Argus Index Online: Historical Newspaper Indexing in a Digital Age

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Argus Index Online Historical Newspaper Indexing
in a Digital Age

• Geraldine SuterChief Editor, Argus Index Project
• Judith PearceNational Library of Australia

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Overview

• About the project
• Creating the index
• Making it available online
• Demonstration
• Whats next
• Questions

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The problem to be solved

• No complete published newspaper index in any form
  for any major Australian daily newspaper

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How we are solving it

• By producing the first complete index to an
  Australian National daily covering the second
  half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th
  century and making this available online

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Why the Argus?

• Quality
• Coverage of the 19th century
• Status as a primary historical research source
• There are indexes for part of its run

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The size of the task

• 1860-1869 in electronic form but needing review
• 1870-1879 completed and ready to go online
• 1880-1908 unindexed
• Remaining years, in print form only and indexed
  to a range of standards

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Administration

• ARC Infrastructure grant
• Eight partners
• La Trobe, Curtin, ANU, Griffith, Melbourne and
  Monash Universities
• State Library of Victoria
• National Library of Australia
• 35 Readers
• 4 Indexers

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Design

• Annual indexes
• Content and arrangement
• Scope
• Controlled vocabulary

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Process

• Reading
• Indexing
• Editing
• Review

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Making the index available online

• Aims
• Challenges
• Outcomes

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Demonstration

• http//www-test.nla.gov.au/apps/argus/

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Whats next

• The next decade (1880-1889)
• The decade after that (1890-1899)
• Review of 1860-1869
• Digitisation of the existing indexes
• Interoperability
• Opportunities provided by other projects

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Questions