loading . . . Newspapers are a vital source for local history. That’s why, back in 2014, I created the Trove Places app – a map interface to help people find Trove’s digitised newspapers by their place of publication or distribution. Trove Places has proved very popular, and the State Libraries of South Australia, and Victoria, amongst others, point their users to it to help with their research. I’ve updated the data several times over the years, though the Trove’s new gatekeeping regime will make future updates difficult.
During my residency at the State Library of Victoria, one of the librarians noted how useful the app was, and asked whether it might be possible to include undigitised newspapers from the SLV catalogue as well as those in Trove. It was, and I did – here’s a brand new app to explore Victorian newspapers, both digitised and undigitised!
Just click on the map to find Victorian newspapers!
It’s pretty easy to use. You just click on the map in an area you’re interested in. The map will display the 20 nearest places where newspapers where published or distributed. The size of the markers indicates how many titles are associated with each place. In the sidebar, details of the newspapers are listed by place, ordered by their distance from your selected point.
You can also find local newspapers using the my place app. Once you enter an address, newspapers from your suburb or town will be displayed, as well as those from nearby locations.
newspapers from Geelong displayed in the my place app
## Assembling the data
How do you find Victorian newspapers? The reference librarians at the SLV pointed me to the ‘Place newspaper published’ field in the catalogue. Searching this field for ‘Australia–Victoria’ returns 3,997 results, compared to the 460 digitised in Trove.
The first step in assembling the data was to harvest the newspaper records from the SLV catalogue. To do this I made use of the Primo JSON API. The method is documented in this notebook. The results was a newline-delimited JSON file, with one record per line.
The harvested metadata doesn’t include links to digitised versions of newspapers in Trove. To add these links I first looked in the `856` field of the newspaper’s MARC record. I also noticed that some Trove links were being loaded from an ‘edelivery’ JSON file, so I added these as well. I ended up with 344 unique links to Trove, but not all of these were to digitised newspapers as some more recent newspapers are available through eLegal deposit. In total there were 268 unique links to digitised newspapers. This is well short of the 460 Victorian newspapers in Trove. Why? It’s possible that the links haven’t been added into the SLV catalogue, or that the ‘place newspaper published’ field hasn’t been populated for records that include the links. It’s also possible that Trove links are hiding somewhere else in the SLV catalogue!
To try and fill this gap, I compared the catalogue metadata with my most recent harvest of Trove newspaper titles. If the Trove url was missing, I searched the catalogue data for the newspaper title. I then manually checked the results, making sure the dates and titles lined up, and added positive matches to a new CSV file which I merged back into the main dataset. This added another 152 Trove links.
The next step was to link the ‘place newspaper published’ values to places with known locations. The ‘place newspaper published’ information is included in the `lds03` field of the harvested metadata. Records often contain references to multiple places, so I split all the newspaper/place combinations out into separate rows. I then matched the places against a list of Victorian place names and coordinates downloaded from the VicNames database. If there were no matches, I manually checked and adjusted the place names – for example, I changed ‘East Kew’ to ‘Kew East’, and ‘Bayside’ to ‘Bayside City’.
To add any Trove digitised newspapers that might still be missing, I made use of my existing Trove harvests. First I compared my Trove Places dataset with my latest harvest of newspaper titles. There were a few new titles, so I matched them to places using this notebook, based on my original Trove Places code. I then merged the Trove Places dataset with the new titles and checked it against the catalogue dataset. If any urls were missing, I added a record from the Trove data.
All of the processing steps are documented in this notebook.
## Building the apps
To make the data easily searchable by its geospatial coordinates, I loaded all the data into an SQLite/Spatialite database and published it online using Datasette. The database contains linked tables for titles and places.
I also created a couple of canned queries which, together with Datasette’s built-in JSON API, made it possible to retrieve places and titles based on their distance from a given point. For example, this url retrieves places ordered by their distance from the point at latitude -36.815, longitude 144.965 : https://slv-places-481615284700.australia-southeast1.run.app/newspapers/places_from_point.json?longitude=144.965&latitude=-36.815&distance=100000&_shape=array
When you click on the map in the Victorian Newspapers Explorer, it fires off a request like this to find nearby places. It then makes a second request to find newspapers related to those places and displays the results.
The Victorian Newspapers Explorer was my first attempt at using MapLibre rather than Leaflet to display maps using Javascript. It’s more verbose, but more flexible, so I think I’ll gradually switch over my other apps, including Trove Places.
All the code of the Victorian Newspapers Explorer is in the slv-demo-apps repository. https://updates.timsherratt.org/2025/12/16/exploring-victorian-newspapers.html
