Files digitised by the National Archives of Australia, 25 February 2021 to 24 December 2022

This dataset contains details of 731,079 files digitised by the National Archives of Australia in 2021 and 2022.

The National Archives of Australia's online database, RecordSearch, includes a list of recently digitised files, but the list only includes files digitised in the last month. This dataset was created by combining regular harvests of this list to create a continuous record of files digitised from 2021 and 2022. It was created and shared to help document long-term changes in access to files held by the NAA.

The first harvest was run on 27 March 2021 and captured details back to 25 February. Since then I have automatically run weekly harvests and saved them in this repository. At the end of 2022, changes to RecordSearch broke the harvesting script, so I ran an extra harvest of the previous month on 20 January 2023 to make sure nothing was missed. I combined all the harvests into a single dataset, filtered it to include only 2022, and removed any duplicates. I also added series titles. The harvesting method is documented in this notebook.

The dataset is saved in CSV format and includes the following columns:

title – the title of this file

item_id – the identifier of this file

series – the identifier of the series that contains this item

control_symbol – the control symbol of this file

date_range – the date range of the item's contents

date_digitised – the date the file was digitised

series_title – title of the series that contains this item

You can construct a url to a digitised file using the item_id. For example:

http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/scripts/AutoSearch.asp?O=I&Number=[item_id]

For more information on harvesting data from RecordSearch, see the GLAM Workbench.