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NSW State Archives

Current version: v1.0.0

A collection of notebooks for working with collection data from the NSW State Archives.

NSW State Archives content in copyright was previously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. See their archived copyright page for more information.

See below for information on running these notebooks in a live computing environment. Or just take them for a spin using Binder.

ARDC Binder Binder

Tools, tips, and examples

Get details of online indexes

This notebook scrapes details of available indexes from the NSW State Archives A to Z list of online indexes. It saves the results as a CSV formatted file.

Harvest online indexes

This notebook harvests data from all of NSW State Archives online indexes, saving the data as a collection of easily downloadable CSV files.

Summarise index details

This notebook counts the number of rows in each index and calculates the total for the whole repository. It formats the results in nice HTML and Markdown tables for easy browsing.

NSW State Archives Index Explorer

NSW State Archives provides a lot of rich descriptive data in its online indexes. But there's so much data it can be hard to understand what's actually in each index. This notebook tries to help by generating an overview of an index, summarising the contents of each field.

Data

CSV list of indexes

Harvested May 2023

Repository of harvested indexes

Currently: 75 indexes harvested with 2,481,881 rows of data.
Harvested May 2023

Run these notebooks

There are a number of different ways to use these notebooks. Binder is quickest and easiest, but it doesn't save your data. I've listed the options below from easiest to most complicated (requiring more technical knowledge).

Using ARDC Binder

Launch on ARDC Binder

Click on the button above to launch the notebooks in this repository using the ARDC Binder service. This is a free service available to researchers in Australian universities. You'll be asked to log in with your university credentials. Note that sessions will close if you stop using the notebooks, and no data will be preserved. Make sure you download any changed notebooks or harvested data that you want to save.

See Using ARDC Binder for more details.

Using Binder

Launch on Binder

Click on the button above to launch the notebooks in this repository using the Binder service (it might take a little while to load). This is a free service, but note that sessions will close if you stop using the notebooks, and no data will be saved. Make sure you download any changed notebooks or harvested data that you want to save.

See Using Binder for more details.

Using Reclaim Cloud

Launch on Reclaim Cloud

Reclaim Cloud is a paid hosting service, aimed particularly at supported digital scholarship in hte humanities. Unlike Binder, the environments you create on Reclaim Cloud will save your data – even if you switch them off! To run this repository on Reclaim Cloud for the first time:

  • Create a Reclaim Cloud account and log in.
  • Click on the button above to start the installation process.
  • A dialogue box will ask you to set a password, this is used to limit access to your Jupyter installation.
  • Sit back and wait for the installation to complete!
  • Once the installation is finished click on the 'Open in Browser' button of your newly created environment (note that you might need to wait a few minutes before everything is ready).

See Using Reclaim Cloud for more details.

Running in a container on your own computer

GLAM Workbench repositories are stored as pre-built container images on quay.io. You can run these containers on your own computer to set up a virtual machine with everything you need to use the notebooks. This is free, but requires more technical knowledge – you'll have to install Podman on your computer, and be able to use the command line.

  • Install Podman.
  • In a terminal, run the following command:
    podman run --rm -p 8888:8888 quay.io/glamworkbench/nsw-state-archives jupyter lab --ip=0.0.0.0 --port=8888 --ServerApp.token="" --LabApp.default_url="/lab/tree/index.ipynb"
  • It will take a while to download and configure the container image. Once it's ready you'll see a message saying that Jupyter Notebook is running.
  • Point your web browser to http://127.0.0.1:8888
  • When you've finished, download any files or data you want to keep from Jupyter Lab, and enter Ctrl+C int the terminal.

See Running in a container on your own computer for more details.

Setting up on your own computer

If you know your way around the command line and are comfortable installing software, you might want to set up your own computer to run these notebooks. You'll need to have recent versions of Python and Git installed. I use pyenv, pyenv-virtualenv, and pip-tools to create and manage Python versions and environments.

In a terminal:

  • Create a Python virtual environment (Python >= 3.10 should be ok): pyenv virtualenv 3.10.12 nsw-state-archives
  • Activate the virtual environment: pyenv local nsw-state-archives
  • Use git clone to create a local version of the GLAM Workbench repository: git clone https://github.com/GLAM-Workbench/nsw-state-archives.git
  • Use cd to move into the newly-cloned folder: cd nsw-state-archives
  • Run pip install pip-tools to install pip-tools.
  • Run pip-sync requirements.txt dev-requirements.txt to install the required Python packages.
  • Start Jupyter with jupyter lab – a browser window should open automatically. If not, copy and paste the url from the command line to your web browser.
  • To shut down your Jupyter Lab session enter Ctrl+C in the terminal.

See Using Python on your own computer for more details.

Contributors

Cite as

Sherratt, Tim. (2023). GLAM-Workbench/nsw-state-archives (version v1.0.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7889259