Files digitised by the National Archives of Australia since 2021

This dataset contains a record of files digitised by the National Archives of Australia since 2021. It has been created and shared to help document long-term changes in access to files held by the NAA.

The National Archives of Australia's online database, RecordSearch, includes a list of recently digitised files, but this list only includes files digitised in the last month, so it's not possible to examine long-term changes. Since March 2021, I've captured weekly harvests of this list and saved them to a GitHub repository. The harvesting method is documented in this notebook.

The annual compilations in this dataset were created by combining these regular harvests and filtering by the year of digitisation, though there have been a couple of irregularities. The first harvest was run on 27 March 2021 and captured details back to 25 February. This has been added to the weekly harvests. 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've also removed any duplicates from the annual compilations and added series titles to each record.

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.