Historic Newspapers on Trove

Trove, the National Library of Australia online site is a wonderful resource for searching historic documents such as newspapers, archives, music, maps, etc. Anyone with early Australians in their family will find this site very worthwhile and interesting.

 

Yes, and you can make corrections to the transcription which I found very satisfying (shows the sort of mentality I have)

 

Once you have signed up you can save your find to either a personal or public list - creating categories to organise what you have found.

 

Best Australian search site ever! Especially handy for funerals, obituaries and weddings. Totally free! Lost count of how much useful info I've found on here.

 

Not just Australian stuff too. Early newspapers reprinted stuff from around the world, so some UK news is often included.

 

True, but British Newspapers on FMP would probably be my first call rather than Trove (for the UK). Trove definitely first for Australia though.

 

I've definitely found UK-based stories in both Trove and its New Zealand equivalent (PapersPast, also free to access) that haven't shown up in British Newspapers on FMP. This may be because of the somewhat hit-and-miss nature of scanning and OCR-ing such old and damaged sources - something that might have got completely garbled in the scanning process for one site may have scanned more accurately at another.
[OCR = optical character recognition: the software that is used to 'read' and translate scanned images into searchable text files]

 

Thanks SuzanneD for explaining OCR. Not all of us are good with acronyms, they slow me down a lot when reading a post. Perhaps there should be a glossary on the forum, especially for newbies