I obviously did a lot of talking in 2012, but I also made a few things… The evolution of QueryPic At the start of 2012 QueryPic was a fairly messy Python script that scraped data from the Trove newspaper database…
I obviously did a lot of talking in 2012, but I also made a few things… The evolution of QueryPic At the start of 2012 QueryPic was a fairly messy Python script that scraped data from the Trove newspaper database…
Earlier this week it was announced that the Mosman Library had been awarded a Library Development Grant for an innovative project that aims to document stories and artefacts relating to the First World War. I’m very excited to be part of it.…
This is the full version of a paper I presented at the National Digital Forum, 30 November 2011. In 1901, one of the first acts of the Commonwealth of Australia was to create a system of exclusion and control designed…
In many of the presentations I’ve given in recent times I’ve managed to include a question raised by Tim Hitchcock in his chapter in The Virtual Representation of the Past. Tim asks: What changes when we examine the world through…
Presented at the Life of Information Symposium, 24 September 2010. Slides are available on Slideshare. This palm print belongs to a 12-year-old boy called Charlie Allen. Charlie was born in Sydney in 1896. His mother was Frances Allen (sometime sweet…
About a month ago I posted a copy of my report Emerging technologies for the provision of access to archives on Scribd. It’s already edging up towards a thousand reads, so I thought it was time I put a link…
I was doing some research using the National Archives of Australia’s RecordSearch database the other day and became frustrated that there is no way of seeing how many pages are in a digitised file without clicking on the ‘Display digital…
The ever-informative Twitter alerted me recently to the History Trust of South Australia’s object of the month. It made me think that it would be nice if there was some way of bringing together all those objects, photos and documents…
Mapping our Anzacs, in case you don’t know, provides a Google map interface to the 375,000+ WWI service records held by the National Archives of Australia. Amongst other other things, you can add scrapbook posts to individual entries and create…
The new version of my Greasemonkey userscript, RecordSearch Image Tools, gives RecordSearch’s digital image pages a rather new look. My previous version had done away with the tired ol ‘lemon-chiffon’ background colour, but I decided it was time to get…
[Contains many broken links – included for historical interest only!] what is there to know about archives? In this age of virtual wonders, it seems that our past is rushing towards us. New communication technologies promise greatly improved access to…
How do scientists document their research? As electronic means of communication become the norm, this question has taken on special urgency. If we don’t understand the process of record-keeping within the sciences, we are in danger of losing our scientific…
On behalf of ASAP I’d like to welcome you all here to help celebrate our 10th birthday. This is a milestone that, at times, it seemed we might never reach, but here we are, stronger than ever. If you haven’t…
What am I doing here? I work for a non-profit organisation attached to the University of Melbourne. What can I say about “Doing Business on the WWW”? You all know universities have it easy, large IT departments, huge bandwidth connections…
