The Australian Women’s Weekly Digitisation Project
Scanning contractor Chris Brothers and Project Manager Marian Hanley setting up The Australian Women’s Weekly on the ATIZ scanner
Cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly issue for 14 January 1939
A selection of covers
About the project
During the 2009/2010 financial year, the National Library of Australia is funding a project to digitise and make publicly available The Australian Women's Weekly, from 10 June 1933 to 15 December 1982. This represents the first 50 years of the magazine, from its inception to when the magazine changed frequency to monthly. The project is being undertaken in association with the magazine’s publisher, Australian Consolidated Press, and the State Library of New South Wales, which has provided its collection for scanning.
The articles, editorials, advertisements, illustrations and photographs contained in The Weekly offer a unique insight into the social fabric of Australia throughout the 20th century. Browsing through the pages reveals how Australians lived in the harsh reality of the Great Depression, through the shortages and grim news of the war years, the conservative 1950s and in the prosperous and optimistic 1960s and 1970s.
Technical issues
Digitisation of The Weekly involves scanning some 210 000 pages and then processing the image files through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to allow for keyword searching. Each page is scanned as a 400 ppi 24 bit RGB TIFF 6.0 file. In the near future, the images will be made publicly available via a search and delivery interface and will be able to be downloaded as pdfs. This project has posed new technical issues for the Library to grapple with. For instance, we had not digitised journals or colour text-based images in any significant way before, so systems had to be developed to support workflows and management of this content.
Although OCR works well for articles with a consistent and standard typeface and format, the nature of The Weekly, which contains many illustrations, often surrounding and superimposed over the text, highly cursive typefaces and often poor print quality, means that the electronically generated text is sometimes inaccurate. The use of Web2.0 technology, which allows users to enhance and enrich content, has been very successful at the Library with the wonderful contribution by the newspaper text correctors through the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program. The same features will be available to users of this content and already there has been public interest in text correcting and tagging The Weekly, which will add to its value as an important social history resource.
Some interesting facts about The Weekly
- It was a best seller since its inception and was so popular that most of the states had their own editions; there was even a New Zealand edition for a time. The first issue in June 1933 sold out and had to be reprinted. Circulation of The Weekly was at one time the highest per capita in the world. It remains a best seller to this day.
- In the 1930s and 1940s the covers were works of art in themselves. The Weekly employed professional artists for the covers. William Edwin Pidgeon (1909–1981) was an Archibald Prize winning artist who also produced many covers and illustrations for The Weekly. Other artists included Geoff Turton (‘Petrov’) and Arthur Boothroyd. One of the covers was even used for a series of stamps.
- During the war, The Weekly was avidly read by Australian troops. The Weekly represented to the troops the security and familiarity of home. The troops could see that their loved ones were safe and people were rallying around the war effort. However, there was one feature of The Weekly that the troops followed religiously—‘Mandrake the Magician’. Although Mandrake was an American comic strip it was ‘Australianised’ for The Weekly. The comic was pure fantasy and never featured any the war-time realities. When The Weekly journalists visited the troops (which they did regularly) questions about Mandrake were asked most.
Missing issues appeal—We need your help!
The Weekly is an iconic publication and online availability will provide access to a resource containing a wealth of information about the lives, aspirations and opinions of Australians in the 20th century. Read more about the project online.
The Library’s copies of the magazine have become victim to their own popularity—loved to death by the public. Many issues have the crosswords completed, coupons for free shampoo samples removed, pinups of idols such as Johnny O’Keeffe purloined for a teenager’s wall and the join the dots on the children’s page completed. As the national collecting institution, the Library wishes to obtain replacement copies of these missing and damaged issues to complete our own collection… but we need your help. To date, the response from the public has been overwhelming! Although the digitised version will meet most general needs, for some researchers there is nothing like the ‘look and feel’ of the original. Only by examining the original hardcopy of The Weekly would you get a true picture of things like changes in size, format, paper quality, print quality and colouration. A webpage lists the missing issues .
The contact person for any enquiries is Julie Whiting at jwhiting@nla.gov.au or on 1800 059 097 (freecall).
Marian Hanley
Project Manager, The Australian Women’s Weekly Digitisation Project



