Trove – searching for old newspaper articles
The National Library has an excellent on-line site called Trove. Their own description is best – it enables you to “Find and get over [249 million] Australian and online resources: books, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives and more”
Yesterday the helpful people at my local library showed me how to search the historic newspapers section. In fact a local paper, the Williamstown Chronicle (1856 – 1954), has had a large number of issues scanned, indexed and put up on Trove.
An important note is that Trove not only has the scanned articles (as ‘images’) but the computer has tried to ‘read’ the newspaper text and convert it to plain text! It does a great job, but doesn’t always get it right. You can volunteer to manually correct the text.
Here’s some quick steps on searching for articles that mention 25 Albert (street) in the Williamstown Chronicle :
- Access Trove. From the main screen select Digitised Newspapers and More
- On the Find an Article screen. Select Advanced Search (under the green “Search articles” button)
- This is the key screen: Advanced Search – Digitised Newspapers and more.
- In The phrase input area type in 25 Albert
- Lower down on the page, there is the Newspaper Title & Location section. In this, scroll through the long list to find the Victoria section heading and keep going until you find Williamstown Chronicle. Select it via the tick box beside it.
- Click Search
The system will perform the search and (hopefully) show the results:
- Click on any of the blue article titles (eg “Agent Sent for Trial”) to view the article; scanned original and ‘text’. I have selected another one; what appeared to be a party invitation from 1926:
Scroll down to find it: 
Notes:
- The RHS is the original scanned image, the LHS is the “Electronically Translated Text” (including an option, as mentioned, to Fix this Text)
- If you scroll down the scanned image, your (found) search text has a feint yellow/orange line under it, highlighting it.
- There are options – top LHS – to Print the scanned document..or save as PDF, JPG image etc. Or buy it. You should read up on how you can legally use these scanned articles.
- If you look carefully you’ll see the search for 25 Albert returned a reference to “..£25 Albert Edward …”. It literally did as it was asked. I didn’t put street or st in the search as that seems to limit it.
