Tag: illustrated newspapers

Building a DIY Trove list exhibition

One of my projects over the summer has been to create a small online exhibition using Trove lists and a nifty online exhibition framework built by Tim Sherratt.

DIY Trove exhibition screenshot

The list feature in Trove allows registered users to create their own collections of items. They’re a handy thing if you’re researching a particular topic and want to organise the material that you’ve found in Trove, or even if you just want to go back to random stuff that you like. You can keep your Trove lists private, or make them public and share what you’ve found with others.

Tim, who until recently was part of the Trove management team, thought that it would be good to take that sharing to another level — so he’s created a framework that lets you use your Trove lists to create an online exhibition. You can read more about Tim’s thoughts on this process on his blog.

I was keen to give it a try, and decided to make a pictorial exhibition about the Chinese in New South Wales to 1940. I started by making nine lists in Trove, which would serve as topics in my exhibition. Gradually I added a selection of pictures, objects and illustrated newspapers articles to each of my lists. I gave each of my lists a short description and arranged the items in chronological order. Because I’ve included newspaper articles, it would be best if I took the time to correct the OCR text for each one, but I’m impatient and wanted to get onto building the exhibition itself.

Tim’s DIY Trove Exhibition is pretty straightforward to use, particularly if you have some experience (even very basic experience) with web publishing or coding. He’s written clear, step-by-step instructions. The process first involves getting yourself a GitHub account and a Trove API key, and then customising his code to make your exhibition. Customising the code might look scary, but if you follow the instructions carefully you should be okay! There are further ways that you can customise the exhibition — for example, I changed the fonts — but you don’t need to do anything more if you don’t want to.

Once you’ve made the exhibition, you can easily add or take away items, or change your list descriptions, or change the order items appear in a list. Simply make the change to your list in Trove and it will appear in your exhibition after refreshing your browser.

Here’s my exhibition:

The Chinese in New South Wales: A history in pictures to 1940

Hope you like it!

A lost newspaper?

On Saturday, 17 July 1869, the Sydney Morning Herald ran an advertisement (p. 9) for a newly released issue of the Illustrated Police News:

I’m intrigued by the prospect of an illustration showing ‘Australian Ladies and their Mongolian Husbands enjoying themselves in a Camp on the Gold-fields’ – but have not been able to locate it.

The ad appears among those advertising other newspapers published in Sydney at the time – Bell’s Life in Sydney, the Protestant Standard, the Protestant Banner – all of which I can find extant copies of. But I haven’t been able to locate any reference to a newspaper called the Illustrated Police News published in Sydney at this time.

There is, of course, the infamous London newspaper of the same name and a Melbourne Police News, illustrations from which are held by the State Library of Victoria. I’ve had some trouble accessing the British Library’s digitised newspapers site, which includes copies of the London Illustrated Police News, to check, but I’m pretty sure the Herald reference is to a different paper.

Clues anyone?