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Building a National Treasure: Contributing to the Australian Newspapers Service

The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales AdvertiserThe Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser available online through the work of the Australian Newspapers service

Capturing the voices of Australians through the decades, Australia’s newspapers are one of the most treasured parts of our libraries’ collections. They tell us, through a myriad of viewpoints, the stories of the people and events that shaped us.

The National Library of Australia is now inviting all Australian libraries, historical societies and other local organisations to contribute newspaper content to its Australian Newspapers service. This service enables a growing collection of historic newspapers from all Australian states and territories to be freely accessible online. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, the first newspaper to be published in the new colony, in 1803, is the earliest of these. With 40 million articles from over 100 newspaper titles representing every Australian state and territory scheduled to be included in the service by June 2011, Australian Newspapers will provide online access to an unprecedented quantity and range of Australia’s newspaper heritage.

The Australian Newspapers service is an element of the Australian Newspaper Plan, a cooperative endeavour through which Australian national, state and territory libraries are comprehensively collecting, preserving and providing access to Australian newspapers. The newspapers in the service are digitised in a standard format which supports long-term preservation and ongoing access.

Access to this newspaper content is through Trove, the national resource discovery service. By searching in Trove, users can also easily find related information in a range of other formats such as books, pictures, maps and sound recordings. All of the digitised newspapers are fully text-searchable and ways to refine results are supported. The digitised newspapers are made accessible in a way that enables users to enrich and enhance the data through subject-tagging, text-correction and annotations.

Contributor Guidelines and a Factsheet are available from the Library for those libraries and organisations wishing to contribute content to the service. These can be obtained directly from our website or by calling the Library on 02 6262 1685.

Hilary Berthon
Australian Newspaper Plan Coordinator