A few years ago I posted about some of my family history related resources, but things have changed a bit since then so I thought it was time for a Family History Month update. ## GLAM Name Index Search The GLAM Name Index Search brings 293 datasets from 10 Australian GLAM organisations together into a single search interface. All these datasets index collections by people’s names, so with one search you can find information about individuals across a broad range of records, locations, and periods. I update the index regularly, adding new datasets as they become available. In April last year, I added more than 6 million rows of data from the Public Record Office of Victoria using their API. That brings the total number of records to close to 13 million! Try it now > ## Directories from NSW, Tasmania, and Victoria A lot of old directories, full of people’s names and addresses, have been digitised by our state libraries, but often they’re difficult to search. I’ve processed 176 volumes from NSW, Tasmania, and Victoria to create new search interfaces that let you search for individual entries. The most recent addition to this collection was 24 volumes of the Sands & McDougall’s directory from the State Library of Victoria. My parents captured in Sands & Mac while building their first house. Try it yourself > Now you can search: * NSW Post Office Directories (54 volumes from 1886 to 1950) * Sydney Telephone Directories (44 volumes from 1926 to 1954) * Tasmanian Post Office Directories (54 volumes from 1890 to 1948) * Sands & McDougall’s Directories, Victoria (24 volumes from 1860 to 1974) The NSW Post Office Directories display page images from Trove. Trove has recently introduced some anti-bot measures which might stop these images being displayed. There’s an easy workaround though – just click on the ‘Open page in Trove’ button to show Trove you’re a human, then go back to your search and reload the page. You’ll only need to do this once, as the bot detector sets a cookie that can be used in any subsequent requests. You can also search the Sands & McDougall’s directories using my experimental my place app (see below). ## GLAM databases have a new home Earlier this year I set up a new server, with added bot defences, to host most of my big GLAM databases including the GLAM Name Index Search and the directories. If you’ve saved any bookmarks to these resources please update them. The old addresses will continue to work for a while, but eventually I’ll need to turn off the redirects. You might also notice an odd-looking screen pop up when you try to access the site. This is just the bot defences at work. It’ll run a little test to try and make sure you’re a human then send you on your way – no clicking on tiny pictures of bicycles is necessary! ## Tung Wah Newspaper Index The Tung Wah Newspaper Index is an English-language index to two Chinese-language newspapers – the _Tung Wah News_ (1898–1902) and the _Tung Wah Times_ (1902–1936), both published in Sydney. The index was compiled back in 2001 at Latrobe University. I’ve put it in a new database with links to digitised pages in Trove wherever I could identify them. ## Finding newspapers by place Way back in 2014, I created a map interface to help you find where Trove’s newspapers were published and distributed. It’s still working, though it’s been moved to my wraggelabs.com site, so please update your bookmarks. I haven’t added to the list of newspapers for a few years, and updating is difficult now as I don’t have access to the Trove API, but I’m going to try and update it manually. Stay tuned. In the meantime, I’ve created a brand new map interface to Victorian newspapers, both digitised _and_ undigitised. Just click on a map of Victoria to find places nearby that have associated newspapers. The list of newspapers links back to the SLV catalogue and Trove if they’ve been digitised. It’s a good reminder that a lot of small, local newspapers still haven’t been fully digitised. Explore Victorian newspapers > You can also search for Victorian newspapers using my experimental my place app (see below). ## Victorian place-based collections Late last year, I had a fun time playing with place-based collections at the State Library of Victoria. My time as Creative Technologist-in-residence resulted in a number of new apps, indexes and interfaces, including the Sands & Mac search interface and the Newspapers Explorer. Many of these will be useful if you’re trying to find out more about the places people lived. You can browse a complete list of my experiments and blog posts, but here’s a few more highlights. ### my place The _my place_ app is a good place to start as it pulls in data from all the different collections that I was working with. It was inspired by the number of people who come to the SLV wanting to find out about their house, or their street, or their town. You just type in an address and _my place_ shows you maps, photos, newspapers, and even extracts from the Sands & MacDougall directories. The search results are bookmarkable, so save and share your discoveries. Map centred on 149 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy Occupants of 149 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy from 1875 to 1925 Georeferenced maps positioned on a modern basemap, showing the location of the currently selected address You can find out more about _my place_ and the collections it uses in this post. ### Committee for Urban Action photos In the 1970s, the Committee for Urban Action photographed streetscapes across urban and regional Victoria. Over 20,000 of these images have now been digitised. I created an interface that lets you explore these photographs street by street. Just click on a highlighted street to see photographs of buildings from the CUA collection. Explore houses street by street > ### Georeferencing Victorian maps I also did a bit of GLAM data plumbing to build a workflow that lets you georeference any of the SLV’s digitised maps. So far more than 1,400 maps have been georeferenced, enabling them to be found and displayed using modern digital mapping systems. You can explore the georeferenced maps using _my place_ or this new interface which displays the georeferenced maps positioned on a modern basemap. Display digitised maps on a modern basemap > If you’d like to help georeference the SLV’s maps there’s detailed instructions here. ## Saving Trove newspaper images I’ve pretty much stopped work on Trove since they cancelled my API access, but saving digitised newspaper articles as decent quality images is still such a pain that I’ve created a new userscript that adds some new download buttons to the Trove interface. New download buttons! ## Don’t forget Zotero! I’ve been continuing to create Zotero translators for Australian GLAM collections. These translators enable Zotero to capture not just citation details, but images and documents from digitised collections. Here, for example, are some details about the translator for Libraries Tasmania that makes it easy to capture digitised documents from their Names Index. Capture images and metadata from the Libraries Tasmania catalogue using Zotero There are now custom translators for Libraries Tasmania, National Archives of Australia, Trove, National Gallery of Australia, State Records Office of WA, PROV, and Queensland State Archives. ## Other useful resources * the Trove Data Guide has lots of useful hints and tips for working with Trove * the GLAM Workbench helps you work with data from a number of different GLAM collections ## Get the latest news… If you want to keep up to date with my work on GLAM collections, follow my blog feed. There’s also an option to subscribe to a compilation email that comes out every month.

I’ve created a userscript that expands the options available in the ‘Download’ panel of Trove’s newspaper interface. Using it, you can download full newspaper article and page images with one click. > **PLEASE NOTE** > While this userscript is very handy, it is also _very slow_ to run. Don’t be surprised if it takes 30 seconds or more to prepare your image. During this time the Trove page might appear to freeze. The amount of time varies according to a number of factors, including the size of the article, the chosen resolution (see ‘Adjust the scale’ below) and the power of your computer. See the ‘Issues and performance’ section below for more. ## Installation and use If you haven’t installed a userscript before, the first step is to add a userscript manager, such as Tampermonkey, to your browser. Tampermonkey is available as an extension or add on for most browsers, to install it: * go to the Tampermonkey home page * select your browser (Chrome / Firefox / Safari / Edge) * follow the link to your browser’s app store * click on the button to install Tampermonkey Note that if you’re using Tampermonkey with Chrome-based browsers (including Edge and Vivaldi), you have to explicitly give it permission to run userscripts after installation. Once the userscript manager is ready, you can actually install the userscript itself: * go to the minified version of the userscript in GitHub * click on the ‘Raw’ button Click on the 'Raw' button * Your userscript manager will intercept the link and ask you if you want to install the userscript * Click on the ‘Install’ button Click on the 'Install' button The Trove Newspaper Images userscript will run automatically when you view a newspaper article in Trove. If you open up the ‘Download’ panel you’ll notice there’s two new buttons. New Article and Page buttons! ### Downloading an article image Just click on the ‘Article’ button to generate a cropped version of the article image you can download (it can take a little while so be patient). Once the image is ready it’ll be displayed below the buttons. Click on the thumbnail or the link to download the image. Click on the thumbnail to download the article image By default, the article image is scaled to 50% of it’s maximum size. The full page images vary in size, but they’re often around 5,000 pixels wide, so even at 50% article images are large enough for most purposes. If you need larger (or smaller) images, you can adjust the scale. #### Adjust the scale Use the ‘Scale’ dropdown to select a scale value between `0.1` and `1`. Setting it to `0.1` will generate a smallish, thumbnail-type image, while setting it to `1` will create a download at the highest possible resolution. However, as described below, increasing the size of the image slows down the generation process considerably. Setting the scale to `1` might double or triple the time it takes for the image to be created. I’d suggest starting at the default value of `0.5` and increasing the scale factor only as needed. If your article covers a large part of the page, and you want the highest possible resolution, you might find it more efficient to download the full page image (see below) and manually crop the article. The full page images don’t undergo any extra processing and can be downloaded almost immediately. #### Mask the article Articles are cropped to a rectangular box that fits their outer boundaries . If your article is an odd shape (ie not rectangular), this might mean that there’s some content from adjacent articles included in your image. You can remove this content by checking the ‘Mask’ box. The same article unmasked and masked Masking will add a little bit to the overall processing time. So only use it if needed. ### Downloading a page image If you want to download the whole page, click the ‘Page’ button. The page thumbnail should appear almost instantly. Click on the thumbnail or the link to download the image. Click on the thumbnail to download the page image ### File names and Trove links The file name of the downloaded image contains the Trove article and page identifiers. For example, an image with the filename `nla.news-article162833980-page16636766.jpg` comes from the article with the identifier `162833980`. You can use this identifier to build a link back to Trove: http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article162833980. ## Background If you’ve ever tried to download an image of a newspaper article in Trove you’d know that it’s not as easy as it should be. The ‘Image’ button in Trove’s ‘Download’ tab actually generates a HTML page with embedded images that are often sliced up in unfortunate ways. I’ve developed a number of workarounds over the years to try and help people get images easily. The basic method is documented by a notebook in the GLAM Workbench – first you extract the coordinates of the article from its HTML page, then you download a high resolution image of the page, and crop the article from the page image using the coordinates. As well as the notebook, I’ve had this running as a service on Cloudrun and, more recently, as a Lambda function on AWS called by a static page in the GLAM Workbench. I also embedded the basic logic into a Python package that people could use in their own data processing pipelines. I noticed recently that Trove had introduced some new anti-bot defences that will probably break all my previous workarounds. While I’m mostly avoiding anything to do with Trove, I wanted to try and keep this alive in some form as I know how useful it can be. I’d also been wondering for a while whether it might be possible to implement the basic logic _inside a userscript_. A userscript is a little bit of Javascript code that runs inside your browser after a page loads. Userscripts can change the way web pages look and function – for example, I’ve created a userscript that lets you navigate through the pages of Trove’s newspapers using only your arrow keys. I’ve written about some other userscripts I’ve developed here, and talked about how useful they can be in this video for the State Library of Victoria. Most recently, I created a userscript to connect the SLV’s digitised maps to Allmaps for georeferencing. However, I’d never tried to edit images in a userscript, and I didn’t even know if it was possible. After a bit of searching I found Jimp – an image manipulation module written in Javascript. It seemed to have all the necessary functions, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the module to load correctly inside a userscript. Eventually I used this Vite plugin to package the necessary Jimp code within the userscript itself. It worked! Once I had the image editing sorted, it was just a matter of extending Trove’s user interface to add some new buttons to the ‘Download’ tab and display the new images when ready. The finished userscript is large because of all of the Jimp code, so I’ve generated a minified version as well. If you’re interested in the Trove-specific code it’s easiest to look in the source file. ## Issues and performance While Jimp makes this userscript possible, I did have a few problems with it. The first is that the most recent version isn’t packaged properly, so there were errors when I tried to import it into Vite. I ended up just installing an older version. Early on I ran into a lot of problems with Jimp exceeding its memory limit. The default memory limit is 512mb, but I found I needed to bump this up to 1024mb to work reliably. It seems the size of images increases significantly once they’re read into Jimp’s buffer. It’s possible to pass along a new maximum memory value to the `read` method, but this isn’t working in the Jimp version I’m using. I ended up just manually editing the userscript code once it had been generated by Vite by searching for `maxMemoryUsageInMB` in the Javascript and changing 512 to 1024. Finally, operations reading large images to or from Jimp’s buffer are _really_ slow. It seems this has to do with the underlying image libraries, so I couldn’t find any workarounds. The slowest step appears to be saving the image in base64 for downloading and embedding in the page. The larger the image, the slower this will be. As noted above, keeping the scale setting at `0.5` reduces the image size and thereby speeds up image generation. Here’s some comparisons using the article in the images above, which is large and covers almost half the newspaper page. First with my fairly powerful desktop computer: Scale factor | Size | Time to generate ---|---|--- 0.5 | 2182 x 1561px (1.1mb) | 27 seconds 1.0 | 4363 x 3122px (3mb) | 52 seconds And second with my 10 year old MacBook Pro (running Linx Mint): Scale factor | Size | Time to generate ---|---|--- 0.5 | 2182 x 1561px (1.1mb) | 1 minute 28 seconds 1.0 | 4363 x 3122px (3mb) | 2 minutes 40 seconds As noted above, if you wanted a large image like this in the highest possible resolution you’re probably better off using the ‘Page’ button to download the complete, high-resolution page image and then cropping it manually. This will still give you a better result than using Trove’s built in download tool or trying to use a screen capture program, and will be much faster than using the ‘Article’ option.

YouTube video by National Railway Museum

After a replica Locomotion No 1 steamed from Shildon to Stockton, Chris Lloyd reflects on a fitting weekend celebrations marking S&DR200.

I did not expect to shed tears while scanning old model railway magazines.