Discussion Searching Trove - your tips

[Gibbsy]

Just after some guidelines on how to best research footy in the late 19th century/early 20th century using Trove. I'm new to the caper but am keen and interested in how to become proficient given my passion for footy history/stats.

Particularly things like which newspapers to search in (Age/Argus/Australasian/Leader/Punch? any more?) and how to narrow down on particular players.

Cheers
Gibbsy

 

[the croucher]

Just after some guidelines on how to best research footy in the late 19th century/early 20th century using Trove. I'm new to the caper but am keen and interested in how to become proficient given my passion for footy history/stats.

Particularly things like which newspapers to search in (Age/Argus/Australasian/Leader/Punch? any more?) and how to narrow down on particular players.

Cheers
Gibbsy

One of the ways I search Trove is to place fulltext: in front of the player name, club or word I'm searching for. I also use the advanced search mode almost exclusively rather than the basic single search field. [NOTE: do not leave a space between the : and the word searched for].

For example, type fulltext:sowden 1900 in "all these words" section and click on the date link above the records found upon the hits returned, then click on Victoria [on left] and about 75 hits will be available.

Another way of searching from years ago
[which might not be so relevant now that millions of corrections have been made to Trove newspapers]
is to keep an eye out for the "incorrect" way Trove has loaded the text.
For example, kootball or footbail were a couple of ways that Trove mis-read football. Fortunately the thousands of volunteers who "correct Trove" on a daily basis are gradually reducing the number of mis-read words.

 

[WhiteHartLane23]

Just after some guidelines on how to best research footy in the late 19th century/early 20th century using Trove. I'm new to the caper but am keen and interested in how to become proficient given my passion for footy history/stats.

Particularly things like which newspapers to search in (Age/Argus/Australasian/Leader/Punch? any more?) and how to narrow down on particular players.

Cheers
Gibbsy

Age, Argus and Australasian have best match reports pre 1925 in my opinion.

Other titles I've found that have useful refs include Table Talk, Winner, Sporting Judge, Weekly Times (some of these are only for WWI years), Prahran Telegraph, Geelong Advertiser (for Geelong stuff), Richmond Guardian (Richmond stuff).

Really depends what you are looking for and more titles are always being added.

Footy Record is also online at http://digital.slv.vic.gov.au/R/?func=collections&collection_id=1081 (but I wish they'd put in into Trove!)

The other thing I often do when searching is use double quotes e.g. "Tom Heaney" to search for that rather the two separate words. Persistence is often the key, and I recommend tagging / using lists to record your finds as it can be surprisingly hard to find something a second time

 

[Gibbsy]

Thanks a lot to both of you. I too have been trying to correct little OCR errors when I see them on Trove; I had to rewrite a whole article last night about the Collingwood 1910 Vice President appointments.

I've definitely been using lists (albeit private) - seems the best way to keep track of links. And I've been making sure I add a note to the entry to remind myself of why I saved that particular link.

The tags thing seems cool, if not just for the benefit of everyone else researching... I've noticed that many articles from the early era have competing teams as well as the relevant VFL season tagged - that's handy. Plenty of australianfootball.com tags as well, I assume that's for their own reference? That site will be a gold mine when it's finally fleshed out.

 

[Gibbsy]

Did anyone check out the beta version of Trove available for access a couple of weeks ago? It's slick.

 

[Connor7395]

Don't trust the big papers for reporting accurate country scores from, ooh, I don't know, up to the 1940's. They're fairly accurate, but on countless occasions The Argus or The Age has a different score than what is reported in whatever newspaper covers the league with quarter by quarter reporting. Post-WWII is good enough I think.

For anything, the sources from preferred to least preferred go:
Annual report/yearbook, weekly newsletter, and books written about or by the league
Town newspaper with detailed match information
Regional/country newspaper that publishes the results every week
Major newspaper's Matches in the Country section

 

[RedmanWasHere]

If you're looking for deaths of those with common surnames, put a relatively obscure surname after their's.

E.g. I'd been looking for an O'Brien and couldn't find him so I added "Dubber" to the search bar and found the one I was after.

 

[Gibbsy]

If you're looking for deaths of those with common surnames, put a relatively obscure surname after their's.

E.g. I'd been looking for an O'Brien and couldn't find him so I added "Dubber" to the search bar and found the one I was after.

Wait I don’t get it. Why Dubber?

 

[35Daicos]

Wait I don’t get it. Why Dubber?

I'm glad somebody else asked that question. I don't get it either!

 

[RedmanWasHere]

Wait I don’t get it. Why Dubber?

Because Dubber is not a common surname and was the surname of one of his daughters' husbands.

 

[Gibbsy]

Because Dubber is not a common surname and was the surname of one of his daughters' husbands.

That context would’ve helped! I thought you just picked any old random name haha

 

[RedmanWasHere]

That context would’ve helped! I thought you just picked any old random name haha

Ah yeah.

Sorry.

 

[Snidely Whiplash]

I regularly go back and watch the help videos in Trove. I always pick up a new way to search or a feature I haven't used well previously.
I use Tags a lot but a caution if you are doing public tags, another similar tag can confuse your findings. Eg I was researching Boyd from Collingwood but others have also used the tag "Boyd" for non football identities and so the tag results get mixed.

I start with fairly narrow search criteria and expand to be more broad as I often find relevant articles in broader searches bit it is time consuming.

I also clip articles or screen shots into Evernote notebooks for future reference. This had been a godsend in locating articles I discovered previously.

 

[Supermercado]

If you want to exclude a tag add NOT publictag:"tag name here" to your search

If you want to only check new items add lastupdated:[year-MM-DDT00:00:00Z TO *]

 

[Gibbsy]

What do we think of the new design that went public a few days ago? I haven't had much of a poke around yet. It's glossy and definitely aimed at the more casual researcher, but all the advanced options are still there if you know where to look. I'm actually liking the image thumbnails for publications etc. It's certainly more of a 2020 website than the original iteration.