, absolutely, that's a much smaller spans of time.
So it really is indeed useful to look for maps of your area then Sue.
Then so yes, it can be, especially if there's been changing numbering of the street, which
can happen. For example, going back to Georgetown in Tasmania
for a moment, I can tell you that the house numbers for Goulburn St changed at some point
between 1968 and 1972. In 1968. The electoral roll shows it shows a family
at number 89, while in 1972 they are at number. 5, not because they moved, but
because the street numbering was reversed when the road was extended to the north and
they needed. More numbers that could be so confusing
when you're undertaking your house history research.
Exactly. The local council or state archives may have historical information about this.
So back to Yass, we can find an example of strett changes using an early map, so this is
the current map and we're looking for 17 Lead St which is on the corner of Lead St and Plunkett St.
And you've got that pinpointed here on this map. Yeah, wonderful.
Yep, so for looking for a map of Yass, I can look for a map and I happen to know there's
one dated 1936. And I've limited it to maps still.
And I can click on that one. And here's the map of the town of Yass.
Again, with so much detail, so much detail. Yes, but you can scroll in, so
that's not a problem. Yeah, and we're looking for lead street if you remember which is.
Here Yep, so Lead St goes up here to Prichett Street or Richard St?
Prichett Street. And then it stops and then it changes to Bourke St.
This is 1936. Now our current map says that
Lead St goes all the way up to Plunkett St. Well, this is our house on the corner here
on Franklin Street, but something's changed. It had changed from Bourke St to Lead Street
at some point and you can also see while we're on the map that this block that we're looking
at. Yes, so something changed.
Which is now #17 is huge, so it has been subdivided at some point around the house we're looking
for is a really old. Federation House built in 1910 and right next
door there's a mid-century house. OK, so there's been some change as time? Yeah yeah.
OK, so you know that they've been development over time. Yeah, yes.
So you know that they've been development over time. Yeah, yes.
So we were able to find a Gazette notice to show in 1963.
Uhm, there's Bourke. St has now changed to Lead St in 1963.
It's good to know, and you did mention searching newspapers earlier, and I assume you mean
the wealth of digitized historic newspapers available through Trove. Can we do something
as simple as just plugging in an individual address into Trove?
Well, we can certainly try! OK great, we happen to be in Trove at the moment looking at our
viewer and we are going to look only in newspapers. OK, great.
Will search we're searching for 17 Lead St yes yes. So if I and I'll put quotation marks
around it so we'll get
more concise.... more concise results.
Exactly. 17 Lead St. Yass
And we're searching only in newspapers. And we get nothing. That's disappointing.
However, you can keep trying. Don't give up on your first try.
So we're going to make this whoops 17 Lead St.
So just the St rather than full word "street" Just the St this time and we've got a couple
of family notices here and these come from the Canberra Times which are a little bit
later than some of the other newspapers and you can see here.
Oh wow. We've got Philip Howard of 17 year lead St
that's his funeral. Actually if you click into it, his name was Philip Herbert.
Howard, actually is that...Howard. There it is Phillip Herbert Howard, 17 Lead
street OK, but we know that 17 Lead st used to be Bourke St.
So we have another option to search for. So we but keep that name in mind.
Let's look for 17 Bourke St. And again we'll just go in.
We're going to put the whole. Thing this time OK.
And see what we come up with. And we've got here.
Some more results. Again, we've got the 17 Bourke St, Yass
And there's Mr. Herbert Philip Howard from 17 Bourke St yes. So he he hasn't changed.
Yeah, and this. So he hadn't changed house. His house has
just changed street name News. Hadn't changed house. His house has just changed
street name News. This confirms that it was wasn't the number
that changed, it was the street of the change, and it looks like he was appointed as a justice
of the peace. Wonderful.
Back in 1950s, 1940s and 1950s, but. It's be aware though we have other options
for searching in Trove. If your house has
a name. See if your house has a plaque on the side of the door that has a name on
it, yeah? We can search for the name of the house.
However, be aware that not all houses were given a name. Don't expect to find a name
for your house in a title search through the title office because the name
is not officially recorded, a family might give a house name in the same way as they
would name a pet, and it would just change with a different family.
The house in yes did have a name. It was called "Hillview". When searching for this, you might
need to use a hyphen, or you might not. But anyway, we can look.
For "Hillview", you can try we back on Trove. OK so back on Trove
And we can search instead of searching for 17, we can search for Hillview.
And see what comes up there. And here's a page for little people on Gumnut
Blossom's weekly chat and we've got someone from Hillview Bourke. St Yass, called Pam Kearney,
and we can go in and find out what she's talking about here.
She wants a pen friend.
She would like a pen friend, yes, and and this was the Catholic Freeman's Journal,
and they had these childrens' pages for the they'd right into Gumnut Blossom and ask these
things, yeah?
Get advice and ask questions. And yeah. So without going step by step through all
the details, I can tell you that in 1946 in the Cootamundra Herald, we found
that Pamela Kearney was engaged to Bert Quinn of Young.
And her parents were Mr and Mrs. E.H. Kearney. Then using electoral rolls, another newspaper
and gazettes we found that Mr Edward Hastings Kearney was a post office worker and acting
postmaster in Yass in 1940. We've got an image of the.
Collection here and here's the post office that he would have worked in, taken a
little later. Of course, the Kearneys only stayed at 17 Bourke
St until 1941, when they moved to Sydney, so there is still a lot of detective work
to complete on this particular house. Land title records will go back much earlier and
newspapers can also help with the search.
So this sweet little letter in 1937 started...
has started it off with the family search and there's another result that also another letter
from Pam telling us that she had...now she had a baby brother.
Don't, yes, I think it was in this one and on the second page.
She says in the Little people section if we go under here.
In the Little people section again. There's Hillview Bourke St.
"Since I last wrote to you, I got a little baby brother. His name is Edward Lee."
That is very sweet. Good on Pam for writing into these papers so that her descendants
can look at them themselves too.
Wonderful.
So I think that's just been a quick overview of how you can use.
maps and papers to track down families who live in your house, but it may take some time,
patience and perseverance, but could be an interesting exploration.
Thank you Sue. That was a really great explanation of the nitty gritty research you can undertake
while researching the history of your house. It's it's very easy to see why people get
so caught up in their research. Such a lovely note to end on two with little Pam's letter
announcing her brother. And with that, we've come to the end of our
webinar today. We hope everyone tuning in has learned something during today's session.
Whether you're a lifelong house history buff or new to the world of tracing house histories.
We encourage you to take a look at other Library webinars to enrich your research as well as
our FAQ page on tracing the history of your house, which is linked below.
And if you need any help undertaking your research, you can also always turn to our
Ask a Librarian service for assistance. And don't forget your own state libraries
and archives. Thanks for tuning in.
hello
and welcome to this discovery video
about one of the library's
less well-known collection areas our
recordings of national press club
addresses
my name is aaron meinergen and i'm the
digital education coordinator here
at the national library of australia
our collection of press club addresses
is found within our oral history and
folklore collection
this collection includes a rich and
varied array of recorded stories
folklore and spoken knowledge the
national library of australia
acknowledges australia's first nations
peoples the first australians
as the traditional owners and custodians
of this land
and we acknowledge them as the first
storytellers
of this continent we give our respects
to their elders past
and present and through them to all
australian
aboriginal and torres strait islander
peoples
founded in 1963 as a lunch club for
media covering the goings-on of
government here in canberra
the national press luncheon club as it
was then known
hosted just four speakers at the hotel
canberra in its first year
the club steadily grew in membership and
influence and
in the next year eight speakers
delivered addresses
the club officially changed its name to
the national press club in 1968
and it moved to specially built premises
in barton canberra in 1976.
today the national press club hosts
around 70 formal lunches and speakers a
year
and is something of a mainstay on the
australian political
and media landscape the club attracts
speakers from a wide range of
professions both domestic
and international who speak on matters
political
commercial and cultural
from 1963 to 1996 the national library
of australia was responsible for
recording
and archiving the press club addresses
today our collection holds 907
recordings made during this period
of those recordings 886
are fully digitized and are freely
available to listen to online
this video today aims to show you how to
find and listen
to this incredible series of recordings
like all things in our catalog the best
place to start is our website
nla.gov
or you can type nla into any search
engine and you'll find your way here
because the press club addresses are in
our oral history collection
we need to start by locating all the
audio in our collection
there's several ways to do this in our
webinar
introduction to oral history there's
some instructions on how to use a
catalog search
to find all the audio material but i'm
going to show you another way you can
navigate to the audio
in the collection the way i'm going to
show you today
uses our collections menu which you can
see along the top of the page here
if we hover the mouse over this header
you'll see a drop down menu appear
on the right there are some web pages
giving you a bit of an overview of the
library
including things about our collecting
statistics collection policies
but what we are looking at today are
these categories listed
on the left down the bottom we can see
oral history and folklore collection if
we click that
we'll be taken to the landing page
scrolling to the bottom you can see
there are a few oral history projects
that have been highlighted
but what we're going to use today is
this link just here
once we click through here it'll take us
to the catalog with all search criteria
for oral history applied
so with very little work we have almost
6 000
oral history recordings at our
fingertips
we're after something very specific
today though
the best way to find something in the
catalog that's part of a particular
series
is to use the narrow search function
down the side here
we can scroll down and find our way
through the headings we can see
series here with a number of entries
when browsing generally
you can click more and see everything on
offer
conveniently for us though the series we
want is right here at the top
national press club luncheon addresses
the number here in the gray brackets
indicates how many entries fit that
section
clicking through here we can find all
the entries listed alphabetically by
author in this case the author means the
speaker giving the address
using the sort function you can
customize how you'd like to see the
results
for example if we sort by date oldest to
newest
we can see that our earliest press club
recording is prime minister robert
menzies in 1964
but how you want to sort your results is
up to you
so we have 886 results
if you for the time you can browse all
entries using the page links across the
top here
for a comprehensive scan of the series
however if you're after something
specific or just want the most efficient
way to find something
again using the narrow search function
is the way to do it
here we have a number of headings and
we'll look at this one here the author
heading
as i mentioned it'll give you the name
of the speaker now you will see that
some results are catalogued as the press
club
as the author but some will be listed
separately by speaker
the narrow search author function is not
exhaustive it will show the top
35 most populated results so people with
only one entry will not be listed
however never fear
if you know there is a recording or you
want to see if there is one
there's a quick way to do this
so for example i know we have a press
club address by bishop desmond tutu
but his name isn't in the list here so
if we use the search function at the top
of the page here and type in the name of
the person
and limit to audio we can see only the
audio results for that person are listed
here
and here are his two press club
addresses right here
you can also do this for other keywords
so let's try
prime minister here you can see we get a
number of results for anyone tagged with
prime minister
so not just australian prime ministers
we have prime ministers
from all across the world the subject
area is another filter that can help you
in your search
the topics of the press club range
widely many are political as you can see
including 33 federal budget addresses
and dresses by prime ministers
deputy prime ministers etc it's not all
politics though
you can see down here there are 10
labeled as actors
if we click through we can see the
results including some very familiar
names
you will also note now that the author
list now only reflects the speakers who
are tagged in the subject area as actors
using the narrow filter fields in
conjunction with each other
will help you get the most out of your
search
it's also worth exploring the subject
tags a little more
to see what else the collection holds in
connection with a speaker or a group
or a subject often a catalog entry will
say if there are photos associated with
the speaker
all you have to do to see is click the
name of the speaker in the subject tab
down the bottom here
and it'll show you what other items the
collection holds
the last filter worth mentioning is the
decades tab which i feel speaks for
itself
it'll only show addresses delivered
within the decade
selected
i encourage you to spend some time
trying out some of these combinations to
explore this series of recordings
i would also say it might very well be
worth heading over to the national press
club website
and having a look at their archive of
speakers you can download a list of all
their past
and future speakers it'll give you a
date
a name and the topic on which was spoken
about
you can then cross check to see if we
hold those recordings
but how do you go about listening to one
of these recordings
once you've actually found it if we look
at the catalog list here
we can see all these blue listen now
tiles
anything with one of these is freely
available to listen to
so let's take a look at one let's have a
look at famous french explorer
scientist photographer and filmmaker
jacques cousteau
you can see the result here and you can
see it has a blue listen now tile
if we click on the tile it will take you
straight through to the player portal
or you can click on the catalog title
and it will give you all the catalog
entry details you can use this link down
the bottom
and it will take you back to the audio
player
in the audio player there are terms and
conditions to read through
if you're happy to accept and abide by
the access conditions click
i accept you'll then see the trove audio
player
the controls up the top are just like
most media players
play stop and volume slider
many of the sessions particularly high
profile names
will have timed summaries these are
basically topic overviews for particular
chunks of the recording
you can skip to a section that interests
you you can click the play button on the
side here and it will jump to that
section
you can also turn syncing the summary on
or off
so if we hit play from the start you'll
see it highlights the first summary
but if we click through the play bar to
the end you can see
the sync summary then jumps to the
relevant section
this is a very useful tool but it's
worth noting again
that not all the press club recordings
will have this function
the national press club address series
with the in the oral history and
folklore collection is a rich resource
with some fascinating insights and
thoughts from some of the biggest names
on the political and cultural landscape
in the latter part of the 20th century
i encourage you to explore this
collection and the wider collection
at your leisure there's definitely
enough there to keep you busy for some
time
thank you for watching
you
hello welcome to this discovery video my name
is Ben Pratten and I'm the Program Manager Education here at the National
Library of Australia in this video i'll be taking a look at
the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia and showing you how you can explore this
interesting book and how you can find other rare books in our collection
online for free the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia is a set
in three volumes of over 800 engravings depicting Australian
New Zealand and South Pacific landscapes in the late 1800s
the images and scenes depicted in these volumes are those that captivated
european arrivals to this land and who felt driven to capture the
natural world and built world around them
to share with the world however the appreciation and admiration of the
sweeping vistas and natural beauty of this continent has long predated
european artists with their sketchbooks the National Library of Australia
acknowledges Australia's First Nations Peoples
the First Australians as the traditional owners and custodians of this land
and gives respect to the elders past and present and through them to all
Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
peoples published in 42 separate installments
between 1886 and 1889 the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia set out to imagine
our country as it was and is through its text maps and above
all its 800 steel and wood engraved illustrations the atlas enshrined a
settler colonial view of white Australia's history
achievements and prospects which was to have a profound impact on
the subsequent evolution of Australian art
being a catalyst for the Australian impressionist movement
it's one thing for me to tell you about the picturesque atlas while i have a
copy here with me but it's going to be more useful for you
if i show you how you can access this and other fantastic resources online for
free the first step in locating anything in
our collection is to find your way to our web page
and to the catalog a quick google search of nla will get you there
or you can go straight to nla.gov.ou once you're there you can find the
catalog here so if we do a specific search for
Picturesque Atlas of Australasia we'll see the results
here the one we want is at the top you can
see that it's showing as a book and as online if it has a thumbnail here
that usually means it's digitized we can click on the title
and we'll get a catalog entry here it shows more details about the work
including a description and some notes if we scroll down
we can see that there are some options for viewing the work at the bottom
online in the Library and order a copy as this is digitized the online option
is available to us should you wish to view the object in
person at the Library you can click on in the Library you must
have a library card in order to view an item in person
ordering a copy means that you can request for a page
or pages to be copied pending preservation and copyright issues
this is a paid service and you can learn more about copies direct
by following this link today we're looking at how you can
access the Picturesque Atlas from anywhere
so we'll go back to online once you click this link
you can see we're taken away from the NLA catalogue and you're now
in the Trove viewer trove is our discovery service that searches the
catalogs of hundreds of institutions across australia
it's also the platform through which we can view our digitized books
if you click on the browse this collection button at the top here
we'll be taken to the collection screen picture escatlist was published in three
parts all three parts have been digitized here
so select the one you're interested in or just start at the beginning
i'll go with volume one for now we're now taken through to the picture viewer
the digitized atlas is high quality and can be navigated through using buttons
across the top and down the sides you can also move around the pages by
clicking and dragging to focus on the part that you're interested in
the default view is one page at a time you can move through the pages using the
mouse wheel or the arrows along the top here
this view is useful in some instances like when you're looking at a particular
section however if you're interested in general
browsing i like to use the two page spread section to make this book easier
to read in context you can't use the mouse wheel in this view
but you can click on the pages when you want to turn or use the arrow keys on
your keyboard the six dots here will expand the view
to give you the thumbnails of the digitized content so you can skim
quickly to find something interesting or the particular
page you're after some of the landscapes are oriented
sideways on their own page to turn them to be the correct position
use the circular arrow here this will rotate any page 90 degrees
clockwise just keep clicking until you have the
correct orientation note that you have to be in the single
page view to do this it will only affect the page you're on
if you progress to the next page it should be in the correct position
the images are of high enough quality that they can be zoomed using the
magnifying glass here to a considerable depth and the
clarity is not lost for the full immersive
experience you can use the crossed arrows
here to bring the book to full screen this will hide the toolbar down the sign
to get it back just click the arrows again
the timeline bar across the top is another way to navigate the book
you can see these blue arrows along the top of the bar these are essentially
bookmarks they mark chapter positions and also any
significant headings or images they are connected to the contents tag
on the left hand side you can navigate the content links by
clicking on them and the book will navigate
to that page
this is a good segue into the left hand toolbar
each of these icons can give you some more information about the work you're
viewing
the i will give you the work details publishing date
title pages etc the C will give you information about the
copyright status of the work you can contact us using the link here if you
have any questions about copyright 123 is the contents tab we looked at
earlier
the magnifying glass this lets you search the work for keywords
this only works if the book has been ocr'd
which means that the text has been digitized if we do a keyword search you
can see it lists the pages on which the word occurs and you can see
in the timeline up the top the pages are highlighted green
if we click on one it'll jump to that page and we can find the word
highlighted
a is the ocr text for some works this will be accurate
as it has been transcribed and edited for errors
some works though will only be transcribed by a computer and in the
case of old text where the print is hard to read it may not be so accurate
the pen and paper this will give you some information about how to reference
and cite the work you're looking at in a range of different styles
the page with the arrow this is a great feature of trove
everything that's digitised on trove can be downloaded for free books pictures
maps etc here you can see a range of formats
to download in pdf and jpeg will download image files of the page or
range of pages you're viewing if you select text it will download the
ocr transcript text you can set the page ranges using the
sliders here if you really want to you can download
the whole thing as an ebook depending on the work and access
agreements with publishers the images about available for download
may be high definition or standard definition shopping cart
this lets you order a high resolution copy from the library's copies direct
service this is the paid service i mentioned
before in the catalog screen finally the arrows will simply get rid
of this bar altogether and give you more room to view the work that you're
looking at
the picturesque atlas is just one of the many old and rare books the library is
digitized and made available online i'll show you quickly how you're best to
find these so back in our catalog
click the advanced search function
then click find down the bottom and once you're here you can see that we have
about 5 million results using the narrow search function limit
your search to book and then also to nla digital
material
this will highlight only the books that the NLA has digitized
now to dive back into the past under the sort by drop down
select sort by date
this will organize the search by date of publication
so now we can see the library's oldest book
from 1162 is at the top of the list you can click through
the thumbnail and we're now back in the familiar trove viewer
you can now spend some time combing through the list and clicking through to
find anything that interests you use the narrow search functions to get
more specific if you like
here are a few other interesting examples of digitized books i've found
in the catalogue the unlucky voyage of the batavia from 1630
darwin's on the origin of species 1859 this is one of the earliest known
surviving copies of the first edition to arrive in australia
the birds of australia in seven volumes by john gould
1869 aurora australis from 1908 the first
book ever printed in antarctica edited by e h shackleton
and an old favorite first copy of the first edition of blinky build a quaint
little australian from 1933. this is the publisher's presentation
copy and was given to the author dorothy wall
these have been a small sample of the many interesting books freely available
to you through the national library of australia's catalogue
i hope this discovery video has been helpful and gives you some tools to
start your own search through our rare and historical book collection
thanks for watching
M: Hello and welcome to the Introduction to the Oral History Webinar.
My name is Mark Piva, Assistant Director of Technical Acquisitions and Finance.
S: And I'm Dr Shirleene Robinson and I'm the Director of Curatorial and
Collection Research.
M: The National Library of Australia acknowledges Australia's first nations peoples,
the first Australians as traditional owners and custodians of this land and
gives respect to elders past and present and through them all Australian Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander people.
So today we're here and we're going to be talking about the Library's amazing oral
history collection and we're going to do it by talking about four broad areas:
What is oral history?
How do we do oral histories in the Library?
How do we keep the oral histories in the Library and then finally
how do we access them?
It is an amazing collection and we really look forward to sharing
some of the work that we do here.
So first up, Shirleene, I guess one of the big questions with this is what is oral history?
Because there's lots of interview types in the world, what makes oral history so different?
S: Well oral history is about people speaking about things that they have personal
experience of.
At the National Library we use the whole of life interview method
which means although we have quite focused collections sometimes, could be people
talking about things such as polio or the experiences of living through particular
events we like people to talk about their whole life because we don't know the type
of questions that people might be looking to
those interviews to answer later.
The National Library's oral history and folklore collection really is quite
extraordinary, it's a very rich collection.
Today it is over 50,000 hours' worth of recorded hours which is quite special so there
really is something for everyone in that collection.
It dates back to the 1950s which makes it the oldest collection of oral history
recordings and folklore recordings that were conducted in this country and it really
can trace its origins back to two quite remarkable people.
So Hazel De Berg was a truly original woman who has been regarded
as Australia's first oral historian so she started to do interviews with people who were
quite famous writers, it was how she began and those interviews evolved from her
asking writers to read from their books.
While she had these incredible people in front of her, people like Mary Gilmore, she
took that opportunity to ask them questions about their lives and so on.
So she did this for about 30 years which is a really amazing
span of time and probably around 1,300 interviews were conducted by her over this
time period.
The folklore collection, it traces its origins back to a gentleman called John Meredith
who was really keen from the 1950s onwards to capture the vernacular culture of
Australian life so he did a lot of trips where he recorded the voices of people who
could speak to that vernacular culture and music as well.
Today our folklore collection has evolved to include multicultural
collecting, we're very keen to make sure that that multicultural heritage of Australia
is also reflected in the folk collection.
So together you have this really dynamic and alive collection that provides a really
rich insight into Australian culture and life in a way that really complements other
types of collection material.
I think there's something really special about being able to listen to the recorded
voice, it's quite an intimate way of connecting with somebody's story.
The great thing about oral history, I think, is that we have
the voices of very eminent Australians, Prime Ministers and people who were very famous
for their achievements in our collection but there are also the voices of
people who perhaps might not be as well- known and oral history gives them the opportunity
to speak and to have their voices heard.
M: That's amazing.
Are there any particular collections of those ones with the
voices who are not normally heard?
Because that is an amazing way to get the message across because you're right, with
these eminent people, they're normally written about in many other areas but there's
some groups of people in our society which normally would not get the opportunity
to have their voices heard?
S: Yeah, that is a really excellent question and I think there's a number of
collections that come to mind and I think that there might be many people who've
heard of the extraordinarily rich Bringing Them Home oral history collection which
comprises of about 340 interviews with people who either were members of the stolen
generations or who were involved in removing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
children from their family groups.
That's an example of a collection where people speak very directly to a part of Australian
history which is quite difficult history but it
is such valuable and vital history and I think it really does show what the unique and
special nature of oral history is.
M: That's great.
So in terms of that like given that we've got so many things to
collect how do we actually go about collecting oral history here in the Library?
Are there any things that you need to consider
when you're thinking out what do we record next?
S: I think that we always want the collection to reflect what's happening in
Australian society and we want it to be a record that will be really useful to people
in the future in 100 years' time, in 200 years'
time.
So while we today can listen to voices that were recorded in the 1950s and
1960s to answer all sorts of questions we want people in the future to be able to do
the same thing.
So in terms of the oral history program at the National Library we
actively commission our own oral histories each year and we have interviewers
who do interviews all across the country and each year they're building on that extraordinary
collection of over 50,000 hours.
So there's a lot of events that are currently unfolding in Australia that we would like
the collection to document.
In the future certainly there will be collections that will
talk about COVID which is something that we're all living through at the moment just
as we have collections that as I mentioned talk about things like polio, that talk about
what it was like to live through the influenza pandemic that happened in the aftermath
of world war one.
So it's always about thinking about what's happening in society
and making sure that's documented and that it reflects the full diversity of Australian
society as well and perhaps those voices that haven't always been heard.
M: That's amazing that oral history is such an important way to get people to tell
their stories in a much more personal, intimate way.
Given that these oral histories are so personal what are some of the things that
the Library does in order to safeguard how those histories are used going forward?
S: I think that's a really important question because we're really proud to hold
the types of collections that we hold and something that is really important to us all
is making sure that we look after the material
that we collect in a way that accords with the wishes of the people who have been recorded.
So sometimes that might mean that we've conducted oral histories which are not
available during the lifetime of the person who's been recorded because we would
much rather that they feel comfortable sharing their full story and the way that
they want to share it, knowing that it won't be
released without their permission so that's certainly an option available to them.
So we do have an extraordinary collection and
a great proportion of it is available online but there is material that we do have which
we won't make available online until we have that permission from the person who was
recorded.
M: Also in terms of the collections are we just taking in new recordings now or is
there another way of us that we are collecting things as well?
S: Yeah, I think that overall we certainly rely very heavily on our commissioned
original program of oral histories so at least 90% I would say of what we bring in is
originally commissioned material but occasionally there can be material that has been
recorded by someone else, someone who wasn't involved with the Library.
Perhaps in a previous decade it could be material that
was really rare recorded say in the 1960s in
a remote community and if that material exists and it's appropriate potentially for it to
come to the Library and it's of national significance then we will take in that material
which we called formed collections.
So it's a smaller part of what we do but it is a
part of the collection plan of the National Library's oral history program.
We've talked a little bit about how the collection dates back to the 1950s and
obviously when people recorded sounds back then they couldn't do it in the way we
would now with a fully digitised collection.
I think there's something that's really quite amazing about the material that we hold,
all that 50,000 hours is that it is a fully digitised collection and I wonder if you could
talk a little bit about that.
M: Yeah, no, that'd be great.
The Library is very fortunate to be one of the few
institutions in the world to say that we have a fully digitised collection and it's thanks
to the efforts of people going back well over a couple of decades to ensure that the
recordings that were taken in the Library are able to be fully preserved and fully
digitised.
We completed a 15-year preservation plan back in 2018 which means all of
the collection's preserved and we're actually adding to it at the rate of 1,200 hours per
year thanks to the commissioning programs that the Library does.
The way that we go about doing that is through a very amazing setup here.
We have world standard preservation suites that are
able to preserve many different types of formats.
Because we're dealing with unique recordings we're able to go through and
play back lots of magnetic playback recordings so things like reel to reel tape,
cassettes, digital audio tape was a format that was used by journalists in the late '80s,
early '90s and some CD recordings.
Along with all that we're also very capably taking on all these newborn digital types
of recordings which we collect through our 30 field recording kits which are
broadcast-standard as well as our own recording studios so we're actually sitting in
the studio now and so the microphones that you hear are the same microphones that
we use when we're recording people as part of our collection.
We also have fantastic multitrack recording facilities so each year we have a number
of performers coming through contributing to the collection and we're able to make
fantastic recordings using those methods too so it's really cool.
S: I think that's an exciting program and I think one of the great things is that
technology allows us to record as you say everywhere from where we are now at the
National Library in this studio all the way to remote communities, parts of Australia
that can be sometimes quite difficult to get to if you're travelling from major cities
because we do want to make sure that the collection is carrying all those voices and
that we can record anyone wherever they be in Australia and that's a challenge that
we really love, I think.
M: No, definitely, that's really good.
So in terms of that I guess the next thing to
look at is how do we access these recordings so again we are also very fortunate to
have a number of great ways for you to be able to access the collection.
The first way is to just go straight into our catalogue
and if you type in a search term and just limit
the results to audio you'll be presented with a list of all the things that are available
in the oral history collection.
What's even more amazing is that if you see a blue button
there called Listen Online you can click on that and that will take you to our audio
player and the audio player is an amazing thing because it plays audio as you'd expect
but also we sometimes provide timecoded transcripts and summaries which enable
you to do really amazing things like word-searching.
You can also access it through Trove as well.
The cool thing about Trove is that you do have a little bit more functionality in
that you can actually search for certain words within Trove which may not be in the catalogue
record and they'll also come up as a hit which will take you to the interview and
allow you to play it back as well.
That's going to be something I'm going to show you
a little bit more in a sec when I actually show you the screen when I do that.
S: I think there's something that's quite extraordinary about the National
Library's collection of oral history and folklore material, is that it is a fully digitised
collection and I'd like it if you could maybe speak a little bit about why that really
matters and why that's so significant.
M: Oh thanks, Shirleene.
Yeah, digitisation is incredibly important.
The whole thing about audio is that you can't touch
it, you can't see it, you only hear it and it's
really important that especially with some of these carriers, the [Lexi] 12:58 carriers
that we have now, they're impossible to play directly, you can't buy the machines
new anymore and so in order for people to actually listen to them the preservation is
the access, you need to preserve them in order to hear them.
So we regard digital preservation as basically essential in order
to be able to access these things.
Here what we do is we apply international standards in order to transfer the material
and what we do is we have a very highly calibrated system of playback and recording
which means that when we record things they're recorded as what we call warts and
all so when you listen to something it's as if you're listening to the original recording.
We don't do any editing here because we want to keep this as a true document and we
also then apply a few things to it in order to make it in what we call a master file
which contains a few descriptive elements so we embed certain information at the title
but also technical information there and also create a whole set of access copies and
MP3 files.
So when you're accessing them at home you'll be listening to an MP3 file
that was created as part of our preservation process.
But just because we preserve it as a digital file and stored it safely on MS storage
doesn't mean we throw the original away and we're very fortunate to have these
fantastic climate-controlled tape stores where we keep those originals in perpetuity
because we just never know when there may be another opportunity that we could
play them back again with even better quality.
S: Speaking about the oral history and folklore collection is there something that
you have that is a particular favourite?
M: There's a lot to choose from here but I think one of the great things is I think
as a collection the Hazel de Berg collection would have to be one of my favourites
because she was a woman who had so much forethought to be able to record people
talking about their lives that she basically gave birth to oral history in Australia.
We're so lucky to have her original recorder here, this beautiful Novatape recorder
which weighs about two ton and is made out of wood and is so battered yet she was
able to extract every possible bit of sonic information out of that machine which
means that the recordings that she did in the late '50s are amazingly good in terms
of quality.
S: Yet there's people that she recorded where the Library holds the only copy of
their voice which is I think really quite special.
For me from that collection I'm thinking about somebody like May Gibbs who
many of you might know for her beautiful work around Gumnut Babies and to
think that she was recorded very late in life by Hazel de Berg and through Hazel de
Berg's persistence so it is full of I guess gems like that, isn't it?
M: Oh absolutely.
What about your?
What's your favourite?
S: I think that it evolves all the time and I think that's the extraordinary thing
about the collection, that you can dip into this wonderful as I said over 50,000 hours
and discover new things all the time.
But some collections that I've enjoyed or think
are really rich I guess since I've been really exposed to it include things like the
Australian response to AIDS, collection of oral history interviews.
Because that was the first oral history collection in the world
to be conducted at the height of the HIV and AIDS epidemic where it really gave a voice
to people who were quite heavily stigmatised at that time so we have these
really special and unique oral histories as part of that collection.
I tend to really like the unique voices, maybe the voices that are from people that
people may not have heard of so could be a miner from Broken Hill, it could be
somebody who can as I said earlier talk about what it was like to live through the first
world war, second world war, somebody who might have served in Vietnam.
I think that it's the everyday stories that make up
our collection and make it so special and I
think something that I know we both enjoy because we've spoken about this is when
we can reconnect people to the voices of people that they might know or perhaps are
descended from who might be in our collection.
That does happen where we will hold an interview with somebody's grandparent or
even great-grandparent and we can make it available to them and to hear that
joy and their delight in hearing somebody that's very special to them speak in that
very intimate, personal way about their life.
I think that is just one of the great things
about the collection.
M: Absolutely, yeah, we always feel when people give an oral history they're
actually giving a piece of themselves to the collection and you can really hear it so we
really fully encourage you to have a listen to our oral history collection because you'll
hear the emotion, you'll hear the pauses, the hesitations and you're hearing real people
talk about their life stories.
So thank you very much, Shirleene, for your time today
and thank you very much for your time as well so thank you so much for watching
and we hope that you can watch the next section.
M: Hi everyone, it's Mark again and what I'm
going to do is just lead you through how to find the Library's oral history interviews
on the internet.
You can see here we're just at the starting page of a search
engine and we'll just go straight now to the Library's catalogue.
Okay, just bringing up the Library's homepage there and we'll
just scroll down slightly to get to our catalogue.
You can start typing in here or what I'm going to do is just click on the catalogue
button on the right.
Because I'm really interested in finding audio material I'm going
to click on Advanced Search and just scroll down to Add Limits and then click on
Audio, click Find.
So what that's done is now returned a list of all the things in our collection which
are audio and you can see here we've got 22,000
items to choose from and we can sort these in a variety of different ways by their
date, author or title and that's great.
The good thing is that on the right there's also
some really interesting information here that can help us sort by the author which in this case is
the main interviewer so Hazel De Berg's name's mentioned,
John Meredith is there, or by subject area and we can expand these so we've got folk music or politicians,
painters and politicians, bit of a thing about journalists there or by series.
The oral history collection actually has a number of different series associated with
it and so if you happen to find that there's a particular project that you're interested
in you can use the series title to help you find some more information there as well.
What I'm really interested in though is not just looking up what's in our catalogue but
I want to see what I can listen to online because what's amazing about our collection
is although it's over 50,000 hours it's actually more like 55,000 hours, a quarter of it
is actually available online right now for free.
So 13,750 hours is available for you to listen to right now.
The way we're going to find it is if you see down here on
Eresources, if we click on NLA digital material all of a sudden that brings up a whole
bunch of names which have this beautiful blue Listen Online button and from that we
can actually click on any one of these and listen to them straight away and there might
be some people there that you're interested in listening to so if you can straight after
our webinar today feel free to jump on and have a look.
There's one in particular that I'm going to play though because it's a really great
demonstration of the power of our system and what I'm going to do is type in Florey
so Sir Howard Florey was one of the inventors or discoverers of penicillin and we
have what we believe is one of the only existing recordings of his voice in the world.
You can see here that Howard was recorded as part of the Hazel De Berg collection
back on the 5th of April 1967.
There's a big blue button there so what we'll do is click
on that button and that will take us to the Trove audio player.
There's an end user licence agreement which you can read, just
telling you what you can and can't do with the audio and if you're happy with that click
I accept.
Okay so here we are and we've got the screen and there's quite a bit of information to
look at here.
On the left we have some information that's been ported over from the
catalogue record, being the title then a little bit of a summary.
We can also bounce right back to the catalogue record by clicking
on that link as well as some information about the holdings and some things there.
For those of you who've listened to audio online before you've got similar sorts of
buttons that you might have seen, a bit of a play button, stop button, volume control
and there's nothing to stop us now, we can just press play and just start listening to it.
"This is Howard Walter Florey and I was born in Adelaide at the turn of the century
or just before.
I've been asked to say something about my young days that I look back
on with great pleasure".
M: Oh that's good, see?
There again just an example of the amazing quality that
we can get from something that's now over 50 years old.
So we can just press play and just listen to it, similar to a podcast
or anything like that so it's a great way to
listen to some fantastic stories.
But you might have also seen here we've got two sections, being Transcript and
Summary.
With the Transcript this is actually a verbatim transcript of what Howard
says so if you like you can actually skim through and see what he's said and so if you
do find something very interesting so for example there he talks about his first interest
was chemistry, we can actually go straight to that point by clicking on the play button, here.
H: "The first interest was chemistry, I was not very good at mathematics, no good at all".
M: Yes, I think we can all relate to that.
So you can do that or similarly one interesting way to also analyse a recording
is to use the online summary if it's available.
Down here we've had someone go through and carefully listen to Howard's
interview and pick up key words, themes which is really amazing because sometimes
this enables you to look at recording in a very different way.
It means that you can actually - because there'll be key words or
phrases which may not have actually been mentioned in the interview but are incredibly
important so from a research point of view if you're looking across a number of
different interviews this enables you to group things together that initially on the
face of it may not be that related.
Again just like the transcript upstairs we can just click straight to that and it'll
take you to the position there.
H: "Well it's not altogether uninteresting that my successor in the Chair at Pathology at
Oxford is an Australian".
M: Okay.
With Howard's interview there are a number of sessions so sometimes
interviews only go for a single session but here we can see that he went for three sessions,
so session 1, session 2, session 3 and again we've got scrolling bars there
that we can look at for all those recordings.
We can also synchronise the recordings so at the moment the sync is on so as the
recording plays you'll see the transcript and the summary gently bounce down to keep
up to speed or we can turn that feature off as well if we wish.
What we can also do though which is really exciting is that if you are using these
interviews for research purposes it's possible to cite the section of the audio so say for
example we're very interested in a hospital in those days because I'm doing a research
project on hospitals I can click on this link and what it will do is generate two
weblinks for you that you can cut and paste directly into any document.
So this one for example will actually play the interview
from that particular point or if you like to
play just the paragraph that's there then you can just click on that one there and that
will take you to those points there in a completely different thing.
So what we can also do though, which I think is really amazing, is we can word
search within the audio so we do know that Sir Howard Florey was the inventor of
penicillin so we're very interested in finding out where he speaks about those things
and typing this word in here we have fully timecoded transcripts and summaries and
so straight away we can go straight to a section where he talks about penicillin.
H: "And I'd only been there four years and the chance came to move to Oxford and I
stayed there as a Professor for, what was it, 27 years
and things went fairly well oneway and another.
We had a bit of luck with penicillin, a great deal of luck in that".
M: Yeah so that's great and again I can cite that audio and paste that into my research
It's a really powerful search engine, I don't think there's too many players if
any that are like that around the world that are able to do with oral histories what we
can do here.
So just before we leave this page we can also download these items so we can go to
Download Page so should you wish to listen to the audio in a different way you can
actually download the files there or bring up a PDF or plain text version of the
summary of transcript as well.
Okay so that's looking at it through the catalogue.
What I might do now is show you a bit of added extra functionality that can be
searched through when we go through Trove.
So we're now in the Trove homepage and Trove is an amazing search portal because
it groups together so many records.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to do a little bit
of a trick where I'm just going to type in a term called "NLA.obj" and what that's going
to do is limit my search term to things within the Library because digital objects
within the Library all have this little prefix there.
Now the interesting thing about the catalogue record to do with Sir Howard Florey's
interview is that it talks about a lot of different things but what it doesn't mention
is a thing called lysozyme and the lysozyme was
a very important component part of his research and because I'm very interested in
this term I want to type it in.
It's not in the catalogue record but what's really interesting
is that it's actually embedded within the timecoded transcript and summary of the interview.
So what I've done here is just put together a little term, NLA.obj lysozyme,
press enter.
It's going to bring up a lot of different things to do with lysozyme but if
I go across the top to music, audio and video I can see here that's brought back one
hit, being the fantastic interview we've just been listening to.
I'll click on that interview and I can see a couple of things there,
listen, listen.
Brings up our player.
Now if I type in lysozyme again
all of a sudden I'm where he starts talking about that, I
can go straight to that section - H: "... but in the laboratory at that time we
were working on an antibacterial substance named lysozyme".
M: So what's really powerful is that all of a sudden we've gone way beyond the
catalogue record straight to the actual transcript and summary.
So it's a really great way to find exactly what you're after really
quickly.
That concludes my demonstration of searching and finding the Library's amazing
collection of oral histories online.
You'll have no shortage of things to listen to with
over 13,750 hours available.
I thoroughly encourage you to go online and have a
listen right now.
End of recording
Transcribed by audio.net.au
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Andrew Sergeant and I’m one of the reference
librarians here at the National Library. Today I’ll be taking you on a brief tour of
the Australian Joint Copying Project which was recently converted from microfilm to digital
format and made freely available online. Firstly I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians
of the land on which the Library stands, the Ngunnawal and the Ngambri people and acknowledge
their elders past, present and emerging. In this 250th anniversary year of the arrival
of James Cook I would especially acknowledge and welcome all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
attendees who may have registered for today’s session. The Australian Joint Copying Project
commonly referred to as the AJCP is a collection of unique historical material relating to
Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific dating from 1560 through to 1984. Beginning in 1948 teams of
librarians and archivists under the coordination of the National Library and the State Library of
New South Wales went to the UK and selectively microfilmed vast amounts of government records
that were held in the then Public Record Office now known as the National Archives
as well as other material from libraries, county record offices, religious societies,
business organisations and private families and individuals. The Project was later joined
by the National Library of New Zealand and other state and university libraries around Australia.
They wound up after almost 50 years in 1997 with over 10,400 reels of microfilm.
Now there were two series of reels created, the PRO series for Public Record Office material
and the M or Miscellaneous series for the other material.
Within the PRO group the despatches, correspondence, letterbooks and registers of the
Colonial Office and the Dominion Office dominate, they comprise almost 40% of the total number of
records in the entire project. In addition to the huge record classes dealing specifically
with the colonies other subjects include colonial appointments, honours, emigration,
overseas settlement schemes, the world wars and imperial policies and relations generally.
Other departments in the PRO that were filmed by the AJCP include Admiralty, Home Office,
War Office, Air Ministry, Foreign Office, Privy Council, Treasury, Board of Customs and the Board
of Trade. The M series is predominantly private records but also includes some official records
including selections from the archives of the Hydrographic Office, the Post Office and the
Ministry of Defence. Eighteenth century material in the M series is mainly maritime records
including blogs and journals of most of the early British explorers of the Pacific. There’s a large
amount of 19th century records which include things like emigrant diaries and letters,
convict records, archives of missionary societies, scientific records and the papers of politicians
and officials. Twentieth century material includes important sources on imperial relations,
migration, trade, public finance, business, wars and defence and scientific research.
Now to allow users to determine what reel of microfilm they needed amongst this vast
amount of material the Project published 11 paper handbooks and also created over 500 individual
descriptive lists in the Miscellaneous series, in all over 10,000 pages of text. The handbooks
on the screen now are Part 11 covering items that were filmed towards the end of the project
and Part 8 covering Miscellaneous series. Many of you watching this may be familiar
with using these handbooks either here or at your state library or institutional library.
Beginning in 2017 the Commonwealth Government’s Public Service Modernisation Fund provided the
Library with the unique opportunity to transform the way AJCP content is presented and accessed
taking it from the analogue to the digital. Beginning by scanning the existing handbooks
and putting them online the Project team then went about digitising 8.2 million
frames of microfilm and converting about 10,000 pages of descriptive text into online finding aids
and in the process providing online access to anyone anywhere with an internet connection to
material that was previously only available onsite in libraries and archives using cumbersome and
noisy microfilm readers. There is a screenshot of part of one of these new look finding aids,
the Guide to the Admiralty Records and as you can see that relates
to Matthew Flinders and the journal that he wrote on board The Investigator.
One of the achievements of the project team was the creation of a brand new
gateway to the content. You can find this portal through Google of course
or from the Library’s home page. To do that hover your mouse over the Using The Library heading at
the top of the screen where you’ll see the link to the AJCP under Research Tools and Resources.
There are several other ways to get into AJCP material including fighting AJCP records
through the Library’s catalogue and in Trove but I personally find this is the easiest,
most methodical way into it. You can see from the screenshot that you can either search by keyword
or use the finding aids to navigate to where you want to
go to and the content is all accessed in the diaries, letters and archive zone of Trove.
Here's the A to Z list for the PRO Series so there are now 24 finding aids arranged by the name of
the originating government agency and including one for some personal questions held at the
TNA. Simply click on any of these to go through to the finding aid for that agency.
Under the Miscellaneous series link on the portal you’ll get an alphabetical list of
over 500 separate collections of material. Again click on any of these to go to the finding aid.
Now I’d like to show you a couple of examples of what you’ll find and how to use the Trove
viewing screen. Firstly as you can see I’m going to search for the phrase Empire Air Training
Scheme using the quotation marks to search for the phrase and that drops me into Trove with 10
results. When I click on the title and then on the Get tab I have a link through to this page
which gives me the option of browsing that collection of records
or going to the finding aid. The finding aid option takes me straight to the right place.
Then I click on the thumbnail and go through to the images.
Here’s one I chose at random. This image as you can see is part typescript and part manuscript.
The vast majority of the items in the AJCP are manuscript
and for this reason it was not possible to utilise optical character recognition software
which only works with the printed page such as the digitised newspapers in Trove
hence you can’t do a keyword search for any of the words that you see on this page.
Searches will only operate from the descriptions in the finding aids
or on other metadata such as subject headings, geographical locations,
microfilm reel numbers or tags that have been added to the Trove record.
By the way users are welcome to create their own tags just as you can for the other zones in Trove.
Okay, I’m now going to use the Browse finding aid function.
This could be particularly useful where you want to see what may be in a whole series, for example.
I’m going to use it to find some pay lists for one of the British regiments that served in
Australia in the 19th century. The 73rd Perthshire Regiment of Foot replaced the disgraced New South
Wales Corps better known as the Rum Corps in 1810 and served in New South Wales and
Tasmania under Governor Macquarie until 1817. So firstly I'm going to use the PRO series link
and the records I’m after will be found under the War Office. This takes me to the finding aid. If
I drill down into the item descriptions on the left side of the screen I’ll find the right series
and it’s series WO12 Muster Books and Pay Lists. I could now just scroll down through the lists
on the right that are arranged by regiment number until I eventually reach the 73rd which is there
or I could also have searched this finding aid for what I wanted.
Here’s a page opening from a quarterly pay list for the regiment from December 1811 to March 1812.
Now while I’m on this screen you’ll see the citation. This one is rather long but you can just
copy it from the details icon in the Trove viewing screen and get the permalink in the site icon.
There's also information on preferred citation methods in the finding aids under
the introductory notes at the top of each finding aid. If you’re interested there’s
the image a little bit larger. Here’s another example of how a citation could be done.
Now I’d like to quickly show you some of the extra features in the AJCP that you might find handy.
Firstly there are permalinks to all levels of records that will give you a URL to copy
and paste into your document and there’s the NLA obj number there, the permanent URL. When
you’re looking at an image in the Trove viewing screen itself you also have a permalink for that.
You can see the breadcrumb trail of this screenshot across the top of the page. This
shows the context of the item that you’re looking at from collection level, or fonds
in archivist speak, down through series and subseries and file down to the individual item.
Click on any of these to go back to that level or on the upper level button to go back one level.
The icons on the left side of the screen are what you’ll see in Trove.
Image details, copyright information, citation methods and download options.
There is as you can see also a link via the shopping cart icon
to our Copies Direct service but if the image quality is poor to start with
it’s most likely due to the original microfilm image
and you may not get a better copy. To print an image first download it to your device and then
print it from there. For downloading you can of course download single images one at a time
like that but to do multiple images or all images in a set click on the upper level link
and this will take you back to the record for that set of images. The download button there will let
you select a range or all images in the set but be careful because some of these are very large sets.
Now for those that are familiar with the old printed handbooks
I mentioned previously that they had been scanned and put online.
You can find them under the Using The Library link at the top of any NLA page
but this time go to the Research Guides link and they’re alphabetically listed under that link.
Here's a screenshot of part of the Guide Page for Handbook Part 2, the Colonial Office records
which as I mentioned before is one of the major features of AJCP. You’ll see the link to the
digitised handbook – here it is, available online – and also links to the series level information.
If you click on any of these they will take you to our catalogue record for that series of records,
for example under CO714 Index to Correspondence
you’ll get this catalogue record. Click on the thumbnail or the digitised item link
in the record to go through to the images. There are now almost 900 individual catalogue records
for series level PRO records and all miscellaneous collection records. You could also search the
catalogue for these records adding the letters AJCP to your search, for example
the Macquarie family papers can be found in the catalogue this way.
To wrap up now I should just mention that if all else fails
see the Help button at the top right of the Trove screen and if you’re still
having problems or just not sure where to start your research or you’ve hit a wall on the way
use the Ask A Librarian link on our homepage to submit a question. We can give you tips
or search strategies to help you out. Well I’d better finish up now and thanks for listening.
English
AllCoursesWatched
Good afternoon, I’m Shannon, I work here in Family History at the Library
and welcome back to those who listened to our previous session. Today we’ve got part
2 of Newspapers for Family History Trove so let’s get right into it. I’m just going
to turn off this camera, though, so I’m not distracted by my face. In our previous
session we looked at browsing newspapers and search tips and some of the features of online
newspapers that are on Trove. In today’s session we’re going to be looking at adding
tags and notes, directing texts and managing your research with lists. So remember to get
to Trove it’s just a matter of visiting the Library’s homepage and right here under
Partner Collections we’ve got Trove or you can just Google Trove, hopefully it should
be the very first result. So we’ll just give that a click and here we are on the Trove
homepage. Now over here we’ve got two options, we’ve got signup or login. Now you can create
an account using Trove, it’s all free. Registering is different to membership to the National
Library or your local library and registering or creating an account really allows you to
make the most out of using Trove. So you can pick a username and ask for other details
such as email, password, you got to confirm your password and confirm you’re not a robot.
Can’t change username so try and keep it all above board, nothing too offensive because
other people might be able to see it. So once you’ve created an account then you can log
in. So I’m just going to log in using my username and password. Hopefully I remember
what my password is, sometimes my mind just goes completely blank. There we are so we’ve
logged into Trove now and we can see over here our signup and login buttons are gone
and it’s been replaced with my username and the dropdown menu. The first thing you
can see is the profile just here. So here’s some information that I’ve added about myself
in my biography and I’ve put I’m just a wee humble family historian and I’ve included
family names I’m researching and locational details about those surnames so this is really
useful information for other people that might stumble across my profile. So I’ve put various
surnames, I’ve been researching for a number of years now so Sutton from Parramatta, New
South Wales and originally from Middlesex in the UK and all the way down to McDermotts
in Adelaide in no particular order, it is what it is. You could put in your other research
interest or any information you want to share with others who might view your profile. When
in your profile you can look at things like text corrections that you’ve made so we
can see I’ve corrected 91 lines of text, we can look at lists I’ve created and I’ll
be going into more detail about these later as well as tags and notes. We’ve got a settings
page. In the upgraded Trove, privacy requirements. All existing accounts and newly created accounts
are set to private meaning nobody can see tags you’ve made or lists you’ve created
or notes or your biography. You can make all of your information public by clicking on
settings just up here and toggling so from private to public and vice versa. All of my
information is set to public but if you toggle it to private and back to public again, it’s
really up to you. It's a good way to keep things private if you’d like to, you might
be doing some top secret research. You might be writing a family history book and don’t
want to be gazumped by a devious cousin but in here you can see all of my settings are
set to public because I want people to be able to collaborate with me, I want people
to see lists I’m working on, tags I’ve created. I want people to see notes I’ve
made and I want people to be able to find me by searching Trove because it’s really
a way of value-adding and finding other descendants or people with similar research interests
as I have. Now that we’ve talked a little bit about the profile let’s kick on to how
we use Trove to manage our research and the first way that I’ll go into managing our
research is by using tags just here. So we can click on the tag cloud, you can see tags
that I’ve made using Trove and I’ll go into a little bit about what they are now.
Tag is a way of describing the content of an article, it makes finding content easier
and flags information for yourself and for other users. As an example lots of female
ancestors might be mentioned in the newspaper using their husband’s first name or initials
only Tagging an article is a way of making female ancestors findable using their names
instead of their husband’s names. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go
back to Trove, back to the homepage and we’re going to search for a female ancestor. I’m
going to search for Mrs W A Flynn. Remember the way of searching that I showed you in
the previous session? In quotation marks tilda 2. We’re going to
limit our search to newspapers and gazette results, we’re going to limit our search
to newspapers under refine results. We can see the first article is Mrs W A Flynn of
Osborne Road in Manly and she’s got a snake in her garden
and here we are. So she had a three foot brown snake which she had nearly stepped on. Could
have been bad for her and her potential descendants. So you can see she’s only mentioned here
using her husband’s initials and surname so she’s not discoverable at all. Her name
was Gladys Florence Stilwell, that’s her maiden name before she was married but because
this article only mentions her as Mrs W A Flynn she won’t appear if you're searching
for Gladys Florence Stilwell. I can make her discoverable or findable on Trove under her
maiden name and forename, Gladys Florence Stilwell or after she was married she was
known as Gladys Florence Stilwell-Flynn, she went double barrel. She preferred to be known
by this name, she was fiercely proud of her maiden name and kept it her whole long life.
The way that I do this is by tagging the article so over here we can see we’ve got the information.
Remember I went through all of this in the previous session and down here we’ve got
the tags feature. So now that I’m logged in I’m going to click on the tag icon and
I’m going to add a tag. I’m going to pop in her name, Gladys Florence Stilwell. Such
a lovely surname, Stilwell, I quite like it. We’re just going to click save. There we
are, the tag’s there. I could put another tag in. You could even do something like G
F Stilwell. So now when I search for either of those terms so I could search for Gladys
Florence Stilwell or Gladys Florence Stilwell-Flynn or G F Stilwell, this article should appear
where it wouldn’t have appeared from a search of those keywords before. So we’ve made
the article, we’ve made Gladys discoverable by her own name, not just under her husband’s
name. So we’re just going to type in her name up here or any of those search terms
that I’ve got below and there the articles come up and you can see all of the tags that
I’ve made for the article just under there as well. Keep your tags brief so I usually
tag using maybe an identifier such as a name. You don’t want anything too long in the
tags because it’s just meant to be short and sharp. If you wanted to put in a longer
explanation of who Gladys was or any additional detail you’d do that by adding a note to
the article. Just down here we’ve got list and then we've got notes. We can add a note
and we might want to just explain for other people who view the article and see those
tags who Gladys was. So you could go something like Mrs W A Flynn is Gladys Florence Stilwell,
wife of William Augustus Flynn so I’ve put in additional detail just there as a note,
not a tag. It’s a bit long for a tag. You can elect to keep your note private. All my
notes are usually public. Anything you put in the notes and anything you tag will be
keyword-searchable in Trove. I’ll just show you. Sometimes Trove might take a little while
to load but give it another go in a minute or so. Sometimes a tag, list, note could take
a while to appear and here we are so we can see the article just there. So tags and notes
are really a way of making things more discoverable so a good example is the maiden names of married
women. But you could put in literally anything and then it becomes searchable via Trove.
Here’s a sneaky note I added to an article long, long ago to prove my point. So I put
in a tag, woozlewazzle. Needless to say the word woozlewazzle doesn’t appear anywhere
in this article but because I’ve popped it in there it becomes keyword-searchable.
I can also delete tags that I’ve put in which is one of the real benefits of registering
for Trove. You don’t need to register to add tags to articles and you don’t need
to sign up or log in but it gives you a level of control over content that you add in there.
So we can just delete that tag because I’m the creator, I put that tag in, I can also
get rid of it when I’m signed in. Again we can see all tags that were created in a
tag cloud on our profile so we just click up here on the dropdown, click tags and we
can see our tag cloud here and all of the tags that I previously created. If I click
on any of these tags it should bring up articles used with that tag or where I’ve used that
tag. So I might just show you an example, I might click on Henry Darlow Sutton. You
can see I’ve used this tag 12 times and I’ve just clicked on it and then it brings
up all of those articles that I’ve used that tag with. Again I can delete most of
these tags that I’ve created. If you tag it, obviously if you delete your tag it won’t
be added to your tag cloud. Ok So that’s tagging. Another excellent way to save and
organise your research is via lists. Okay so just up here under my profile I’m going
to click on lists so we’re going to see an example of some lists I’ve created. Lists
are a great way of saving articles you’ve found about a particular person or subject
in one easy to find and keep track of place. It’s a great way to keep track of your family
history finds on Trove. We can see down here examples of lists I’ve created. I’ve got
quite a few lists. Some of them don’t have many in them but some of them have quite a
few articles. I’ll click on a list to show you an example of a list I’ve made.
We can see here my list for Henry Darlow Sutton and you see a description of this list and this
description is really useful for me when I launch back into Trove and want to start researching
Henry again. Because I’ve got quite a few people on my family tree I find having this
information such as who he is, how he’s connected to me so he’s my great times three
grandfather, I’ve got some information about how I’m descended from him. All of these
people are deceased so I don’t mind listing them here but I probably wouldn’t put names
of people that are still alive. I’ve got his details about his birth and his parentage
and his descent, what he worked as so again useful keywords that I could pop in maybe
as a Boolean and search so I could go Henry Sutton and Baker, and remember we covered
that in a previous session. Details about who he married and where they lived and then
finally when he died so I can limit my search to when he was at least alive. Down here we’ve
got a permanent link to this list so I can send any other family and I’ve sent that
persistently to quite a few family members who are interested in my family history research.
Down here we can see all of the articles that I’ve saved about Henry. We can see the tags
that I’ve popped in and you can also see notes to item that you’ve added to list.
I’ll go into this a bit more as well. So these little snippets or these notes that
I’ve added to articles are really useful because it means I don’t have to go back
and read the article to find particular parts of information that I’m after so location
of death, residence, the fact that he was a member of a Friendly Society and other information
about notices. This one that he was fined for obscene language but I’m not quite sure
whether that’s my Henry, it sounds a bit like him. Who knows? Funeral notice so you
can see really useful information, list numerous names of children, particularly the married
names of daughters. So I find the list a fantastic way of keeping track of my research. Now that
I’ve shown you a list and all that you can achieve with it I’m going to show you how
to create a list and I'm going to use the example of Gladys who we used before, who
we tagged an article about so we might go Gladys Florence Stilwell, how to spell her
name and we search for her. We found the article about a snake in a garden, I’ll click on
that and now I’m going to add this article to a list by creating a list. So over here
just underneath the tag and above the notes is the List feature so we just give that a
click. What we do is go add so I can add it to a previous list I’ve created and I can
add it to multiple lists just by ticking in the little boxes here and clicking save. Perhaps
you’ve got an article that mentions several ancestors so you don’t want to just restrict
it to adding it to one list. We can see some of the lists have these little people symbols
next to them so groups people so this little silhouette of a person. These are collaborative
lists but there’s no list currently for Gladys or for her husband for that matter
so I’m just going to create a new list by clicking on this plus symbol here. I’m going
to add a title and I might put something like G times 3 grandmother as a description for
the list. Don’t worry too much about that in here, you can always edit that later so
that’s really just a placeholder for me. If you like to make a list private or collaborative
so private, nobody but you can see it and collaborative list we’ll go into it in a
bit more detail later. The article’s a bit self-explanatory but I could add a reason
for adding this item which then appears in the notes field in the list. So I could put
a bit more detail. Three foot brown snake in garden, Gladys almost stepped on it. Then
we can click save. Then we can see that the article appears in this list so there we are.
If we go back into our lists just by clicking our profile up here I think we’ve now got
Gladys Florence Stilwell in our lists section, we can just click on that and again sometimes
it could take a little while for the content to load so I usually give it a couple of minutes
but I’ve just refreshed the page and here it is. We can see the article saved in here
with my note, we can see all the tags I’ve made and I can always edit the description
by going into manage this list here, edit list details and changing it up a little.
Heaps of detail, you saw my other list about Henry Darlow Sutton. You can also delete this
list and you can change a list from public to private to collaborative which I’ll go
into in just a moment. Once you’ve created a list it’s very easy to keep adding content
to it so I’ll go back and we’ll go another search for G F Stilwell so Gladys Florence
Stilwell and if we find any other articles about her
– there’s quite a lot of results so I might refine it just a bit further. Nice unique
name, though, Gladys Stilwell. We can see there’s a lot of articles about balls and
fancy dresses and music so if we find another article about Gladys all we need to do is
click on it, click lists, click add and it should float to the top ‘cause it’s the
most recent one we’ve created and edited. All we do is click the little tick-box and
click save just there. If we go back into the list by clicking her profile and going
lists we can now see that there’s two items in there so it’s very easy to just continue
adding articles that you find about a particular person to a list that you’ve created but
you do need to be registered to use the list feature which is why it’s important to create
a Trove account. Lists are popular with family history searches or for people with other
research interests such as cooking, recipes, craft, patterns. You can make a list about
anything. I’ve made a list about a UFO my grandfather claimed to have seen in Nowra
in the 1950s and because all of my lists are set to public and my profile’s all set to
public any list I create so the title of the list or anything I put in the description
of the list becomes discoverable and text-searchable on Trove. So not only is the top level a heading
or title of the list searchable but also this description here, any of these names that
I’ve put in are then searchable by Trove. So if somebody searches – I’ll show you,
just by copying and pasting it in there so just want to search on that and here we are
in the lists. So that’s come up in bold because it’s all searchable, everything
is searchable. You can look for specific lists by going to the list category just over here,
perhaps you want to see if somebody has worked on a list about your ancestor and you can
search Trove. I recommend just searching for a name just as we’ve done in the general
newspapers category and seeing what comes up. So a good way to see if other people are
researching the same person as you. Now we’re just going to take a look at collaborative
lists. We’re going to click on our profile and I’m going to go into lists again. So
this is a relatively new feature of Trove at the time of webinar recording. The new
feature of Trove is collaborative lists. You can work together with other Trove users on
a single list, adding content to it, deleting content and it’s a feature that I really
quite love. Before to work on a list you might have all had to share a username and a login
and a password and now you don't need to do that. So we can see here I’ve got my personal
list that only I work on and I’ve got my collaborative list just here. So here’s
some of my collaborative lists just here. Again it’s easy enough to switch from public
to private to collaborative list or to make a list collaborative. So we’ll go to Gladys,
I’ll go manage this list and then I’ll go edit list details and I’ll make this
list a collaborative list. You can add a Facebook so you can add your personal Facebook to share
or if it’s family history group you could link to that as well and then we just click
save. If I go back to lists okay we can see I’ve made the Gladys list collaborative
so we can just click on that and it should appear here under my list of collaborative
lists. To create collaborative lists your privacy setting in your profile needs to be
set to public and they appear separately to normal lists in your profile. Anyone who has
signed up to Trove can request to collaborate on your list or if you want to invite people
to collaborate on your list you just need to send them the list URL. So if we click
here Gladys is collaborative now and all you need to do is send them this. They need to
be registered and signed up and logged in and they can request to collaborate on your
list. So nobody’s requested to collaborate on Gladys’ list because I’ve just made
it collaborative but if I go back to my other collaborative lists we can see here this little
orange notification next to Ann Sutton. So we can click on Ann and we can click manage
this list and I can see some shady-looking character by the name of shanman has requested
to collaborate on my amazing list. I can now approve, decline or block their request. I
might want to find out a bit more information about who they are before I decide what to
do which is why writing a little biography and making it public can be quite useful.
So if I click on their profile, click on their username, we can look at their biography.
We can see he’s incredibly interested in Sutton family history research so I can go
back and with that information I can approve. Once you’ve approved you can control a person’s
level of access and control over the list so I can change shanman to be administrator
or change to collaborator. Once I’ve changed him to administrator, I can transfer ownership
of the list to shanman so I can click transfer ownership and give total control of the list
to shanman which sounds a bit odd but I think it’s a pretty useful feature for succession
planning. So is there somebody who you want to inherit your research? Perhaps you’ve
been researching somebody’s family history on their behalf and you want to gift them
the list so this is a way that you can do that but I don’t want to gift my list to
shanman. Once you’ve given them ownership of the list they then have to elect or they
have to agree or grant you ownership back if you ever do want it back so think long
and hard before giving somebody else your list because there’s really no way other
than them agreeing to give it back, like any gift, really. I might also like to see what
lists shanman has on the go so what list has he created? So if I click on his username
I can see his profile, text corrections he’s done. He’s very lazy, he’s only done five
lines. I can see tags he’s created, he hasn’t even made any tags, shocking. No notes but
he has made one list so you could see the list, Ann Sutton, that’s my list that he’s
collaborating on but he’s also got a list here, shanman, called Martha Caroline Burton
which is a name that I know from my family history research so I can click on that and
I can request to collaborate on his list. So that’s creating lists in a nutshell.
So we’ve gone through creating a list, adding the list, editing list and making lists collaborative
and approving, rejecting, blocking and requesting to join other people’s collaborative lists.
The last thing I want to show you in Trove is text-correcting so we’re going to perform
a search of Trove and I'm going to search for the wife of Henry Darlow Sutton, Mrs H
D Sutton. Whenever you search through Trove you might see a little note about when the
text of an article was corrected so we could see here under the first article text corrected
by you and for other Voluntroves. So because I’m logged in, I’ve signed up we can see
articles where I previously corrected the text and that’s how it appears. If there’s
no note like with this second result here it means the article has never been corrected
so we just go click. Remember I went into in the previous session optical character
recognition? It’s a process where the computer reads the newspaper and translates the text
in the newspaper in the machine-read text over here. Usually it does a pretty good job
as we can see with this article here. There doesn’t appear to be many mistakes in the
article so we could see some mistakes with the surname so that should be Rafshauge but
instead it’s rufscg. That’s an instance where the machine hasn’t correctly read
this surname up here, it hasn’t done a good job probably because the print’s a little
bit faded, little bit blurry, the resolution’s not great but usually it does a pretty good
job. The accuracy is, believe it or not, somewhere over 80%. This one’s quite good because
I think the text is very clear but let’s take a look at some really awful examples
of optical character recognition and I’m going to show you some family notices from
The Herald newspaper which was added to Trove just about a year ago, maybe a little bit
longer. So we’re going to just search Trove. It’s actually possible to search Trove for
articles which have never had corrections and the way we do that, I’ll go back to
the homepage and we’ll search Trove and we’ll go not in that Boolean phrase, colon
and we’ll got not has – sorry – colon, corrections. We can see all of our results,
there’s no little notices about text being corrected by me or by Voluntroves or anybody.
We’ll limit it to newspaper. We’ve still got quite a lot of uncorrected articles, we
can see we’ve got over 260 million so get correcting. Limit to newspaper and we’re
going to limit our search to The Herald, we’ll go Victoria and then we’ll limit to title
so The Herald just here. So we’ll limit to The Herald and we’ll scroll down just
a little bit and we’ll click family notices just over here so now we’re going to find
family notices that never had corrections. You can see the third result just over here
and we can see even just by looking at the thumbnail that the print of the newspaper
is a bit faded so we can click just here, family notices. You can see the terrible quality
of that newspaper so it’s all blurry, it’s quite faded and there’s quite good reasons
for this. Most of the newspapers on Trove are scanned from the microfilm, not from the
hard copy. The Herald was one of the earliest Australian newspapers microfilmed so the filming
wasn’t as perfect as it is today. Because the scan of the newspaper isn’t fantastic
the computer has had a really hard time of trying to read this text over here and translate
it into accurate text just over here. So none of these names here would turn up from a search
of Trove because this is the text that we’re searching. Nobody’s search for Fekhuson
and people might be searching the Essk, that could be a surname. So we can actually make
this text over here match what the newspaper says over here and make those names discoverable
and searchable which is a popular pastime of many Trove users. So we’re already in
the article text field but all we need to do to edit that is click fix or review this
text and we’re just going to put in what we can
see on the screen. Don’t get creative, it needs to match what we can see so that’s
Essk,by but it should be Essery. Then we can click save. We can keep going and text-correcting
or we can save and exit but I’m going to stop it, it’s just an example. We can see
it’s stayed corrected. So now if somebody searches for any of the names we’ve just
corrected, focus on Essery, they will appear from a research of Trove. If we click on our
profile up here we can see previous text corrections we’ve made
and we can see the past correction I made which was on today’s date, the date of recording
in The Herald in that family notice just there. So all of your past corrections should be
on your Trove profile for text corrections. So that’s text-correcting in a nutshell.
It needs to match exactly what is in the newspaper. Again don’t add even a full-stop where there
was none, it needs to exactly match. Many people just go through and correct things
like family names. I probably wouldn’t bother correcting the entire article, I’d just
correct the bits that people are likely to be searching for so it’s a great community
service that you’re doing by increasing discoverability of individuals. Instructions
on text-correcting can be found in the help pages just up here so just click help, click
become a Voluntrove and right here, correcting newspapers. So we’ve got why text needs
correcting, find articles to edit. So we’ve got why text needs editing, find articles
to edit, editing guidelines. It’s all in here, it’s a very comprehensive overview
and instruction on how to correct text on Trove. So that’s a run-through of using
Trove and keeping track of your research. I do have a few final tips before we go so
we’ll just go back to our presentation. So what should you be searching newspapers
for? The answer is everything, really. The obvious things to search for in Trove are
the names of your family members but there are certainly other things you can search
for. Ships’ names, descriptions of events, local events, global events, anything you
can think of, really, information about a particular house or street address. We’ve
got a webinar on how to research the history of your house and Trove certainly features
in that. Sometimes with family history you really need to think about the broader context
of an ancestor’s life and what was happening around them in the press. So you could search
for event descriptions, rail accidents, murders, place names, businesses, bankruptcies, advertisements.
My other bit of advice is remember name variants. Your ancestor’s name could have been written
up in a number of ways in the newspaper as we’ve seen across these previous two sessions.
Initials of given names and then fully written out surname are common in older newspapers.
Female ancestors might have been written up using their husband’s names or initials
and also try searching for nicknames. Robert could be Bob, Patrick could be Pat. Remember
my favourite way of searching Trove is to start broad and then refine using the simple
search and refer back to the first session for advice on how to do this where we went
through search tips, refining your results and all of those ways to use Boolean terms
and keywords to limit your search further. There are a number of ways you can connect
with Trove, Trove has a Facebook account, it has a YouTube channel with some instructional
videos put out by the Trove team, it has a Twitter account and there is a Trove blog.
Trove regularly posts Trove tips on social media, so it is worth signing up for the Facebook
page. The help pages are quite interesting, and they have a lot of hints about using Trove
so there’s quite a lot of information about everything we’ve covered today, specifically
about newspapers but you might also find information about other Trove categories that could be
useful for your research. If you do have a general question about using Trove for family
history or even family history more broadly it’s best to use our Ask a Librarian service,
not the Trove contact so this is where those general enquiries about family history go,
is Ask a Librarian which is just on our homepage just here. Why not take a look at our previous
webinars? For this webinar and all of our past webinars go onto our YouTube channel.
Just go to our homepage, hover over Using the Library right under here under Learning
Sessions, you’ll be able to access all of our past webinars as well as information about
upcoming sessions as well. Okay, that’s me done. I hope you’ve found something useful
in this talk. I really do thank you all for listening and I hope you have a lovely day
and happy Troving.
English
AllWatched
Good afternoon, my name’s Shannon
and I work here in Family History at the National Library.
Today’s session is Newspapers for Family History, upgraded Trove.
I’m just going to turn the camera off so I’m not distracted by my face but don’t
worry I’m still here.
In today’s session we’re going to focus on using Trove newspapers for family history.
I don’t work in the Trove team and I didn’t work on the upgrade, I’m just a humble family
historian who uses Trove
so I can’t really help with feedback as part of this webinar unfortunately.
But if you have any feedback Trove would love to hear from you directly and get in touch
with Trove via the contact form on their website.
I work here at the Library and even I have to use the form to submit feedback but it’s
pretty easy to use.
I’ll show you how to find the contact form in just a bit.
So in today’s session we’re going to be covering browsing newspapers and we’re going
to be using a family history example.
We’re going to be taking a look at some of the features of online newspapers available
on Trove and then we’re going to be looking at some search tips, some of which you might
already be familiar with but hopefully something in there that you’ve not seen before.
But first what is Trove?
Because it’s not just newspapers.
Trove is what’s called a federated search engine.
It brings together over 1,000 catalogue records from libraries, archives in museums big and
small and makes their collection searchable through one easy portal.
The best thing about Trove is that it’s free.
For family historians Trove is probably best known for its collection of digitised newspapers
which begin in 1803 with The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser.
Coverage of most newspaper titles runs through to about 1954.
There aren’t many newspapers available after 1954 due to copyright.
Some later issues of newspapers such as The Canberra Times have been made available on
Trove with the permission of the publisher and The Canberra Times goes all the way up
to 1995 on Trove.
As well as newspapers Trove also provides free access to digitised Commonwealth and
New South Wales Government Gazettes.
Gazettes are an excellent resource for family historians.
Here are just some of the things you might find using gazettes.
You might find a lot of information about convicts, I found some excellent information
about some convict ancestors such as when they were issued tickets of leave, when they
absconded, when they were granted various pardons or certificates of freedom.
You might find government employment notices such as teachers,
police positions or public servants.
You might find information about businesses founded, bankrupted, bought
and sold, extended and closed.
Probate notices, you might come across those in the government gazettes.
You might come across professional registers, architects, medical practitioners,
nurses, solicitors etc.
You might even find information about criminals and bushrangers such as reward notices and
crimes and perhaps one of my favourite but least exciting bits about the government gazettes
is the legislation, proclamations of acts and regulations.
What laws were our ancestors living under that shaped their entire lives?
But today we’ll be focusing on newspapers, not gazettes.
So to get to Trove you can access it via the National Library’s homepage, it’s right
here under partner collections or you could just Google Trove in whatever browser you’re
using and it should come up, hopefully as a first result.
So we’ll just give Trove a click, you get some cultural advice information, you click
here to find out more.
I won’t go into that too much today.
Here we are on the Trove homepage.
I just wanted to briefly cover some of the elements that we can see here.
Trove is split into a series of landing pages, explore, categories, community, research and
first Australians.
We’re not going to look at all of these today but we will be spending some time in explore.
In the top right-hand corner of the screen you can
sign up to Trove or log in if you already have an account.
We’ll talk more about this a bit later on.
It’s not necessary to create an account to just search Trove but you do need it to
create a list and it’s good to have if you are into text-correcting, tagging and putting
notes on articles because it gives you a greater level of control over edits that you can make.
I quite like checking the Trove news as there’s occasionally information about new content
that’s been added to Trove or new information about upcoming or past Trove webinars.
My other favourite page is the help page which has pages on how to search Trove.
A lot of what we’ll be covering today will be found here.
You can also access various help pages through the categories landing page just over here.
So for instance we’ve got newspapers and gazettes category.
We can click on that and we can see there’s information about those categories as well
as information about searching them.
Today we’ll be focusing our attention on the digitised newspapers available on Trove
so let’s go take a look at them.
Broadly there are two ways of locating a newspaper article using Trove, those are searching and
browsing and which one you use will depend on how much information you already have.
Browsing is particularly useful if you already know when an article was published and in
which newspaper or if you’re seeking contextual
information to bolster your family history research.
Perhaps you're looking for information about things that were happening around the time
of your ancestor’s birth, marriage or death or other life event.
What major things were happening and what made the news on a local and global scale
that could possibly have shaped our ancestors’ lives?
Context in family history is sometimes everything.
I’ll show you how to browse the newspapers on Trove using an example from one of my favourite
resources, the Ryerson index.
So we’ll just Google Ryerson.
The first thing that comes up should be the Ryerson index so it’s ryersonindex.org.
So it’s a free index to death notices, to funeral notices, to obituaries published in
Australian newspapers and it goes all the way back to when newspapers began in Australia
in 1893 through to current issues.
New content is always being added and I found a lot of notices for a lot of relatives from
searching the Ryerson, it’s a fantastic resource.
My hat goes off to all the volunteers out there that add content to it.
It’s free to search.
So we’ll click search and it’s just a matter of popping in a surname so we’ll
go Flynn and we’ll go Michael as a given name and I might know when he died or I might
have a date range.
I do know the year that Michael died, 1867 and we can see three results.
So the index gives some information such as when he died, the age, date of death if that's
mentioned in the notice, other details, in which newspaper the notice was published and
the date of publication.
So let’s go back to Trove now and look for the notice that was published about Michael
Flynn’s death in The Empire on the 9th of November 1867.
So we’re just going to close the Ryerson now and we’re going to go back to Trove.
To browse newspapers on Trove all you have to do is click explore and then click browse
newspapers and gazettes open in browser.
Here we are on the browse page.
So you can browse articles by title, place, date, category and you can have a look at
all the newspaper and gazette titles that are on Trove.
I’ll give that a quick click, just some statistics about the level of coverage on Trove.
Sometimes it could take a little while to load depending on how busy Trove is.
If you do it at peak hour which I’m currently at about lunchtime here it might take a little
while and you can see all of the titles that are on Trove and it gives you an indication
of what dates are covered as well which is really useful.
We'll go back for now and we’re looking to browse The Empire, 1867, November the 9th
for the notice of Michael Flynn so we’ll go title and then we just filter down so we
click E for Empire, we’ll see we’ve got The Empire but it was just Empire for Sydney
so we’ll give that a click.
See date range covered 1850 to 1875 and we’ll go 1867 then we can select the month from
this dropdown menu here so it was November and it was the 9th which is a Saturday.
Then we can click the page.
It’ll give an indication of the sorts of articles that are on that page so you don’t
have to exit out to page level and look through absolutely everything, if you wanted to do
that you could click the little eye and then you’ll be viewing the page.
So you could see stock and share reports on page 2, Parliament information on page 3,
shipping notifications on page 4.
We wanted family notices which are on page 1, how lucky we are.
Here we are, we’re now viewing the specific article they were after and we can magnify
or if you’ve got a scroll on your mouse you can zoom right in.
Here we can now view the death notice of Michael Flynn and it reads, on the 6th instant at
his late residence, number 3 Market Lane, Michael Flynn, late of the 50th Regiment,
aged 57 years.
So we’ve got quite a lot of information about this person in a two-line obituary or
death notice that we can then use to go and hopefully research this person
a little bit better.
We know that he was in the British Army now so we can trace information about his regiment
and maybe start asking questions, are there any records relating to that?
Any muster books and pay lists.
We also have his address so a huge amount of information in just two lines.
While we’re viewing the notice I’m just going to explain some of the elements that
we can see on this page here.
So up here you’ve got all of the options to browse further so we can go to the previous
or next issue or we can go back to browse issues, we can page-turn so previous, next
or browse pages.
We can go to the next or previous article or we can browse articles.
The magnifier’s over here, in and out.
The rotate buttons so pretty self-explanatory.
I’m not sure why you use them, maybe you have a picture that you’ve seen in a newspaper
and you want to look at it from a different angle perhaps.
The reset zoom so that takes us right back out to sort of page level.
You’ve got the maximise viewer size over here in the right corner so now we’re just
viewing the individual page.
It’s stretched across the browser window.
Just close that.
We've got the info button over here, info tab, we can just click that.
We’ve got our article identifier so if you want to send somebody a link to this article
or these notices you would copy this and send it to them or perhaps you want to save it
or bookmark it.
This is a nice clean permanent link to the article that should never break unlike this
up here which is full of the browse string that we just went through in the URL, less reliable.
We've also got the page identifier so maybe if you want to use the entire page you can
click on this here.
That’ll take us back to page level.
I’ll be going over tags, lists and notes a bit later in the talk so we won’t really
go into that too much now.
Article text so this is text generated from a process called optical character recognition
which is where a machine reads the text in the article just here and translates it into
a type script over here.
You’ve got categories so again we’re in the family notice categories.
You can download the article as an image, as a PDF or you could
download the text over here.
You can download the page or the entire issue of the newspaper.
The shopping trolley here will take you to the Library’s Copies Direct service.
Perhaps you’ve found an article that is of terrible quality on Trove.
The scans of the article tend to only be as good as the quality of the microfilm or newspaper
that the content’s digitised from but say you want a better copy.
A lot of people particularly request better copies of photos that they find in newspapers.
You can order better quality copies, high resolution digital downloads or print copies
by the Library’s Copy Direct service by filling out the online order form.
You can print the article as image or you could print the text from the article over here.
Toggle layout so that’s if you’re viewing Trove articles via a mobile device or maybe
an iPad so it switches the layout so the text appears just under here.
So that’s really in a nutshell browsing Trove newspapers.
The other way to locate articles on Trove is by keyword searching.
So we’ll go back to the Trove homepage. Here we are.
There’s a few ways to limit your search of Trove to newspapers.
On the homepage we’re greeted with a single search bar just here.
We can type in a keyword and I'm going to type in Henry Goode and hit enter or hit the
little magnifying glass, it’s up to you.
We can see we’ve got over four million newspaper results and we've got the top three results
displayed but just by using that single search bar we’ve searched across all collections
that are available via Trove so we’ve got results for magazines and newsletters, images,
maps and artefacts, research and reports, books and libraries.
Remember these results are from libraries all over Australia, over 1,000 libraries,
archives and museums contribute content to Trove’s federated search catalogue.
Easy enough to limit our search to newspapers and gazettes or just newspapers.
We just click here, see all newspaper and gazette results then we’ve just got results
for newspapers and gazettes and we can limit further to just newspapers by just clicking
on this little box just over here.
Now we’ve only got results for newspapers but we’ve still got over four million results
which isn’t a very useful search.
There’s a few other ways to limit your search to just newspapers.
Back on the Trove homepage we can type Henry Goode again, we can click the little arrow
next to all categories and limit our search right off the bat to newspapers and gazettes
and there we are.
Again you’ll need to click newspapers, just limit your search to newspapers.
You can also click explore, browse newspapers and gazettes, open browser and search newspapers
and gazettes up here so we’ve got a variety of ways to limit our search to newspapers
and gazettes if you want to search both.
So we’ve searched for Henry Goode.
Again we’ve got over four million results, it’s not a terribly useful search.
We’ve also got a high number of irrelevant results, we’ve got results for Mr Charles
Henry Goode, we've got results for Sir Charles Henry Goode, Henry Charles William Goode,
we’ve got Dulcie Goode of Hopetown, we’ve got Mr Henry Hill, Director of Goode, Durrant
& Co or is it Burrant?
Who knows?
We’ve got a huge number of irrelevant results and that’s because of the way that I formatted
my search.
If I search for Henry Goode just like this I’m going to get results for articles where
those two words appear somewhere in the article no matter how unrelated they are to each other
as we saw with Henry Healy of Goode, Durrant & Co.
So instead of just popping a name in what I’m going to do is enclose the name in quotation
marks and hit enter or the search magnifying glass.
You can see we’ve gone from over four million results to just over 7,000 results so that’s
a lot better than what we had.
By using quotation marks I’m performing what’s called a phrase search.
Some of you might also know it as a near search.
A phrase search structured like this for Henry Goode will find the words Henry and Goode
when those two words appear next to each other in an article so it’s useful for looking
for names.
This search still allows for one word in between Henry and Goode and it will still allow for
some variation in the spelling of those words to account for the imperfections of optical
character recognition.
So if Henry Goode appeared in the newspapers with a middle name this search will still
pick up those articles.
This allowance for an additional word in between a phrase is what’s known very appealingly
as a phrase slop.
In this case the phrase slop has a value of one because it allows for just one word in
between Henry and Goode
but what if I want to increase the number of words between Henry and Goode?
What if Henry Goode had two middle names?
I can still do my phrase search but increase the number of words in between Henry and Goode
by adding a little symbol called a tilde after my phrase search.
This is a tilde.
It’s a little squiggly line.
It should be just below the escape bar on your keyboard.
Just hold the shift key and press it.
Then I add the number 2.
This increases the number of words that can be between Henry and Goode to two words or
another way of putting it, we now have a phrase slop value of 2.
We can see the number of results has appeared because I’ve broadened
my search terms a little.
So now my search will pick up articles where Henry Goode appears in the paper with two middle names.
If he happened to be called something as fantastic as Henry Hubert Egbert Goode, for example,
this search should still find him.
Even more importantly, and this is why I really love the tilde 2, adding the squiggly tilde
line and the number 2 will also find articles where Henry Goode is written
in reverse word order.
So if his name was written in a newspaper as Goode comma Henry which is common in obituaries
this way of searching should still find those articles.
I find this way of searching with name in quotations, tilde symbol and the number 2
the best way to begin searching for somebody on Trove and when I'm doing my family history
this is normally the way I start structuring my very first search for a person.
It’s much more useful than performing a standard phrase search using the advanced
search function and I’ll show you why now.
So over here we’ve got the advanced search which is a feature I actually never use.
Some of you might be big fans of it, I find it’s easier to start with a broad search
and then refine using quotation marks and things like tilde symbols.
So here’s the phrase search field of the advanced search on Trove and if we pop in
his name just there and hit search it’s searching for the phrase Henry Goode.
So it’s essentially the same kind of search as if we put his name in quotation marks without
the tilde 2 so we’re not going to get things like reverse word order or up to two middle
names but we’ll still get results for things like Henry Harry Goode
where he has one middle name.
This applied as a search limit over here so we can’t even edit it so it’s much easier
just to use the simple search and pop the name in quotation marks, just so.
You can increase the number of words in between a phrase by increasing the number or the phrase
slop value after the tilde symbol.
For some obituaries you’d need to put a 6 or an 8 after the tilde symbol in order
to find them through a Trove search because of the way they’re structured with surname
at the beginning of the obituary and given name somewhere in the middle or at the end of it.
So if you’ve got something like Goode, my dearly beloved departed husband, Henry, you
might need quite a large phrase slop.
This will of course give you a huge number of irrelevant results which is why it’s
good to have indexes like the Ryerson for death notices, obituaries and funeral notices.
You can also decrease the number of words in between Henry and Goode so a basic sort
of phrase search just like this will allow for one word in between Henry and Goode.
If we don’t want any words between Henry and Goode we can just put tilde zero which
is perhaps useful if you know an ancestor who definitely did not have a middle name.
But even though we’ve gotten rid of all of the results in between Henry and Goode
this search will still allow for some fuzziness or variation of spelling and I’ll show you
some examples of this now.
So we’ve got Henry’s good, Henry Good, no E on the end, Henry Good-man, Henry Goodman.
We’ve got Henry goods so we’re still getting some variation.
This really is to account for the imperfections of optical character recognition.
I’ll be talking about how to fix this in just a little bit.
So let’s go back to our search for Henry Goode tilde 2 which is my standard way of
searching and we’ll look at ways to refine your search further.
So we’ve got almost 20,000 results.
Can limit our search to newspapers over here.
Trove makes it very easy to refine your results to a particular time or place by giving us
these filters on the right-hand side of the screen so you can sort it by state, by territory,
newspaper title – incredibly useful, category so advertising – perhaps you're just looking
for family notices, date range – a feature I use constantly, you can even limit your
search to articles which contain photos or illustrations or cartoons or maps and I have
found some photos of people I’ve researched and ancestors from looking through Trove newspapers
and limiting my search here just using this ‘photo’.
One thing I tend not to use is the word count feature, but you might want to use it.
So if I know Henry died in Rockhampton, Queensland during the 1920s I can refine my search to
the state he lived in so we could go Queensland and we’ve gone from almost 20,000 results
to just over 2,000.
I can limit my search to a local newspaper title which is an incredibly useful feature
and I might limit it to The Capricornian.
There’s a few newspapers for Rockhampton on here and I can limit my search or refine
my results to the decade that I know my Henry passed away in so I can go 1920 to 1929 and
we can see there’s two articles published about Henry Goode for that period.
We've done that and now we’ve only got two results so we’ve gone from almost 20,000
results to just two just by refining our results over here
and then we can click on the article and view it.
We can see my search terms are highlighted in yellow over here.
We can see the optical character recognition text over here.
Remember when I’ve entered search terms I'm not searching this over here, I'm not
searching that because it’s just a picture of a newspaper, what I’m searching is the
machine-read text over here, optical character recognition.
A lot of people wonder how do I get rid of that yellow highlight and just have a clean
image of the article.
It’s very easy, all you need to do is click on details just here and click the link to
article identifier which is a permanent link to the article.
So our search terms aren’t factored into the equation whereas before they’re part
of the string or the history of how we’ve found this article which you can see in the
URL just up here.
So when you search Trove you’re searching the optical character-recognised text over
here and we can see this is all looking pretty good, it’s reasonably accurate, I can’t
really see any mistakes.
That’s because it’s likely somebody has gone in and corrected it all.
This isn’t always the case and I’ll show you some examples of some badly read machine
text in the second half of this webinar.
So that’s how we’ve gone about
searching for an article of Henry Goode and refining our results.
It’s a pretty good example, it’s a reasonably clear-cut case.
Depending on your family and their circumstances and how often they were putting notices in
the paper you might have more or less luck finding articles on Trove.
That’s part of the joy of searching through newspapers, you never quite know what you’re
going to come across.
So we’ll go back now and we’ll clear all our limits but I’ll just click newspapers
so we’re not searching through gazettes.
So we’ve done a very basic search for Henry Goode and we’ve refined our results using
the features over here so using the limits to limit our search to a very specific article.
There’s another way that you can limit your search or refine your results and it’s by
using what librarians call Boolean terms or expressions.
You can modify your search of Trove or an individual or for anything, really, with just
three little words which are AND, OR and NOT.
So you can see we’ve searched for Henry Goode and there’s a Sir Charles Henry Goode
who’s popping up quite a lot in our searches.
Because he’s somebody quite famous he’s going to appear everywhere and really take
up a lot of space in our search results that we might not want.
It's very easy to eliminate him from our search equation.
The way we do that is by using Boolean term NOT.
So we can get rid of Charles by searching for articles that contain the phrase Henry
Goode but not Charles.
So we’ve got rid of all of the articles that contain the phrase Henry Goode and also
contain the phrase Charles.
There’s a real problem with this search technique.
It will get rid of results that might be relevant because it will remove all articles that mention
Henry Goode that contain the word, Charles.
What if Henry Goode had a son named Charles who is mentioned in an article about him?
Or what if a Charles is mentioned in a death notice on the next line up or a few lines
down in the article about family notices?
We’ve eliminated it from our results so you could potentially get rid of results that
you’d want to see.
But it can be useful if you’re getting a number of results that aren’t relevant.
If your ancestor had the same name as somebody famous like an actor or a Lord or Lady or
Sir – I’ve got a convict Henry Sutton who shares a name with an inventor who tends
to hijack my search results – you can try searching for their name and then NOT actor
or NOT Lady or NOT inventor to get rid of those results that you don’t want if they’re
appearing en masse.
So NOT is useful to eliminate results.
Another Boolean term I use all the time is OR.
Henry Goode wasn’t always mentioned by his full name.
Conventions of historic newspapers tend to be first initial only, he was often only mentioned
as H Goode.
So I can find all newspaper articles that mention either Henry Goode or H Goode at the
same time by using OR.
All I’m going to do is put in OR in caps and put in H Goode just as another phrase
search, the same I did as previous with Henry.
I’m going to hit search.
The number of results will of course jump.
That’s because I’m now searching for articles that contain either the phrase Henry Goode
or the phrase H Goode.
My favourite Boolean expression or term, though, is the word AND. AND does the opposite of
NOT, it tells Trove to combine our search phrase with another word so OR was an either
or search, and combines the phrase Henry Goode with another word and finds all articles that
contain this phrase.
Perhaps we’ll put in another word such as the name of the town that he lived in, Rockhampton.
So now we’ve hit search, we’ve got just under 800 results and all of the results should
contain the phrase Henry Goode and the word Rockhampton so it’s a really useful way
of limiting your search to search for an individual that was living in a particular place.
You can really build on your search using these Boolean phrases and it’s quite useful
if you are searching for a specific bit of information.
I know that my Henry was a photographer when he lived in Rockhampton so perhaps I want
to find articles that mention this and his activities as a
photographer while he was in that town.
So I can go Henry Goode AND Rockhampton AND photographer
and now we should get all articles that mention the phrase Henry Goode as well as the words
Rockhampton and photographer.
You can see we’ve only got just under 170 results now so you can see it’s a constant
process of refining our search by using Boolean searching.
So we’ve got quite good relevancy.
The truth is you don’t even really need to include the word AND.
A lot of people use plus instead so plus, no space and we can see it’s done the same
thing, same number of results.
You don’t even really need to do that for AND, you can just type it in and it should
automatically factor that you’re looking for articles which contain the phrase Henry
Goode and the words Rockhampton photographer.
But I find it useful because I like to see precisely how my search is structured.
So if you know the name or occupation or the names of children or the parents or spouse
of an ancestor or any other identifying features such as an address try phrase searching of
a person and use a Boolean search AND
to combine your initial results with another word or phrase.
There are however very specific rules about combining an OR search
with Boolean expressions AND and NOT.
You need to group your OR phrases together using brackets and this is where it starts
to get very complicated.
So remember our search for Henry Goode was Henry Goode OR H Goode?
If we structure our search like this, Henry Goode OR H Goode AND Rockhampton we’re going
to get results for articles that mention the phrase Henry Goode or articles that mention
the phrase H Goode AND Rockhampton, we’re not going to find articles that mention necessarily
Henry Goode and Rockhampton.
So we need to group Henry Goode or H Goode together using brackets just like so, very
easy and there we have it.
Now we should find articles that mention the phrase Henry Goode and Rockhampton OR H Goode
AND Rockhampton if that makes sense.
It’s a bit tricky, things can start looking like a mathematical equation.
There’s instructions on the help pages if you get stuck but it’s just important to
be mindful of that when you’re playing around with the Boolean OR search.
I do have one last advanced tip for searching on Trove.
Remember before we discussed decreasing the phrase slop to exclude or include things such
as middle names and reverse word order but how we’re still getting variation in the
spelling of those two words even when we search for something like Henry Goode zero to eliminate
middle names, we’ll still get variation in spelling of the word Henry and Goode.
If you wanted to do what’s called an exact search so you only want to find results for
articles with those words exactly as they’re spelt in the newspaper it is a little bit
complicated so bear with me as we’ll look at how it’s done.
I’m going to step away from Henry for a little while and use another example and the
example that I’m going to use is Frank Major.
If I just search Trove for Frank Major like I usually would even using the technique of
phrase or near searching, if we scroll down the page you can see everything, all kind
of results that aren’t relevant.
Major is a rank so we’re getting results for Major Frank Parker and major is also an
adjective so we’re getting results talking about
the time in 1954 that Frank took a major share.
Even if I reduce the phrase slop to zero it’s still not quite an exact search and of course
it’s by relevancies so it looks good but if we go to the last page remember we’re
still getting variation in the spelling of those two words so we’ve got Frank Majority
and we’ve got Frank’s major still.
Remember Trove will always allow for some fuzziness or variation in how two words within
a phase is spelt to compensate for the imperfections of character recognition.
To do an exact search all I need to do is type the word full text colon before Frank
Major, keeping the phrase slop as zero and hit enter.
If I do this by using that full text search I will only get results for Frank Major, no
middle names, no reverse word order and no variation
or fuzziness in the spelling of Frank and Major.
Often you don’t want to do an exact search because you’ll miss out on things.
Remember allowing for some inaccuracy is useful.
The one thing to keep in mind is that it’s better to start broad and then refine and
try using Boolean terms to build your search.
That said, if you have a family member who has the same name as a ship or a rank or perhaps
you’ve got somebody with a surname of Field and you’re getting articles about sporting
ovals all over the country an exact search can be useful.
So that’s the basics of searching Trove.
All the tips about Boolean searching and more can be found on the Trove help pages just up here
and happy Troveing.
My name is Heather and I am the Digital Education Coordinator here at the National Library.
Before we start this short video I’ll just turn off the camera.
Before we start today’s video I would like to pay my respects to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri
people on whose land this video was recorded.
I acknowledge the deep and enduring connection of all indigenous Australians to country and
I pay my deepest respect to elders past, present and emerging.
I would also like to extend my respects to the traditional owners of the lands from which
you may be joining me today, including the Cammeraygal people on whose country I grew
up on in Sydney’s northern suburbs.
Alright so let’s launch into our subject today.
This year for Bastille Day, the national holiday of France, we thought to share with you a
great French language resource that is online and freely accessible.
In this short discovery video we will discover Le Courrier Australien, a French English bilingual
publication that is one of Australia’s oldest surviving foreign language newspapers.
It is available online and at your fingertips through Trove.
In fact you can see it here on the screen in front of you, the very first edition of
Le Courrier Australien printed on Saturday, the 30th of April 1892.
From this time until 2011 this newspaper was in print format.
These issues have now been digitised and they’re available to view through Trove.Le Courrier
Australien is not all written in French language as you might assume.
In fact it is an interesting combination of both French and English language articles.
When it first started back in the late 1800s it was one of the only sources of information
about news and events in France and other Francophone countries such as Belgium.
As well as Francophile events that were happening here in Australia the newspaper covers a range
of subjects such as science and trade, literature and fine arts, fashion, visits from French
personalities to Australia, politics, the first and second world wars and other content
relating to politics more broadly.
There are advertisements for products and companies and notices, much like other newspapers.
The list really does go on about what you can expect to find here.
Le Courrier is excellent if you are interested in learning more about history as it relates
to the French community in Australia and French and Australian history and relations generally.
Today Le Courrier Australien is a website, it covers everything the newspaper covered
in terms of the content and advertisements and you can still access the content in both
French and English languages.
So let’s have a look at Le Courrier Australien in context.
I will show you how to do a basic search, how to download an article and where to find
citation information in Trove.
Lastly, parlez-vous français?
Do you speak French or are you learning to read and write in French?
I will show you how you can make this amazing resource more discoverable by correcting articles
that have been incorrectly transcribed by the OCR, that is the optical character recognition
software.
As you can imagine the words often get jumbled and the special characters such as the grave
accent, the acute accent or the cedilla, that squiggle under the C in Francais aren’t
recognised.
If you are interested in French history and how it connects with Australian history you
might find this a simple and fun way to get involved and learn along the way.
Okay, let’s redirect now to the Trove homepage and take a look at a basic search.
I’ll click on the Trove icon and that will redirect us to the homepage.
Okay, there are two simple ways to do a basic search.
The first one you can jump straight in and use the title of the newspaper as keywords
and type them into the search bar.
Change the category to newspapers and gazettes and hit search and away we go.
You can see here there is a long list of results.
To reduce this list use the panel on the right, limiting the results as you like.
Let's click on title, for example, so that we know the content we’re looking at comes
from Le Courrier and for something fun we can limit the category or type of content
to humour.
In this case there is only one article showing so let’s click on this.
In fact it is an article that includes cartoons created by the Noumea-born cartoonist, Emile
Mercier.
During his lifetime Mercier contributed cartoons to many different Australian newspapers.
His cartoons are witty and comment on the daily life of Australians as they were during
his lifetime.
In this case the article and cartoons cross over two pages.
Using this handy tab up the top you can simply browse through these pages as you would if
you had the paper in front of you and flip from page to page.
Here we can zoom in and have a look at the detail of some of his cartoons.
We can also zoom out and view the cartoons in context.
So now that we've had a look at this way of doing a basic search let’s go back to the
Trove homepage and look at another option to browse issues of Le Courrier Australien.
Now that we are back on the homepage what we need to do is click on the explore tab
at the top here and underneath the browse newspapers and gazettes we’re going to open
the browser.
From here we’ll go to browse titles and under the column of titles A to Z we’ll
go down to L. Carefully scroll down the list of titles in the L category until you happen
upon Le Courrier Australien.
Now you’ll see a column with the life dates from 1892 all the way to 2011.
I’m particularly interested in the period of the 1940s so why don’t we have a look
at the 1945 issue.
If we go to July, given that we’re thinking about Bastille Day, and we’re in luck, we
can see that we have Friday the 13th, the day before Bastille Day.
We’ll click on that and what we have is a list of pages for that issue.
If I click on the eye symbol on the right-hand side that will bring up the first page in
its entirety.
If I click on the reset zoom button it will centre the first page here.
If I hover over the different articles on this page and click you’ll see that I’m
presented with an option to read this particular article or you can use the list on the left-hand
side and select which article you would like to read.
As you can see here the article at the bottom, France’s National Day, is written in English
whereas the other articles here are in French language.
If I click on the second article we can see the images highlighted.
The image shows a scene of the storming of the Bastille on the 14th of July 1789 and
which was the event that marks the beginnings of the French revolution and the change from
monarchy to republic.
Now suppose you were interested, like we are today, in Bastille Day, in the history of
this French national day in Australia, you might choose to download one of these articles
that you see on this front page.
If we click on this one here it’s a very small article but quite informative because
it gives us some idea about who was attending different functions for France’s national
day back in 1945 and in Sydney.
So let’s have a look at how you can download this article if it was of particular interest
to you.
All you need to do is go over to the left-hand side, click on the download button here and
as I said you can select the type of format that you’d like to download the article
to, whether that’s as an image, a PDF or as text.
The resolution of the images and text downloaded is not high and the content found here is
intended here for personal, private use and research purposes.
With that in mind let me show you here where the citation information lives.
This is very handy.
The details of this particular article and the newspaper issue generally can be found
under details.
You will first find a persistent URL in case you want to refer to the article and find
it later again or a persistent URL for the page and you will see that there are different
citation styles available.
At the very bottom you will find an option to export the citation to reference software
such as Endnote.
Lastly, en français, a little bit of text-correcting goes a long way so let’s redirect to a French
language article on this page by simply returning to the view all articles on this page option,
reset the zoom so we can see the whole page.
Let’s click on the third article we can see from the list which you can see here isn’t
so clear however we can make out in that first line ‘L’invitation formelle du President’.
Let's have a look over here on the left-hand side.
In order to text-correct all you need to do is click on the small pencil.
That will then highlight the line of text from the article that you’re about to correct
and we can see here that as I correct, L apostrophe, invitation formelle du – in this case – President.
If we click save you’ll see that it now has saved that text.
Now that I have text-corrected that small portion and I'm logged into my account here
I can click on text corrections and you’ll see that the text correction I just made is
now available for me to view in my list.
It notes here that it’s one line and I can be redirected to that article there.
But if you enjoy this comprehension exercise and want to do more you have the option to
simply return where you left off if you are logged in or you can use the persistent URL
as I showed you earlier in the detail section and that will take you back to the article
and you can make anonymous contributions there.
Bonne fête nationale et à bientôt.
We look forward to you viewing more of our discovery videos and learning more about the
National Library’s collection and the great resources we have available for you.
Thank you very much
Good afternoon, everyone, my name is Rachel and I work in Reader Services here
at the National Library.
Welcome to this Aussie Sports Hero webinar.
Before we move on I will just turn off the camera.
Okay, I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people who are the
traditional custodians of the land on which this webinar is being held and pay respects
to their elders both past and present.
I pay my respect to the elders of other communities in Australia and extend this respect to all
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ people in attendance today.
Now we’ve probably all been missing our sport, myself included however today’s webinar
is not a celebration of Aussie sporting heroes as such.
Apart from having a lifelong love of many sports and having evolved into a true Canberra
Raiders fan I also have a background in cultural studies.
Sport of course plays an important role in many cultures across the world, not least
our own.
The purpose of today’s webinar is to demonstrate how our eResources can be used to undertake
social and cultural research, whether for scholarly or personal interest reasons.
Specifically I will be looking at the relationship between the representation of Aussie sporting
heroes and the Australian dream.
To put this into some context this year the Library’s theme has been Australian dreams.
This theme explores visions for the future, ideals, aspirations, goals, reminiscence or
nostalgia and reflections on who we are.
Undoubtably part of this dream narrative is the idea of Australia as a great sporting
nation.
Traditionally our sporting heroes have looked something like this.
Sir Donald Bradman who was described at a Deakin lecture by John Carroll as the embodiment
of Australian character ideal, arguably the nation’s greatest sporting hero who also
happens to be a white male cricketer.
But what about our sporting heroes who are not white, not male and/or don’t behave
like Donald Bradman?
In this webinar I want to demonstrate how you can explore the portrayal of our contemporary
sporting heroes and how this might differ to the Australian dream ideal of the great
Aussie sporting hero.To do this I have chosen to explore three case studies which I hope
will demonstrate the diversity of our modern-day sporting heroes.
These are the Australian men’s cricket team ball-tampering scandal, Adam Goodes, and women
in sport.
Now I'm sure you’ll appreciate that these topics can all be explored in depth but with
the time limitations we have I will very much just be skimming the surface of each of them
but I hope they give you a flavour of the type of research possible using our eResources
and encourages you to do more of your own searching.
Also I’d just like to reiterate that this webinar is specifically focused on our eResources,
I will not be spending time looking at the Library’s catalogue or Trove or indeed any
other specific resources which ordinarily would be very useful for this type of research.
Instead I will show how to navigate our eResources portal, give you research tips along the way
and demonstrate the great value of this service and wealth of digital resources available
to you.
As well as searching across the full text content in our portal I will also be demonstrating
some specific databases, namely NewsBank and PressReader which are excellent sources of
contemporary newspaper and magazine coverage of Australian sport.
First though a general introduction to our eResources portal.
An exciting feature of the portal is that you can easily conduct full text searches
of many of the eJournals, eBooks and more in our collection.
You can also choose to search specific databases individually.
You can access the eResources portal via the Library’s homepage which is NLA.gov.au and
then click on the eResources box just down here.
To access licensed databases and the full text content in the eResources portal from
home you will need a National Library card.
For those of you who don’t already have a Library card it is very easy to sign up.
Simply visit the Library’s homepage and click the Get a Library Card link just here
and fill out the online form to apply for a card.
If you cannot visit the Library to pick up your card we offer a complimentary mailing
service and we’ll send your card out to you to begin your research at home.
So going back to the Library’s homepage I’m now going to click on the link to the
eResources.
You’ll find that you only need to accept the terms and conditions as you enter the
site rather than each individual database and this means you can move between databases
without interruption.
To log in from home click the link at the upper centre of the eResources homepage.
You’ll be redirected to our catalogue to enter your details but will be taken back
to eResources upon logging in.
To log in you just need your user ID located on the back of your Library card and your
surname.
When using our eResources onsite like I am today there is no need to log in as you will
automatically be given access to everything the portal has to offer by just clicking the
link at the top of the page.
Now you’ll also notice some links in the top banner of the eResources homepage.
Our eResources page now links directly to our catalogue and vice versa so you can jump
back and forth between the two.
We’ve also included a link to our research guides so you can easily refer to them for
research assistance.
If you know what specific database you’re wanting to use or you want to find a database
on a particular subject go to the browse eResources tab which is just here.
Here you can refine by access level.
The Library has three different categories of eResources, those that are freely available
to anyone over the internet, licensed resources that you can access from home with your Library
card and onsite resources for which you need to be in the Library building.
For the purpose of today’s session we’ll be focusing on licensed resources which you
can use at home to conduct your research.Okay so to begin with I’m going to explore our
first case study, the Australian men’s cricket team ball-tampering scandal and to do this
I’m going to use the NewsBank Access World News database.
NewsBank is a licensed resource which includes current and historical full text newspapers
from across the globe.
It provides coverage from news resources from over 172 countries including over 600 titles
from Australia.You can find and access individual databases several ways including via the library’s
catalogue but a simple way to find a database however is via the browse eResources tab.
Here you can search for databases by either typing in keywords or the title of the database
or even the first letter of the title into the searchbox or you can browse by first letter
here.
You can also browse by topic, for example newspapers if you’re looking for newspapers
or by access conditions so for example you can browse all our licensed resources.
So to find and access NewsBank I’m just going to start typing in the title NewsBank
and it actually will pop up before I’ve even finished the title and I can click on
the link for the database here.
Now within NewsBank itself you can access an advanced search by clicking on more search
options or you can search by date or by map which allows you to refine your search by
location.
You can also search or browse through an A to Z list of all news sources found in NewsBank
by clicking on the A to Z source list up here.
When using eResources for your research you will find there is invariably an option to
conduct an advanced search however I much prefer to do a basic keyword search and then
use limiters to refine my results.
I find this method provides a wealth of relevant material to work with and can lead you to
various ideas and research which you might not originally identify.
Some keyword search advice however.
Keep updating your keywords as you go through your research, they’re only a starting point
as once you begin reading material you’ll find other terms that will be fruitful to
search as well.
Remember you can experiment with combinations of keywords too.
So to find some initial keywords I need to unpack my topic and then start with what I
know.
Now I’m sure you’re all familiar with the ball-tampering scandal when during a test
match Cameron Bancroft was caught trying to rub up one side of the ball with sandpaper
to make it swing in flight.
Captain Steve Smith and Vice Captain David Warner were found to be involved and all three
received unprecedented sanctions from Cricket Australia.
I’m interested in finding reports of the scandal to see how it might have impacted
the portrayal of Australian men’s cricket and cricketers both here in Australia and
overseas and I'm also interested in knowing if there has been any redemption since with
the sporting heroes involved and if so how and why this might have been achieved.
So some keywords which I might want to start with are Australian cricket ball-tampering.
I’m just going to put that in here and hit the search button.
Now I can see that there’s thousands of results on that search so it was obviously
fairly big news however I can also see on the left-hand side here that the results are
sorted by newest so I have articles from this month sitting at the top of my results list
and they are not necessarily the most relevant.
So I’m going to change my result list to search by best match.
Clicking on the left here and this time I get results at the top of my list which date
mainly from around the time of the incident which was 24th of March 2018.
Alternatively I can narrow my search results to focus on reports from around the time of
the scandal by using the date limiters on the left-hand side.
So I’m going to narrow my search results to those dated between the 24th and 31st of
March 2018 and if I hover over the little question mark next to date I can see that
I need to enter my date as month, day, year so I’m just going to go 24th, 2018 and 3rd
for the March and then 31, 2018 and apply that and scroll back up to the top.
So even just for that one week alone there were still nearly 3,000 results.
So if I want to read a preview of an article I can either just hover or click where it
says preview or even just hover over the article itself and a little article preview will pick
up.
So for example for the first result, We cheat at cricket, allows me just to read a little
bit more from the beginning of the article.
But if I scroll down the first page and have a look at the results I get a good idea of
the headlines and the reaction created by this event including that the Prime Minister
at the time, Malcom Turnbull, said that the nation is shocked and bitterly disappointed
over the ball-tampering incident.
I can also focus my results a little bit more by adding some new keywords so I’m just
going to add the word heroes to my search, keeping the date range the same and just see
what I come up with from that.
Here I get a bit more of a manageable list, there’s 77 results and again I can read
through the headlines to see not only the reaction in Australia but also from overseas.
Now if I want to I can tackle these set of results as two separate groups, those from
our region and those from elsewhere by using the location limiter on the left-hand side.
So for example I can click on Australia Oceania which will find both Australian and New Zealand
results.
If I want to know further I can, down to Australia or New Zealand but if I just scroll down this
first page again I get some example of the impact of the incident.
For example I can see headlines that read such as Brazen, arrogant act seals downfall
of Australian greats, Our local cricketers slam their heroes for ball-tampering disgrace,
and a bit further down, Spotlight on ball-tampering reveals bigger moral questions.
So if I like I can then clear the filter up the top here for Australian Oceania so that
we can have a look at results from other locations overseas so if I go back to the source location
and just click on more options and click all the other overseas locations here and just
apply that this is a good way of finding some outsiders’ views as well of Australia and
also its relationship with sport.
So for example if I scroll down there is a – article here from a UK paper called The
Northern Echo titled Comment: Does Australia’s reaction to the ball tampering scandal prove
it’s the greatest sporting nation on earth?
I’m just going to read a few lines from the actual article.
Australians are terrible losers, it is their fiercely competitive spirit which makes them
such daunting opponents on the field of sport.
Australians are also terrible winners, it is not enough for them to celebrate their
victories, Aussie supporters and stars seem to regard sporting triumphs as chances to
needle their vanquished foe with a form of boyish arrogance which too often crosses the
line dividing banter from bullying.
The article goes on to ask, would sporting cheats in any other country or in any other
sport be treated such a public shaming as former Captain Steve Smith who wept as he
apologised for bringing shame to a nation which welds sporting glory to its sense of
self-worth?
So not only does this article contain some interesting content but I’ll also use this
chance to point out that as with most databases there are various options available to you
for managing individual pieces of content.
So for articles in NewsBank you can find options above the title of the article which allow
you to do such things as sighting, emailing, printing, downloading, saving to your folder
and also copying the link, getting the permalink.
You can also choose to change the size of the font or have the article read to you.
But for now I’m just going to head back to our results using the back to results command
here and I’m quickly going to investigate if there’s been any redemption for the players
involved in the scandal.
Firstly I’m going to clear all my filters using the clear filters command up at the
top here and I’m going to replace the word heroes with redemption.
Now also I’m going to change my results from best match to newest using the filter
here on the left as I’m really interested in how the cricketers are currently being
portrayed.
If I scroll down a little I can see some interesting results including Sandpaper and sobbing: Two
years on from Australian cricket’s darkest hour, Story of the good men in Baggy Greens
and Slow road to redemption.
Now several of these articles discuss an eight-episode web series called Test which documents the
redemption of the players and the Australian cricket side over a period of 18 months after
the ball-tampering incident.
If I open the Sandpaper and sobbing article which is from The Independent newspaper the
author, George Sessions, writes, that the scandal would be a watershed moment for the
Aussies where the mindset shifted from win at all costs to trying to do things the right
way.
The author mentions that not all the players involved for fully redeem themselves however
as he goes on to say, it has been a completely different story for Smith who’s enjoyed
a sensational 12 months and will be the star for 2019 Ashes, proven to be an almost immovable
object for England bowlers.
It was during the 50 over World Cup where the former Captain made his return to the
international scene alongside Warner.
The pair were booed initially but Smith’s batting exploits would soon turn jeers to
applause from English crowds.
So maybe winning at all costs is no longer part of Australian cricket culture but instead
winning modestly is the key to redemption and appreciation.
But these reports of the scandal in relation to Australian cricket culture and how this
might have changed over the last couple of years gives me some new keywords I can try
so for example I could try a search on Australian cricket as a phrase and the keywords culture
and sandpaper.
But hopefully by using some new keywords I will find some results which help to contextualise
the information I have already found.
However before I leave this topic for good I would just recap on the searches, how they
have changed while I was researching ball-tampering scandal.
So initially we had a search for Australian cricket ball-tampering, I then added the word
heroes to combine some new keywords and gain some more specific results.
We next had Australian cricket ball-tampering redemption which was really just changing
the keywords to get some other types of results and then Australian cricket as a phrase with
culture sandpaper which is combining some new keywords and phrases which have come up
during my research so far.
So now I’m going to head back to the eResources portal and move onto Adam Goodes, the first
nations AFL star.
Now I could find lots of really useful information on Goodes in NewsBank but I want to use this
opportunity to show you how to search across the eResources portal which allows you to
conduct full text searches of many of our databases.
At this stage approximately 75% of our online content is full text searchable and we’re
working to improve this even more.
Once again to begin I need to start by unpacking my case study and identify some keywords.
Attention has recently returned to Adam Goodes with the screening of two documentaries, one
titled The Final Quarter and the other, The Australian Dream.
Both retell the controversy which began with an incident during the 2013 indigenous round
AFL match when Goodes asked security to remove a 13-year-old girl spectator who had called
him an ape.
I’d like to investigate whether this incident and what happened afterwards highlights cracks
in certain aspects of the Australian dream and whether it sheds light on the portrayal
of our non-white Aussie sporting heroes.
Again I’ll only be demonstrating how to get started with this research and I’m very
much just scratching the surface.
I can begin by searching some keyword terms in eResources portal to see what I come up
with.
Again to get the most out of the eResources portal I will need to change or modify my
original keywords over time but to begin with I am just going to search on the phrase, Adam
Goodes.
Now I can see that there’s a fair amount of results there so I’m definitely going
to have to refine my list.
Before I do, though, I’m going to open one of the results to show you how easy it is
to access this material.
I can see that several of my results are available as full text.
I know this because it states full text both in the results list and the time records and
it’s important to take note of this because our portal does also return results for just
citations as well as full text content.
So to see the full text content I just need to click on the PDF full text which I’m
going to do for the result, A race to the goal from the Metro magazine.
So in this case I’ve just opened it up in my current tab but alternatively I could have
chosen to right click on the link and open the article in a new tab.
I’m just going to scroll down a bit, it’s going to take a little while to load because
it is a PDF with a lot of photographs.
We’ll just scroll down.
This article basically discusses the two recent films on Goodes as do several of my search
results.
It also provides more information about the incident, why the public reaction and what
it all might have meant and as the author, Travis Johnson, writes, the final act of the
sporting career of Adam Goodes served as a vocal point for a – well the polite term
would be discussion about racism, not just on the footy oval but in Australian society
and culture as a whole.
Following the incident Goodes became the subject of increasing hostility from both game day
crowds and public commentators and after enduring a campaign of abuse that included being loudly
and repeatedly booed at seemingly every game he played during the 2015 season Goodes announced
his retirement from football in September that year.
Johnson goes on to say, the broader discord around what is generally referred to as the
booing controversy was prolonged and often heated with pundits on both sides of the political
divide ruminating on the meaning of it all.
Was it racist?
Was it even about race?
Who gets to decide that it is?
Did Goodes comport himself with dignity or was he, as was averred by many of his critics,
a poor sportsman who was performing for sympathy just as he allegedly performed for free kicks
on the field?
Johnson continues, this rigamarole has proven fertile ground for factual filmmakers with
Goodes, thanks to his reputation as one of the most esteemed players of our national
sport, serving as a lightning rod for uncomfortable contentions about race in modern Australia.
The author contends that the pair of films viewed together provide a more complete and
nuanced understanding of Goodes, his position in our society and what the events of his
final years as a professional footballer can tell us about our attitudes to race, respect
and success.
So there’s a fair bit there to work on but for the moment I’m going to go back to our
results list just using the command here on the top left and move to refine my list a
little bit more.
I can do this by using the limiters on the left-hand side here.
I can see under format that there are a lot of results from news sources.
This is not surprising and as I want to examine the portrayal of Goodes that are most likely
relevant to my research so for now I’m just going to click on the news format button there
and if I wished I could narrow my results further by publication if I scroll down here
and choose one of those that’s there.
Or if click on show more I can also see that there’s all these other news publications
that are part of my search results.
I can also if I want narrow my search by content provider so bearing in my mind that I'm on
news at the moment there’s NewsBank which we were looking at earlier and if I click
on that that will bring up results from NewsBank.
These results include a link for full text from NewsBank and for most of NewsBank’s
results you can click on the link and be taken directly to the full text content of the article
which is a very useful feature.
However you may also get results from material in NewsBank to which the Library does not
have access.
This is rare and it tends not to apply for newspaper titles as such.
So an example is material sourced from the ABC and we’re currently working on gaining
access to the full text of these results.
It's important to remember that you can change what limiters you’ve applied to your search
as you go so here I’m just going to uncheck the NewsBank limiter and I'm going to have
a closer look at the subject limiters for our search.
Now I can click on show more again as I did before to see all the subject headings but
I’ve noticed there’s a subject here for Adam Goodes himself which reduces my results
to a more manageable number.
But it’s important to remember when limiting by subject that not all of our content has
actually been assigned a subject heading yet.
I can see for example that there are no news results when using this subject heading and
this is because the content from NewsBank as well as some other providers that we have
have not actually been assigned subject headings in our portal.
So for now I’m actually just going to remove the subject heading for Adam Goodes.
Now if I’m only wanting to see Australian content I can refine by geography using the
limiter down here or instead if I wanted to look at overseas content I could just refine
it that way to overseas.
I can only refine it by date range up the top here, by subject which we’ve covered
and also language and more.
It’s worth experimenting with these limiters too to see what different results are suggested.
Another way of refining my search of course is to add different or additional keywords
so for example I could add the word, hero and see what we get.
Okay so it looks like there’s some potentially interesting and useful articles here For example
my Adam Goodes is a hero for our times which is from The Age and it was written just after
he retired.
In this article the author, Tim Dick, acknowledges the treatment Goodes received after calling
out racism and interestingly praises Goodes for demonstrating qualities which are reminiscent
of our traditional Donald Bradman-type sporting hero.
To give you an idea of what I mean I’ll quote one section.
He played masterfully on the field, he serves well off it.
He doesn’t show off.
He is unlike what we see from too many of Australia’s sportsmen, full of hubris, too
big for their boots and revelling in quick praise for modest records.
Not Goodes, he is an example to those like Nick Kyrgios and the Australian men’s cricket
team, he proves that modesty remains both honourable and popular.
He lives the motto, actions, not words.
He is a proud indigenous man, an inspiration to all Australia.
So without analysing this passage too much I think the author is speaking to one of our
underlying sporting hero narratives, one which emphasises the importance of modesty and of
actions speaking louder than words.
His argument concurs neatly with the previous story around Steve Smith’s redemption which
emphasised the importance of winning modestly.
The author contends that those sporting heroes who live up to this enduring image will be
celebrated.
However certainly Goodes was not celebrated nor revered by everyone so other narratives
must also have been at work and if I go back to my results list using my command just here
there’s one other article that I wanted to look at which is The two stories of Adam
Goodes and it’s taken from the Eureka Street Journal.
In this article you might be able to get some idea of what other narratives were at play.
As the author states in here Goodes was outspoken on racial issues, calling out racist remarks
whether they were made by club presidents or people in the stands.
This provoked the ire of those who didn’t like their sport being politicised and perhaps
didn’t like their racist attitudes being challenged.
So perhaps challenging us, making us feel uncomfortable does not fit the traditional
narrative of the Aussie sporting hero, particularly if those doing the challenging sit outside
the mainstream ideal of the white Anglo male sporting hero.
If I click on the detailed record link just here on the left of the article I can also
find some other subjects, terms which I might find useful to search on such as racism in
sports which can help to further contextualise my research so far.
So hopefully now you have an idea of how to build and refine your search within the eResources
portal but before we move on there are a couple of other things I’d like to quickly show
you.
Firstly how to organise your content.
So if I go back to the result list as a starter so I’ve started to identify material that
is of interest to me but rather than looking at the content in each record I can create
a smaller creative group of resources by clicking on the little folder icon to the right of
the item record just here.
I’ll save a couple more to my group.
Now to see all these saved items together in my personalised list I can click on the
folder view link on the right-hand side and there they are.
Now I’ve done this using the onsite version of eResources which logs you in as a general
Library user.
This means that upon leaving this Library computer at the end of today’s session these
groups will be lost.
This doesn’t matter so much if you’re planning to do all your research and reading
in one go but for most of us that isn’t always the case.
Luckily there is an option to create a specific profile for yourself that will remember your
saved groups and keep them safe for returning to another day.
The profile you will need to create to do this is separate to your Library card login,
in fact it’s a profile with EBSCO, the provider with whom we collaborated to create this portal.
In creating this EBSCO program you’ll be able to not only access your saved groups
within the Library but also remotely so you can research at home.
Now to create this EBSCO login simply click on the sign into my EBSCO host link at the
top and create your profile.
I’m now going to sign in with my profile details and show you what it looks like.
So I think those are all saved, we’ll try that.
Okay, this is where you can get a bit creative with how you organise your content.
If you are just beginning your research you could group all your chosen material under
one folder.
If you’re further into your research and have started to notice common threads amongst
your material you might like to create and name some new folders.
If you would like further help with this EBSCO folder management you can click on the small
question mark bubble just here to learn more.
So now we’ve talked about organising content on a broader level, the collection of content,
I'm going to go back to my search results and open one of the records.
So we can look very quickly at how to manage individual pieces of content through each
item record.
So I will just open up this one here.
So on the right-hand side there are a variety of features which allow you to sight the article,
print the email, save, export to a bibliography or you can access the permalink to the article
here.
Permalinks are very important as they are the guaranteed method of finding your way
back to a specific record or page.
If you’re documenting your research these are also the links you need to use in your
bibliography as they will provide access to your future readers.
Additionally our eResources portal will generate a variety of citation styles for you dependent
on what you’re after.
So for now I’m going to move on to my last case study, women in sport.
For generations our sporting heroes have been predominantly men.
Here I want to look at the increasing exposure of women in sport in Australia and whether
this is impacting on our ideas of Aussie sporting heroes.
Within this framework I want to look at whether increased exposure of women in sport and the
changing nature of their participation has changed Australia’s notion of a sporting
hero or whether deeper cultural aspects still need to be addressed.
Again this topic could be researched extensively but instead in the time we have left available
I’m going to show you, using some basic searching, another of our databases, namely
PressReader.
PressReader not only allows you to search across a wide range of newspapers and magazines
but you can also browse specific titles, displaying them in their original format, layout and
language.
Titles are archived in their original format for three months only but individual articles
dating from approximately 2003 onwards can also be searched and viewed in PressReader.
So I’m going to click on new search and I’m going to go back into the browse eResources
tab and search for PressReader just by typing it in here again as we did before for NewsBank
and there’s PressReader.
So let’s dive in.
As this is a database in which I can browse full issues of magazines and newspapers in
their original format for the past three months I’m going to start my search by simply browsing
some representations of women in sport.
To do this I’m going to choose Australia publications so choosing from the countries
list on the left and then I’m going to scroll down the categories on the left-hand side
and pick sports.
Now I think you can see from the results that there are not too many representations of
women in this list of titles.
A couple relate to women in sport but the vast majority include only male representations,
on their covers at least.
If we go back to where we started and we pick sports from down the bottom we
can actually see coverage worldwide and I think you’ll see that the trend is not really
something that is unique to Australia.
There’s mainly male representations there as well.
But now I'm going to do some searching across the PressReader database which will allow
me to find articles dating back several years rather than just the last three months.
I’m going to go back to the homepage and I’m going to just put some basic keywords
in the search box which is up here on the top right-hand side and to start with I’m
just going to put in women sport heroes.
Now this gives me a very large number of results.
Before I go any further I am just going to limit them to Australian publications by clicking
on advanced search, going to publications here and choosing Australia and going save
and then search.
But again I still have a lot of results and a lot of them don’t look very relevant and
this is really because I’m searching on some very generic, heavily used words across
a single database containing newspapers and magazines and these words pop up a lot in
the TV guides.
So in order to get some more meaningful results I need to search on some keyword phrases and
I’m going to do this by clicking in the search box in the top right and I’m going
to go to advanced search and I'm going to change my search tier to women’s sport as
a phrase and putting heroes as a phrase.
Now another search I could have tried at this point is women in sport as a phrase and the
keyword heroes.
I’m just going to try that for the moment.
Now I have a much smaller set of results.
I can see on the left-hand side, I can either look at my custom results which are those
from Australia or if I wanted I could look at overseas results or all publications from
choosing the in all publications bit there.
I can click on a result to view the whole article but before I do I’m just going to
point out the three vertical dots which you can see to the right of the articles’ titles
in this corner here.
If you click on those dots it gives you access to various functions such as page view which
allows you to see the original format if the article dates within the last three months
as well as listen to the article, copy, share or print.
But the first article that I’m going to have a look at is We are gladiators: the elite
athletes looking to raise the profile of women’s sport which provides some insight into how
and why women in sport are trying to raise their profile.
The article from The Guardian dating from January 2019 discusses the Women in Sport
Photo Actions Awards which aims to capture images showcasing the skills, strength and
athleticism of sportswomen in action and to combat the traditional stereotyping of the
female body image.
The project hopes to change the portrayal of female athletes from smiling stationary
models to tough, fit competitors, role models, heroes and leaders.
It also aims to increase the visibility of women’s sport with Minjee Lee, the Australian
women’s golfer, saying that for generations our sporting heroes have been predominantly
men because they have the exposure.
Another example of an article I might look at is where have Australia’s male sporting
heroes gone which actually asks the question, do we even have an Australian male sporting
hero anymore?
Written by Stephen Ganavas the article states, that Australian sporting culture does not
exist in a vacuum, it is a byproduct of wider cultural trends in this country.
This includes but is not limited to the boys’ club culture in men’s team sports resulting
in the win at all costs mentality.
He goes on to say the numerous drug, alcohol and sex scandals that continue to plague men’s
sports are indicative of the underbelly of toxic masculinity which permeates through
it.
The author then discusses how female athletes are stepping up and filling the voids vacated
by their male counterparts with likeable female athletes providing genuine role models with
star power for girls and boys.
Another one I might look at is A sporting chance?
I don’t think so which discusses the rising profile of Australian women’s sports whilst
also highlighting the inequality still faced by women regarding pay and conditions.
The article from The Daily Examiner dates from 2015 when the female soccer team, The
Matildas, ranked ninth in the world fought for a pay rise from 21,000 per annum, one-fifteenth
of their male counterparts’ wage, to $34,000.
As a follow-on to this in November last year The Matildas finally achieved a new pay deal
that has gone a long way in achieving equal pay for male and female soccer players here
in Australia.
However although both men and women now receive 40% of tournament match payments there is
still some way to go to achieve pay parity as tournament match payments are currently
significantly higher for men than women.
Now if I want to find out more about the gender pay gap in sport I can try a new search by
clicking in my search box here and I’m going to go with the women’s sport and change
the second phrase to gender pay gap and search on that.
Just scrolling along and looking at the search results there I can see tags on other keywords
which I could pursue further for my research such as women’s rights, human rights, discrimination
and feminism.
Something else that I might want to examine in this whole case study is the portrayal
of women in individual sports.
Women are increasingly participating in sports which have historically been strongly associated
with masculinity.
As an example the first season of Australia’s national Australian Rules football league
for female players began in 2017.
Throughout the history of Australian sport there have been many images which have triggered
debate about broader social issues.
One which did just that was the photo of Tayla Harris kicking the opening goal during an
AFL women’s match in 2019 which has come to be known simply as The Kick.
The photo triggered a wave of misogynistic abuse on social media and was followed by
condemnation of the online trolls.
If I want to research this incident and the debate which followed I can search PressReader
with the words, Tayla Harris, which I’ll just put in and we’ll change that phrase
to The Kick.
I can see that there are over 300 results over here with 200 from Australia which is
fairly substantial.
I can see articles which reveal that Harris has recently written her biography, More Then
A Kick including one from The Western Australian here dating from May this year.
If I click on the three vertical dots and on page view I can see it in the original
layout which is just there.
If I go back to my search results I can also see articles about the bronze statue that
was unveiled in Melbourne in September 2019 which immortalises Harris’ kick including
one from The Bulletin which is titled Tayla Gets the Kick Out of Statue.
Here Harris basically says the following about the statue, it doesn’t matter if you’re
a man or a woman, young or old, everyone has a right to do what they love.
That’s what I want people to see when they look at this.So before I leave this particular
topic I’m just going to recap on the keywords that came up in my research in PressReader
as I went along.
So again to start with we had women sport heroes which was a very basic beginning with
some very broad keywords then followed by women’s sport and sporting heroes, combining
two keyword phrases.
At that point we could have also tried women in sport as a phrase with the word heroes.
Then we moved on to women’s sport gender pay gap using some new keywords that had come
up during my research so far.
At that point we come to the end of our session today.
I hope that going through these steps has given you an idea of how our eResources can
greatly assist you with your research, whatever your passions.
I hope that by using three case studies I have shown you how to best navigate and utilise
the portal as well as how you can investigate individual databases, particularly for primary
resources such as newspapers and magazines which can be so important for cultural research.
Finally if you need any help with our eResources portal there are a number of help guides and
an introductory video to assist you with navigating this service.
You can find all of these on the eResources homepage via the help tab.
If you need any further assistance at all you can always use Ask a Librarian.
So thank you, everyone, today for listening and happy researching, everyone.
Welcome.
My name is Damian Cole and with me, Amy Ramires, and we are reference librarians in the Reader
Services branch here at the National Library of Australia.
We’re here to talk to you about using the Library’s collections to research the history
of a place, the local history of a place, what we have in the collections and how to
go about using and accessing them.
I’ll just turn the camera off now so we can actually get into the presentation.
As a quick overview of what we’ll talk through today we’ll show you the variety of materials
available across the Library collections that can be used to find the history of a place
or a location, a town, a city, a suburb or a region.
Some of this may be predictable if you’ve used the Library before, particularly if you’ve
already done some research of your own history of your place already but some I hope may
be surprising and enlightening.
We’ll go through how to find items in the collection with some guidance on catalogue
searching, how to use the Library collections both at home and here in the Library reading
rooms.
One thing to say is that we’ll not be specifically looking at family history.
Family history is of course bound up in the history of a place, the history of people
living in that place and it may be that people are your primary interest of your research.
There are a whole range of resources of full family research and indeed it’s probably
the biggest single use of the Library’s collections though it is quite specialised
and can be complex.
The sorts of methods and materials we’ll be talking about will be a way to get to the
stories of families and people by getting to the story of their place, where and how
they lived.
We offer several separate learning program webinars like this focusing on family history
so I suggest you have a look at the Library’s YouTube channel and learning program calendar
for more.
The key place to start is where your place of interest is.
For me, being Canberra born and bred, this is my local place here and so the place that
I’ve researched and am familiar with.
We will use some examples of different resources we have on local history but only as an example
of the sort of resources we have at the Library and online.
For your place the range of materials and how to find and use them will be much the
same, just insert the name of your place that you want to find the history of, insert whatever
name we may be referring to as an example.
We will have varying materials on different places, maybe more or maybe less but to start
searching is the way to find out.
We want to show you with various places and examples the range of likely materials and
resources we have on the history of a place, to find the story of a place and that then
can be your place to search for.
The Library has a collection of more than just books, the collection includes imagery,
music, spoken words, objects, digital resources and more on all manner of subjects and through
this presentation we’ll show you the range of what the Library has, how to use it and
an idea of what sort of local stories you can find in this.
So to the materials in our collections starting with printed collections.
The first and obvious, books are the core of the Library collections as you would expect.
The Library has some six million books in the collection and continues to collect current
publications from Australia under the Legal Deposit Scheme that requires any book published
in Australia to be deposited in the Library.
These include ongoing publications such as journals, periodicals, magazines and newspapers
and these are increasingly being collected in a digital format.
For what we collect today some 30% of single title books and 70% of regularly published
periodicals are in a digital format.
The books are probably the best place to start researching the history of a place.
These include things such as histories and general works, biographies, government publications
and heritage reports.
family histories or books on the lives of significant personalities in a place, publications
by local historical societies including their journals and newsletters and books on community
groups and commercial businesses.
They include publications contemporary to the events of the past written by those who
actually lived through that history and transient publications that are a rich source for local
histories such as phone and business directories, the White and Yellow Pages and also even consider
fiction books set in the place that give an idea of how it was to live in that place at
that time.
But as any good librarian would say libraries are more than just books.
The National Library has a large collection of many varied formats, information presented
in all forms.
If there’s one thing I’d really like to take away from this presentation it is the
National Library and indeed any library is more than just books.
These different formats can be used to find different and unexpected stories or present
different sides to the one story and we want to take you through these different formats.
The Manuscripts Collection contains the unpublished and personal diaries, journals, letters, notebooks
and literary drafts.
We aim to collect papers and records of individuals and organisations that reflect the diversity
of Australian society, culture and environments.
It includes papers of people from ordinary settlers and workers to government and city
officials, writers and other creators and records of organisations such as community
groups, social clubs, business and enthusiast groups.
Manuscripts can tell the personal story by those who lived it.
Manuscript collections can be small, maybe just one folder of documents or very large,
perhaps hundreds of boxes.
The largest personal collection we hold is the papers of Sir Robert Menzies, over 500
boxes covering his life and career.
The archival nature of manuscripts, personal and unpublished can make using manuscripts
challenging so just be ready to spend a bit of time on them but I’m sure it will be
worth it.
All manuscript collections are catalogued, the details within them are often not.
Large collections have finding aids like a listing of the contents of the boxes.
Many finding aids are viewable online linked from a catalogue record for that collection,
others are in paper format and available here in the Library’s reading rooms.
But if not viewable online you can always ask us to email a copy of a finding aid to
you.
Do ask for assistance in using manuscript collections.
There are issues such as access conditions and copyright and fragile materials may complicate
things but they are probably one of our best used and I think most useful collections.
Some examples of the spread of things in manuscripts, it includes the papers of the personal such
as a collection of 15 letters written by Thomas Hampton to his brother during his travels
around the Victorian goldfields in 1850s, ‘60s, ‘70s.
They tell of life on the goldfields and methods of mining and farming and of his success or
lack of it.
Extremes of weather and other things he experienced from around Maryborough, Ararat and Carisbrook.
He says the general state of the colony is prosperous with plenty of gold-getting but
he also believed that wine production would soon become an important thing for the region
and so a great insight into one person’s view of their place.
There are also papers of the professional such as the records of Burnima and Bibbenluke
Stations.
Nearly 40 boxes of papers covering the operations of these two pastoral stations in the Monaro
region of southern New South Wales from 1888 to 1915, the collection includes letterbooks,
financial records, diaries, station ledgers and business correspondence.
Although they may seem dry financial records they tell the story of business and life on
the land in a way that was so common at the turn of 20th century Australia written by
those who lived there and worked the stations.
Also a wonderful way to combine it, the papers of both the professional and the everyday
such as the papers of Charles Studdy Daley.
With a 40-year career in government Daley was one of the most significant public servants
in the early development of Canberra as the capital city.
He was also a keen musician in his personal time.
This collection shows how the personal likes of a professional of such interests can start
their own stories.Amongst documents and letters on the development of the Canberra site as
the capital and pamphlets on town planning are records that Daley created and collected
on the Canberra Musical Society of which he was President for 20 years.
Things such as meeting minutes, member files, concert programs and reviews.
This tells the story of how inhabitants of Canberra lived and played in the growing city,
the social life of the city and this can be a central part of the life of that place.
Taking the Daly collection as an example can show family history can be explored through
the local history through our manuscripts collection.
In the Musical Society member files are the names of some of my family living in Canberra
in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Although the collection is not in itself a likely family history resource, and I have
no relation to Charles Daley myself, but I find part of my family in the collection and
can imagine my family living in Canberra going to concerts, enjoying the music and it seems
on at least one occasion being late with their membership dues.
This can show that a local history and then a family history can appear in a resource
you may not first think of looking in.
The papers of the person will tell the story of their life and where they lived and so
who else lived there so do think broadly for your local history research, not just in the
obvious resources you may think of first.
I’ll now hand over to Amy to continue talking through our collections.
AMY: Thank you, Damian.
So pictures are a handy resource when researching the history of a place.
Our pictures collection holds around one million photographs and artworks which document aspects
of Australian life, society, personalities and events.
Examples include portraits of individuals, images of landscapes and structures, political
cartoons and imagery of everyday life.
So I guess this poses the question, why do we collect these items and how does our collecting
differ from that of an art gallery?
Our collection of pictures is for their documentary value and not about aesthetics or artistic
value.
We do collect images from prominent artists, of course but most of our collection is based
on ordinary individuals documenting their own life experiences and their surroundings.
We also collect contemporary photographs that document today’s places, events and people
and this is done in a variety of ways whether by commission or donation.
A large portion of the Pictures Collection is digitised and viewable online and those
that aren’t can be viewed here at the Library in our Special Collections Reading Room.
So relevant to today’s discussion pictures assist us by giving an image to a story, they
show the place you are researching as it was and how it has developed so I’m going to
take you through a few examples of the types of imagery we have in our collection.
So a key purpose of the Pictures Collection is to document a changing landscape over time
to show how a place has grown and changed.
So we have a wide range of photographs of locations, scenes and buildings from around
the country and one of these wider-ranging formed collections in the Library is the Ledger
Collection.
It contains around 421 photographs which includes album prints from various photographers and
of course his own work.
The photos were taken between 1858 and 1910 in Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and
South Australia.
Ledger was a town planning consultant who eventually became a lecturer in town and regional
planning.
He made extensive use of the photographs to show how Australian cities and towns have
changed.
Most of the photographs in the collection are of public buildings and streets and cities
and towns such as the Royal Engineers’ Office but there are also natural landscapes depicted
in the collection such as Lavender Bay here in Sydney Harbour.
Definitely not how it looks today but it’s just an example of how these places have changed
over time.
So local photographers are important as they create a large bank of photographs documenting
a specific place.
So one of these examples is the Mandurama Collection which is a collection of over 3,000
photographs of people and daily life around Mandurama and the central New South Wales
region at the start of the 20th century.
These photographs were captured by Evan Antoni Lumme and possibly his wife, Rose.
Many of the figures that are depicted in the collection remain unidentified but also this
collection is an invaluable source for seeing parts of Australia during the Victorian and
post-federation eras with few of these types of collections of this size surviving to this
day.
Another collection I’ll mention is the Jeff Carter so Jeff Carter was a freelance photographer
and journalist who was self-proclaimed as the photographer of the poor and the unknown.
There are over 600 photographs in this collection with most of the photos being individuals
who had recorded oral history interviews with him.
There are photographs of sceneries and cities and regional towns in most of the states and
territories and Jeff is widely regarded as one of Australia’s most influential documentary
photographers as his span of photographs has created a significant visual record of Australian
life.
So artworks, while allowing a more imaginative expression of place, are also helpful for
helping us understand a picture how it once was.
This could be especially helpful for places that no longer exist at this current time.
So Glenelg Hotel and the flagstaff by John Michael Skipper.
So John Michael Skipper was an artist and also a solicitor and he was known for having
a natural skill and painted various scenes in South Australia and the goldfields in Victoria.
His sketches and paintings of built and natural environments have been credited as holding
great artistic and historical value.
But I also wanted to bring your attention to an artwork that links to the Thomas Hampton
letters Damian mentioned before.
This sketch is of the Mt Alexander goldfields and while this isn’t an area that is connected
to Hampton’s story it reflects on how we can use multiple formats to tell us the same
story.
So doing a comparative analysis of different formats allows us to understand the same place
in different ways so connecting a written description of a past time to a more visual
description of place.
Of course our national collection is just that, a national documentation of the varied
lives of our nation’s people.
So our collection of portraits and documentation and events across the country must try to
reflect this diversity.
Alongside oral history interviews, which I’ll be talking about in a few moments, we also
have a collection of individual portraits from those who have been interviewed.
So Bob Gebhardt is one of these individuals.
Gebhardt recalls his life as a drover and his early days in Broken Hill in New South
Wales.
He speaks about this relationships with his Aboriginal and Afghan mates and co-workers
and his worker as a master welder of international standing.
Portraits of individuals can connect us to place through the people they are depicting
such as understanding prominent industries and the area.
But our collection also holds photographs of events in the life of a place from the
ceremonial to the everyday.
One of the photos I have depicted here is a group of people in a semiformal attire at
an event in Newcastle.
So the picture reflects a few things.
This picture is part of a newspaper photographs archive, The Newcastle Morning Herald and
The Miner’s Advocate archive.
So it depicts the importance of these archives in telling everyday stories.
Another thing that I want to point out is many of our photos such as this one are of
unknown subjects so many subjects in our collection remain unidentified.
We’re constantly searching to improve our descriptions of collection material so if
you can establish who they are or where they are in these photographs definitely get in
contact with us and we can improve our descriptions and that in turn will assist future researchers
and would be immensely valuable.
Okay so moving on to maps and the collection that I feel has the most to say about local
places and history.
So our maps collection in total includes around one million maps which includes different
types highlighting topographic surveys, land ownership, design and development, road and
tourist maps and also mapping from the air.
The range of maps we hold spans from European maps and their assumption of a great southern
land mass up to the satellite and digital datasets that are being produced today.
So maps gives us a complete picture of the layout of the landscape and how people have
lived on the land.
They give us a sense of place to a story and gives us a physical way to show that place.
So many of our maps in our collection are fully digitised online and can be downloaded
from Trove.
The different maps we’ll be talking about are all covered in more depth in our online
research guides as well so if you’re finding you’re having difficulties finding relevant
maps in our collection or just want to understand them a bit better then they are an excellent
resource to go to.
A well known and key resource for understanding local history and family history are land
ownership maps, typically referred to as cadastral or parish maps.
These are considered a strength of the Library’s map collection mostly due to the amount of
parish maps we hold but coverage and dates do vary between different states.
Recently the Library has undergone a project which aims to digitise these cadastral and
parish maps.
Thousands of maps from New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland have been digitised and placed
online and these days also run by a similar system so they're separated by counties and
then subdivided into parishes.
So for the ACT, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and Northern Territory they all have
varying systems that they use.
This is especially the case for South Australia, Northern Territory and WA as not all of the
states are separated into counties, parishes or hundreds with this separating concentrated
to the higher populated areas.
Wikipedia has some handy pages which talks through how land was divided across Australia
and the differing systems each state and territory used.
If you’re also looking for more detailed deposited plans of towns and suburbs these
can be found through the relevant land registry department of your state and territory.
For example in New South Wales that would be the Land Registry Services and their Historical
Land Record Viewer which is online.
So land sales plans so these are posters advertising blocks of land or sites for sale for a variety
of reasons, whether it be commercial or personal.
These can include sales that did occur or plans that didn’t progress any further.
So these posters can be used as early evidence for prices of blocks of land, its boundaries
and past built environments and any eventual changes to the roads or land usages.
The National Library holds around 100,000 land sales plans in the collection.
Most of our collection records the auctions of eastern Australia from around the 1840s
to the 1930s.
I guess the most known function of maps, and one that should come to no surprise, is that
maps highlight the physical landscape of the land as it once was and how it has changed.
So topographic maps both highlight the natural and manmade environments of a place.
So the Library holds around 200,000 post 1990s Australian topographic maps which have been
published by both national and state mapping and surveying authorities.
So I’m going to switch over to Trove just to highlight the differences between these
two topographic maps.
So one of them is a 1976 version which is highlighted here and the other is from 1989
so there’s just over 10 years’ difference between the two.
So I’ll start with 1976 so as you can see all the vineyards around here, there’s quite
a few of them, still lots of grassy areas along here and a big pine plantation up the
top.
So not a lot of urban development going on, it’s still quite a natural landscape and
we jump over to 1989 and you can already see all these built-up areas starting to form
here where it once was grassy and a natural landscape.
Very lightly you can see the size of some vineyards shrinking over on this side here.
But another thing I will point out is that icons in maps do change over time so while
in the 1976 version the pine plantations are noted with this area prominent dark green
icon, that completely changes in the 1989 version where it’s more of a light green.
So it's pretty important to just bear in mind those differences that can occur in maps.
So I’ll just go back to the PowerPoint now and we’ll move on to aerial photography.
So the Maps Collection includes aerial photography conducted by the Commonwealth Government for
surveying and planning purposes for the 1930s to the 1980s.
All Australian states are represented in our collection including Papua New Guinea and
Antarctica which amounts to around 800,000 photographs.
The aerial photography is a perfect way to see the growth of the cities and towns and
changes to the landscape.
They were used by city planners and other professions such as environmental resource
management, ecology, archaeology and the military.
Unfortunately, most of this collection is only viewable at the Library but flight diagrams
are available online through Geoscience so you can figure out what series of aerial photographs
will show the area you want.
So a supporting resource that researchers find key in using maps are gazetteers.
Think of it like a geographical directory.
These are often used in conjunction with maps because of the explicit written detail they
go into about a specific place.
Older gazetteers include information about its location, latitude and longitude, the
geographical profile of the place, the main industries and commerce, the population count
and even things like how regular the post deliveries are.The origin of the locality’s
name is also an important bit of information that gets mentioned in these guides.
But changing or variant placenames can be a confusing thing when researching a place
so examples of some placename changes in the past include Darwin which was once known as
Palmerston, many placenames in South Australia during world war one as they were of German
origin.
So I thought I’d also mention that the Bailliere’s New South Wales gazetteer for 1866 is digitised
online through Library of Congress so that is also a handy guide to go to if you can’t
make it onsite and view these in person.
So moving on to oral history and folklore our oral history interviews document life
stories from people across Australia with different and somewhat similar stories relating
to our cultural, intellectual and social aspects of life.
Our earliest interviews date back to the 1950s but can discuss events decades before that.
Our interviews can be a part of a project focusing around a unified thing or they can
be singular.
Oral histories are a detailed oral picture of a place through reminiscence and can also
be a chance to hear about details of places that are underrepresented in the historical
record.
So many of our interviews are available to listen to online and have written transcripts.
As these collections could hold sensitive information they might also have access conditions
so you will need to contact us if that is the case.
Some might be available for access by getting written permission but some might not be accessible
for the interviewee’s lifetime.
So I just wanted to point out really quickly a few of the prominent collections so Wendy
Lowenstein’s 1930s depression collection so this collection comprises of 172 tapes
of recollections of life during the depression in the 1930s and these were recorded by Lowenstein
in 1972 to 1976.
Around 68 of these interviews are available online.
The interviewees all lived in all the states and included bagmen, shearers, station hands,
canecutters, builders, plumbers, a whole range of occupations.
Some of the examples of specific place descriptions relate to land prices during the depression,
the rising popularity of places due to low rents and the origins of particular stores
in townships.
I also point out the Drovers oral history project so this is a collection of around
140 interviews with around 25 of them available online.
Most interviewees lived in Queensland and the recordings were made in Charters Towers,
Mt Isa, Cloncurry, Emerald, McKay, Bundaberg and there were also other recordings made
in Alice Springs, Adelaide and Canberra.
So onto newspapers.
Newspapers are an effective form of detailing local history as they discuss stories at the
time they are happening.
Local newspapers are an important source of information on any town or city as they document
events that occurred in that place as well as people that lived there.
The National Library’s collection holds the major daily newspapers as well as reginal,
local and community newspapers.
So most Australian newspapers pre-1955 are digitised on Trove, after this it can get
tricky as to whether you can find newspapers online or if they can only be viewed onsite
at a library.
For newspapers not on Trove and for post-1955 papers these are most likely on microfilm
and print.
Microfilm is the preferred method for viewing these papers as they are more robust than
the typical newspaper.
For newspapers around the 1990s onwards newspapers can be accessed through our subscribed online
databases such as NewsBank and the Australian New Zealand Reference Centre.
These can be accessed at home by logging in with your library card but this’ll be discussed
in a few moments by Damian.
The National Library has presented other learning programs focusing on newspapers which will
provide more in-depth information.
This section was just to give you a brief overview of how newspapers document local
history and a brief overview on the different ways you can access newspapers in our collection.
So now I'm going to hand it back over to Damian who’s going to discuss a few more of our
collections and how you can go about finding them.
Thank you, Damian.
DAMIAN:So to our music collections.
As well as reading and listening to history you can also sing to it.
The Library has a collection of printed sheet musical scores, some 300,000 in all, in a
range of musical styles.
Music and lyrics can tell so much of the story of a place.
Music served as a form of advertisement, a celebration or describing an event or local
personality.
A song about a place can really show what people thought about that place or what that
place wanted people to think about it.
Many songs about Canberra in the early 20th century seemed to be trying to convince Australians
to accept the new city as their capital so perhaps a little bit of that Canberra cringe
that all of us Canberrans perhaps still feel today.
Many of the older musical scores are digitised and can be seen online.
To ephemera.
Now ephemera is a term given to printed materials that were intended to be short-term or immediate
use.
They are ephemeral, seen as minor things to inform for a moment but we have collected
and kept them as they are largely the everyday documents of people’s lives that tell the
stories of these passing events.
The ephemera collection includes advertising material, postcards, posters, trade catalogues,
performance programs, tourist and travel guides and scrapbooks.
All these can tell a story of a place and the people living in it as they are the material
produced by a local group or about a local event.
Not all items are individually catalogued but they do have subject area catalogue records
and descriptive lists that can be seen through our website.
They are often grouped by who produced them or under very broad subject headings so this
is in a way a bit like manuscripts, a bit of searching may be needed to find what you’re
looking for or just something unexpected that is informative.
Again many ephemera items are digitised and viewable online, not always entire contents
of a collection.
Ephemera can be based around an event in the calendar of a place such as a festival or
formal dinner of a social group or be advertising for a place such as here, the El Dorado Motel,
the first motel in Surfers Paradise.
We are currently collecting ephemera around the COVID-19 pandemic to document the day-to-day
experiences of Australians living through this event as this event that we are living
through now will become part of our history that researchers in the future will turn to
the Library to find out more about.
So to websites.
A new resource launched by the Library just last year is the Australian Web Archive, the
AWAarchives.au domain name websites from 1996 onwards.
This covers government, commercial and personal websites.
It’s basically a snapshot of each page within a website as it existed at that time.
The AWA is accessible via Trove and so searches of Trove will include the AWA in results.
Websites can be a source of historical information as has already been compiled and published
online.
Older versions of existing websites can be seen as well as websites that may no longer
be active.
Just like collecting books that have been published the Library now aims to collect
websites that have been published online, the new way to tell old stories or to document
the history of a place from now into the future.
While all websites can be searched for there are groupings of selected websites by theme
including one on local history.
For example there are 35 different websites created for the 2013 centenary of Canberra
that have been archived that tell the story about how Canberra celebrated our local history
as well as a collection of 41 websites devoted to exploring and describing historical villages
around Australia.
So while that was a quick overview of the variety of materials in the collection that
can be used to research the local history of a place there are many other ways to find
that information online.
I want to go to a website to show you some of these online resources that can be accessed
through us and used for researching local history so I’ll click through to our National
Library homepage.
So on our Library homepage one thing to look at is research guides.
We publish a number of research guides online to aid in researching particular subjects
and parts of the Library collection.
You can see this through Using the Library and under our Research Tools and Resources,
research guides.
Listed by various subjects these research guides list useful resources, provide guidance
on using the cataloguing collections and show what resources exist beyond the Library.
They are a very good first step to researching almost any topic.
Guides that are relevant to local history include guides to Australian cemetery records,
guides to topographic maps and maps of family historians and many guides on family history
research and the use of birth, death and marriage records.
I go back to our homepage to another option to Blogs, to our Stories and into Blogs.
Staff and researchers produce blogs that are another source of information on what is in
the collections, the stories that can be told and how to use the Library collections.
New blogs are regularly published on all aspects of the Library collection and how to use the
Library.
To probably one of our most used resources, and certainly if you’re not able to come
visit us in Canberra the most important one perhaps, is our eResources so click through
from eResources to take you into our eResources portal.
What we refer to as our eResources are subscription of websites containing online journals, databases,
newspapers and eBooks.
If you’re logging into our eResource you need to accept the terms and conditions but
things such as Australian online journals and other publications on history and society
can all be relevant to researching local histories.
The first thing to do if you are trying to get into our eResources is to log in with
your National Library card and I’ll talk a bit about that shortly.
But once you’ve logged in with that card it opens up the content of a lot of things
you can see online.
Search for content within a database perhaps but the best way to perhaps start is to browse
the resources that we have.
A list of the sorts of resources we offer but also the basic subjects as a way if you
want to get started.
There are three basic categories of eResources to be aware of and having a look at these
little icons that appear before each one of them.
Free websites that are basically freely available websites that we just link to because it’s
particularly useful or perhaps hard to find, licensed eResources.
These are the ones that you can log into from home with your Library card so just look for
the one that has the small little key icon.
There are also a lot of onsite resources with the little National Library of Australia building
icon, are ones that can only be accessed here in the Library building.
But you can see even from this starting list there’s quite a variety there so from home
always look for these little key icons, these are things you can access from home.
So in talking through the various resources we use the question of course you always have
next is how to find things.
So from our Library homepage here our catalogue is just under the top banner so click on Catalogue.
The online catalogue is the first and best place to begin.
It’s basically the database of what is in the Library collections.
I’ll try and give a very basic overview of using the catalogue with some search tips.
Given how much there is you may want to find and the number of different ways to find the
same thing it’s a bit hard to get a complete this is all you need to know-type description
so the best advice I can give is to explore the catalogue.
Don’t assume you’ll find the perfect item straight away, the more you look the more
you’ll find and so be patient.
There are many different ways to search for things in our catalogue, perhaps the first
if you know a particular book that you want to find is just to search for the book title.
I’ll have a search for one that I’ve used a lot for my own local place history and in
knowing the title you just type in the title name and click find.
It’ll then bring up a list of results that match that search but the first one is the
book that I was after, Canberra following Griffin which is a really good history of
the early development of Canberra.
On a record such as this there’s already some things you can start to explore further
with.
Looking at these subject headings will effectively be links to groups of items on that same subject
so even if you find just one item that you think is going to be useful that’s the way
to then look at the subject headings, it has to find what else is on that same subject.
So again if you get stuck, just finding one item of use is really the best way to get
into things.
Another simple way to search is by keyword which is probably the broadest way to search
so I’ll have another go at that as an example.
The simplest way is just the placename that you’re interested in and history.
This is going to get a lot of different results but there are ways to narrow things down into
things that are more useful for you.
If you get too much to begin with you can use things such as these narrow search options,
just select just a particular format within that great range of things that we’ve been
talking about.
If you just want to have a look at things that are online and easy to see rather than
print materials or again those subject headings to see in this large result what are the related
subjects and by clicking on these you’ll get into those little smaller groups of items
that may be a bit easier to comprehend.
You can also arrange your search results in different ways.
The date oldest to newest is probably the best, particularly if you’re looking at
things such as historical books but if can also break up what you’re looking at by
date as well.
So don’t be put off by perhaps getting too many things in the first result, there are
all sorts of different ways that you can then break down that large list of items so things
may be a little bit more specific for you.
So these are examples of where we’ve digitised the map, the book, the oral history recording
that you may be looking at.
Things that are viewable online will have this icon on the left to click on and that
will then take you into the actual digitised view of the book where you can effectively
then read the book as it were in front of you.
To search for general works about the history of a place a good way to use is the browse
function.
You can’t browse a book yourself in a Library collection but you can browse lists of books
that have a catalogue.
So I’m going to the Browse alphabetically option, select what you want to browse subjects
and then type in a subject and for local histories the best format to follow is the placename,
the state and history.
So there you can see how it’s already starting to bring up that browse option.
By clicking on the top one you’ll see this kind of arranged list of subject headings
and by clicking on one of them you’ll get to the actual records of the books that match
that heading.
So always try that simple format of placename, state and history as the best way to get started.
In searching for a placename if the first result doesn’t get too much then think about
searching a bit broader for that same area such as think about searching for the region
rather than the actual placename itself.
You may find that there are items that are a little bit broadly discovered rather than
just under that one location.
Or think of a nearby placename or a shire name or the next neighbouring town as other
ways to get to perhaps some material about the particular item place that you want to
have a look at.
But this basic structure is the one to use, the placename, the state as an abbreviation
and history as a subject to look for.
You can also search for personal names such as a significant individual or your own family
member perhaps or family name and also look for property names.
If we can try one that we’ve had a look at before and that’s actually the item that
I showed you, some of those station books and you can see other things related to that
station name you're looking for.
While history is perhaps the best subject to be looking for from the start there are
all sorts of other subject headings that may be useful for finding out about the history
of a place, things such as city planning, description, travel, genealogy and social
life.
So using that same structure of placename, state and a subject, something like social
life and customs will bring up another grouping of things that may be useful to find out about
the history of that place.
But some basic advice on using the catalogue is to be patient, be persistent, think laterally
if the first result you get doesn’t get something that you want and if you find a
thing that is a match for what you want explore further from there through those subject headings.
There is a help page on the catalogue with tips for using the catalogue and also various
how-to videos that can be used to actually show how to search through our catalogue.So
I’ll just get back to our presentation.
The key thing in actually using the Library’s resources is to have a National Library card.
While you don’t need a card to search our online catalogue or to view digitised collection
items the card is used to log into our eResources to see that online content and if you come
to the Library building in Canberra, use to request and view items here in the Library
building . To get a Library card, apply online through our website to get a Library card
and we will then post the card out to you.
So once you find what you want what now?
If you're not in Canberra to visit the Library building there are still several ways to access
our collection.
As we’ve said through each of these formats many items are digitised and can be seen online
through our catalogue, almost six million images and we are still digitising more all
the time.
From home the Library card can be used to access eResources, online journals, eBooks
and newspapers online.
While you can’t exactly borrow books yourself from our collection we can loan many of our
books to other libraries through the interlibrary loan service.
If you find something we have in our collection go to your local public library and ask if
they can request an interlibrary loan and the book may be able to be sent there for
you to use.
You can also use our paid copying service called Copies Direct.
Using this you can order copies of items in our collection as digital scans or paper photocopies.
There may be some limits on what can be copied and how you can use it because of copyright,
access conditions on manuscripts and oral histories, and sometimes items may be just
too fragile to copy.
But submit an order for what you want and our copying staff will check all of this and
let you know what is possible.
Of course there is always Trove as I’m hoping many of you may have already used this.
Trove is like an online discovery service that combines the online catalogues of libraries,
archives, museums and galleries across Australia.
It will show you which collecting institution has a particular item so if you find something
in our collection you like search Trove and you may be able to find another library closer
to you that has the same thing.
In looking beyond just the Library for local history you should also be trying your state
library, state archives and a local public library of the place you’re looking at.
These will have many things that we ourselves may not have in our collection.
Also a local historical society is a great resource to try.
These are great sources of local information but as they often have very limited resources
or are staffed by volunteers they may not have as much of an online presence as other
sources.
If you’re able to visit Canberra and come to the Library building to use the collection
here we do operate a little differently to most libraries you may have been to.
Our collection is not all on shelves in a room where you can just browse along yourself.
With 11 million items there are just too many to have in one room to let you wander around
so our collection is kept in what we call closed stacks.
Material needs to be requested by you for us to bring it from these closed stacks to
you to use.
You’ll need a Library card for this, to log into our online catalogue and submit requests
for what you want to see and we then deliver that request material to a reading room for
you to use.
Library cards can also be used to pay for photocopying and printing in the reading rooms.
So you have a taste there of the range of materials of Library collections on the subject
of local history in a range of different formats and different ways to present information
and stories.
We hope you can see beyond just the books, there are many other formats to search and
use when researching the local history of a place and to find the story of that place,
how to use the catalogue, how to use the reading rooms and access the collection from home
and what our services are.
For any queries on using the Library such as searching for material, how to research
a subject, how to get copies or permissions, how to access something you’ve found you
can submit an online enquiry form or a phone call through our Ask a Librarian service and
this is available from our homepage.
We can’t do all your research for you but we can guide you on your search and explain
how to use our collections.
We are here to help you on your research to find the history of your place and the stories
that that place can have.
The Library that we have here is full of such stories to uncover and thank you from both
of us.
Well good afternoon and welcome to the webinar. I'm Andrew Sergeant and I’ve
been a reference librarian here at the NLA since 2000. By the way the image you’re
looking at is of Andy Cunningham and his sisters taken around 1920 probably at the family’s
property, Lanyon. Canberra locals will know the place well.Now the aim of today’s session
will be to show you how using our collections of local and social history in a range of
formats can help paint a richer picture of the lives of your ancestors to fill out the
basic details of dates and places that you may already have from your genealogical research.
Maybe it’ll help you to understand things like why they moved or why they changed jobs
and how they lived. Now there’s a fair bit to cover so I’ll get straight into it. Don’t
forget that you can submit questions to Heather and me during the course of the webinar and
we’ll try to cover at least some of them at the end.Now this isn’t going to be a
history lesson but I thought I’d give you this brief timeline of the history of Canberra
to get things going. As I mentioned a minute ago knowing what happened and when in the
place where your ancestors lived can be really helpful as you try to add flesh to the bare
bones of birth, death and marriage records in your family that you might already have.
Your ancestors may well have been involved in some of these events in some way which
will give you further avenues of investigation. A quick example might be the opening up of
the country to railways where your ancestors like some of mine were railway workers. So
it could be a worthwhile exercise for you to put together your own timeline of the places
you’re investigating even if they’re not very detailed, such as this one. So you can
see this one for Canberra starts with the evidence of indigenous Australian habitation
in this region going back to at least 25,000 years ago found in the Tidbinbilla Nature
Reserve. Several different tribal groups lived around the region, namely the Ngunnawal, Ngambri
and Walgaloo peoples. Now for those interested in indigenous genealogy I’ll show you where
to find a guide shortly that will be a good starting point. So 1820 we have the first
European explorers led by Charles Throsby in several journeys from what’s now Lake
George reaching Molonglo and Murrumbidgee Rivers. In 1824 the first European to actually
purchase land here was Joshua John Moore. He never actually lived here but established
a farm named Canberry. It took him what’s now most of Civic, the ANU and Acton Peninsula.
In the 1830s further farms were established, Palmerville, Pialligo, Yarralumla, Duntroon,
Oaks Estate, Tuggeranong, Lanyon. You can see how some of these names are from long
before the actual capital city of Canberra was established.1845 the first church opened,
St John the Baptist at Reid which is now Canberra’s oldest building. In 1863 the post office was
established. In 1887 the railway from Sydney finally connected through to Queanbeyan. In
1900 a Royal Commission was established prior to federation to decide on a site for the
new national capacity city separate from Sydney and Melbourne. In 1908 the decision was made
by Parliament to locate the capital city at the proposed Canberra site. 1909 the federal
capital territory was created from New South Wales transferring of land to become Commonwealth
Government land. In 1912 an international competition to design the new capital city
was won by American architects, Walter Burley Griffin and his wife, Marion Mahony Griffin.
In 1913 the foundation stone was laid for the city. The first sale of leases of federal
capital territory land was in 1924. In 1927 Parliament moves from Melbourne to Canberra
with the opening of the interim Parliament House and we as the then Commonwealth Parliamentary
Library came with it.Now after the second world war is when we really start to see Canberra
develop into what we have today and apart from what’s on the timeline on the screen
you have things like 1946 the ANU being founded. Woden started to be developed in 1964, Belconnen
in 1966, Tuggeranong in 1973 and Gungahlin in 1991.Now a little bit on what we do. Library’s
role as defined by the National Library of Australia Act 1960 is to ensure that documentary
resources of national significance relating to Australia and the Australian people as
well as significant non-Australian library materials are collected, preserved and made
accessible. In short our mission is to collect, connect and collaborate. Now here’s what
our homepage currently looks like. I’ll click through to the live site and quickly
show you some of the important features to look out for. This is how our home page currently
looks and if you scroll down a bit you’ve got the link to the catalogue for searching
collection material within the Library, you’ve got a link to Trove and to eResources and
I’ll go back into those in a bit more detail later. There’s information under getting
started that’s useful for people who aren’t familiar with the place. The link to get a
library card and if you don’t already have one it’s very well worthwhile getting one
even if you’re not based in Canberra because the card will give you access to electronic
resources.This Ask a Librarian tab, this is currently the preferred way of contacting
the Library during the closedown. If you click through to the enquire now button that will
start up an online form for you to fill in which will come through to us in the reference
section and it’ll then be allocated to the most appropriate section of the Library to
respond to. Also on the homepage right up the top we’ve got lots of dropdown tabs
and under Using the Library you’ll see a lot of information there, research guides,
family history research, link to our learning sessions, information about the reading rooms,
getting copies and more. There’s also much more information under the other tabs too
that you can have a look at later.Okay. Now before I go any further I’d like to point
out our online research guides. You may have seen the link a second ago. From the home
page there’s a link under the Using the Library tab for research guides. These include
many family and local history-related topics and I’ll click through to it now. There
we are, they’re listed alphabetically so you can see the very first aerial photographs,
I’ll mention a bit of those later, lots of family history-related items, one on indigenous
family history that I mentioned, indigenous language collections, the Australian Joint
Copying Project, maps that’ll be very handy for you in a few minutes so lots and lots
of interesting topics. These have been put together by our reference staff and I would
really recommend them to you as a first point of call before you do any new research on
our website. Now I’m going to spend the next little while showing you the variety
of things you can find in our collections through the catalogue to help you fill out
the story of your Canberra ancestors. Before I go any further I should stress that while
this session is about Canberra if you’re not from around these parts you can apply
the same techniques for searching for material in our collections relating to your locality.
I’m also going to mention books and other physical items in the collections but as nobody
can actually get in to see them at the moment I’ll also be showing you what you can access
online through the catalogue, Trove and eResources. Okay, to begin I’m going to show you a few
tips on searching the catalogue. What we’re doing today is really a crossover between
local history and family history so I’ll be doing a little of each.Probably the most
obvious starting point is to search for your particular family’s name and see what comes
up. Many of us might have a family member who’s already given us a head start by publishing
a family history and the Library has thousands of these in our collections, most of which
will be available for interlibrary loan to your local public library if you’re not
a Canberran. If you know of such a book it’s easily found by an author or title search.
My own family is an example.My mum’s cousin published two volumes on the McInnes family.
If any of you out there know any McInneses around this district, especially around Queanbeyan,
then they’re probably my lot. So a search for the words in McInnes family will bring
up these two books. Just quickly go into the catalogue and show
you how I got them. They’re the top two there. As you can see there’s also 40 odd
hits for other works in the collection about McInnes family. Now there’s the two books
there and you can see my very handsome great-great-great-grandfather, Duncan, and his father, Gilbert, the patriarch
of the family. There they are again listed on the catalogue with all these other ones.So
those 40 odd hits are for people who are not my family and therein lies a bit of a hurdle
for you. You may not be looking at the right family at all. We have over 150 entries in
the catalogue for Smith family, for example, so how do you get around checking through
all of these individually on the offchance that one of them has something on your family?
Thankfully there are people out there who have dedicated themselves to helping with
this quandary. They create bibliographies of family histories.In Australia one researcher
in particular, Ralph Reid, embarked on a long-term project that at its conclusion listed over
9,600 family histories that were published in and relevant to Australia with an index
of almost 450,000 surname or title entries and a supplementary listing of related placenames,
and an index of 26,000 surnames listed in selected pioneer registers. Ralph periodically
deposited his work with us on CD-ROMs, each updating the last as well as in print. Now
these aren’t widely held in libraries but we’d be happy to check our copies for you
if you put a query in through our Ask a Librarian service that I showed you earlier.Now what
if your family history hasn’t been published in its own right? The family name might not
appear in a catalogue record but you know that they’ve been long-term residents so
they could well be mentioned somewhere. Well there are locality-specific biographical registers
and indexes often produced by the local genealogical or historical societies such as this one for
Canberra and Queanbeyan produced by HAGSOC. A good search term to use in this case is
the word pioneers. A subject search, you can see that I’ve changed the search method
from the default all fields to subject for the words pioneers Queanbeyan or pioneers
Canberra will bring up a number of examples. This particular one contains 112 pocket biographies
of pioneer families, about a page on each and although their names don’t appear in
the catalogue record there's some of my McInnes at one of the family homes, [Mungula] 14:23,
long ago demolished near what’s now Callum Forest. The men in the family were apparently
very proud of their bikes and rode in local bicycle club competitions. So how do we go
a bit further, for example into where our ancestors lived and how they lived? This is
where we cross back over into the realm of local history. This time I’m going to do
a basic keyword search for the term, Canberra history. You can see I left it on all fields
which is like a keyword search but this results in almost 10,000 hits, far too many to handle.
This search looks for both words, Canberra and history, in all the fields in the record,
title, author, subject, publishing details and any notes fields. This is the broadest
possible search but it will pick up lots of results that won’t be relevant. The default
sorting is by relevance ranking, similar to a search engine which puts those results with
both words together to the top so you may get some good results on your first page but
by the last page a search like this will throw up a lot of meaningless results for you. So
the message is be careful when doing an all fields search. It might work well for some
searches but not for others that incorporate commonly used words.So a good way to narrow
it down straight away is to change the search method to subject and you can see there I’ve
now changed it from all fields to subject and this straight away has the effect of narrowing
it down to just over 1,200 hits. Still a lot, of course.Now you can also sort your results
by date, author or title if relevant. I’ve sorted this list by date, oldest to newest
and you can also use the narrowing options on the right-hand side to further narrow things
down. In this case the format and eResources options might be particularly useful to see
what's been digitised that you can access offsite. Now another way of being more specific
is to use the hot links subject headings in the catalogue record. You can see this example
is quite a few subject headings. These are assigned by catalogue as according to a global
standard called Library of Congress subject headings. The technical librarian speak for
this is controlled vocabulary. You don’t really need to remember that, just remember
that this system allows you to use the standardised term across most library catalogues anywhere
in the world. If you’re in a record like this simply click on the link to see more
on the same subject. Now while it’s a global system it is based on US cataloguing rules
so you’ll need to keep in mind that it contains American terminology, for example it might
use words like ranches instead of farms in the subject headings or railroads for railways
etc. So if you're using subject searches just be aware of that.Now some other things I’d
like to note before I leave this record is cite this link. That’ll generate citations
in three different styles or send it off to endnote which is very handy if you’re creating
a bibliography or writing an article. You can email or print the pages as well, of course.
The add to favourites link - when you logged in with your card this will let you keep and
sort as many catalogue records as you want to indefinitely. That way you can come back
to them any time without the need to write down details.The online versions link there
– this one usually goes to a digital version on the publisher’s website which may no
longer exist so you’ll see options there to look in Trove, the Wayback Machine or Google.
In this case the site was the Canberra 100 site that was created for the Canberra Centenary
in 2013 and as the way of things on the internet this site doesn’t exist live anymore but
if you click on the Trove link you go through to the Trove web archive where you’ll actually
get a PDF copy of the book.This field is also where there would be a link to an ebook version
of a publication if it was deposited with us which might be accessible offsite depending
on the access conditions set by the publisher. Now the series field there, if you know the
title of a series, in this case Keys to Canberra’s History, and you wanted to see what else was
published in that series use the advanced search tab up here, select series from the
dropdown menu and type or copy and paste in the name of the series and that will bring
up the rest of the titles in the same series for you.Check the notes field if there is
one for any information about the item that might be important. The similar items box
over at the right can be another good way to discover related results. It’s computer-generated
based on common keywords that it’s found in the records so it may or may not find things
that are actually relevant to your particular search. The find in other libraries link here
drops you straight into Trove and does a search for the item to let you see where else it
might be held.Now I want to show you a bit more on subject searching which is the best
way to locate material if you know what to do rather than just searching for random keywords.
You can simply use combinations of the subject heading terms in the basic catalogue search
screen and change the search method to subject. This will find records that have these terms
just in the subject field which will usually bring up adequate results for you. You might
remember that I did this a little bit earlier when I narrowed down my keyword search for
Canberra history.But to do a more methodical and precise search click on the browse alphabetically
tab. I think the best way to show you this is going to be live so I’ll leave the slides
for a minute and go back to the website, just hope it works. Okay. So there is my results
for Canberra history and as you can see I got 1,200 results. If I click on the browse
alphabetically tab and select subjects and now I start typing in one of those Library
of Congress subject headings you can see it starts wanting to drop me in that place at
that point in the list. You’ll see it’ll start going chronological and then from there
alphabetical and Canberra ACT will have most of the headings. Some of them will have more
than one subheading and the more headings the narrower the subject focus of that work
is going to be. Then you simply click on the previous and next arrows to go back and forward
through the list. You can keep going as far as you want.So try the same for Queanbeyan.
Drops you in at that minute and again it starts off with Queanbeyan Age, various societies
and clubs, again works about them treated as a subject, gives you related notes that
might be useful and then it goes into the geographical again which is where most of
the headings are going to be.Again as I mentioned before, do this for whatever location you’re
interested in so do it for say Bathurst. It starts off with the Bathurst 1000 because
numbers come before letters in this system and then it starts going into alphabetical
listings and people with the name Bathurst. There’s a use instead heading so if you
use the wrong heading it might suggest to you which one is the right one to use. If
I went back and narrowed it down a bit further, Bathurst, NSW, it’s now skipped a few pages
and put me into the headings for Bathurst, the location.So this is a much more methodical
way of using the subject headings and it might give you some subheadings that you wouldn’t
have thought of previously. As I mentioned you’ll sometimes also see things like preferred
headings if you type in the wrong term or see also notes that can give you other related
headings to try. Okay so back out of here for the moment and back to the slides. Here’s
just a few suggested subheadings that you can use, they work for Canberra or Queanbeyan
specifically but of course trialling the same method for whatever location you’re interested
in. There’s many more that you’ll see as you work your way through the catalogue
as well. Of course the larger the place that you’re interested in the more headings
and the more likely you’re going to find something. Here's a list of a few of the subheadings
to try after a geographic location such as Canberra ACT or Bathurst NSW. Again the number
of results you’ll get of course will vary depending on the place you’re interested
in but these are some of the more commonly used ones and you can see a lot of those are
directly relevant to family history research in one way or another. Now I hope you’re
enjoying some of these watercolours that I’ve been throwing into the presentation. This
one’s of an old German settler’s farm on the Molonglo River that’s long gone and
the land is now under Lake Burley-Griffin, not far from here. If you have anyone in the
family who may have farmed along the Molonglo Valley there’s a book that will be a very
handy reference to you. It’s called Lost Houses of the Molonglo Valley, Canberra before
the Federal Capital City published in 2007 so fairly recent.Now in the book the author,
Linda Young, has incorporated a map laying out the locations of the farms covered in
the book or numbers there. You can see Linda has overlaid the old course of the Molonglo
River on top of a modern aerial photo. Canberra locals will know that this is where the Library
is so number 16 is just on the lawns down next to the lake in front of the Library.
Now as it happens the previous owner of that farm was my Irish convict, great-great-great-grandfather,
one John Crinigan. It actually belonged to his second wife, his daughter married a Corkhill
and for the locals, yes, the same Corkhills who now run the landscaping supply business.
So working at the Library it feels like I’ve really actually come back to my roots literally.
Just quickly old Crinigan was an interesting character, he came out from Ireland on the
Waterloo in 1837, was assigned to G T Palmer or Palmerville, now in Ginninderra and then
after marrying and getting his ticket of leave he built a stone hut at what is now Amaroo.
Its foundations have recently been excavated and it’s part of the Canberra History Farm
now.Which brings me onto our pictures collection. We have a large collection of historical and
modern images of Canberra many of which are digitised and available through the catalogue.
If you’re looking for a particular place an easy starting point is simply to type in
a location and limit the search format to picture, for example Tharwa, Lanyon, Tuggeranong,
Griffith, Woden. We also have modern collections, not just historical items, for example by
Loui Seselja that I’ll show you in a minute.Here's a shot from Mt Ainslie. You can clearly see
the Sydney and Melbourne building in the middle distance and Northbourne Avenue coming up
to it with Reid and Braddon developing quite well. This image is from the De Salis, Farrer
and Champion families’ photograph collection. Now you can download any of these low-res
images straight from the catalogue for personal use or study through the Trove viewing screen.
If you click on the thumbnail image it’ll take you through to that and then you can
download them or print them from there.Now with items in formed collections such as this
or photos and albums that have been individually digitised and catalogued you’ll see extra
links in the catalogue record such as this one. There’s a link to the parent record
for the collection as a whole and below that is the link to see all the individual child
records in that collection. So in this case it’s as I say from the De Salis, Farrer
and Champion families’ photograph collection and if you clicked on the collection record
link that will take you to the record for that whole collection. By clicking on the
child link you can see here, here’s the first few child records for that particular
collection. Note over here under your eResources the entire collection has been digitised and
is accessible online. Now I mentioned the modern photographs. There’s one from 1996
shot by our staff photographer, Loui Seselja, who also took the photograph of the Library
that you would have seen at the very beginning of our presentation. Loui worked with us for
several decades and took thousands of photos, a lot of which are now digitised and online
because we own the copyright. Okay, onto our manuscript material. Now the manuscript collections
in the Library contains diaries, letters and notes, unpublished material. For the Canberra
region we also have some quite rare family farm business records. Manuscript materials
are of course usually considered as primary source documents in historical research so
as it says in the slide best place, start with the catalogue using a family name or
maybe a relevant subject heading and limit your search to manuscripts. Some of them will
have online finding aid and I’ll show you that in a second. If there’s no online finding
aid you may need to use our Ask a Librarian service to enquire further. Examples specific
to Canberra and the region include the De Salis family, Cunningham family, the Faithfull
family, Samuel Schmach, Reverend Pierce Galliard Smith or Terrance Aubrey Murray of Yarralumla
which locals will know now as Government House. The Manuscripts Collection is quite complex
and very little of it is digitised or accessible online. It often needs the mediation of expert
members of the Manuscripts team so I’d suggest that in most cases you might need to use that
Ask a Librarian form to make initial enquiries if you’re after anything from this area.I’ll
quickly show you an example of a catalogue record and the accompanying finding aid. So
it’s rather a long record. This is the record for papers of the De Salis family from roughly
1840 through to about 1930. You can see it’s a decent-sized collection, it's 14m of shelf
space which is how archivist and manuscript librarians describe the size of a collection.
There are over 50 boxes and indicates that there are permission requirements for some
of these before you’ll get access to them so again this is where you’d need to contact
Manuscripts via that Ask a Librarian form to go further. But there’s also additional
notes in this case about associated related materials that might be useful.Now you also
see up here the link to the finding aid which will give you a detailed listing of the contents
of each box and you’ll need to refer to this finding aid if you want to order copies
of things or use them in the reading rooms. Here’s what the first part of the finding
aid itself looks like if you click through in that link. Again you can then scroll down
or click on links in the table of contents to get more detailed descriptions of the contents
of each. You’ll see now you’re starting to get box numbers indicated.
Okay. Onto maps. Now our maps collection is the largest in Australia and there are many
maps in the Canberra region. Again the easiest way to begin a search is to use a placename
and limit the search to maps. I’d also suggest that you check our detailed research guides
on maps that I showed you earlier to get the most out of your research and of course use
the Ask a Librarian form to contact our maps staff for further advice.Town maps like this
one show the first title holders of smaller town allotments. This one’s of Queanbeyan
and there’s also a very good one at Braidwood from the same time. These examples also show
dwellings and significant buildings in the towns. Many of the house and buildings on
the Braidwood map are actually still there. Pastoral maps will show squatting or pastoral
runs while parish maps were created by Lands Departments to register all landholdings and
will show more detail, title holders, size of the block, a portion number and a purchase
registration number and other useful geographical information which you can then use to request
historical land title searches of the relevant state or territory Lands Department. Many
of the older maps are now online and these are a great boon to local and family history
and show the occupiers of runs and registered land title holders.Your starting point will
be to locate the parish within a county. If you’re not sure of this you’ll need to
use a gazetteer. For pastoral runs there are gazetteers for each state mostly published
in the 1860s or ‘70s while Gleeson’s List of New South Wales Place Names is the most
comprehensive guide for parish and place names for New South Wales. These are both online
and again see the Australian maps for family history research guide for links and more
information while in Wikipedia there’s a very handy article titled Lands Administrative
Divisions of Australia that lists all the land divisions state by state. We also have
a terrific collection of real estate sales plans advertising subdivisions from the late
1800s to the early 1900s. This one’s of Ainslie of 1927. For 20th century research
we also hold a huge collection of aerial photos, I think from memory starting in the 1920s.
So again try a catalogue search for a place name plus the word aerial and limit the format
to maps. Now I’ll quickly show you what I meant about pastoral maps versus parish
maps. Here’s the section of a pastoral map for New South Wales and part of Queensland
that I’ve zoomed in to show the part covering the Canberra region. Now as you can see there’s
not a lot of detail. It’s good for putting a landholding to the larger geographical context,
though. So parish maps are probably going to be of more use to most of you.Here's an
example of the catalogue record for a map of the parish of Goorooyarroo in the County
of Murray near Queanbeyan. This is what it looks like when I click on the thumbnail to
go through to the Trove viewer and when I zoomed in to look at more detail what do I
find but my old ex-convict ancestor, John Crinigan. Officialdom always had trouble spelling
his name, probably the thick Irish accent that he had but that’s definitely him and
as you can see he’s holding a few parcels of land there right next to a larger block
that was assigned to his former master, G T Palmer.So that really says something I think
about how Australia developed into an egalitarian society when an ex-convict could end up owning
land right next door to his former master. I also found lots of other family names on
this map including my McInneses and others that we’re related to through marriage like
the Bing Lees, Southhalls, Rowleys and others. So these maps can be a real goldmine of information
for family historians. Okay, I’ll move on to oral histories. Now oral histories in the
National Library may not necessarily be the first thing that may come to mind but our
oral history and folklore collection is a rich and deep source that is increasingly
easy to access as it is being digitised and made available as audio files through the
catalogue. There are several Canberra-related oral history collections including those listed
here, many of them done by local farming families such as the Oldfields, the De Salis family,
the Southalls, Cotters, the Jeffreys as well as many by politicians, senior public servants
and ordinary citizens.So for those that have been digitised there will be a link to listen
to the audio. You should also look out for the timed notation at the side if available
and some have a printed transcript that is keyword searchable and linked directly to
the audio which is a real advantage. Oral histories that haven’t been digitised or
have restricted access conditions are accessed in the Special Collections Reading Room. To
find more in the catalogue use audio as a search limit.Now you will need to be aware
of permissions attached to the oral history that you wish to use. These conditions will
vary so check the catalogue record carefully and also use the parent child limits that
I mentioned before to go from collection level records to the individual interviews. Once
again contact the oral history staff for advice via that Ask a Librarian form.Now here’s
just a sample of what you can hear. I hope it’s going to work for us, I’ll click
through to it. This is a small portion of Mr Oswald Woodger interviewed in 1971 whose
father had the first petrol station in Kingston. He remembers the start of the Fishwick industrial
area and early businesses so I’ll click on the Listen online. I’ve read all the
terms and conditions and accept them and here you can see now you’ve got your timed transcripts.
I think I’ll scroll down a bit and might go with that one.“That, that place which
I've just mentioned was known as the Garden City Service Station and the recent name I
don't think anybody else could get the name but how-, however. Well, I was in the business
for a few years until 1931 until the depression hit everybody of course. And my o-, my father
and my uncle, Mr Kalthore, and a few other people who were interested in these businesses,
they lost their capital and, and eventually they were wound up I think and leased out
to other people. From there, my father thought that I –“Okay, that’s probably enough
of that, you can listen to more later, of course.Okay, quickly on to our eclectic collection
of ephemera. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, ephemera are transient things that are
often not intended to last, postcards, menus, pamphlets, tickets, invitations, programs,
catalogues, greeting cards, timetables, flyers, orders of service, stickers, badges, bookmarks,
trade cards and even plain old junk mail we’ve got. For Canberra this includes things like
federation and the founding of the city and their centenaries, advertising material, area
guides, booklets, postcards, posters, t-shirts. You can also look for ephemera from businesses,
organisations, societies etc. For example here we’ve got the Hotel Canberra, Canberra
Theatre, Canberra Rep, The Canberra Philharmonic Society, Canberra Show, the Grammar School,
Canberra Golf Club.So if your family were involved in any events or were members of
societies you could find little treasures of information that you just won’t get with
other formats. A simple way to find this material is just to use the words Canberra or your
location and ephemera and a basic search. I’ll click through and just show you an
example. So I’ve searched a keyword search for Canberra ephemera and now if I restrict
it to just NLA digital material to see what’s online that anybody can access and here’s
the laying of the foundation stone in 1913. There’s the catalogue record for it. Again
there's the formal subject heading, printed ephemera of Australia which is very broad
which is why in this case it’s probably more precise to actually use a keyword search
with a location and the word ephemera.If I click on the thumbnail and go browse this
collection this brings up the items within that particular collection. You can see there’s
a few there. This one here has eight children or eight pages within it and there it is,
the programme in all its glory. If I scroll on a bit further see if I can pick it up.
Lady Denman naming the city and of course they weren’t quite used to spelling the
word Canberra yet so it’s spelt with one R all the way through the programme. Okay.
On now to newspapers which of course can be an excellent tool for research. We’re lucky
to have much of Canberra’s past available in Trove but there are also other way access
newspapers. We hold a very strong collection of papers relating to the Canberra and southern
New South Wales region as well of course as papers from around Australia in print, on
microfilm and online. With newspapers you might need to be prepared to follow the name
change trail, for example The Queanbeyan Age went through several name changes from 1864
to 1927. It was The Queanbeyan Age and General Advertiser, later it became The Queanbeyan
Age and Queanbeyan Observer. It has now of course virtually disappeared after merging
a few years ago with The Chronicle. Now there’ll be separate catalogue records for each name
change but you’ll see former and later titles in the records to help you navigate your way
through. It’s also important when looking in the catalogue to check the holding section
of the record under the In the Library tab to make sure we actually hold the issue that
you’re after ‘cause there are frequently gaps in our holdings, especially for the 19th
century collection of newspapers.Generally in Trove Australian digitised newspapers cease
at the end of 1954 because copyright still applies after 1955 although we do have The
Canberra Times through to 1995 in Trove. Otherwise there’s very little online in Trove post
1954. You’ll get The Sydney Morning Herald archives which go up to early 1995, you’ll
get those through the eResources portal that I’ll show you in a minute but otherwise
for this period you’ll need to go to microfilm until from the 1990s onwards you can go into
things like Newsbank through eResources which is available from home. So it’s good to
be aware of that gap between when Trove at the beginning of the online newspaper databases
when manual searching and microfilms or even print was necessary. But don’t forget if
you’re not Canberra-based microfilms can be sent to your local public library via an
interlibrary loan. We run regular learning sessions about newspapers using all of the
different formats as well as a Trove newspaper session so I won’t do too much more on newspapers
now. Speaking of Trove I’m betting that most of you will be familiar with Trove to
some degree especially with the newspaper zone. Again I’ll only briefly touch on this
because it can be a whole session in itself. Once again we do run regular sessions on Trove
that you should keep an eye out for. Something that catches a lot of people out on Trove
is that while it’s hosted by the NLA it’s actually a collaborative national project
with contributions from hundreds of libraries, museums, archives and other cultural collecting
institutions around Australia. So look at it like a collection of collections and if
you find something in Trove that you want to reproduce you’ll need to approach the
institution that holds the original material. If it’s not ours we can’t give you permission
to use it. You don’t need a library card to use Trove but you can create your own Trove
account so you get extra features. Don’t forget that it is more than just newspapers,
it lists books, journals, manuscripts, government gazettes, pictures, maps, audio, archived
websites, lists and tags created by other users. You can also restrict your searches
to only online material. Now just quickly here's a couple of results from a search of
the newspapers from my old convict forebear, John Crinigan, to show those of you who may
not be familiar with Trove and how the newspapers look.Now here’s the results after I searched
for the phrase, John Crinigan. You’ll see there’s an article about the remains of
his stone hut in Amaroo, a couple of entries in the New South Wales government gazettes,
there’s six results altogether for that, mostly about contract tenders that he’d
submitted. There's about 34 results for newspaper articles. If I go to the newspapers here he
is in the Queanbeyan Magistrate’s Court in 1863 on charges of assault. Now the original
newspaper wasn’t very well printed unfortunately so the scan’s a little blurry but you might
be able to make out some of it about a pub called Woodman’s Inn where there was singing
and dancing going on and he burst into the room and let one of the singers and dancers
have a bit of a mouthful of how badly he was doing and it turned out into a bit of a melee.
So he was fined one pound and the magistrate said that at his age – he would have been
about 44 by then – he should have known better. Here he is in 1868 on slightly less
serious charges of breaching the Diseases in Sheep Act. The charge was withdrawn but
he had to pay the inspector’s expenses of 10 shillings. There’s a few more instances
where John gets on the wrong side of the authorities. But by the time we see his death notice in
1899 he was now a man of sterling character and held in the highest esteem by all classes
in the community. No mention of his convict past or his brushes with the law. So it seems
like even then you couldn’t believe everything you read in the papers.Okay, onto briefly
our eResources portal. So this is where you come for access to licensed subscription-based
electronic resources such as eBooks, full text journal databases, historical and current
newspaper databases like Gale NewsVault, The London Times archive, NewsBank, it has links
to other websites and genealogy databases, Ancestry and Find My Past. Now 80% of these
resources are accessible offsite either as free websites or through your NLA card which
is another reason to get one if you haven’t done so already.With the Library being closed
at the moment the eResources portal will be well worth exploring. For those new to the
site I suggest you look at the short video under the help tab to get you going and I’ll
show you that in a second. If you’ve previously used our eResources but not for a few months
you’ll see that it has changed quite a bit. The site is now almost totally keyword searchable
except for things like Ancestry, Find My Past and a couple of others meaning that you don’t
need to search individual databases separately. You can do a keyword search across the whole
site and get results. However you can still navigate around the site like you could previously
to individual resources using the browse eResources tab. Now I’m going to click through to the
live site and give you a very quick look and it’s worked for me. Now again I’d need
to accept the terms and conditions before I can go any further. There's the help tab
with the little video that explains how it all works. Under the browse eResources tab
for those who’ve used it previously there’s the browse by category feature that you might
be most familiar with. If you click on the little plus symbols, gives you narrower topics
within them. So there’s one for Genealogy ACT, not a great deal of stuff in there, I’m
afraid, but there’s a link to Find My Past and other things. You can see the little symbols
next to them indicate the type of resource they are so that is a little globe icon, that’s
just a free website that you don’t need to register for. Find My Past has the library
log which means it’s only accessible within the building. Other things with the gold keys
are what you access through your card. You can also search alphabetically if you know
the name of the database that you’re looking for so if I go to A – I’ll get rid of
Genealogy first – go to A and that lists all the resources beginning with the letter
A. There’s a very large full text journal database called Academic Search Complete covering
a huge range of subjects and again you see the variety of material. There’s a link
to an Ancestry.Okay now I’ll do a very quick keyword search demonstration which shows you
how to search across the site. I’m just going to search for Tuggeranong district.
That’s brought up 206 results which you can narrow down by various methods again,
similar to what we do in the catalogue or Trove and I'm just going to pick that first
one there, Tuggeranong town that never was. It was published in the Canberra Historical
Journal which of course we have in print in the collections but this way you can get straight
to it in full text and there it is. From here you can of course download onto your device
or print the article out. There is what Walter Burley Griffin envisaged for Tuggeranong,
it was going to be a military [unclear] 55:41 which never eventuated. Now again I just want
to stress that there’s much in the eResources portal on all sorts of subjects and again
you can read eBooks or download full text articles from offsite if you’re logged in
with a card. Ancestry and Find My Past will have a lot of the records that are otherwise
normally available in the building in our family history area. These will include things
like records for births and baptisms, marriages and divorces, deaths and burials, inquests
and probate records, directories and almanacs, land records, electoral rolls, 19th century
census, convict records, immigration and shipping records and more. Now you can access Ancestry
or Find My Past through your own personal subscription. We can’t do that but we can
do limited lookups on our subscription for you if you send us details of the person you’re
interested in via the Ask a Librarian form but please be aware that we can only do up
to an hour of genealogical research for you so please don’t send us lists of names.
We can’t undertake ongoing research on your behalf. Now a final word on getting copies
of our wonderful collection material. Firstly if your local public library is still open
they may be able to get books or microfilms from our collections or even elsewhere in
Australia. They do that via the interlibrary loan system. There’s usually a fee for this
service so ask your library to arrange this and they’ll tell you whatever fees are involved.
Instead of borrowing you can of course look for second-hand copies of books on the internet
via one of the many bookseller sites out there. I can suggest a site called Books and Collectibles
where many Australian booksellers list their stock and a site called Via Library for international
searches which also covers the Australian sites. Our Copies Direct service is another
alternative. Use it to buy copies of our collection material that you can’t copy for yourself,
for example most special collection items or if you need higher resolution images or
of course material from our general collections if you can’t borrow it. Most things can
be copied within copyright allowances and permissions and exemptions may apply for some
purposes such as research and study.This is the Copies Direct page, there’s a link to
it at the very bottom of our home page. You can see to start an order you can click on
that describe the item cartouche and it will start up a blank order form that you fill
in but the easiest way to order a copy of something from our collections is to go through
the catalogue record itself. At the bottom of any record click on the order a copy tab
or if you’re in the Trove viewing screen for something use the shopping cart icon on
the left-hand side. The order form will then be populated with the details of the item
automatically which saves you a lot of work and you then complete the form online. A credit
card is required. Now if you’re not sure about copyright check in the copyright status
tab. We also have information on copies and copyright under the Using the Library tab
on our home page that I showed you right at the beginning. If you’re still not sure
or if the record says copyright’s undetermined I’d suggest that you put the order in regardless
and our Copies Direct staff will then contact you if there were any copyright or other issues
to deal with and your credit card would not be debited if they can’t fill the order.
Okay, lastly don’t forget that we’re only one of a number of institutions that will
have materials relating to Canberra’s history. Here’s a list of some of the main ones to
consider with links to their websites. Of course unfortunately all are currently closed
to the public but their sites will have varying degrees of online content to explore. While
I’m at it I know that the societies would welcome new members if you're interested in
joining. HAGSOC, the Heraldry and Genealogy Society of Canberra, has an excellent research
library for members and it also publishes a very useful guide to doing your research
called Family History for Beginners and Beyond which is now into its 16th edition. You don’t
need to be a member to buy it. Again there’s a link to that on their home page. Another
interesting one there that many of you may not be aware of is the Capital History Here
website which has only been going for a couple of years. It has regular articles on Canberra
history, updates on Canberra in the news and hosts a new project called Canberra 100 which
over this year will tell the story of Canberra through 100 objects and that kicked off with
the iconic Canberra red brick. Well that wraps it up for me. Thank you all for staying the
distance with me and I hope it’s been useful to you.
Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining me today.
My name is Aaron and I am a reference librarian here at the National Library of Australia.
Now before we begin I have to start out by saying that I am not an expert in dating photographs
but this talk has been developed with the help of our special collection cataloguers
and I do have a lot of experience in hunting down the right information in our collections.
So what we’re going to be having a look at today, we’re going to have a look at
how you can date photographs that you might have in your own personal collections and
what clues the images might provide to tell you important details about your family history.
So these methods are similar to how research librarians here at the National Library go
about their daily work and some of the ways that you can find out information about the
photos are similar to how the National Library describes and dates photos in our own collections.
So we’ll be having a look at how you can not only find out a little bit about the photos
but we’ll be having a look at how you can find photos in the Library’s collection.
We have an extensive pictures collection and it could contain images perhaps of your family
history, your town’s history, something that’s relevant and interesting to you perhaps,
or some photos that could give you some context about a particular time or location.
So let’s begin, shall we?
First up what is the photo?
I’m going to assume that most of us have an old photo sitting at home somewhere, it
could be black and white, sepia, it could be of some family members or a location that’s
perhaps central to your family story outside in a garden, something like that but perhaps
you want to find out more about that photo.
Hopefully you know a little bit about the photo, perhaps who one of the people in a
group might be or how the photo even came to be in your possession.
Maybe it was from your mother’s family passed down through the generations or perhaps the
photos are in an album.
Knowing who owned that album is a great start to narrow down which side of the family it
is or what the events are likely of.
But that’s not always the case, I suppose.
Identifying individuals is one of the very basic ways that you can start to get an idea
of what the photo is and what it’s about.
Hopefully you know who they are as I said or even better the information has been written
on the photo, as you can see, this photo here.
Doesn’t actually tell us who the individuals are but there is a little bit of writing and
it might give us a starting point to find out where we’re starting from.
However if you don’t have any of that information that’s fine.
If the photographs you have are still a bit of a mystery, don’t worry.
I’m here today to show you a little bit about how to put your detective hat on and
how to discover some of the clues in those family photos you might have.
Alright so let’s begin.
What we might do is just do a little bit of a run-through the history of photography so
having an idea of what the photo is and what the likely age of the photo is going to be
is going to be useful to give us a date range.
So we’ll be mainly exploring 19th century photographs in this talk as they’re older
and they usually tend to be the source of most mystery in a lot of family albums where
the photographer and perhaps the subjects in the photo are no longer with us.
So photography was invented in the 1930s but it wasn’t very common until the 1860s.
Sorry, 1830s and common in the 1860s.
So this does of course mean that you are not likely to find images of your convict ancestors
as they came across in the first fleet but it does start providing us with a clear date
for dating photos.
So photography was common in the ‘60s but hugely expensive and it was largely restricted
to photography studios.
Even individuals who could afford to have a photo taken may have only ever had two or
three photos taken of them in their lifetime.
In the early 1900s the famous Kodak box brownie and celluloid film provided a more affordable
option and we start to see more personal, more intimate photos happening and then continuing
into the 20th century photos become more and more accessible and more popular.
Colour photography, while it’s been around since the ‘40s wasn’t really the norm
until the ‘60s or thereabouts.
So let’s have a look at different types of photos.
So you’ve all seen different types of old photos in different formats, we’ll go through
a couple of those.
This is by no mean an exhaustive list but it might give you an idea of the kind of thing
that we’re looking at.
So first up we have the daguerreotype so very early photographic process, one of the first.
They were first introduced in Europe in 1839 and remained popular for about 20 years.
The photo was usually made on thin copper plate and it gave them this distinct, almost
ghostly mirror-like appearance.
The photos seemed to float.
Being on thin copper surfaces actually meant that the photo and the negative themselves
were very fragile so some of them got easily damaged as you can see in this picture here,
we can just see this ghostly image staring back at us.
Daguerreotypes were usually housed in these hinged frames and they were very precious
things, very expensive things.
They cost around a week’s wage for the average labourer, about a guinea in those times so
something that only those of well-off means could actually afford.
So very precious, very looked after.
Next, moving on, the ambrotype, kind of the same process.
Ambrotypes are a photo on glass instead of copper.
The glass negative was backed in black which then gave us this positive image on the other
side of the glass.
Like the daguerreotypes they were also presented in small hinged cases as we can see here and
they tend to be a little clearer, a little – I don’t know, denser, I guess.
They don’t have that ghostly floating quality like the daguerreotype does.
One thing about ambrotypes, though, they only produced one copy, no duplicates could be
made so each ambrotype is a unique thing, it is an original and no more copies can be
made of it.
They are incredibly fragile.
Next up we have the carte de visite or CDV, they were introduced in 1859 and they became
one of the most common forms of photography in the 19th century and they cost around a
shilling a time.
You’d be very lucky if you had a daguerreotype or an ambrotype at home.
It’s more likely you probably have a carte de visite in your album somewhere.
They tend to be this sepia-toned image and have a fairly standard measurement so 2.5
inches by 4 inches, 6.3 by 10.5cm for those of us who are metric.
As I said they tend to be sepia-toned and they were mounted on thick paper.
They were traded between friends almost like calling cards or collecting cards, I guess.
It's possible to get an approximate date of the carte de visite from the quality and shape
of the card on which they’re mounted.
Early cartes from the 1860s or thereabouts are thin, poor quality and pretty bland in
detail but as the decades roll on they get more and more elaborate, the card gets thicker
and better quality and the borders become a bit fancier.
Carte de visite often include the photographer’s name or the studio in which they were created
which you can see here in this image but something to keep in mind, that if you do have some
carte de visite in your family albums, keep in mind that the subjects were not always
private individuals, it was very popular to collect cartes of famous people, famous actors,
singers, military people, generals, things like that.
So just because you have this image in your family album it doesn’t necessarily mean
that that person is related to you, it might pay to do a little bit of a delve into who
that person might be, especially if they’re wearing ostentatious clothing or high-ranking
military outfits, things like that.
Here are some more examples of some carte de visites, you can see the photographer studios
written on the left and right, most cards.
The one on the left is an example of a hand-coloured card, it’s not colour photography.
Charming but perhaps the hand-colouring could be a little heavy-handed in this instance
but still charming, nonetheless.
Next, similar to a carte de visite is the cabinet card.
Similar in that it’s printed on card but these tend to be larger, include extensive
logos and studio names, things like that.
These become common in the second half of the 1800s.
The cabinet card was large enough to be seen across the room and they were typically displayed
in cabinets or on mantlepieces, things like that.
Could be a bit of a talking point in a room as well.
I particularly like this image.
I have no idea what’s going on but I don’t know whether they’re acting a scene or something,
but it looks amusing anyway.
Moving on, going back to the daguerreotype style of photo here we have the tintype, also
known as the ferrotype and it was widely used during the 1860s and ‘70s.
It lost popularity when higher quality prints came along but did survive into the 20th century,
usually as a carnival novelty kind of thing.
It’s the cheapest photographic option of the time costing as little as three pence
a piece.
It started out in formal studios but later became popular with street and travelling
photographers as they could be ready in only a couple of minutes so we see people from
a broader sample of society being able to afford photos and less staged photos than
we would have seen in old-fashioned studio photography.
Instead of glass or card the image was printed on an iron plate hence the name ferrotype.
No tin was actually used ironically, and they had this characteristic dark, black appearance.
Next we have photo postcards so we’re in the 1900s now, introduced in 1903.
Basically it’s a photographic image printed on photocard stock.
A bit like you might visit somewhere today and pick up a postcard of a stock image this
was a way to personalise your postcard.
So you have the photo on the front of you standing in front of a famous landmark or
even your own house but on the back we’ve got this standard postcard infrastructure.
Perhaps you’ve got some of these in your album and you’re lucky enough to have a
personal message written on the back which is really nice to have and fill out the story
of that photo but it’s okay if you don’t.
So these were heavily, heavily collected, again trading cards or calling cards and were
used as we would call them today souvenirs.
So a few more examples here, the Mountain Grand Pleasure Resort in Warburton, Victoria,
a whole group posing in the garden but then you have another example here of the five
men standing outside the Pig and Whistle Hotel.
I don’t know where it is but looks like it would offer a rip-roaring time.
Again an example of the hand-coloured card here.
So in 1889 the earliest type of photographic film was introduced so film as we know it
today.
The first transparent plastic film was created in the late 1800s but it was very rare prior
to 1900 so the film was initially made from highly flammable nitrocellulose called nitrate
film.
Cellulose acetate or safety film was introduced in 1908 so it took a while to catch on because
the safety film was more expensive but it wasn’t flammable or as flammable so there’s
always a trade-off, I guess.
The first Kodak camera was introduced in 1888 but it wasn’t until 1900 when the box brownie
became available for five shillings that we see roll print really taking off and becoming
an affordable option.
Then of course not long after that the first world war and the following years saw a large
growth in the popularity of roll film.
The availability of cheaper photographic options, we see more amateur photographers.
Casual family photographs became common, again those more intimate family photos rather than
posed and staid-looking photos.
Continuing with the analysis of a photograph as an object, in addition to taking into consideration
the format of the photo it’s worth taking into account the information that can be found
perhaps in or around the photo.
So it could include handwritten text and dates.
So the image on the left here, we have three names of the three people in the photo which
is really handy.
The one on the left, we have information actually written on the photo, probably before it was
developed.
Not as aesthetically pleasing perhaps but it definitely does the job, tells us what
the photo is and where it’s at.
Could be written on the back, preferably and hopefully in a soft pencil and not a Biro.
But if it’s in an album it could be written underneath the photo or in the album as well
so it’s always great when you’ve got some written information.
Like this photo, full of information.
If you can read the handwriting well good luck to you but the information is there.
I’m going to say though with family photos, it’s natural to assume that the written
information is correct and it likely is but you should always be open to the possibility
that the information is incorrect.
Any of you who have even started to scratch the surface of your family history will know
that there is always that family story that’s been passed down as gospel but on a little
bit of closer inspection something just doesn’t add up, dates don’t match, people aren’t
in that place at that time.
It could just be misunderstood information, or someone’s got wires crossed somewhere
but it’s worth keeping that in mind.
So using supporting information that you can find in, on and around the photos, we can
help decipher whether that information is correct.
So some other ways that we can date photos, not just from the type of photo are things
like postal marks.
Perhaps you have one of those photographic postcards that were sent.
Postmarks are a great way so the franking mark on photos can give us an idea.
So we can see in this photo it’s going to George Street in Sydney but it’s been marked
by the post office in Goulburn in New South Wales.
You can also see where the stamp would be fixed there’s another stamp there.
It’s hard to read in this instance but on many of them it is easier to read.
I’m definitely not going to go into stamps right here because we do not have time but
there are many websites online dedicated to dating and deciphering stamps.
Also the Kodak Austral postcard can be dated off the text around where the stamp would
be affixed.
You can see in each example here the kind of format and layout is a little bit different.
The website that is listed down the bottom here, and it will be included in the link
of the YouTube video, it’s a whole forum dedicated to how to date these postcards just
by the writing of Kodak Austral around the edges so that’s another way that we can
get some information out.
Photographers’ imprints.
Now in early photography, being that little bit more expensive it tended to be the realm
of studio photographers.
People would have to go into the studio, sit for the photo, that kind of thing.
These photo studios were shameless advertisers and they more often than not included their
name and their business on their wares.
So we can get a lot from this information.
Unfortunately it doesn’t tell us anything about the sitter or usually doesn’t but
you can find information out about the studio name, the location and possibly a sitter number.
So if the image is sitter number 5 that would indicate it’s very early in this studio’s
career so you could perhaps run a Trove search for the studio name.
You might be able to find out when they opened, when they closed, find out a rough date range
of that studio and then be able to place that photo if you’ve got a sitter number, place
it somewhere in their business chronology.
So as I said doing a Trove search for something like Bond and Co like you can see on the left
here might turn up some interesting results.
So moving on let’s investigate the image.
We’ve looked at the photo as an object but now we’re going to have a look into the
image.
So photographic studios, we were just talking about them, let’s have a look at what they
can tell you.
So close examination of props and the way that subjects are standing can give us an
idea of the date of a photo and where it might have been taken.
Early photography required the subject to stand still for a number of seconds which
can get a little hard if you’re trying to stand there very still for a long time.
So early photographic studios used props so people could steady themselves.
On the left we see a very stiff and staid pose from the two in the photos.
Lady is sitting down, the gentleman is standing up but you can see he's bracing himself on
her chair so he doesn’t wobble all over the place.
Gentleman on the right perhaps taking a bit of a cavalier approach, standing by himself
reading a book but I think he’s doing a pretty good job there.
Studio backgrounds started with very plain backgrounds but with substantial furniture
props so you can see both of these are fairly plain in the background.
The gentleman on the left has a nice table there with barley sugar-turned legs there.
In the following decades however backdrops became more elaborate and the subjects took
on more of a casual pose as photography improved.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s we see more ornate backgrounds so the little girl on the
right here as a kind of Grecian, I don’t know an Etruscan kind of temple in the background,
very fancy.
The gentleman on the left I guess are trying to portray that they’re outdoors.
We can see that there’s grass around them, upping the game of studio photography backdrops.
Now outfits, clothing.
Hopefully everyone in your photo are wearing clothes and dating outfits is a fun way that
we can use to help us date a photo.
It’s not as accurate as some other methods but it can be pretty fun.
Those with a keen eye for detail can accurately pinpoint 19th century and early 20th century
clothing down to within five or 10 years by recognising different components or a particular
look that was in Vogue.
Perhaps the photos you have are of well to-do ancestors who had the means to be able to
keep up with the latest fashions and you have them in their most glamourous attire there,
haute couture.
Photographs during this period were special affairs so the subjects often wore their best
outfits however only those with a good income could keep up with the latest fashion.
Those who were of less well-off means tended to dress less fashionably because they just
didn’t have the money to be constantly updating their wardrobes, they made their own clothes
or when buying new clothes they prioritised practicality over fashion.
Older people in photos were slower to change fashion and tended to hang onto clothes and
it’s also worth noting that if the photograph took place in Australia they may have been
several years behind the fashions of Europe.
But using the fashion of subjects to date photos can provide us with the earliest date
that a photograph might have been taken so let’s have a quick whizz through some fashion
styles and we’ll see if we can spot some of the information we can pick up.
So men’s outfits, it’s only dateable to about a decade or so.
Male modes of dress reflected a more subtle shift.
It usually was things like a subtle shift in tailor, slow-changing features such as
neckwear, fashions in facial hair, that kind of thing and the appearance or loss of certain
garments.
So looking at the gentlemen in the photo they're wearing the same kind of suits you might see
out today with a few tailoring alterations but looking at men’s clothes, look for things
like the cravats, the bowties, the ties even, fob watches, those things tended to come in
and out of fashion and change and are more accurate ways of dating male fashion because
these were easier to update rather than buying a whole suit.
Dating female attire is a little easier because women’s dress went through a succession
of more distinct changes and more dateable styles through the 19th and early 20th centuries,
especially around things like the changing silhouette formed by corsets, bustles, crinolines,
those kinds of things.
In addition to the silhouette things like sleeves, dress length, they can give us another
place to start our dating process.
For 20th century dress length most importantly and I will say always judge dating the fashion
in a photo by the younger women in a photo if possible.
Older people as I said tended to be more conservative, they tended to hang onto things for longer
and the younger people, if they could afford it, tended to be more on top of what was fashionable
at the time.
Children’s dress echoed adult clothing for the most part but it did follow some of its
own conventions but it can be a little more difficult to pinpoint precisely.
That being said it’s still possible to gain a reasonable date range from a photo, especially
combined with other dating methods.
Keep in mind though that up until the early 1920s dresses were still the standard uniform
for young boys and girls alike so if you have a photo that you think might be from that
period of a younger person you may not automatically be able to presume gender just by the fact
that they’re wearing a dress.
So very quickly I’m going to run through a couple of decades starting in the 1850s
to see how fashion evolved and pick up on some of the key styles that you might be able
to find to help you pinpoint a date and therefore be able to perhaps put a person in a particular
photo at a particular time.
So for gentlemen take note of things like neck wear, facial hair, width of lapels, buttons.
For female fashion take note of the silhouette, if they’re wearing crinolines, bustles,
the sleeve shape, the waist height, hair length and the skirt length as well.
So 1850s for gentlemen facial hair was generally in, definitely for older gentlemen.
The man on the right is a little bit younger.
But you can see these big boxy coats, they’re both wearing a very similar style of coat,
very popular in the 1850s for gentlemen.
For women crinoline so the hooped skirts creating that big full Victorian look, very common.
So too was this over the shoulder shawl-looking style.
1860s, whiskers very much the fashion, clean-shaven faces very, very rare.
This big bushy look was very much in.
You can see also the ladies here wearing their crinoline skirts as well.
So the 1860s for women, the crinoline again still very dominant, the style hasn’t changed
much from the 1850s.
Moving on for gentlemen, side whiskers become shorter but the mutton chop was still very
much in.
The gentlemen on the left a little bit older with mighty mutton chops.
The gentleman on the right here, bit younger but you can still see he’s got that style
happening as well.
For the ladies, more elaborate ornamentation started appearing on dresses.
This coincided with the introduction of the sewing machine, making it more economical
to introduce more elaborate designs into these dresses.
The 1880s, whiskers again dropping in popularity.
The gentleman on the left clean-shaven but the gentleman on the right still with this
big bushy beard.
Would not look out of place perhaps in Melbourne or Sydney these days, that look, I don’t
think.
In the 1880s for women the bustle was very popular, that padded undergarment that gave
the dress that very distinct flow out the back.
That was very much the style at the time.
So the 1890s, many men embraced the walrus moustache.
You can see here both walrus moustaches in varying degrees of evolution but you can see
the neck tie they’re wearing, almost a cravat, almost a very widely tied tie and their mode
of dress is very similar despite the obvious age gap we have here.
In the 1890s for women hourglass-shape silhouettes start to emerge with corsets becoming more
and more popular.
1900s, collars very, very high.
At the beginning of the 1900s collars were very high but as the decade progressed collars
got lower and lower.
For women the 1900s, very early 1900s are more – I don’t know, perhaps a more feminine
style with more lace and floral and things like that start to appear.
1910s so just before the war, clean-shaven faces were back in fashion and especially
post-war clean-shaven faces definitely in fashion.
Hair very short, very neatly trimmed.
For women in the 1910s more elaborate outfits so the early 1910s we’re talking the Titanic,
that kind of era, lace flowing but as the decade progressed and of course the war and
after the war, dresses became plainer, very much practical during and after the war.
In the 1920s men’s fashion started to relax, suits still very much the go but fashion relaxing,
hair still short and we start to see this introduction of the fedora look, the classic
1920s look.
For women outfits became less fitted and we start seeing shorter hair in women as well
and skirts getting shorter as well.
The 1930s, fedora hats definitely the hat of choice, hair still very neatly cropped
but the tie is now very much more aligned with how we would wear ties these days, smaller
knot, more conservative, I guess.
The 1930s for women so skirts become longer again and the waistline returning to a normal
waist position.
We also see the kind of iconic cloche hat here very much coming into style at that time.
So that’s a very, very quick visual journey from 1850 through to 1930, it is not a comprehensive
overview of fashions at that time but hopefully it might give you a little bit of an example
on how you can start dating fashion.
Something else so we’ve got the fashion but of course hairstyles.
With gentlemen facial hair tended to come in and out of fashion so you could date it
by that.
For women the hairstyle changes were much more noticeable so there are a number of resources
both in the Library and on the wider internet to put a chronological order on different
types of hairstyles throughout Australia, Britain, United States, things like that so
have a look online for those and you can try and match sample styles to a hairstyle you
might see.
Age is another way that we can date photos so not the age of the photo but the age of
people within the photo so you can usually distinguish different generations in a photo,
grandparents, parents, children and oftentimes the children are arranged in age order which
is sometimes the height order but I’m sure you might know in your own family that’s
not necessarily the case.
So determining the age can be difficult just by going off the subjects’ appearance alone.
Also keep in mind depending on the time period we’re looking at and keeping in mind the
family’s income and their I guess we would say societal position, I guess, people of
less well-off means may look a lot older than they were, having to work in factories and
in the fields rather than people who were more well off and didn’t have that quite
as the manual labour side of things so that’s something to take into account as well.
Also if you know an individual in the photo and you know their - even a vague age range,
perhaps when they died or how old they are now you can count back to what approximate
age they might have been in that photo as well.
Weddings, who doesn’t love a wedding?
Weddings are popular occasions for photos, were and still are, of course and they are
a real treasure to have in the family photo album.
Wedding photos can help us identify individuals or refine a date range, especially if you’ve
delved into your family history research and are kind of aware of who may have got married,
when and where.
In the mid-1800s the royal brides popularised the white wedding dress which would go on
to become the staple in wedding photos.
It also became a bit of an indicator of the class in inverted commas of the bride in question,
how fancy was it?
How close to the actual royal wedding dress was it?
As we get into the later 19th century women tended to get married – those who couldn’t
afford a white wedding dress tended to get married in their best dress which could be
of any colour, it could be something that could be repurposed for their Sunday best,
other parties, things like that.
It wasn’t uncommon for women to get married in their going away outfits so they could
have the wedding and leave straight away on their honeymoon.
So having a look at these images you can see very different, we have a black dress on the
left, a white dress on the right but you can date things like bouquets, veils, what flowers
were in fashion when so these photos are a little bit later.
As I said wedding dresses were very much informed by inverted commas high society, the royal
brides so if you have a photo you think is from around a particular area have a look
to see which royal brides got married, see if a dress matches that and you might be able
to place a broad date.
Military.
I am not going into depth about military uniforms and insignia, do not have time for that today,
unfortunately but we do have other webinars here at the Library that do go into that a
little bit more but dating military photos can have fairly precise results.
So determining which armed conflict can help narrow down a date range and then by extension
which family relations were likely to have served in that particular conflict and who
that particular subject might be.
So the colourful uniforms of the colonial forces so the red coat look were replaced
in 1903 or thereabouts with the standardised pattern khaki, the drab olive, and new badges
and buttons were used to distinguish regiments and corps and of course the iconic slouch
that was included as head gear as well.
The Australian War Memorial has some great blogs on dating features of uniforms including
nurses’ uniforms from different periods and we’ll include the links to those blogs
beneath the YouTube video of today’s recording as well.
So while fashion will not provide you with a definitive date it is another important
clue to establishing a realistic timeframe of when a photo might be taken.
So that’s the people in the photo.
What else is in the image?
So having covered what the subjects in the image are wearing let’s turn our attention
to what’s in the background so there are tons of details you can get from the background
of the photo.
So perhaps you’ve got a series of photos in albums taken at the same place or of the
same family.
You will get to know certain locations, perhaps it’s a garden, perhaps it’s a family estate
that’s changed or been added to or burnt down and rebuilt, things like that, gardens,
trees, you can get a lot from that.
So let’s look at the buildings in the photo so building architecture.
So looking at the exterior of a house can give us clues to when it was built, of course.
So on this slide is a very broad overview of the kind of architectural periods in Australia.
There are a range of useful resources around architecture, again the National Library has
webinars online devoted to dating your house and other buildings.
But comparing when the building might have been built can again give us that earliest
date a photo might have been taken.
There is a link included in this slide, it will be included in YouTube as well.
Wikipedia gets a lot of bad press but this particular page has quite an exhaustive list
of architectural styles and substyles throughout Australian history for both private residential
dwellings and public buildings as well, it is a very useful resource.
Motor vehicles.
So getting a car was a source of pride for many families and often a good excuse to take
some family photos next to the brand new car.
It’s still a thing today.
So identifying the model of car, the year of the car can give us a good starting point
for when the photo might have been taken.
It might also give you some interesting insights in your family as well, how much did this
car cost?
Is it bought new?
Is it likely second-hand?
Was it a common item at the time or perhaps your family was the first family in town to
get a motor car.
Now that would have been exciting.
So not only identifying the model of car, the type of car but also the number plate
of a car as well.
So to confirm the date, if you can make out the number plate you can find out which state
it was registered in and what the style was at the time for those number plates.
So there’s a number of online resources so this is Wikipedia again, it shows you examples
of all the states’ different historic number plates, the current ones, the Victorian number
plates.
I remember them being green when I was a kid, now they’re blue.
New South Wales yellow, now they’re black or you can get all different types of styles.
Knowing those types of things can help you pinpoint when that car might have been bought
or the photo taken.
Alright, building signs.
So we’ve had a look at the private spaces, we’ve looked at houses, family albums, things
like that but chances are some of your family albums might include snapshots of town or
a street, things like that.
So moving into that public sphere we can get a bit of an idea of the times again.
So most streets, high streets might include building signs, billboards, things like that
so it can not only help identify a particular town if that’s in question but a date as
well.
So building and business signs will indicate which businesses were operating when and where
at the time of the photo so what you can do is search for a business name in Trove, do
a wider Trove search or perhaps do a Trove search for digital newspapers and help you
find advertisements from that business in a particular timeframe or perhaps you’ll
find a business that the photo’s taken in one part of town but you might find that in
1920 the business moved to another part of town so you can gauge your photo’s date
range from there as well.
Now the next thing, telegraph poles.
Now this was something completely new to me before I was looking at this webinar.
It’s a unique dating method but again one that shocked me.
Poles and wires can give us a bit of an idea of when a photo was taken so Australia used
a number of different telegraph poles throughout history so their value is greatest from the
period from 1880 through to about 1920.
Since before 1880 wires were rare and after the 1920s cars tend to be a better dating
guide.
So the first step in dating a pole is to identify the route it took and what service it most
likely provided.
So wires were erected at different times for telegraphs, telephones, electrical distribution,
high-voltage transmission and tram rounds.
In the case of telegraph routes the styles changed significantly, you can see here on
the left.
But once erected the pole routes changed very little so only an earliest possible date can
be established on these.
Let's go back and have a look at the broader streetscapes here so we’ve got building
signs, we’ve got telegraph poles here, we’ve got vehicles so knowing specific town or street
will provide of course the most accurate results but I’ve got a quick example here of how
we can see the changes throughout the decades that we can pick up on through different photos
from different eras.
So this is a range of photos showing Elizabeth Street in Sydney so the first one is from
1911 so that’s the one we have on the screen here.
We’ve got horse and carts, we have tramlines - you can just see a tram way up in the back
distance but there’s not many - telegraph poles everywhere and you can even tell by
the style of dress about what time period we’re looking at here.
If we move thorough to the next image we have Elizabeth Street but in the 1930s so we still
have tram tracks but there are many, many more trams here, there are motorcars where
there were none before.
You can just see turning around the corner about midway in the image we have horse and
cart so it’s still around but not nearly as much as the image we were looking at just
before.
So of course it’s a long street so we’re going to have some different perspectives
but same street, different styles.
So let’s move on another 20 years in the 1950s.
So motorcars very much the go here, you can see a double-decker bus up the back, no horse
and carts, no trams but it’s also very easy to see female fashion in this image as well
so again going back to dating photos by fashion are going to come into play here as well.
Let's jump forward a large amount to 1986 so colour photography, whacko.
So it is in colour so popular in the ‘60s and thereafter, many more cars so again you
can see number plates very clearly here.
Building signs.
You might just be able to make out on the Davis Armstrong sign top middle, you can see
a telephone number.
So knowing when telephone numbers changed into longer digits can also be a useful way
to date the age of a photograph.
So I know that was a big jump but we can see how the same street has changed very much
over time.
So other less common things you could use to date photos would be things like railways
and trains, did that line run through there at that time?
Is that line now closed?
What type of engine is it?
Railway gauge even, things like that.
Ships, style of ships change, I guess so we have ferries here, the wharf in Hobart, we
have a cat picture here.
You can’t get on the internet without seeing a picture of a cat.
But you have a zoomed-in image here showing this trading vessel here with the decorative
bow on it with the little tender next to it, can give us an idea of the time we’re looking
at here.
Different events are also going to be helpful so the one on the left is the Sydney Harbour
Bridge opening ceremony so if there’s a picture of that in an album you could date
the photos around it in that same era.
We have images of crowds greeting the Queen when she arrived in 1954 so using images of
public figures can be useful so we’ve got a young-looking Queen Elizabeth here so public
figures will have many portraits of them so you can gauge how old they are in your photo
to what year that might have been in their life perhaps.
Cricket matches, who was playing, who was playing for a particular team at that time,
and major national events as well.
So I have talked about dating the photos that you already have but perhaps what you might
want to do is you might want to have a look for a particular photo, see if a particular
photo exists of your ancestor or your hometown, something like that so I’m going to run
through a crash course on how to find those things using the resources we have here at
the National Library.
So I’m going to jump through to the National Library of Australia’s homepage which is
NLA.gov.au.
It’s very simple, if you just Google NLA or National Library of Australia we will be
the first result.
So this is our homepage.
If you scroll down you will have our search our collection catalogue bar here so this
is your gateway into the National Library’s collection.
So all you need to do is use keywords so whether it’s your hometown, whether it’s your
family name even or a business just type that in.
We do have a large collection here, we have over a million photos here at the National
Library of Australia but the fact of the matter is we may not have a photo of your great-grandfather
or your great-great-grandfather, it may not happen but what we will have are photographs
from the area that they are from and from the time period in which they lived.
So I'm going to use a personal example so I grew up in Victoria, my home town is Ballarat
so I know that in the catalogue there is not a photo of my great-grandfather but I do know
he lived in Ballarat in the 1930s.
So let’s type in Ballarat as a search example, hit the enter key or the search button, you
will see that in the National Library’s catalogue we have 4,353 results for Ballarat.
I don’t have time to go through all of those as much as I would like but I’m looking
for photographs about what my family’s life might have been like.
Using the narrow search field down on the right-hand side we’re going to narrow down
our results by all online.
This means it doesn’t matter where you are in Australia or overseas you can still access
these things because they have been digitised and I’m also looking for pictures so I’m
going to click the picture button here.
So you can see we’ve gone down to 459.
Still a lot but a bit more manageable.
As I said my great-grandad was living in Ballarat in the 1930s so let’s narrow it down to
that as well.
You can see here narrow search, we’ve narrowed it down to all pictures from the 1930s that
are online on the National Library’s catalogue.
We’ve got 34, I’m okay with 34 pictures.
So you can see the most common result here is from a collection by Frank Hurley, photos
taken between 1910 and 1962 so all of these images are quite familiar to me.
So I can look through.
If we click on the thumbnail which is the image here it will take you directly to the
image in our Trove viewer.
So for those of you familiar with Trove you will know how this works.
For those of you who are not, Trove, you can move the photo around, you can zoom in, the
photos are usually in very high definition so you can zoom in and out.
So this is a photo of Sturt Street looking up to the Ballarat Town Hall here some time
I’d say the late ‘30s perhaps.
So you can date by - I know that some of these buildings are still here, some of them are
very much not.
This building is now a 1960s style bank so I know it’s definitely not after the ‘60s.
You can also download an image from Trove using the functions down here, you can download
a jpeg which is your standard image file and download it directly to your computer which
is very, very useful, hit the back button and then you can continue on through the results
that you’ve got as well.
So that’s one example.
The search results come up because these photos have been tagged with the word Ballarat or
the word Melbourne or the word Sydney.
There will be images that will slip through the search of course so it can help to start
out very, very broad.
So for example you can use the word portrait.
If you use the inverted commas here it will look for things specifically tagged with that
word so 94,000 results for portrait, narrow things down to online and then narrow things
down to picture.
You’re going to get everything that’s tagged with the word portrait.
You can use the narrow down functions to narrow down your area further so perhaps you only
want portraits of actors, narrow it down through there.
So start broad and then narrow it down one by one.
Don’t launch straight in using very specific terms because it’s not likely to yield a
whole lot.
Something that we do have at the National Library that is very useful is the Fairfax
photo collection so there’s about 17,000 negatives documenting newsworthy and historical
events so this is the Fairfax newspaper negative collection.
So a quick search of Fairfax here, we can scroll down again online and then you can
see under series just down the side here we have the Fairfax archive of glass plate negatives
and it's making a liar out of me because we actually have 18,003.
So if we click on the series it will only give you the results that are included in
that series so these are all digitised so we can click through and then we can view
so just for those again who may not have seen that.
So you can click through an image so Don Bradman, click.
In theory, if it wants to work.
There we go.
If we scroll down again, right down the bottom, National Library digitised item and that will
open up for us again when the internet’s going to work.
It’s being a bit slow today.
It will open up into that Trove viewer that we were looking at before.
This is very odd but I guess not that odd for the internet.
So I apologise for that, you cannot always trust the computer.
Try one more time.
Perhaps that’s not going to work.
So searching in our National Library catalogue you can find a lot of things but there are
things that you just may not be able to find.
If you can’t find something in particular in our catalogue broaden your search, the
resources you are using so I would suggest jumping back to our homepage here and then
under the catalogue search bar you can go to Trove.
Again for those of you who are familiar with Trove you know about it, you know that it
is a brilliant resource.
Let’s type in again Ballarat just because why not?
Trove will give you results, not just photos whereas in the National Library’s catalogue
we had about 4,500 we have about 100,000 results here.
Again it’s worth noting to click this available online button here, just run your search again.
This means again that if you are not in the National Library or you’re not where a particular
photo is stored you can still access it.
But you can see here our search for Ballarat online images has returned 3.2 million articles,
84,000 objects, 49,000 photographs, that’s all included in here as well but of course
newspapers, 3.1 million digitised newspapers which is huge.
Again for those of you who know Trove you can click through, you can read individual
newspapers, you can browse different newspapers, things like that.
I won’t get into that, there are many National Library recorded webinars where you can learn
the basics of using Trove and things like digital newspapers as well.
So I’m going to jump back to my PowerPoint and I'm going to call it a day as far as I'm
concerned but are there any questions from anyone?
RENEE: Actually we had many, many questions, Aaron, and really this has been such an engaged
audience.
I’d like to thank everyone who shared their tips and even offered recommendations on resources.
We have a lot of eagle-eyed people among our attendees today who said that they were spotting
other possibilities for identifying the clues in photos including things like street lights,
verandas on houses and many, many things and also the details they saw in ads.
So we have so many detectives in our audience, it’s been an absolute pleasure to answer
your questions.
One question that came up was quite a good one.
It seems that maybe the people aren’t as used to using Trove as usual so thank you
very much for doing that good demonstration.
If you have any more questions about using Trove you can always send us an ask a librarian
enquiry and that goes for any of the questions, any questions that might have popped up for
you today that you’d like a bit more information about.
There is one I’d like to answer before we move to the end, I know that we’re really
pressed for time but I’d just like to go back into the Library’s catalogue and the
question was how can you tell if an image is in copyright or not?
So I’m going to do a search for a portrait, one that I know exists.
I’m just going to start very broadly as Aaron did and these are my results.
They actually should all be digitised materials so what I can do is I can actually click on
any of these.
I think the internet is being very slow, I apologise for that because all of these should
have a thumbnail appear next to the image but for our purposes I can still show you
how to tell if an image is in copyright or not.
We simply click on the title, we go down to the bottom of the catalogue record.
We look at the copyright status tab which is really, really useful and it shows based
on the metrics of the expected creation date that can give a broad guideline on whether
it’s out of copyright or not.
Copyright’s quite a complex legal issue so what we would say is this is an indication
that it is out of copyright but almost all of the images that Aaron has featured today
are out of copyright.
When you view the recording of the webinar if you’d like to do that on Friday you’ll
be able to look at all of the links of the images and find them again in our catalogue.
Alright so let’s now go back to our presentation.
Questions, okay so we’ve mentioned ask a librarian.
This is a time when we always encourage you to ask questions.
You can Google NLA Ask a Librarian and we’ll be happy to get back to you by email.
Also thank you again for joining us today, as I said it’s been a really engaged group.
You might like to join us for upcoming webinars and we have one coming up on Canberra family
history on the 29th of April but in this webinar we’ll also feature techniques for searching
about family history clues in your location really wherever you are in Australia.
In May we have Tracing the History of your House so you can jump online onto the NLA
What’s on page and register for those right now.
Aaron mentioned that we have many previous webinar recordings and these are all ready
for you to watch wherever you are.
You can just Google NLA YouTube and you’ll be able to find our learning playlist.
So thank you again so much for joining us, it’s been a pleasure and until next time
happy researching.
All right, good afternoon everyone. My name is Ella and I work in Reader
Services here at the National Library of Australia. As Ruby mentioned, today I'm
going to go through our enhanced eResources portal with you and I'm going
to be doing this specifically through a research lens. Just turn the camera off...
All right, so my background is in Art Historical research, so it might be the
research romantic in me but I'm very excited to be able to channel my love of study and discovery
into today's session with a few art historical references scattered in
amongst it all. That being said, my hope is that this webinar will be of use to
researchers of all kinds. Not only scholarly independent researchers, but
also those who enjoy learning about their hobbies, passions and interests at
home, and also those who want to use our eResources portal more generally. To give
you an idea of today's session before I start, I plan to use an example research
question as a kind of case study to navigate our eReources portal, giving
you research tips along the way and demonstrating the great value of this
service, which puts a wealth of digital resources at your fingertips. First, a
general introduction to eResources at the Library, and our new improved
eResources portal, which was launched earlier this month on the 2nd of
September. And here's the home page in front of you now. We've worked hard to
design this new portal, which combines previous functionality with new features
that enhance discoverability and make searching easier, more flexible and more
efficient. So if you're one of those few users who indicated they had used that
previous portal you'll notice some of the same features mixed in with some new
and improved ones and I'll go through them all today. Indeed, perhaps the most
exciting new feature of our portal is that you can now easily conduct
full-text searches of many of the e-journals, ebooks and more in our
collection here at the library. This feature is especially great in a
research context, as it means you were drawing from a more very pool of
resources, and this variety can really enrich in
your bibliography and you're learning at large. Now someone who learns best with
visuals, I've put together this very high-tech diagram using a picture from
our collection to demonstrate how I like to think of your resources at the library.
You, the researcher are the diver, quivering with anticipation, planning to
dive into a large and possibly intimidating pool of resources and
content. And eResources is the diving board you can use to guide you smoothly
into this pool. So without further ado, let's dive in. All right, so in terms of
accessing the portal, for those of you who have previously used the library's
eResources, getting to this new portal is much the same. So we've gone to the
NLA's, the Library's, homepage "nla.gov.au". We can scroll down and click this big
eResource box here to take us to the portal. Another great
new feature linking our physical holdings to our digital ones is the
ability to switch from searching for material in the catalog to doing the
same search in eResources. So I'll go through that now so if you were to go
into our catalog again through the nlas homepage, clicking this green catalog
button here, and you were to conduct a search, and click "Find", you're interested in
birds for example, you can then go to this in
"eResources" link, this new link off the top of the page and click that to be taken
to our eResources portal and it will automatically conduct that same search...
So back to the library's home page for those of you who indicated that they
didn't have a library card yet it's very easy to sign up. Simply visit our home
page and click the "Get a Library Card". If you scroll down a little bit it's the
second option on the right here. If you cannot get to the library to pick up
your card, we do offer a complimentary mailing service and we'll send your card
out to you about your residential address to begin your research at home.
All right. So now the moment you've all been waiting for, we'll enter the portal
by clicking this Big eResources box just here. Now one of the new features of
our portal is that you only need to accept the terms and conditions as you
enter the site rather than each individual database, as it was previously.
So this means you can move between databases without that interruption.
So I'll click on this green accept button here to enter the portal and here we are.
So to log in from home, click the link at the upper center of the eResources
page, this one up here in this yellow or golden banner. You'll be redirected to
our catalog to enter your details but will then be taken back to eResources
upon logging in. To log in you just need your user ID, the long number located on
the back of your library card, and your surname. When using our eResources on site,
like I am today, there is no need to log in as you'll automatically be given
access to everything the portal has to offer by clicking the link. So I'm going
to go ahead now and click this link in the upper center in the yellow banner to
log in.
And now, because I am on site here at the Library using one of the Library's
computer, you can see in the upper right corner here it's saying, "Welcome your
location is the National Library of Australia". All right, so now let's talk
through some of the features of the new eResources homepage. You'll notice some
new links in the top banner like the home page over here to the left of the
page. Our eResources page now links directly to our catalogue through this
link and vice-versa so you can jump back and forth easily
between the two. We've also included a link to our "Research Guides" here, and so
you can easily refer to them for research assistance. I constantly refer
to our Research Guides, so I'd really recommend that you have a look. And we've
also got a link to our previous eResources portal, called the eResources
legacy portal. It's important to note that this legacy page will only be
accessible until the 1st of November, so I really encourage you to get familiar
with the new portal as it stands. All right, so now we'll move down to this
larger search box in the center of our page here. If you know what specific
database you are wanting to use, you can use the "Databases A - Z" function and
this function will be something familiar for those of you who have used the old
portal. Click into that now by clicking on that text, and here you can see
they're listed alphabetically, so you can search that way, and it's you're also
able to refine by access level within this feature. So you can see over to the
left here there are three categories outlined for our eResources. Those that are
freely available to anyone over the Internet, the symbol is this little globe.
We've also got "Licensed Resources", which you can access from home with your
Library Card with the set of keys. And we've also got "Onsite Resources" for
which you need to be in the library building, the little NLA building there.
For the purposes of today's session, we will be focusing on freely
accessible and licensed resources, both of which you can use at home to conduct
your research. Looking back at the top of this box again we've also got a
"Publications A - Z" function, so if you have a specific journal or
publication you're wanting to search in, you can do so that way. And we've also
got the help tab here. I'll be coming back to this later, but just a quick look
at the help tab, so I'll go back to search here by clicking the search
button. So as with our previous portal from this
home page you also have the option to conduct an "Advanced search" by clicking
this link here. I'll click on it now so you can see what it looks like. It'll be
quite familiar to you so while you can do this advanced search I much prefer to
do a basic keyword, just keyword search, and then use limiters to refine my results.
So I'll go back. Yeah I find that this method gives me a wealth of relevant
material to work with and takes my reading to places I wouldn't have been
able to identify at the very beginning. Just kind of one of the joys of research
and it's my hope that today's case study will demonstrate this. So speaking of
today's case study, head back into the PowerPoint. Let's get into it, so I can
show you how to use the eResources portal for your research in five easy
steps. Here's the research question I've come up with for today's session.
"Identify and discuss key themes in the work of the 20th century
Australian modernist artist Margaret Preston". All right, so step one. Break down
your topic and identify key words. So to begin it's always a good idea to break
down your question and identify the key words you'll start undertaking your
research with. In looking at this example question, three obvious starting points
come to mind.
Themes, Margaret Preston and Australian modernism. And this is what you can get your
highlighters out and identify those keywords within that initial question. So
it's from here that you can start searching these terms in the
eResources portal to see what you come up with. But here's a bit of keyword search
advice. Keep updating your keywords as you go through your research. Your
research question is only a starting point, as once you begin reading material
you'll find other terms that will be fruitful to search as well. Remember you
can also experiment with combinations of keywords. I must confess as an art
historian this isn't the first time I've looked into Margaret, for Margaret
Preston. So to demonstrate just how the keywords you search might morph and
change over time, here's a sneak peek into how my own search has changed when
researching this artist using eResources. So first off we have Margaret,
Margaret Preston, my first search, and this is sort of a basic beginning using
one of our initial key words identified at the very start of my research. I then
searched "Margaret Preston modernism", combining keywords here to get more
specific results. "Margaret Preston printmaking", combining keywords again,
this time with a new keyword that came up during my research thus far. "Margaret
Preston still-life". Here I am combining keywords again, this time with another
new keyword that came up during my research.
"Margaret Preston Thea Proctor". Again I'm combining keywords here this time
using the name of one of Preston's contemporaries that I found to be
referred to throughout material on Preston. And finally, "Australian
printmaking", a completely new keyword. So different to
that initial list I had, to find information to contextualize the
research I've undertaken so far and to generate new ideas. So you can see the
real variety and change over time with my keyword searching, and although I said
finally, before I said Australian printmaking, I think these keyword
searches could just continue to grow as you're studying. So hopefully this gives
you some idea as to how you can get the most out of the portal, in not just
sticking with your original keywords. They're very useful to get you started,
but can be changed or modified over time to yield more results. And this is one of
the aspects I find most exciting about research, but once you start you soon
find yourself building an intricate web of content and ideas that is just so
infinite and plentiful and exciting. So now we'll move on to actually searching
these keywords in eResources. So step two, use keywords to perform searches in
the portal. So we'll move back to the portal there. So as I mentioned one of
the most exciting features of our new eResources portal is that you can now
conduct full-text searches of many of our databases. So upon searching one of
your initial keywords like "Margaret Preston", you'll get results from across
in many different databases. So I'll type in "Margaret Preston" now. We'll see
there's also an autofill option here. I'll click on this big green search
button to start my search. So again this full text search capability is so great,
because it means you can easily have access to really varied material with
just the one search. So here on the first page of search results we already have
material from a periodical. You can see over here, identified by that text as
well as material from academic journals, identified to the left of these item
records. So at this stage approximately 80% of our online content is full-text
searchable. Hence the variety of results here and
we're working to improve this even more. It's worth noting that to make sure you
can still easily access some of our popular databases which aren't full-text
searchable, we've added direct links to them that will always appear on your
search results page so here, you can see these links down the right-hand side of
the search results page here and no matter what search you do these links
will always remain here on the right. And there's also "Quick Links" to get into
that "Databases A - Z" function and "Publications A to Z" function as well.
All right, so now I'll just quickly open up one of the results to show you how easy
it is to access this material. Let's see, I'm going to choose this second result
here as I can see that the full-text version of this article is available to
me. I know this because it states "Full Text" here on the record, which is
important to take note of, because our portal does also return results for just
citations as well as full text content. And as you can see this text identifying
material as full text comes in a variety of formats depending on what database it
was found through, so you'll see this first one is available in full text, and
it just says "PDF Full Text", whereas this one available through JSTOR says "JSTOR
Full Text", but they mean the same thing. All right, I'm going to open this content
now by clicking on the title here, this link, which will take us through to the
individual item record. I can see all of its details here and I'm getting back to
navigating these individual records a bit later in today's session but just
immediately to access this content quickly I head over to the left of the
page here where you can see this JSTOR full-text and a link just here so I'm
going to click on this link it's going to open up in a new window so it's taken
me through JSTOR through to the JSTOR record and I can
click this "Download PDF" button here so I'm going to click on that now. Accept
these terms and conditions" here, and here we are with our academic journal article
ready for the reading. Let's go through and show you so this is that full text
article. Okay great. So now heading back to our search results...let's move on
to the next step. Step three. Refine your search results. So after
conducting a keyword search you can refine your results using the limiters
to the left of the page. So I'll show you where they are now. You can see this
"Refine Results" bar here if you scroll down there really are a lot of options
available to you to refine those results to best assist your research. Looking for
academic papers? Refine your results to academic journals under "Format", which
will mean you have a more academic pool of resources which is always useful to
maintain the scholarly integrity of your research by using verified content.
Only want to see Australian content? Refine by "Geography" under this tab here.
You can also refine by date range, subject, language and more, and it's
really worth experimenting with these limiters too to see what different
results are suggested. If you are limiting by subject, please note that not
all of our content has been assigned a subject heading quite yet. So getting
back to our research question today, given my research topic, I might like to
see what limiting to the format of academic journals has to offer. So I'll
scroll back up here on the left and check this "Academic Journals" box. My
search will be updated and then I might also add "News" under format, so that I can
see not only valuable academic journal articles, but also equally
valuable newspaper articles, which enrichen your research as primary sources of
information. So I'll check that box here. For more information about primary
sources at the Library, you might like to take a look at our recent blog post
written by our librarian Lisa, titled "From the horse's mouth", which you can
find through the Library's homepage. Getting back to my search results here, it
might also be relevant to see what specifically Australian sources have
written about Preston, given that she's an Australian artist, so I can limit to
"Australia" under this "Geography" tab that I showed you earlier on the left. So I'll
check that box that says "Australia". Okay. It's worth remembering that you can
change what limiters you've applied to your search as you go. So here, having
clicked, "Geography", I can see that I've refined my results to a point where they
just aren't as useful. I'm only returning 14 results, and I can tell that by
looking at the search results one to 10 of 14 up here. And I can see in just having
a quick look through these results here that there's really varying degrees of
relevance. All right, so to get back to more useful results, I can head over to
this current search box on the left of the page here, and I can just uncheck
"Australia" or not uncheck, but cross off Australia here by clicking this "Remove"
button.
So now looking at my search results, I've
got 921 results. If I scroll down, I can see
these results are looking initially a lot more relevant to those previous ones.
So these would be the limiters I would decide to use I think for conducting
this research on Margaret Preston today. And again, if you're ever confused as to
what limiters you have applied, you don't want to scroll through the list you can
go to this current search box and see exactly what keyword you've searched and
what limiters you've applied to this search to get these kinds of results. So
another type of material I'm sure many researchers would like to know how to
find, and general users as well, is ebooks. If I go back and remove my current
limiters, so I'll head over here and click the little cross next to "Academic
Journals" and "News", I can then refine my search by going to the "Format" feature,
clicking "Show more", and then just selecting "ebooks", and clicking this big
green "Update" button. And here we go. A relevant and scholarly publication
published in 2015 to help with my research. And I'll open this up now by
clicking the link the title, entering the item record, I can see cataloging details
here. Heading over to the left of this item record page over here and clicking
the "PDF Full Text" link...
now we have our ebook opening. And there you have it. I now have access to the entirety of this
ebook. You can see over here you can navigate this ebook via its contents or
you can just scroll through to the relevant pages. Not gonna wait for those
individual pages to load though. I'm gonna head back to my results now and
start thinking about the next step. Step four. Organize your content. Just click
back, and back. Now I'm going to uncheck "ebooks" here. And I thought we have good
results under "Academic Journals" as a limiter and "News", so I'm just gonna apply
those limiters again to go back to that those search results that we liked. So
now that I have this refined search I can now start identifying material that
is of interest to me in undertaking my Preston study rather than going into
each record and looking at each individual piece of content as I go, I'm
going to create a small group of saved content before knuckling down to start
reading. To create this smaller curated group of resources, I can click on the
little folder icon to the right of the item record. So I opened this one
previously as an example. I liked the look of it. I want to add it to this little
group, so I had it over here and I click this little manila folder with a "plus" on
it. And just see that's now changed to a full folder. I can see that this second
result is full text, so I click on the folder over here I'm going to read it as
well, and I might save the third one too.
All right, to see all of these saved items together in my personalized list, I
can click on the "Folder View" link up here on the right. And here it is. My very
select group of resources. Now I've done this using the onsite version of
eResources, which logs you in as a general Library user. This means that upon
leaving this Library computer at the end of today's session,
these saved groups will be lost. This doesn't matter so much if you're
planning to do all your research and reading in one go. But if you're anything
like me, it can be fruitful to conduct research and reading over several days
to let the ideas you're learning about really settle in your mind. Luckily, there
is an option to create a specific profile for yourself that will remember
your saved groups and keep them safe for returning to another day. So the profile
that you will need to create to do this is separate to your Library card login.
In fact, it's a profile with EBSCO, the provider with whom we collaborated to
create this enhanced portal. In creating this EBSCO profile, you'll be able to not
only access your saved groups within the Library, across various sessions, but also
remotely, so you can research at home. To create this EBSCO login, simply click on
the sign in to "My EBSCOhost" link which I'll show you here at the top of
the page, and create your profile. I'll now sign in using my profile
details and show you what it looks like.
So I just clicked on that link. It's remembering my details and I'll click
the "Sign in" button here. And so if you haven't got that EBSCO account yet,
you would go down to the bottom of this page and this text says "Don't have an
account? Create one now", and you click that link and enter your details. And
this EBSCO account is free, so I'm just going to click the "Sign in" button here.
So we're now logged in to my profile and this is the part where you can get a bit
creative with how you organize your content. If you're just beginning your
research, you could group all of your chosen material under one more generally
titled titles folder, in this case perhaps Margaret Preston. If you are further
into your research and have started to notice common threads during your
reading, you might like to break them down into those instead. Alternatively, if
you are super organized and are starting your research with an essay structure
already in mind, you could sort your content by paragraph
number. And you can see down here you can add custom folders and that's when you
can give them those custom names and those custom groupings. So being able to
so flexibly save content is a really great feature because it means you can
tailor how you organize your research in a way that best suits the way you think.
And if you'd like further help with this EBSCO folder management, you can click on
the small question mark bubble to learn more. 'll show you where that is. It's
this button at the top of the page and if you hover over that and click it,
it'll take you to EBSCO's really thorough outline and guide as to how you
best manage your custom folders. So I'd recommend you take a look at that.
All right I'll exit out of that now. and I'll go back, all the way back, to my
search results again. And on to step five. Navigate individual records. So now we've
talked about organizing content on a broader level, the collection of content,
let's take a look at how to manage individual pieces of content through
each item record. So again, I do really like this article up here. I'm gonna go
into the item record by clicking on the title. And here we have some
cataloging details and some tools and functions, and I'm going to show you some
of these features now. So over to the right of this item record page we have
the "Tools" bar. The first feature I want to show you, or the first tool I want to
show you, is this "Permalink" option. And permalinks are very important as they
are a guaranteed method of finding your way back to a particular record or page
on the Internet. These are also the links that you should
be using in your bibliography, if you're generating one, as they will provide
access to your future readers. So by clicking this "Permalink" link here, you
can see that I've got this generated permalink that will always just be
associated with this item record. So I can copy and paste that into my
bibliography. To get out of this permalink tool we'll just click this
cross button here.
Move on to another tool, the "Cite" tool. So our eResources portal will generate a variety
of citation styles for you, depending on what you're after. So I'll click on this
link on the right of the page again here, and here we go, the portal has
automatically generated a variety of bibliographic entries. So we've got the
APA, Chicago, Harvard and MLA.
So very useful to use this "Cite" tool when keeping track of all your
references. I'll exit out of this site tool now, by pressing that cross button
again. Alright, just briefly in this Tools bar there's also the option to save the
item record details to your computer, which can also be very useful. And if in
looking at this record you decide you don't actually want it in your folder
anymore, because you'll remember that I saved this one to my folder previously,
there is this "Remove from folder" option here. So there's just one more aspect of
using the portal that I'd like to touch on before wrapping up today, and
that is what you can do to access scholarly material that is not available
online. For example if I was looking for an article in an issue of In print
Journal, published by the Print Council of Australia, I might see in eResources
that the result for this material is just a citation rather than full text
content. in this instance we strongly suggest you also try a search in the
Catalogue for this material, as there are other ways you might be able to get your
hands on this content digitally without visiting the Library. So I'm gonna head
using this "Catalogue" link at the top here, back to the NLA Catalogue page, and I'm
going to search for Imprint here, typing "Imprint" in the keyword search bar here
and clicking "Find".
Right. If I scroll down, I can see the Library does indeed have imprint in its collection,
yes, physical issues published by the Print Council of Australia and I can
then check to see what issues of Imprint are held by entering the Catalogue
record, by clicking the link, the title.
Here we have the catalogue record, and I'll scroll all the way down to the bottom of
the record, and look at the details next to Items or Issues held. Upon seeing the
issue I am after is indeed in the collection,
I can then, subject to any copyright restrictions, place an order for a copy
of the article using the Library's Copies Direct service. I do this by
clicking the "Order a copy" tab, which is up here. So I'll click that now, clicking "Add
to Cart", and following the prompts specifying the details of the article
I'm after. For any questions about our Copies Direct service, please see the
Library's website. Now, heading back to our PowerPoint now. Alright, so as we come
to the end of our session today I hope that by going through these steps with
you, you've been given an idea of how our eResources portal can greatly assist
with your scholarly research. I hope that by using the Margaret Preston research
question as a kind of case study I've shown you how to best navigate and
utilize the portal to find, gather and access a wide variety of content and
material to shape your research and writing. And just to repeat those five
steps that I followed, they were, one, break down your topic and identify
keywords. Two, use keywords to search eResources. Three, refine your results.
Four, organise your content. And five, navigate individual records. Finally, we
know that becoming familiar with our enhanced eResources portal will be a
change, so we've put together a number of help guides and an introductory video to
assist you with navigating this new and improved service. You can find all of
these on the eResources homepage via the "Help" tab, and of course if you ever
need any further assistance, you can always use our Ask a Librarian service.
Thank you for listening and happy researching everyone. Ruby: Great thank you so
much Ella. We've got quite a few questions that have been asked, so we'll
cover those, and if you do have any questions for Ella before the end of the
session, please send them through and we'll work through them. All right, so we've
got um one of the first questions that got asked by Peter and um, Tara also.
Uh, Leanne also asked it. Is is it worth putting in your search results in
quotation marks? For example, putting Margaret Preston in quotation marks?
Ella: I mean you could definitely try that. My instinct is always to go as broad as
possible to begin with, because you just don't know what results you might
accidentally be eliminating by being too specific at the beginning. That's why
rather than recommending you start with an advanced search I recommend starting
with that general keyword search. So I would start without those quotation
marks. Ruby: Yes because using the quotation marks you're searching for those two
words together as a phrase and so if you wanted to narrow it down it could be
useful for a person's name but other general keywords, like Ella said, I think it
is really advisable to to start general if you're getting too many results
that's probably when it's a good idea to look at the quotation marks. Great, so
Loretta asked the question. She's still unsure if all of this that you've
demonstrated today, can be done from home or do we have to be at the Library?
Ella: No the wonderful thing about today's session is everything I've shown you can
be done from home, so you can conduct that research
home. As I mentioned the Library has three categories of eResources, free,
licensed and onsite. And to be honest, the onsite
resources which you can only access in the Library's building, they're not the
bulk of our collection. So the bulk of our collection for eResources is those
freely recent freely available resources and those ones that you can access with
your library card at home. So as long as you've registered with the Library and
you have that Library card with your user ID, you'll be able to do all of this
from home. Ruby: That's it, it should be exactly the same as Ella demonstrated. And
I suppose just touching on onsite resources, Janet noticed that that
Ancestry link came up on the side, so are you able to access Ancestry through the
NLA. Ella: So Ancestry is one of our onsite resources, so you do need to be in the
Library building, due to licensing restrictions, but again if you go to that
"Databases A to Z" feature and you filter by category, by access category, you can
see what is available to you at home and what you will have to come into the
library to use. Ruby: And I should point out with some of those big family history
databases like Ancestry, a lot of public libraries around Australia do provide
access to that so it's worth checking with your local public library to see if
they provide access to that database, as it's very popular. All right our next question is from Jennifer and
she actually has an EBSCO account with another institution so does she need a
separate login to access a separate EBSCO login for our eResources? Ella: No,
don't believe you do, I think you just need the one EBSCO account, for each
individual person, and then you can start categorizing and saving all your content
from a variety of institutions. Ruby: Excellent. And extending from the EBSCO account, Joe
asks is there a time limit to hold material in your profile. Ella: No, there's not,
unless you remove the content from the lists and the folders in your EBSCO
profile account, tthey won't ever go away, so they'll be there forever. Ruby: Great. I've
got just another question, um, someone would like you to list your five steps
again. Ella: Sure. Ruby: This is something we might send out
in the email tomorrow and it will be in the recording but if you could just
list those five steps. Ella: Sure. And I do apologise, I did actually think as I was listing them
in my conclusion just then, that I should have had a PowerPoint slide, because as
scholarly researchers, I'm sure you're all taking notes. Uh, it's not very useful
for you. But I will repeat them now. So step one, break down your topic and
identify your keywords. Step two, use these keywords to search eResources.
Step three, refine your results. Step four, organize your content. And step five,
navigate individual records. Ruby: Excellent. So we do have two more, questions we'll get
to, and if you do have any more we can stick around for a few minutes after to
answer them by text. And we also have as well on the slide there a link to our
Ask a Librarian service, where you can send us your inquiries and we can spend
up to an hour researching them. But the last two, oh, we've got a third one just
slipped in, so I might be, we might be able to get to that as well. We had a
question from Loretta about accessing JSTOR articles, and it sounds like in her
trying to access, them she's hit a paywall and she was wondering how this
would change with her Library card. Ella: Great, so if you are accessing databases
through the eResources portal, that will give you that access. So you need to log
in, if you're at home, like I showed you, through the eResources home page, and
then you'll be able to go to "Databases A to Z", lookup JSTOR and access it
that way, and there won't be any problems with that. Ruby: That's it. I think sometimes,
depending how you, if you say, search Google for an article or something, and
went through that, that's going, that's not going to give you our Library access.
You do very much need to go through that process Ella demonstrated in our eResources portal.
All right, so the next question's from Tara and in your referencing section she
says you, that her students use Harvard for referencing not Harvard Australia. Is
there a way to access this citation style through your site? Ella: No, I don't think
there is but there are plenty of freely available...
sort of free ones like KnightCite that will generate those references for you
once you put in the detail, so I'd recommend you do something [inaudible]...
Ruby: Two quick questions that have just snuck in... Ella: Sure. Ruby: ...that we'll cover. So
Loretta said thank you for answering her question before about JSTOR. Is it the
same for EEBO, which I believe is Early English Books Online. Ella: Yes. So you will
need to log in for early English books online as well through the eResources
portal, as I outlined. Ruby: Yeah. Great and then the last question comes from Robin and
she says, Am I able to research medical research journals" Ella: Okay, so the bulk of
the Library's eResources collection is social sciences focused. Nut what you can
do, is if you have a particular journal title that you want to double check
whether or not we have it in our collection online, go to that
"Publication's A to Z" function on the eResources homepage and you can search it
that way, because we do have some STEM content available online. Ruby: Excellent and I
think it is that process of trying different keywords and search terms and
seeing what we access, because we do provide access to such a large number of
databases and within them there are so many articles that it's definitely just
worth exploring. Great, well thank you so much Ella. Ella: Thank you. Thank you for
listening everyone. Ruby: And thank you everyone for those questions. And we'll
finish up today's session now, so as I showed, we've got an upcoming webinar you
can see on our screen on Ephemera. and if I go back as well, like today, we're
recording our session, if we have recorded quite a number of previous
webinars as well, which are available in our YouTube channel so if you have any
interest in some of the other topics that we've covered in previous webinars,
you can watch those. And we have more upcoming as well if you want to join our
live ones. And again if you have any further questions about our eResources or
any other Library questions, please use our Ask a Librarian service. But
thank you so much for attending today. you will get a feedback survey when you
exit out of today's webinar. We'd really appreciate if you could fill in that
survey and tell us what you think and that survey will also be emailed out
tomorrow with the recording and links and Ella's key points. All right, thank you
everyone and have a good rest of the day.
English
AllLiveWatched
Alright welcome everyone and thank you for joining me today for today's webinar
on Film, Television and Media. So my name is Ruby and I'm a reference librarian
here at the National Library. So this webinar is being broadcast on
Ngunnawal and Nambari country. So i'd like to begin by acknowledging and
celebrating the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay
my respect to elders past present and emerging. This presentation has been
developed by our 2019 Indigenous Graduate, Nicole who joins me today and
will be presenting part of today's webinar. So hopefully you've joined us
today to learn about some film, television and media themed items held
in the National Library's collection, and I'll be talking through the way in which
you can go about accessing these items. So we've aimed this webinar at people
who work in the film, television and media industry and how you can use our
collection in your work, and also for those who are more broadly interested in
how our collection reflects the changing media landscape in Australia,
over the past century.
So in today's webinar we'll be taking a broad exploration of the Library's collection.
Pulling out some interesting and relevant examples and explaining
how our services can support your work.
We'll have a question break in the middle of the webinar, to answer any questions
that have been asked and also one at the end.
So looking at us, The National Library, we're located here in Canberra next to
Lake Burley Griffin. We are a non-lending library or reference library.
So this means our library users are unable to take our collection material out of the building.
The library's role, as defined by the National Library Act 1960,
is to ensure that the documentary resources of national significance,
relating to Australia and the Australian people, as well as significant non Australian
library materials, are collected preserved and made accessible.
Currently we refer to that through our strategic priorities
of: Collect, Connect and Collaborate.
So looking at our collection, we've collected almost 260 kilometers of material.
Approximately 10 million collection items and every year we add
to that with roughly 2 kilometers more, and so here we can see an image at our
off-site storage.Which I feel gets across that sort of idea of kilometers of material.
Our digital collection is also constantly expanding and currently
contains five petabytes of digital storage.
A petabyte being one thousand, million, million bytes.
We facilitate access to our collection through the library building
here in Canberra and through our online services.
A fun little inclusion I've added is Isaac, who helps deliver our collection material to our
readers here in the building. Um, so each robot is called Isaac, it's a collective
term, and it's a really, Isaac's one of the popular attractions in our behind
the scenes tours and has been featured in several news articles,
including by the ABC News.
So this guy helps deliver those kilometers of material to our reading rooms.
The major part of our collection is thanks to legal deposit.
So legal deposit is a requirement under the Copyright Act of 1968, that has enabled
the National Library of Australia to collect Australian publications
for more than a hundred years.
So legal deposit "applies to any Australian person, group
or organization that makes this material available to the public for sale or for free".
So what this means is that anything that has been published in Australia
should be in our collection. So since 2016 we also have the edeposit service
where we collect electronic books, journals, magazines, newsletters, maps
sheet music and websites, to preserve them for the community and future generations.
And this has expanded our collection a lot more into material that
we call "born digital". So thanks to legal deposit the National Library has a
comprehensive collection of Australian material from the last hundred years.
In addition to our general printed collection we have a range of format
based and themed collections in our library, here we can see a nice little overview.
So each area has specialists library staff who work
closely with collection material and manage access. The majority of these
collections are primary source material. A primary source being an authoritative
first-hand glimpse into the past...
One collection we don't have in the library
is a film collection, which is unfortunate but the National Film and
Sound Archive is a separate institution which houses Australia's audio-visual
archive and is responsible for developing preserving maintaining and
providing access to a national collection of copies of film, television,
sound and radio visual, audio-visual materials and related items.
So the film and sound archives collection was actually part of the National Library
here until 1984 when it became an independent cultural organization.
And so they took their film collection quite rightly with them and that's why we
don't have any specific film materials here.
We do however have a very strong media collection
that explores the film industry through other formats which I'll cover today.
So what do we have in our collection? A large range and variety
of materials that you can use in your film and media work and unique
collections that reflect the media industry in Australia.
To start exploring some of these collections
I'm now going to hand over to my co-presenter, Nicole
who will introduce you to our maps collection.
NICOLE: Thanks Ruby and hello to
everyone listening in to today's webinar. As Ruby mentioned I'm Nicole
I'm one of the library's graduates for 2019 and before I begin I too would like to
acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we are broadcasting from
the Ngunnawal and Nambari people.
And I pay respect to elder's past, present and emerging.
So I did get a lot of enjoyment from researching today's
topic of Film, television and media. It's a subject I'm quite interested in and
it's also what I majored in at University.
So having this theme to focus on
allowed me the opportunity to search through many of the different collection areas.
And something I discovered in the early stages of exploring the vast
collection, is the notion of scope creep. So you may have all come across this
even when you set out with a clear idea of what you want to research the ability
to stay on topic is nearly impossible when you start to dig down and discover
items of interest...
So on that note you may notice that even though I'm focusing
specifically on cartographic material held in our maps collection, the way in
which you're able to use the information found on the maps is quite varied.
Also before I show you a few examples-
if you would like to know more about how to best navigate
your way through our Maps collection I can highly recommend one of
our recent webinars that was presented by Susie. She is one of our reference
librarians here and she offers some great advice on how to best locate
specific maps and also how to go about ordering digitized copies, of digitized maps.
So this recording is available to re-watch either via our YouTube channel
or directly from the National Library website, which is nla.gov.au
So we'll admit as a staff member of the library I am in a convenient position to
gather information, but you should all know that if you ever do come to a dead end
especially when you first start researching, we as librarians can offer
assistance and guidance. Assistance from staff is not only limited to patrons who
frequent our reading rooms here in the building. We can also offer advice to
those of you who are browsing our website and exploring the digital collection.
So this is through our Ask-a-Librarian service.
So as we perform searches throughout this presentation
we will point out to you where the ask-a-librarian
service points are located.
so through the next section of the webinar
I would like to show you some of my favorite items which are held here at the library.
They relate to today's theme and they're held within our maps collection.
So firstly we have the Australian movie map it was
published in 1996 and when folded it appears as a brochure with tourism
information, but it folds out to a map of Australia. So this is a great example of
material the library aims to collect but it may not be the first thing you would
consider searching for in our catalogue.
The map pinpoints locations of motion
pictures filmed here in Australia, ranging from 1906 to 1996.
And you might be able to see
the locations are numbered clockwise starting from the top, in Darwin.
So they've included 20 film locations and around 70 other
attractions and landmarks relating to individual Australian films, the film
industry and movie locations.
So overall it serves as a film tapestry
location guide and travel companion.
This particular map is not yet digitized,
So I've just included a few photographs for the session today...
The second item I have chosen to show you all is a map of the
land of Narnia and surrounding countries. This is a color printed poster of
Pauline Baines original 1971 artwork and these particular posters were published
by Penguins, by Penguins books in 1972. To promote the paperback series
of C.S Lewis "Chronicles of Narnia".
Part of the map had already been sketched by Louis
in his manuscript of "Prince Caspian" in 1951.
Baine's idea was to have the map
themed medieval rather than a survey of mountains and castles.
So she included the wind blowing at the corners
and a few Heraldic ships, whales and dolphins in the sea...
The third item I would like to share with you is "Star Trek Star Charts: the
complete atlas of Star Trek". It is a paperback Atlas published in
2002 by Jeffrey Mandel. This is a full-color book that helps to put the
whole Star Trek universe into perspective. It serves well as a visual
aid to make sense of where galaxies are located to one another and highlights
where the Federation is in relation to all other places in the galaxy.
It's a very detailed, detailed cartographic guide, which includes: the Milky Way maps,
showing the quadrants galactic arms followed by a tally of chartered worlds
and civilizations, then a political overview map
of this quadrant and that's just to name a few.
So the next item I've chosen to show you all is um...this is called
"TV maps", so it is a map which is loosely based
on the style of a 1960s Washington street map,
which is home to America's first TV station.
And the way, and the aim, and it's aim
is to pay homage to TV gold, with, um, it has fictional districts
dedicated to for example, the Simpsons,
South Park, Sesame Street, kids TV and Sci-Fi.
It also features landmarks named after some of TV's biggest stars, such as
Oprah Winfrey, Ricki Lake, Nick Park, Harry Hill and Benny Hill.
So I could sit here and talk about all of my favorite items.
I could sit here all day talking about them but I would like to show you
in the next section, how you might go about
actually using the catalogue search function to discover items just like these...
Okay so now that we're on the National Library homepage
to search in our collection, I'll just click through
to the catalogue....
and the first search we'll look for
is the Star Trek Atlas...
So to find it in the catalogue
you only need to type in two words...
So just "Star" and "trek",
and to narrow the number of search results, search results
we can just select subject here and we
can limit the search to only show results for maps
if we select "map" here, and then press the "find" button..
So here you can see this is a very successful search
there's only one item listed and it's exactly what we're looking for
but as most of you have probably all
experienced searching for items is not always as easy as this.
So if you just start a new search,
we'll click on "catalogue"...
So we'll try to search for something a bit more broadly.
So if we just type in the word "broadcast".
We'll limit the search so we're only finding maps in the results,
and then click the "find" button.
So you can see here there are a few more results that have come up
and as I scroll through you can see..
some of the items... have the... image thumbnail.
So we might have a look at this one.
So in the catalogue entry here there is quite a bit of detail.
We can see, we have the scale at which the map is set and in the
description and notes there's a lot more information here as well.
Because it is a digitized um, it has been digitized
We can have a closer look at the item by clicking on the thumbnail.
Here... and the digitized image opens up in the Trove viewer.
So it's quite a high definition scan and you can zoom in on any area of
the map just by clicking on the area you want to see closer.
And we can just recenter a
map by dragging it with the mouse to the middle...
So we can see here the title of the map and the key
to zoom back out you can use the
magnifying glass with the minus symbol here.
And then just to recenter the map...
So just have a quick look here,
where we are, well there we are...
So here you can see, um
the different kinds of wireless radio waves that were available in Australia,
from the 1930s...
So on that note I'm going to hand back over to Ruby and I will
just thank you all for listening in today...
RUBY: excellent thank you so much Nicole
and I should extend my thanks to Nicole
as well for developing today's session.
I'm going to go back to the PowerPoint now
and we'll continue with the rest of the content.
So moving onto a new area now,
we have our newspapers and family history team here at the library,
and they manage our newspapers collection and answer family history questions
sent to us from around the world. Family history is only becoming more and more
popular as online access to genealogy records becomes easier.
It forms a large part of our learning program here at the library
and we have extensive online resources,
such as research guides and databases to support family history researchers...
and newspapers and family history zone has been featured in
episodes of the television show "Who do you think you are?",
especially featuring our newspaper collections for family history research.
So we've combined newspapers and family history, as newspapers can be a key
resource for family historians.
But today I want to look more closely at our
newspaper collection for another reason.
As newspapers are a valuable media resource
both for contemporary and historical news.
You might be searching for a specific article
or curious about how important events were reported on in the news.
We collect all Australian newspapers, ranging from Capital city,
Capital city dailies, major regional newspapers, a range of country town
newspapers, newspapers published by ethnic groups and political organizations
as well as newspapers representing special interests.
We also have the largest collection of overseas newspapers in Australia.
Our newspaper collections from the Asia and Pacific region are particularly strong...
So we collect and store the printed editions but we also microfilm
a number of state and regional newspapers,
as they are much easier to store and access
and it preserves the original printed paper...
some of you may be familiar with microfilm?
it has been around for decades,
but we are still creating it and using it today. Like a photograph film reel the
newspaper is captured on 35 millimeter acetate film. We can capture thousands of
pages of newspapers on a single reel. We do supply our microfilm reels on
interlibrary loan, so speak to your local library
if you require access to this material and cannot visit us in Canberra...
However I want to look past the microfilm and look at what you can
access online. Most of you will be aware that newspapers these days have online
websites, where you can access newspaper articles.
Some of these are free to access,
however some do require paid subscriptions, often, however it can be
difficult finding archival newspaper articles on these news websites.
So if you're wanting to research published newspaper articles,
we have quite a number of options freely available here at the library.
So most of you were very familiar with Trove.
For those who don't know it's a site that
collects library and institution collections from around Australia.
Providing a central site to search and it's most popular content zone is it's
digitized newspapers. Where you can search Australian newspapers from 1803 to 1954.
The 1954 date is due to Copyright, as newspapers published post
1955 are within Copyright and have not been made available.
There are a few newspapers available post 1955
in Trove such as the Canberra Times, where we've
been given specific copyright permission to upload
but there is only a few exceptions to this.
Trove is very easy to search and a great research tool for
discovering and accessing historical newspaper articles, as well as other materials.
Once you find a relevant article you can download it and use it as you wish.
You can find film reviews, cinema advertisements and other articles,
exploring film and media topics...
I did a search for the story of the Kelly Gang most of you knowing that's
one of the first, Australia's first feature film, we get over a thousand results.
And you can see just from the top few results, published in the early
1900s when the film was released
and includes regional papers as well as major city dailies...
So I know a lot of you are familiar with Trove but if you
do want some more help into researching Trove.
We have quite a number of webinar recordings
that go into a lot of detail, particularly 'Discover Trove' which is an
introductory session, and Trove for family history which explores mainly that
newspapers zone... So Trove is the best place to go to access Australian
newspapers pre 1955 but if you're after more contemporary archives you'll need
to visit our a resources portal and so our eResources contain a variety of
electronic resources, such as full-text journals, newspapers ebooks and dictionaries
a number of our databases including the ones I featured today can
be accessed from home or work using a National Library Card...
So the key databases I'll be highlighting today are our newspaper databases
but we also have a huge range other database collections
they may contain relevant information for your media research.
So a number of you are familiar with our eResources
and you may notice that we've recently enhanced our eResources portal
and now have a search box where you can full-text search the majority of our databases.
You can type in keywords, subjects or other information, and find
journal articles or other relevant information that you can access
This search unfortunately doesn't pick up some of the articles from our bigger
newspaper databases but you can individually into these databases and search and
access them from there...
So if you haven't used this new eResources portal I highly
recommend it. It's very user friendly and we have a lot of help advice as well
if you need it on the page...
So the three databases I wanted to highlight today are Factiva, The Sydney
Morning Herald archives and PressReader and all of these are available off-site,
with a library card, free of charge.
Factiva is a major newspaper database
that you've may have used before and has holdings from the late 1980s to today.
You can search articles from a huge number of Australian newspapers using
full-text searching as well as overseas newspapers...
We also have our Sydney Morning Herald archives
and this is one of the very few databases that offers
access to newspapers between the post- Trove, past 1955, and pre-internet 1995,
in this instance, period. As most newspapers from this time are still only
available on microfilm but if you are after an article in The Herald or of the
Sydney area, you are in luck because this is a really user friendly database
that's easy to navigate...
and last we have PressReader which isn't so much an
archive, as it only holds the last three months of publications.
This database has a great selection of magazines and newspapers
from around Australia and overseas.
So I'll just quickly demonstrate how to access these
databases in our new eResources portal.
So if I click back through to the homepage
we can see under the catalogue bar that Nicole took us to
we have a tab for our eResources...
We also can see links to Trove, if you want to get through it
through our homepage and also to "Get a Library Card" as well if you haven't yet
got that library card. But for those who do you can leave this session and start
searching our eResources straight away.
So I click on the accepting terms and
conditions and this is a new platform.
So if we wanted to search more broadly for
journal articles I could type in a keyword here but because I know which
database to go to I'm going to click on our databases A to Z and this is how
I can find the databases like Factiva. Today I'll just find PressReader.
So typing, even, not even the full word, we can see it's this result here.
We get a little bit of a description about what we hold. If we click through, we then
get taken straight into the database...
and here we can see the different magazines and newspapers.
So with the other two databases,
Factiva in particular you're really only searching for the text of the newspapers.
The Sydney Morning Herald one you do see the digitized images of the newspaper liking Trove,
but I've chosen PressReader in part
because we get these full-colour pages that we can explore.
So if you're wanting to keep up-to-date with news and events
definitely recommend this one and again we can
limit by country to "Australian publications" and we can see it's a
number of magazines, as well as newspapers, as well and it has really
good international holdings so you can search for a topic that's in the news
and you can see what countries around the world
what they, how they've written those articles
and what perspective they've taken as well...
Alright back to the PowerPoint
before I go to far. So our newspapers collection is not only
resourceful for researching information and data for a film documentary or news
story but you can also get footages and images through our copies direct service.
So this is particularly for those older newspapers and I'll touch
on our copies direct service a little bit more later on.
Alright so before I go any further,
I'll see if there's been any questions asked.
It doesn't look like we have any questions
pending live answer which is great.
Please ask questions as you as I go through though if you have any and I'll
answer them at the end of today's session...
Alright, so moving on to our next collection now is our pictures collection,
and the pictures collection here at the library contains over a
million photographs and artworks documenting Australian life, Society,
personalities and events...
It includes portraits, landscapes and structures,
political cartoons and images of everyday life. We collect pictures for
their doc umentary value not for their artistic value. So while there are works
by significant artists and photographers, most are creations of ordinary people
documenting their surroundings and experiences.
The vast majority of publishing questions we receive are on our pictures collection
as there are many people who come across images in our collection that they would like
to use in their documentary film or media project.
If you do want to publish any
material from our pictures collection we have an online form on our website.
Copyright permissions may apply and I'll be covering copyright and publishing
collection material in more detail at the end of today's presentation...
So I want to highlight a few relevant and interesting pictures collections
today. To give you an understanding of the scope of the collection and how it
can be a valuable resource in your work the main collections I'll highlight have
been digitized, meaning they're free to search and view from home.
So starting with prominent Australian photographer Robert McFarlane
whose images we hold, span 1963 to 2000
and captures the Australian film and media industry during this period.
His collection also includes images of Kings Cross and
Redfern in the 1960s and unemployment and development of Australia as well...
He also features really lovely portraits of prominent Australians in the film,
in the fields of film, television, radio, theater, politics, literature, sport and art,
and here's two examples here....
We hold the Andrew Chapman campaign photograph collection
from 75 to 2004, which includes portraits of key
political figures of the time. As well as the supporters, protesters and the media
on the campaign trail. A Nice reflective photo of Bob Hawke,
and here we can see another one of his images
a behind the scenes of Paul Keating talking to James Morrison.
On The Today Show with Carrie Anne Kennerley back in 1996...
Louis Seselja is a Canberra base photographer
who spent part of his career here at the National Library.
We hold over 4,000 photographs by Louis in our collection, the vast
majority which are digitized...
He captured many key events in Canberra
from the last several decades from portraits, to these images which present
or capture a different perspective of the media presence around stories...
Moving on to Wolfgang Sievers now
this is one of Australia's most significant, influential photographers
who specialized in architectural and industrial photography.
So we hold over 13,000 photographs and 51,000 negatives of
Sievers from 1938 to 1991...
collection includes important
photographs of the early days of television, mainly focusing on the
technical setups. So we can see here a gentlemen with early television equipment
I'm sure those who are working in this industry, I'm sure it's changed significantly
and again he even has photos of televisions being constructed.
So very much a sort of behind-the-scenes look at this period of time.
In addition to individual photographers we also hold collections
from major media bodies such as Fairfax. So in this instance this is the Fairfax
archive of glass plate negatives.
About 18,000 images all up in our collection.
So these are taken, images taken by Fairfax photographers
trying to capture the perfect image
to correspond with an article for the daily newspaper.
Here we can see at underworld figure Kate Lee
and the significance of this collection
is related to its original purpose, "to document newsworthy and historical
events, people and places from the 1900s to the 1940s.
So it includes images around topics such as the construction
of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which we can see here...
The Great Depression, politicians, sportsmen and women.
This image again was from that opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge
and captain Francis de Groot cut the ribbon too early
As well as more rural in everyday life.
We have this lovely one of children racing down in Billy carts
as well as a sort of look at a more of domestic scene in Darlinghurst...
Another interesting historical collection is the William Henry Corkhill,
Tilba Tilba collection which is a favorite of mine and a great example of
one of the unique personal collections we hold.
So William Henry Corkhill was an accountant,
cheese maker and farm manager who decided in 1880-1890 to
become a photographer. So this unknown, previously unknown man
took over 20 years, many
photos of the Tilba Tilba area
and allows us to see life in this community as it unfolds and develops...
So it includes, so if you're looking for
reference points of a small Australian town in the 1900s exploring
these images which have been digitized, we can see how life was in a small but
thriving rural community...
Included in our pictures collection is political
cartoons which you can discover easily in our catalogue
simply by searching for the politician by name.
and all of our pictures of collections is discoverable through our website
and we are in, ever, forever digitizing more and more
material so that you can view and download images from home.
That being said there is still a large number of photographs
in the collection that have yet to be digitized.
So you can still discover these through our catalogue
however you may need to visit the library building to access the
collection or you can use our copies direct service
to request copies of specific items.
So for example one collection that is not available
digitally is the Penny Tweedie collection,
which we can see from the catalogue screenshot I've taken
has over a hundred and sixty thousand photographs
of Penny's photojournalist activities over the years...
So as I've touched on a few times now,
we have a copying service here at the library called copies direct
and this is a fast easy and inexpensive way to get copies
of material from our collections.
So you can get copies of collection materials
from all of our collections, including what I cover today, but I wanted to
highlight it now as it's particularly useful for our pictures collection.
With the collections that are not yet digitized it allows you to receive
a digital copy of that material.
If the material you are after has already been digitized,
we can provide you with a high-resolution image. As the digitized images
in our catalogue are lower resolution files.
Now though I've said, you can get copies of library material.
It is dependent on copyright. So you may be limited to how much
can be copied
or the use might be restricted to personal or research purposes
to use copies for publishing you will need the material to
be out of copyright or you have copyright permission... I will touch on
copyright at the end of today's session, but if you are unsure we actually
recommend putting through your copies direct order and our staff can advise
you if extra steps are required for copying permissions.
To place a copies direct order the easiest way is through the catalogue record.
So if I click through now,
So here we can see that item record of the Penny Tweedie archive, and we can
scroll down, so even though it's telling us as a digitized item, this isn't
unfortunately digitized images it is giving us a sort of a finding aid
description of the collection.
Under "In the library" if we were to visit the
library and access this collection physically, this is how we'd go about it
with our library card.
The third tab along is our 'Order a Copy'
and so we can see here it links to our copies direct service
and an option to 'add to cart'.
So by clicking on this this just takes us through to an online form
or you can follow the steps...
and then get that copying placed
and so the copies direct website also has more information about that...
Unlike other collection areas pictures staff also offer very detailed advice on how to
access pictures for filming. So if you're wanting to visit the collection here in
Canberra and film the physical material, we do have a webpage you can refer to
just recently we had an ABC film crew come and visit to film pictures material...
Alright moving on to our next collection area now, the manuscripts collection.
Our manuscripts collection ranges from single items to very large collections.
So collections comprise a wide variety of unpublished materials including
letters, diaries, sketches and artworks, notebooks, maps, photographs, literary
works, organization records, blogs and many other types of records, in both
paper and digital form.
So I wanted to have a quick look now at the manuscript
collections of some of Australia's leading, Australia's leading media figures.
To give you an understanding of what we might hold in this collection.
So whether you're after inspiration for your next project or researching the
life of one of these prominent Australian figures.
You can see here we've got some director and filmmaker collections...
We have a number of collections around prominent Australian actors
and this material often includes
Diaries and personal letters which provide private insights into working
processes, as well as professional and personal relationships as well...
Continue with the lists of manuscript collections,
here are some other key figures.
I'm sure most of you will recognize some of the names:..
and a few more for you...so a real mix of different people within the media industry.
If they're a prominent Australian there's a chance that we'll
have that collection available...
We also have substantial manuscripts collections
on other key Australian figures particularly politicians but as well as
other key figures. Um with the Robert Menzies collection, one of our most
accessed and it's around 600 boxes of materials for Menzies.
To access our manuscripts collection
it is recommended to come and visit us and look through
the collection yourself as some of the collections are very sizeable and can be
difficult to determine the exact contents through the online finding aids.
If we hold a manuscript collection that is relevant to your research I would
highly recommend exploring it as these collections contain unpublished, valuable
insights into the work and personal lives of these Australians.
So we have an oral history and folklore collection
as well, here at the library and this dates back to the 1950s
and includes a rich and diverse collection of interviews and
recordings with Australians from all walks of life.
The collection consists of around 45,000 hours of recordings
and includes folklore recordings, interviews
with distinguished Australians, interviews with people who've lived
through significant social trends and conditions, as well as some recordings on
environmental sound. A lot of the prominent Australians who are featured
in that little list in their manuscripts collection also have interviews as well.
In this oral history collection, so if you're looking at telling the story of
an individual you could very well find published and unpublished material in
our collection, associated photographs as well as interviews of that individual.
One of the main collections in oral history is the Hazel de Burgh collection.
With 1290 recordings of interviews and readings of prominent Australian poets,
artists, writers, composers, actors and more. Again like our other collection I
areas we have digitized a number of oral history and folklore recordings.
So if I click through, to our website again,
and again w e're taken to the catalogue
and we can see this is the page for the Hazel de Burgh collection which I could
find very easily just by searching 'Hazel de Burgh'.
We get a nice description and summary
and this is what we call a parent level or collection level record
So within this we can see under "related records', we can actually go into the
collection a little bit further. So if I click on this link here, we can see all
the items and materials that are sit within this collection.
we can see quite a number coming up
but I just want to draw our attention to this search bar,
on this "narrow search' option on this right-hand side we can see we have quite
a number of options to refine our search by such as decade, Geographic, subject
area, but what I want to do, is we can quite quickly limit all online.
So if from home, straightaway we're getting just results
that we can access from home
and we have a thumbnail that indicates we can listen online. So just
clicking on that thumbnail will take us straight through, accept the 'terms and
conditions' and we can see we can play the recording as well as a really
excellent transcript as well. With keywords, so you can often search as well
if you're just wanting to find a reference within an interview, you can
search the transcript to see where that reference might have taken place in the interview...
And it's looking a little bit closely at the oral history collection.
I've just put up on the slide some of the other collections that we have of
particular significance here, such as the folk music by John Meredith. We have the
'bringing them home' oral history project, 'Forgotten Australians and former child
migrants project'. So this is speaking to interviewing, um sort of general Australians
on their experiences and perspectives. So there's Australian Paralympic stories as well...
And coming up to the end of our collections we have our ephemera collection.
Which is a collection of minor publications and pamphlets as well
as leaflets, handbills, invitations, cards, menus and junk mail.
Essentially it's a lot of material that wasn't intended to be preserved but we
have preserved it. So our ephemera collection can receive a lot of
media coverage, as we do probably call-outs around elections and other
key events such as the same sex marriage survey. So here you can see some of the
same sex marriage survey material that we collected, as well as a news article
written by ABC News about that...
Alright so now, what everyone's been waiting for...
the fun, the copyright.
So as I've touched on through looking at some
of our collection highlights, use of the National library's collection will be
dependent on copyright. So accessing or researching material
often doesn't require any permissions. All that access is controlled by us here.
However if you want to publish material, this is when you need to determine if
the material is in copyright. Now there is a lot of information around copyright
in Australia and I only have a general knowledge of copyright, I'll admit.
So it's always worth visiting the copyright pages on our web site or
visiting the Australian copyright Council's website which has great Fact
sheets around the different aspects of copyright.
Looking at copyright duration,
under current law for literary dramatic and musical works, that were published
during the lifetime of the author, copyright lasts for seventy years from
the end of the year in which the author has died.
For published sound recordings
and film, the duration of copyright is seventy years from the end of the year
in which the recording film was published.
Under previous copyright laws, material that was created or published before
1955 or if the author died prior to 1955, that material is out of copyright and
this is where this includes that newspaper material available on Trove.
So conveniently the National Library catalogue and Trove, both provide an
approximate calculation of the copyright status of a particular work
in the catalogue record.
So we can see here, a screenshot from the item record and it
actually tells us the copyright status, whether it's in or out of copyright and
then the reason why.
Once copyright expires, there are no longer any
copyright related restrictions on its copying or reuse, and this is sometimes
referred to being in the public domain. We have a large amount of collection
material that we have digitized and made freely available to download that is out of copyright.
And so this means you're free to publish the material in your next work.
That being said if you are wanting to publish any of our unique
collection material, we request that you inform us through our 'intention
to publish' form. So this will allow us to inform you of your responsibilities in
relation to copyright, conditions of use Moral rights, performance rights and
correct forms of acknowledgement.
We also have a web page as well on how to
correctly cite our collection material as well, even if it is now copyright.
As reference librarians we receive a lot of questions around clarification on
copyright for materials in our collection. So if you're not sure,
please send us a message...
So now we're coming to the end of today's webinar and as we've looked at a
huge range of material in our collection I just want to quickly go over again
collection discovery and access.
So we saw the catalogue is the best place to
search our collection and that can just be accessed through our home page.
Our collection is also discoverable through Trove as well, as that is a collection of
different library collections from around Australia. So you can discover our
collection as well through Trove.
And as well we have our eResources for our
online journals and databases...
So to access our on-site collection and
electronic resources, you will need a library card. So those that don't yet
have a library card, you can register it very quickly online through that
homepage link and have it posted out to you for free.
Those materials that are not yet digitized
or you're wanting to view the original material,
this is where you come and visit us in Canberra
and access our collection materials in our reading rooms.
So a reminder that today's session and any of our previous webinars
are recorded and uploaded to the National library's YouTube channel. So if you want
to watch this one again or watch any of the ones we've touched on and more
please visit the channel you can subscribe to if you'd like and you can
be alerted to any new videos that are added.
You can also keep in touch with us
through our social media platforms where you can hear of events, new resources and
highlights of our collection through one of these platforms.
Alright so that's been today's presentation I'm now just going to see
if there's being any questions.
If you do have any questions please send them through...
Alright it doesn't look like we have any questions pending at the moment.
Hopefully that means you've all, I've answered all your questions or I've also
known as Heather's been typing a few responses as well which is wonderful.
Ah, here we go Bob asked "If we have any radio holdings?" So unfortunately we don't
have any radio recordings in our collection, that is held at the National
Film and Sound Archives. They have really useful guides on their website about
radio recordings. We have some more of the related material around broadcasting
and things like that. Alright, great well thank you so much for attending today.
We'll wrap up today's session. Um so if you have any further questions you can
use that Ask-a-Librarian service to contact us and we have some upcoming
sessions as well. So especially if you want to explore our new eResources platform.
We have a new webinar coming up in just a few weeks. We also have one looking
more closely at ephemera. As well as subjects around dangerous and persuasive
females coming up at the end of October, which looks at our our collection
surrounding women, important and influential women through history.
So I'd recommend watching those.
S o we'll stay around for a few minutes longer, so if
you have any last-minute questions we can answer them by text but a reminder
that the recording and links from today's session will be emailed out to
you all tomorrow. So thank you for joining us and I hope you have a
wonderful rest of the afternoon.
Find the Map You Want
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DIY Projects
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The Art of Literary Investigation
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Trove Government Gazettes
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Welcome.
My name is Damian Cole and with me, Amy Ramires, and we are reference librarians in the Reader
Services branch here at the National Library of Australia.
We’re here to talk to you about using the Library’s collections to research the history
of a place, the local history of a place, what we have in the collections and how to
go about using and accessing them.
I’ll just turn the camera off now so we can actually get into the presentation.
As a quick overview of what we’ll talk through today we’ll show you the variety of materials
available across the Library collections that can be used to find the history of a place
or a location, a town, a city, a suburb or a region.
Some of this may be predictable if you’ve used the Library before, particularly if you’ve
already done some research of your own history of your place already but some I hope may
be surprising and enlightening.
We’ll go through how to find items in the collection with some guidance on catalogue
searching, how to use the Library collections both at home and here in the Library reading
rooms.
One thing to say is that we’ll not be specifically looking at family history.
Family history is of course bound up in the history of a place, the history of people
living in that place and it may be that people are your primary interest of your research.
There are a whole range of resources of full family research and indeed it’s probably
the biggest single use of the Library’s collections though it is quite specialised
and can be complex.
The sorts of methods and materials we’ll be talking about will be a way to get to the
stories of families and people by getting to the story of their place, where and how
they lived.
We offer several separate learning program webinars like this focusing on family history
so I suggest you have a look at the Library’s YouTube channel and learning program calendar
for more.
The key place to start is where your place of interest is.
For me, being Canberra born and bred, this is my local place here and so the place that
I’ve researched and am familiar with.
We will use some examples of different resources we have on local history but only as an example
of the sort of resources we have at the Library and online.
For your place the range of materials and how to find and use them will be much the
same, just insert the name of your place that you want to find the history of, insert whatever
name we may be referring to as an example.
We will have varying materials on different places, maybe more or maybe less but to start
searching is the way to find out.
We want to show you with various places and examples the range of likely materials and
resources we have on the history of a place, to find the story of a place and that then
can be your place to search for.
The Library has a collection of more than just books, the collection includes imagery,
music, spoken words, objects, digital resources and more on all manner of subjects and through
this presentation we’ll show you the range of what the Library has, how to use it and
an idea of what sort of local stories you can find in this.
So to the materials in our collections starting with printed collections.
The first and obvious, books are the core of the Library collections as you would expect.
The Library has some six million books in the collection and continues to collect current
publications from Australia under the Legal Deposit Scheme that requires any book published
in Australia to be deposited in the Library.
These include ongoing publications such as journals, periodicals, magazines and newspapers
and these are increasingly being collected in a digital format.
For what we collect today some 30% of single title books and 70% of regularly published
periodicals are in a digital format.
The books are probably the best place to start researching the history of a place.
These include things such as histories and general works, biographies, government publications
and heritage reports.
family histories or books on the lives of significant personalities in a place, publications
by local historical societies including their journals and newsletters and books on community
groups and commercial businesses.
They include publications contemporary to the events of the past written by those who
actually lived through that history and transient publications that are a rich source for local
histories such as phone and business directories, the White and Yellow Pages and also even consider
fiction books set in the place that give an idea of how it was to live in that place at
that time.
But as any good librarian would say libraries are more than just books.
The National Library has a large collection of many varied formats, information presented
in all forms.
If there’s one thing I’d really like to take away from this presentation it is the
National Library and indeed any library is more than just books.
These different formats can be used to find different and unexpected stories or present
different sides to the one story and we want to take you through these different formats.
The Manuscripts Collection contains the unpublished and personal diaries, journals, letters, notebooks
and literary drafts.
We aim to collect papers and records of individuals and organisations that reflect the diversity
of Australian society, culture and environments.
It includes papers of people from ordinary settlers and workers to government and city
officials, writers and other creators and records of organisations such as community
groups, social clubs, business and enthusiast groups.
Manuscripts can tell the personal story by those who lived it.
Manuscript collections can be small, maybe just one folder of documents or very large,
perhaps hundreds of boxes.
The largest personal collection we hold is the papers of Sir Robert Menzies, over 500
boxes covering his life and career.
The archival nature of manuscripts, personal and unpublished can make using manuscripts
challenging so just be ready to spend a bit of time on them but I’m sure it will be
worth it.
All manuscript collections are catalogued, the details within them are often not.
Large collections have finding aids like a listing of the contents of the boxes.
Many finding aids are viewable online linked from a catalogue record for that collection,
others are in paper format and available here in the Library’s reading rooms.
But if not viewable online you can always ask us to email a copy of a finding aid to
you.
Do ask for assistance in using manuscript collections.
There are issues such as access conditions and copyright and fragile materials may complicate
things but they are probably one of our best used and I think most useful collections.
Some examples of the spread of things in manuscripts, it includes the papers of the personal such
as a collection of 15 letters written by Thomas Hampton to his brother during his travels
around the Victorian goldfields in 1850s, ‘60s, ‘70s.
They tell of life on the goldfields and methods of mining and farming and of his success or
lack of it.
Extremes of weather and other things he experienced from around Maryborough, Ararat and Carisbrook.
He says the general state of the colony is prosperous with plenty of gold-getting but
he also believed that wine production would soon become an important thing for the region
and so a great insight into one person’s view of their place.
There are also papers of the professional such as the records of Burnima and Bibbenluke
Stations.
Nearly 40 boxes of papers covering the operations of these two pastoral stations in the Monaro
region of southern New South Wales from 1888 to 1915, the collection includes letterbooks,
financial records, diaries, station ledgers and business correspondence.
Although they may seem dry financial records they tell the story of business and life on
the land in a way that was so common at the turn of 20th century Australia written by
those who lived there and worked the stations.
Also a wonderful way to combine it, the papers of both the professional and the everyday
such as the papers of Charles Studdy Daley.
With a 40-year career in government Daley was one of the most significant public servants
in the early development of Canberra as the capital city.
He was also a keen musician in his personal time.
This collection shows how the personal likes of a professional of such interests can start
their own stories.Amongst documents and letters on the development of the Canberra site as
the capital and pamphlets on town planning are records that Daley created and collected
on the Canberra Musical Society of which he was President for 20 years.
Things such as meeting minutes, member files, concert programs and reviews.
This tells the story of how inhabitants of Canberra lived and played in the growing city,
the social life of the city and this can be a central part of the life of that place.
Taking the Daly collection as an example can show family history can be explored through
the local history through our manuscripts collection.
In the Musical Society member files are the names of some of my family living in Canberra
in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Although the collection is not in itself a likely family history resource, and I have
no relation to Charles Daley myself, but I find part of my family in the collection and
can imagine my family living in Canberra going to concerts, enjoying the music and it seems
on at least one occasion being late with their membership dues.
This can show that a local history and then a family history can appear in a resource
you may not first think of looking in.
The papers of the person will tell the story of their life and where they lived and so
who else lived there so do think broadly for your local history research, not just in the
obvious resources you may think of first.
I’ll now hand over to Amy to continue talking through our collections.
AMY: Thank you, Damian.
So pictures are a handy resource when researching the history of a place.
Our pictures collection holds around one million photographs and artworks which document aspects
of Australian life, society, personalities and events.
Examples include portraits of individuals, images of landscapes and structures, political
cartoons and imagery of everyday life.
So I guess this poses the question, why do we collect these items and how does our collecting
differ from that of an art gallery?
Our collection of pictures is for their documentary value and not about aesthetics or artistic
value.
We do collect images from prominent artists, of course but most of our collection is based
on ordinary individuals documenting their own life experiences and their surroundings.
We also collect contemporary photographs that document today’s places, events and people
and this is done in a variety of ways whether by commission or donation.
A large portion of the Pictures Collection is digitised and viewable online and those
that aren’t can be viewed here at the Library in our Special Collections Reading Room.
So relevant to today’s discussion pictures assist us by giving an image to a story, they
show the place you are researching as it was and how it has developed so I’m going to
take you through a few examples of the types of imagery we have in our collection.
So a key purpose of the Pictures Collection is to document a changing landscape over time
to show how a place has grown and changed.
So we have a wide range of photographs of locations, scenes and buildings from around
the country and one of these wider-ranging formed collections in the Library is the Ledger
Collection.
It contains around 421 photographs which includes album prints from various photographers and
of course his own work.
The photos were taken between 1858 and 1910 in Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and
South Australia.
Ledger was a town planning consultant who eventually became a lecturer in town and regional
planning.
He made extensive use of the photographs to show how Australian cities and towns have
changed.
Most of the photographs in the collection are of public buildings and streets and cities
and towns such as the Royal Engineers’ Office but there are also natural landscapes depicted
in the collection such as Lavender Bay here in Sydney Harbour.
Definitely not how it looks today but it’s just an example of how these places have changed
over time.
So local photographers are important as they create a large bank of photographs documenting
a specific place.
So one of these examples is the Mandurama Collection which is a collection of over 3,000
photographs of people and daily life around Mandurama and the central New South Wales
region at the start of the 20th century.
These photographs were captured by Evan Antoni Lumme and possibly his wife, Rose.
Many of the figures that are depicted in the collection remain unidentified but also this
collection is an invaluable source for seeing parts of Australia during the Victorian and
post-federation eras with few of these types of collections of this size surviving to this
day.
Another collection I’ll mention is the Jeff Carter so Jeff Carter was a freelance photographer
and journalist who was self-proclaimed as the photographer of the poor and the unknown.
There are over 600 photographs in this collection with most of the photos being individuals
who had recorded oral history interviews with him.
There are photographs of sceneries and cities and regional towns in most of the states and
territories and Jeff is widely regarded as one of Australia’s most influential documentary
photographers as his span of photographs has created a significant visual record of Australian
life.
So artworks, while allowing a more imaginative expression of place, are also helpful for
helping us understand a picture how it once was.
This could be especially helpful for places that no longer exist at this current time.
So Glenelg Hotel and the flagstaff by John Michael Skipper.
So John Michael Skipper was an artist and also a solicitor and he was known for having
a natural skill and painted various scenes in South Australia and the goldfields in Victoria.
His sketches and paintings of built and natural environments have been credited as holding
great artistic and historical value.
But I also wanted to bring your attention to an artwork that links to the Thomas Hampton
letters Damian mentioned before.
This sketch is of the Mt Alexander goldfields and while this isn’t an area that is connected
to Hampton’s story it reflects on how we can use multiple formats to tell us the same
story.
So doing a comparative analysis of different formats allows us to understand the same place
in different ways so connecting a written description of a past time to a more visual
description of place.
Of course our national collection is just that, a national documentation of the varied
lives of our nation’s people.
So our collection of portraits and documentation and events across the country must try to
reflect this diversity.
Alongside oral history interviews, which I’ll be talking about in a few moments, we also
have a collection of individual portraits from those who have been interviewed.
So Bob Gebhardt is one of these individuals.
Gebhardt recalls his life as a drover and his early days in Broken Hill in New South
Wales.
He speaks about this relationships with his Aboriginal and Afghan mates and co-workers
and his worker as a master welder of international standing.
Portraits of individuals can connect us to place through the people they are depicting
such as understanding prominent industries and the area.
But our collection also holds photographs of events in the life of a place from the
ceremonial to the everyday.
One of the photos I have depicted here is a group of people in a semiformal attire at
an event in Newcastle.
So the picture reflects a few things.
This picture is part of a newspaper photographs archive, The Newcastle Morning Herald and
The Miner’s Advocate archive.
So it depicts the importance of these archives in telling everyday stories.
Another thing that I want to point out is many of our photos such as this one are of
unknown subjects so many subjects in our collection remain unidentified.
We’re constantly searching to improve our descriptions of collection material so if
you can establish who they are or where they are in these photographs definitely get in
contact with us and we can improve our descriptions and that in turn will assist future researchers
and would be immensely valuable.
Okay so moving on to maps and the collection that I feel has the most to say about local
places and history.
So our maps collection in total includes around one million maps which includes different
types highlighting topographic surveys, land ownership, design and development, road and
tourist maps and also mapping from the air.
The range of maps we hold spans from European maps and their assumption of a great southern
land mass up to the satellite and digital datasets that are being produced today.
So maps gives us a complete picture of the layout of the landscape and how people have
lived on the land.
They give us a sense of place to a story and gives us a physical way to show that place.
So many of our maps in our collection are fully digitised online and can be downloaded
from Trove.
The different maps we’ll be talking about are all covered in more depth in our online
research guides as well so if you’re finding you’re having difficulties finding relevant
maps in our collection or just want to understand them a bit better then they are an excellent
resource to go to.
A well known and key resource for understanding local history and family history are land
ownership maps, typically referred to as cadastral or parish maps.
These are considered a strength of the Library’s map collection mostly due to the amount of
parish maps we hold but coverage and dates do vary between different states.
Recently the Library has undergone a project which aims to digitise these cadastral and
parish maps.
Thousands of maps from New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland have been digitised and placed
online and these days also run by a similar system so they're separated by counties and
then subdivided into parishes.
So for the ACT, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and Northern Territory they all have
varying systems that they use.
This is especially the case for South Australia, Northern Territory and WA as not all of the
states are separated into counties, parishes or hundreds with this separating concentrated
to the higher populated areas.
Wikipedia has some handy pages which talks through how land was divided across Australia
and the differing systems each state and territory used.
If you’re also looking for more detailed deposited plans of towns and suburbs these
can be found through the relevant land registry department of your state and territory.
For example in New South Wales that would be the Land Registry Services and their Historical
Land Record Viewer which is online.
So land sales plans so these are posters advertising blocks of land or sites for sale for a variety
of reasons, whether it be commercial or personal.
These can include sales that did occur or plans that didn’t progress any further.
So these posters can be used as early evidence for prices of blocks of land, its boundaries
and past built environments and any eventual changes to the roads or land usages.
The National Library holds around 100,000 land sales plans in the collection.
Most of our collection records the auctions of eastern Australia from around the 1840s
to the 1930s.
I guess the most known function of maps, and one that should come to no surprise, is that
maps highlight the physical landscape of the land as it once was and how it has changed.
So topographic maps both highlight the natural and manmade environments of a place.
So the Library holds around 200,000 post 1990s Australian topographic maps which have been
published by both national and state mapping and surveying authorities.
So I’m going to switch over to Trove just to highlight the differences between these
two topographic maps.
So one of them is a 1976 version which is highlighted here and the other is from 1989
so there’s just over 10 years’ difference between the two.
So I’ll start with 1976 so as you can see all the vineyards around here, there’s quite
a few of them, still lots of grassy areas along here and a big pine plantation up the
top.
So not a lot of urban development going on, it’s still quite a natural landscape and
we jump over to 1989 and you can already see all these built-up areas starting to form
here where it once was grassy and a natural landscape.
Very lightly you can see the size of some vineyards shrinking over on this side here.
But another thing I will point out is that icons in maps do change over time so while
in the 1976 version the pine plantations are noted with this area prominent dark green
icon, that completely changes in the 1989 version where it’s more of a light green.
So it's pretty important to just bear in mind those differences that can occur in maps.
So I’ll just go back to the PowerPoint now and we’ll move on to aerial photography.
So the Maps Collection includes aerial photography conducted by the Commonwealth Government for
surveying and planning purposes for the 1930s to the 1980s.
All Australian states are represented in our collection including Papua New Guinea and
Antarctica which amounts to around 800,000 photographs.
The aerial photography is a perfect way to see the growth of the cities and towns and
changes to the landscape.
They were used by city planners and other professions such as environmental resource
management, ecology, archaeology and the military.
Unfortunately, most of this collection is only viewable at the Library but flight diagrams
are available online through Geoscience so you can figure out what series of aerial photographs
will show the area you want.
So a supporting resource that researchers find key in using maps are gazetteers.
Think of it like a geographical directory.
These are often used in conjunction with maps because of the explicit written detail they
go into about a specific place.
Older gazetteers include information about its location, latitude and longitude, the
geographical profile of the place, the main industries and commerce, the population count
and even things like how regular the post deliveries are.The origin of the locality’s
name is also an important bit of information that gets mentioned in these guides.
But changing or variant placenames can be a confusing thing when researching a place
so examples of some placename changes in the past include Darwin which was once known as
Palmerston, many placenames in South Australia during world war one as they were of German
origin.
So I thought I’d also mention that the Bailliere’s New South Wales gazetteer for 1866 is digitised
online through Library of Congress so that is also a handy guide to go to if you can’t
make it onsite and view these in person.
So moving on to oral history and folklore our oral history interviews document life
stories from people across Australia with different and somewhat similar stories relating
to our cultural, intellectual and social aspects of life.
Our earliest interviews date back to the 1950s but can discuss events decades before that.
Our interviews can be a part of a project focusing around a unified thing or they can
be singular.
Oral histories are a detailed oral picture of a place through reminiscence and can also
be a chance to hear about details of places that are underrepresented in the historical
record.
So many of our interviews are available to listen to online and have written transcripts.
As these collections could hold sensitive information they might also have access conditions
so you will need to contact us if that is the case.
Some might be available for access by getting written permission but some might not be accessible
for the interviewee’s lifetime.
So I just wanted to point out really quickly a few of the prominent collections so Wendy
Lowenstein’s 1930s depression collection so this collection comprises of 172 tapes
of recollections of life during the depression in the 1930s and these were recorded by Lowenstein
in 1972 to 1976.
Around 68 of these interviews are available online.
The interviewees all lived in all the states and included bagmen, shearers, station hands,
canecutters, builders, plumbers, a whole range of occupations.
Some of the examples of specific place descriptions relate to land prices during the depression,
the rising popularity of places due to low rents and the origins of particular stores
in townships.
I also point out the Drovers oral history project so this is a collection of around
140 interviews with around 25 of them available online.
Most interviewees lived in Queensland and the recordings were made in Charters Towers,
Mt Isa, Cloncurry, Emerald, McKay, Bundaberg and there were also other recordings made
in Alice Springs, Adelaide and Canberra.
So onto newspapers.
Newspapers are an effective form of detailing local history as they discuss stories at the
time they are happening.
Local newspapers are an important source of information on any town or city as they document
events that occurred in that place as well as people that lived there.
The National Library’s collection holds the major daily newspapers as well as reginal,
local and community newspapers.
So most Australian newspapers pre-1955 are digitised on Trove, after this it can get
tricky as to whether you can find newspapers online or if they can only be viewed onsite
at a library.
For newspapers not on Trove and for post-1955 papers these are most likely on microfilm
and print.
Microfilm is the preferred method for viewing these papers as they are more robust than
the typical newspaper.
For newspapers around the 1990s onwards newspapers can be accessed through our subscribed online
databases such as NewsBank and the Australian New Zealand Reference Centre.
These can be accessed at home by logging in with your library card but this’ll be discussed
in a few moments by Damian.
The National Library has presented other learning programs focusing on newspapers which will
provide more in-depth information.
This section was just to give you a brief overview of how newspapers document local
history and a brief overview on the different ways you can access newspapers in our collection.
So now I'm going to hand it back over to Damian who’s going to discuss a few more of our
collections and how you can go about finding them.
Thank you, Damian.
DAMIAN:So to our music collections.
As well as reading and listening to history you can also sing to it.
The Library has a collection of printed sheet musical scores, some 300,000 in all, in a
range of musical styles.
Music and lyrics can tell so much of the story of a place.
Music served as a form of advertisement, a celebration or describing an event or local
personality.
A song about a place can really show what people thought about that place or what that
place wanted people to think about it.
Many songs about Canberra in the early 20th century seemed to be trying to convince Australians
to accept the new city as their capital so perhaps a little bit of that Canberra cringe
that all of us Canberrans perhaps still feel today.
Many of the older musical scores are digitised and can be seen online.
To ephemera.
Now ephemera is a term given to printed materials that were intended to be short-term or immediate
use.
They are ephemeral, seen as minor things to inform for a moment but we have collected
and kept them as they are largely the everyday documents of people’s lives that tell the
stories of these passing events.
The ephemera collection includes advertising material, postcards, posters, trade catalogues,
performance programs, tourist and travel guides and scrapbooks.
All these can tell a story of a place and the people living in it as they are the material
produced by a local group or about a local event.
Not all items are individually catalogued but they do have subject area catalogue records
and descriptive lists that can be seen through our website.
They are often grouped by who produced them or under very broad subject headings so this
is in a way a bit like manuscripts, a bit of searching may be needed to find what you’re
looking for or just something unexpected that is informative.
Again many ephemera items are digitised and viewable online, not always entire contents
of a collection.
Ephemera can be based around an event in the calendar of a place such as a festival or
formal dinner of a social group or be advertising for a place such as here, the El Dorado Motel,
the first motel in Surfers Paradise.
We are currently collecting ephemera around the COVID-19 pandemic to document the day-to-day
experiences of Australians living through this event as this event that we are living
through now will become part of our history that researchers in the future will turn to
the Library to find out more about.
So to websites.
A new resource launched by the Library just last year is the Australian Web Archive, the
AWAarchives.au domain name websites from 1996 onwards.
This covers government, commercial and personal websites.
It’s basically a snapshot of each page within a website as it existed at that time.
The AWA is accessible via Trove and so searches of Trove will include the AWA in results.
Websites can be a source of historical information as has already been compiled and published
online.
Older versions of existing websites can be seen as well as websites that may no longer
be active.
Just like collecting books that have been published the Library now aims to collect
websites that have been published online, the new way to tell old stories or to document
the history of a place from now into the future.
While all websites can be searched for there are groupings of selected websites by theme
including one on local history.
For example there are 35 different websites created for the 2013 centenary of Canberra
that have been archived that tell the story about how Canberra celebrated our local history
as well as a collection of 41 websites devoted to exploring and describing historical villages
around Australia.
So while that was a quick overview of the variety of materials in the collection that
can be used to research the local history of a place there are many other ways to find
that information online.
I want to go to a website to show you some of these online resources that can be accessed
through us and used for researching local history so I’ll click through to our National
Library homepage.
So on our Library homepage one thing to look at is research guides.
We publish a number of research guides online to aid in researching particular subjects
and parts of the Library collection.
You can see this through Using the Library and under our Research Tools and Resources,
research guides.
Listed by various subjects these research guides list useful resources, provide guidance
on using the cataloguing collections and show what resources exist beyond the Library.
They are a very good first step to researching almost any topic.
Guides that are relevant to local history include guides to Australian cemetery records,
guides to topographic maps and maps of family historians and many guides on family history
research and the use of birth, death and marriage records.
I go back to our homepage to another option to Blogs, to our Stories and into Blogs.
Staff and researchers produce blogs that are another source of information on what is in
the collections, the stories that can be told and how to use the Library collections.
New blogs are regularly published on all aspects of the Library collection and how to use the
Library.
To probably one of our most used resources, and certainly if you’re not able to come
visit us in Canberra the most important one perhaps, is our eResources so click through
from eResources to take you into our eResources portal.
What we refer to as our eResources are subscription of websites containing online journals, databases,
newspapers and eBooks.
If you’re logging into our eResource you need to accept the terms and conditions but
things such as Australian online journals and other publications on history and society
can all be relevant to researching local histories.
The first thing to do if you are trying to get into our eResources is to log in with
your National Library card and I’ll talk a bit about that shortly.
But once you’ve logged in with that card it opens up the content of a lot of things
you can see online.
Search for content within a database perhaps but the best way to perhaps start is to browse
the resources that we have.
A list of the sorts of resources we offer but also the basic subjects as a way if you
want to get started.
There are three basic categories of eResources to be aware of and having a look at these
little icons that appear before each one of them.
Free websites that are basically freely available websites that we just link to because it’s
particularly useful or perhaps hard to find, licensed eResources.
These are the ones that you can log into from home with your Library card so just look for
the one that has the small little key icon.
There are also a lot of onsite resources with the little National Library of Australia building
icon, are ones that can only be accessed here in the Library building.
But you can see even from this starting list there’s quite a variety there so from home
always look for these little key icons, these are things you can access from home.
So in talking through the various resources we use the question of course you always have
next is how to find things.
So from our Library homepage here our catalogue is just under the top banner so click on Catalogue.
The online catalogue is the first and best place to begin.
It’s basically the database of what is in the Library collections.
I’ll try and give a very basic overview of using the catalogue with some search tips.
Given how much there is you may want to find and the number of different ways to find the
same thing it’s a bit hard to get a complete this is all you need to know-type description
so the best advice I can give is to explore the catalogue.
Don’t assume you’ll find the perfect item straight away, the more you look the more
you’ll find and so be patient.
There are many different ways to search for things in our catalogue, perhaps the first
if you know a particular book that you want to find is just to search for the book title.
I’ll have a search for one that I’ve used a lot for my own local place history and in
knowing the title you just type in the title name and click find.
It’ll then bring up a list of results that match that search but the first one is the
book that I was after, Canberra following Griffin which is a really good history of
the early development of Canberra.
On a record such as this there’s already some things you can start to explore further
with.
Looking at these subject headings will effectively be links to groups of items on that same subject
so even if you find just one item that you think is going to be useful that’s the way
to then look at the subject headings, it has to find what else is on that same subject.
So again if you get stuck, just finding one item of use is really the best way to get
into things.
Another simple way to search is by keyword which is probably the broadest way to search
so I’ll have another go at that as an example.
The simplest way is just the placename that you’re interested in and history.
This is going to get a lot of different results but there are ways to narrow things down into
things that are more useful for you.
If you get too much to begin with you can use things such as these narrow search options,
just select just a particular format within that great range of things that we’ve been
talking about.
If you just want to have a look at things that are online and easy to see rather than
print materials or again those subject headings to see in this large result what are the related
subjects and by clicking on these you’ll get into those little smaller groups of items
that may be a bit easier to comprehend.
You can also arrange your search results in different ways.
The date oldest to newest is probably the best, particularly if you’re looking at
things such as historical books but if can also break up what you’re looking at by
date as well.
So don’t be put off by perhaps getting too many things in the first result, there are
all sorts of different ways that you can then break down that large list of items so things
may be a little bit more specific for you.
So these are examples of where we’ve digitised the map, the book, the oral history recording
that you may be looking at.
Things that are viewable online will have this icon on the left to click on and that
will then take you into the actual digitised view of the book where you can effectively
then read the book as it were in front of you.
To search for general works about the history of a place a good way to use is the browse
function.
You can’t browse a book yourself in a Library collection but you can browse lists of books
that have a catalogue.
So I’m going to the Browse alphabetically option, select what you want to browse subjects
and then type in a subject and for local histories the best format to follow is the placename,
the state and history.
So there you can see how it’s already starting to bring up that browse option.
By clicking on the top one you’ll see this kind of arranged list of subject headings
and by clicking on one of them you’ll get to the actual records of the books that match
that heading.
So always try that simple format of placename, state and history as the best way to get started.
In searching for a placename if the first result doesn’t get too much then think about
searching a bit broader for that same area such as think about searching for the region
rather than the actual placename itself.
You may find that there are items that are a little bit broadly discovered rather than
just under that one location.
Or think of a nearby placename or a shire name or the next neighbouring town as other
ways to get to perhaps some material about the particular item place that you want to
have a look at.
But this basic structure is the one to use, the placename, the state as an abbreviation
and history as a subject to look for.
You can also search for personal names such as a significant individual or your own family
member perhaps or family name and also look for property names.
If we can try one that we’ve had a look at before and that’s actually the item that
I showed you, some of those station books and you can see other things related to that
station name you're looking for.
While history is perhaps the best subject to be looking for from the start there are
all sorts of other subject headings that may be useful for finding out about the history
of a place, things such as city planning, description, travel, genealogy and social
life.
So using that same structure of placename, state and a subject, something like social
life and customs will bring up another grouping of things that may be useful to find out about
the history of that place.
But some basic advice on using the catalogue is to be patient, be persistent, think laterally
if the first result you get doesn’t get something that you want and if you find a
thing that is a match for what you want explore further from there through those subject headings.
There is a help page on the catalogue with tips for using the catalogue and also various
how-to videos that can be used to actually show how to search through our catalogue.So
I’ll just get back to our presentation.
The key thing in actually using the Library’s resources is to have a National Library card.
While you don’t need a card to search our online catalogue or to view digitised collection
items the card is used to log into our eResources to see that online content and if you come
to the Library building in Canberra, use to request and view items here in the Library
building . To get a Library card, apply online through our website to get a Library card
and we will then post the card out to you.
So once you find what you want what now?
If you're not in Canberra to visit the Library building there are still several ways to access
our collection.
As we’ve said through each of these formats many items are digitised and can be seen online
through our catalogue, almost six million images and we are still digitising more all
the time.
From home the Library card can be used to access eResources, online journals, eBooks
and newspapers online.
While you can’t exactly borrow books yourself from our collection we can loan many of our
books to other libraries through the interlibrary loan service.
If you find something we have in our collection go to your local public library and ask if
they can request an interlibrary loan and the book may be able to be sent there for
you to use.
You can also use our paid copying service called Copies Direct.
Using this you can order copies of items in our collection as digital scans or paper photocopies.
There may be some limits on what can be copied and how you can use it because of copyright,
access conditions on manuscripts and oral histories, and sometimes items may be just
too fragile to copy.
But submit an order for what you want and our copying staff will check all of this and
let you know what is possible.
Of course there is always Trove as I’m hoping many of you may have already used this.
Trove is like an online discovery service that combines the online catalogues of libraries,
archives, museums and galleries across Australia.
It will show you which collecting institution has a particular item so if you find something
in our collection you like search Trove and you may be able to find another library closer
to you that has the same thing.
In looking beyond just the Library for local history you should also be trying your state
library, state archives and a local public library of the place you’re looking at.
These will have many things that we ourselves may not have in our collection.
Also a local historical society is a great resource to try.
These are great sources of local information but as they often have very limited resources
or are staffed by volunteers they may not have as much of an online presence as other
sources.
If you’re able to visit Canberra and come to the Library building to use the collection
here we do operate a little differently to most libraries you may have been to.
Our collection is not all on shelves in a room where you can just browse along yourself.
With 11 million items there are just too many to have in one room to let you wander around
so our collection is kept in what we call closed stacks.
Material needs to be requested by you for us to bring it from these closed stacks to
you to use.
You’ll need a Library card for this, to log into our online catalogue and submit requests
for what you want to see and we then deliver that request material to a reading room for
you to use.
Library cards can also be used to pay for photocopying and printing in the reading rooms.
So you have a taste there of the range of materials of Library collections on the subject
of local history in a range of different formats and different ways to present information
and stories.
We hope you can see beyond just the books, there are many other formats to search and
use when researching the local history of a place and to find the story of that place,
how to use the catalogue, how to use the reading rooms and access the collection from home
and what our services are.
For any queries on using the Library such as searching for material, how to research
a subject, how to get copies or permissions, how to access something you’ve found you
can submit an online enquiry form or a phone call through our Ask a Librarian service and
this is available from our homepage.
We can’t do all your research for you but we can guide you on your search and explain
how to use our collections.
We are here to help you on your research to find the history of your place and the stories
that that place can have.
The Library that we have here is full of such stories to uncover and thank you from both
of us.