Tim Sherratt

I’m a historian and hacker who researches the possibilities and politics of digital cultural collections.

My main project at the moment is the #GLAMWorkbench, which brings together many examples, tools, code and tutorials to help people explore the digital collections of galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.

#Histodons #GLAM #DigitalHumanities

:me:: https://timsherratt.au/
:updates:: https://updates.timsherratt.org/
:projects:: https://wraggelabs.com
:pronouns:: he/him

Public Key

npub17u49auwfvaun27caqfrjf9vmf0heh5s5nt2h5ggeyq8jpev7af3qjqcpmy

NIP-05 Address

wragge_at_hcommons.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs0w2j778ykw7f40vwsy3eyjkd5hmum6g2f44t6yyvjqrequk0w5cspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds2tkuzk

Publishing to

nostr-pub.wellorder.net

relay.damus.io

Author Public Key

npub17u49auwfvaun27caqfrjf9vmf0heh5s5nt2h5ggeyq8jpev7af3qjqcpmy

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Last Notes

2026-03-06 03:02:18 UTC

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Snap!
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/116/180/001/300/739/478/original/35da1447fed9bdca.jpeg

2025-06-23 08:47:51 UTC

I think this is the first Trove Data Guide reference I've seen in print.
"While acknowledging the transformative effects of databases like Trove—whose sheer volume has allowed historians to fashion ‘new narratives of women’s lives’—feminist scholars remain wary about the distortions of the digital. Beyond debates about bias and silences within the archive, and fears about the rise of a new digital positivism, Tim Sherratt’s insider’s guide to Trove is vital reading for users seeking to fathom its limits and possibilities."
Keating, James. “Beginning a New Century of Women’s Suffrage History?” Agora 59, no. 3 (2024): 36–39. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.T2024111300007500859019781 #histodons #GLAM

2025-04-16 03:17:53 UTC

Today's anxiety brought to you by not knowing WTF is happening with paid work in the next couple of years...

2025-03-21 03:24:36 UTC

It's been four weeks now since the National Library of Australia suspended my API keys, forcing all my work on #Trove to stop: https://updates.timsherratt.org/2025/02/24/years-of-work-on-trove.html #GLAM #openGLAM #histodons #digitalHumanities

2025-02-21 01:30:50 UTC

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This what the email said: "Trove API Terms of Use specify that developers may access metadata only and do not provide extended rights. We consider the use of an API to extract and save full text as being in violation of the Terms of Use."
Which given that the API provides full text from newspapers, journals, books etc means that using the API is a breach of the API terms of use...
In any case, I didn't use the API to get text from the NED periodicals, I downloaded the PDFs.

2025-01-27 00:48:47 UTC

The Primary Source (https://ozglam.chat/) shares information about Australian GLAM collections (that's #galleries, #libraries, #archives, & #museums). But how do you keep up-to-date with the latest posts? There's a few different ways:
- Create an account at The Primary Source. Once you've done that, you'll receive a weekly email with posts you might have missed. (Of course you can disable this if you don't want more emails!)
- Add the The Primary Source RSS feed to your preferred feed reader: https://ozglam.chat/latest.rss
- Follow @npub1me3…52eg for regular updates.

2025-01-21 05:31:57 UTC

I've now got one eye that is not only cataract free but, thanks to the new lens, is much less short-sighted that any time since my teens. It's a bit weird to be suddenly able to see your own face in such clarity after 40 years...

2025-01-17 06:45:24 UTC

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Thread compiled into a post for my updates feed: https://updates.timsherratt.org/2025/01/17/changes-to-trove-newspapers-in.html

2025-01-17 04:59:43 UTC

I'm back in the land of the computers and catching up with new year things. Here's a quick look at what changed in #Trove's digitised newspapers in 2024.
6,241,739 digitised newspaper articles were added to Trove in 2024. The rate of digitisation was pretty quick until the end of March when the processing of the Melbourne Sun ended, then things flattened out a bit. #GLAM #histodons #digitalHumanities @npub1uc0…cpgf
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/113/841/928/965/188/847/original/e12d64c41168367c.png

2024-11-28 03:53:07 UTC

Perhaps someone who works in one of #Trove's partner organisations could ask them to fix the CORS headers on API responses? Reports by mere commoners seem to be ignored, and the bug is now over a year old. Reports are here: https://github.com/Conal-Tuohy/TroveProxy/issues/24 and https://github.com/GLAM-Workbench/trove-api-intro/issues/49#issuecomment-2398297626

2024-11-26 09:55:49 UTC

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Absolutely! Don't get me started on historians who think their only job is to talk to other historians...

2024-11-26 07:00:38 UTC

Just following on from my little rant yesterday about the AHA president's keynote disappearing behind a paywall at the end of the year, I updated my notebook that analyses #openAccess status in Australian history journals (now using the awesome @npub10qx…kwm3 API). In total, more than 90% of articles in History Australia and Australian Historical Studies are locked up. The "read and publish" agreements have had an impact over the last couple of years, but the majority of articles are still closed. #histodons #openAccess
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/113/547/964/351/156/893/original/068cbf1723b97165.png
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/113/547/964/326/615/732/original/00e8793078948146.png

2024-11-25 06:30:00 UTC

So the president's keynote at the Australian Historical Society conference in July, which discusses the role of history in Australian society, and ends with the words 'Let’s fight not in the dark, but in the daylight', is now available from the journal History Australia for free -- UNTIL THE END OF DECEMBER. For fuck's sake, perhaps part of the reason the public doesn't get engaged in history is that so much Australian history is locked up behind paywalls.
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/113/542/181/552/617/310/original/f286af16518028ed.png

2024-11-21 05:13:50 UTC

Yay, I've finally finished processing all the available volumes of the Tasmanian Post Office Directories! You can now search across **54** volumes from 1890 to 1948. The recently-added volumes are:
- 1920
- 1933-34
- 1941-42
- 1942-43
- 1943-44
- 1945-46
While these volumes could be downloaded as PDFs from Libraries Tasmania, they weren't previously searchable, as they don't contain any OCRd text. I've extracted images from the PDFs, pre-processed the images, run them through Tesseract to extract the text, and used Datasette to make them searchable. Now all we need is for #librariesTasmania to add a link from their Directories page...
More on the latest update: https://updates.timsherratt.org/2024/11/21/six-more-volumes.html
Or just start searching: https://glam-workbench.net/libraries-tasmania/tasmanian-post-office-directories/
#histodons @npub1uc0…cpgf #familyHistory #GLAM

2024-11-19 03:34:48 UTC

#jobalert Head of Cultural Heritage at TMAG: https://careers.pageuppeople.com/759/cw/en/job/519425/head-of-cultural-heritage-705252 #museums #histodons #GLAM

2024-10-09 10:44:13 UTC

Big historic Hansard news! Thanks to information from the Dept of Parliamentary Services I've finally been able to access XML files for Australian Commonwealth Hansard between 1981 and 1997. This means I've been able to run a complete harvest of *all* the XML files from 1901 to 2005 for the very first time. I've just pushed all the XML files to the Hansard-XML repository. More info to come! https://github.com/wragge/hansard-xml #histodons #digitalHumanities #hansard

2024-09-24 01:59:33 UTC

Turns out my searchable version of the Tasmanian Post Office Directories is missing 1920 because the 1920 volume was digitised differently to everything else and didn't get picked up my my processing scripts. Spending the day manually cropping 700+ pages to make it consistent with the other volumes...

2024-09-10 05:37:25 UTC

Exciting news from National Library of New Zealand -- you can now correct OCRd text of the digitised #newspapers in Papers Past: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/help/text-corrections #GLAM #histodons

2024-08-27 04:46:01 UTC

Thanks to the folks who have bought me a coffee today! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/wragge It really helps keep me going!

2024-08-27 03:29:10 UTC

If you’re interested in opening up GLAM collections for use in research, you might like to join the new Collections as Data Interest Group, part of the Research Data Alliance. The next meeting will be on 18 September at 3pm AEST. More details: https://updates.timsherratt.org/2024/08/27/join-the-research.html Please share! #GLAM #archives #libraries #museums #openData #digitalHumanities

2024-08-26 08:01:21 UTC

Before #FamilyHistoryMonth ends, I thought I should update my GLAM Name Index Search. There's 18 new datasets, so in total there's now 279 datasets from 10 Australian GLAM organisations – almost 12 million rows of data! And it's free! Just type a name in the search box to get started. https://updates.timsherratt.org/2024/08/26/more-datasets-added.html #GLAM #openData #familyHistory #genealogy

2024-08-21 07:07:56 UTC

Just updating my list of GLAM datasets in gov data portals and it looks like there's a few new datasets from the Queensland State Archives that I'll need to add to the GLAM Name Index search...
https://spaces.hcommons.social/media_attachments/files/112/998/748/894/464/489/original/591d91f6864878f8.png

2024-08-03 11:51:13 UTC

ooops I've already fallen behind in my #FamilyHistoryMonth postings... Here's one for today. If your family comes from a non-English speaking background, check out this list of #Trove newspapers published in languages other than English. There's 55 different titles, in a range of languages including Chinese, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Greek, Polish, and Ukrainian. https://github.com/GLAM-Workbench/trove-newspapers-non-english/blob/main/non-english-newspapers.md #GLAMWorkbench #familyHistory #genealogy