Trove 101

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One of the great features of Trove's newspaper viewer is a column that contains the text transcript of the article. This can be helpful when the original scanned article has printed text that isn't very clear or legible. The text column is located to the left of the article viewing pane.

While viewing digitised newspaper and gazette articles, you may notice that the text in the column doesn’t always match the text in the article. You have the power to fix this by editing the column text to match the article.

Go to an article that you want to edit. If you need help to find an article, check the Find articles to Edit section.

While in the newspaper viewer, select the green  🖋 Edit text to match article button at the top of the text column, or hover your cursor over a sentence that you want to edit and select the 🖋  icon.

If you are not logged in to your Trove account, you will be requested to Login.

Edit the text in the column while following the guidelines on this Help page. Select a sentence, and a green border will appear around it with a cursor to enable editing.

Save changes as you go by selecting the green Save button. 

When you’ve finished editing and want to save your changes, select Save & Exit. 

To discard any changes made since your last save, select Cancel and exit editing mode.

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The transcript text of digitised articles is created by a computer when newspapers and gazettes are scanned and digitised. Because of this, the text is not always correct, especially if the original items were in poor condition.

When you search for keywords in Trove, the search engine uses the original article text AND the transcript text. By editing a transcript to match an article, you’re improving the chances of keywords in the article being found.

For example, if we do a search on dog shows in Perth. Trove would comb the entire archive of articles for any text related to our search. If the article has errors like Perth misspelled as ‘Berth’ or Dog as ‘D099y’ it wouldn’t be picked up by the trove search engine and not be highlighted in yellow like the corrected text.

Editing text to match articles = making Trove searches more successful.

Trove is a valuable source of information for us at the Museum of Perth. A lot of the research that we do here are on local people, businesses, places and events. A majority of this history can be found from the local newspapers of that time, sometimes you just can’t find it from a simple search of the web. By making corrections, you make it easier for other volunteers and researchers, who are seeking to find these articles.

Transcripts can also be downloaded, so by editing a transcript to match an article, you’re also editing the downloaded transcript.

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On Trove there are multiple ways to find an article for research or to make corrections. This section will cover multiple ways on how to find an article to edit.

The simplest way to find an article or newspaper you are interested in is by using their powerful search engine. If you’ve got a general topic to look for, utilizing Trove Search will make it easier to find articles that interest you.

Starting from the homepage. You can simply find an article by typing into the search bar and hit enter. You will then be brought to the search result page, After you click on Newspaper & Gazettes you can browse through the many articles brought up by your search. Depending on what keywords you used, you might get a large volume of articles to sort through. To make it a lot easier, narrow your search by using the “Refine Your Results” filters on the right hand side, you can filter down by various criteria like newspaper name, location, year, wordcount and category.

You can alter your keyword search by using the Advanced Search under the magnify 🔍button on the right. This tool can alter your search result to be more explicit and direct compared to the broader refine result filters.

When you first start editing newspaper and gazette articles, we recommend finding articles on topics that interest you, such as your hobbies or family history. Once you are more comfortable with trove, we highly recommend finding articles based on our ongoing projects and locations in Western Australia.

A good tip: If you want to find articles that haven't been edited yet, you can search for them from the Trove homepage search field. Enter with your keyword/s: <keyword> NOT has:corrections

Example: To find unedited articles with the keyword: Margaret river , enter in the Trove homepage search field: Margaret river NOT has:corrections. You can also reverse the effect by removing NOT in the search to find only edited articles.

Trove has a very powerful, comprehensive search engine. By utilizing precise keywords and filters you are able to find any article in the Trove collection.

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You can manually browse Trove’s entire digital newspaper collection, to find articles to do corrections on. Trove has over 200 million articles, covered by thousands of newspapers throughout the history of printed media in Australia, with more modern articles being added over time.

To start, from the homepage you click Explore from the top page and then under Browse Newspaper and Gazettes click Open browser.

The Newspaper & Gazettes browse page is a tool to help you comb though the entire collection by using strict tags by time, place and newspaper, this will help you to narrow down to an article. To start click newspaper and then start browsing by clicking one of the 5 tags available: Title, Place, Date, Category, All newspaper & Gazettes title. A new window will pop open and you continue to filter down by adding more tags from each column left to right, until you get to a newspaper of that date, then by choosing a page and then selecting an article to view and edit.

Once you are ready to move on to the next article. Instead of going through all the previous steps, by selecting the blue row of tags above the article, you can move to a different article by clicking on any of the previous filters you already selected and adjust them to get a different result.

If you need to find or edit a newspaper by going through broad themes like newspaper, date or location. Using the browse tools is a great way to do a wide search with enough structure to find an article to work on.

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Participants that are undertaking research for the Museum of Perth use the list feature to keep a collection of articles that need editing (relevant to the research project). Trove list is a very powerful tool to keep track on what articles need edits, check if they have been completed and if done correctly.

To get started once logged in with the Museum of Perth account, in the search bar type in .MOP then under All categories select Lists.

We added the .MOP prefix on all the lists we created, this makes it easier for them to appear in the search results. Click on the list you want to work on or have been assign to. Within the list you can search and see the status of each article listed. If you find an article with no notes or added tags, that would most likely mean it needs editing. Please note that some articles could have been edited in the past but this doesn’t always mean the article was finished completely, so its always good to check thoroughly to see if that is the case.

You are free to add notes yourself to the article. Click the pen & paper 📃🖊 icon under the article title to add a note. Good practices to utilize this feature:

• Show that you are working on the article and don’t want anyone else to edit over you work, while editing it yourself. For example Work in progress - {name} {date}.

• Leaving your first name with the first letter of your surname to do a [CTRL + F] to find the article you last worked on. This helps if you lost track of your article.

• Marking the article as completed so another volunteer can do a quick check and remove it from the to-do list.

• State any problems you find with the scan or critique the article.

This is a part of a workflow we use to help with our research. One group of volunteers would search for articles relevant to the research they are working on and add them to the corresponding list. Then another group would focus on proof reading these articles. This keeps the momentum going for the researching group, to collect the information they need while not being bogged down to edit whole articles, unless it’s really needed. Feel free to ask you supervisor for current lists that need to be worked on or if you want to help with the researching side and add new articles to the lists.

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With great power comes a bit of responsibility. Please follow these guidelines to ensure that text in Trove is edited correctly wherever possible.

• Match your edits to the exact text of the onscreen article wherever possible. 

• Don’t delete text from the transcript if it appears in the onscreen article. 

• Include only the text of the onscreen article in your edits. If you have more information or thoughts to share, put them in a tag or note. 

• You don’t need to match the visual style of the article with bold or italic font.  

• If you find an edit that obviously doesn’t match the onscreen article, feel free to correct the text. If you prefer to advise Trove, get in touch.

For spelling or formatting errors, add the corrections in a note that is separate to the transcript. Some words for personal or place names may reflect a historical spelling at the time that the article was written. Trove’s search engine also uses text in notes and tags, so an article with an added note will still be found in a search.

Example: If the name of Australian actor Lottie Lyell is consistently spelled "Lottie Lyall" in an article and you’re sure that it’s the same person, you should leave the transcript spelling as "Lottie Lyall" and add a note saying: "Lottie Lyall = Lottie Lyell", "Lottie Lyell actor", or similar. Trove’s search engine uses this note, so a search for "Lottie Lyell" will still find this article.

Sometimes it is not possible to match text exactly. For example:  

• Transcribe upside-down letters as normal letters. Add a note letting others know that the line/letter is upside down when it is important – such as when the upside-down letters are the solution to a puzzle. If the upside-down letter is a printing error, no note is needed.  

• The ‘long s’ or ‘ſ’ (as appears in many early publications) should be transcribed as a lowercase ‘s’.  

• Transcribe names starting with M’ as Mc, or add a note with the corrected spelling.  

• Minor errors, such as transposed letters in a word where the correct spelling appears elsewhere in the article, may be corrected. 

There is no spell check in Trove's editing mode. Spell checks appearing here are from your web browser and you can change the options in your browser settings. 

Punctuation and hyphens should match the text as originally published, with two exceptions:  

• Text in small caps (looks like upper case, but in a smaller font) can be corrected to either upper case or sentence case text.  

• Hyphens that split words across two lines can be kept as is or be removed, so the whole word is combined at the end of the first line. Neither way affects Trove’s search. Other kinds of hyphens should stay as is. 

Sometimes, non-alphanumeric characters (e.g. @, # or &) appear in the transcript where a picture in an article has been incorrectly processed. If these characters do not appear in the article text, they can either be ignored or removed. They do not impact search results.  

If you come across a character in the text that isn't available on your keyboard, select Insert symbol and choose from frequently used special characters. Characters not in this list can be copied from either the Character Map (Windows), or the Character Viewer (Mac).  

Correct non-English text using the same guidelines as for English text. For Latin script languages (e.g. Estonian, French and German) most accented or special characters can be accessed through the Insert symbol button. These languages follow the standard horizontal left-to-right reading order.  

Chinese language articles in Trove may have any of the following reading orders: horizontal left-to-right, vertical right-to-left or horizontal right-to-left. When editing, correct the text to the modern horizontal left-to-right reading order, as this will give the best results in Trove search.  

If you would like to provide an English translation of an article, do this in a note and not in the transcript. 

Tables may appear in the transcript as either: each line read left-to-right across the entire table or as columns one after another. Edit tables in the transcript to match how as they have been originally created in the article – if the table has been transcribed as left-to-right across the lines, separate the columns by using the vertical bar/pipe symbol: |  

Note: This symbol can be found on a keyboard directly above the Enter key, although its position may vary on some keyboards.

You can only edit one page of articles at a time. If an article spans over 2 or more pages, it will have a separate transcript for the text on each of those pages. Save your changes on the current page before moving to another page.  

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The number of lines of text in a transcript should match the lines in the article. If a transcript is missing lines or has combined multiple lines into one, you can split or add lines. To do this, hover over the line you are editing until the + and - symbols appear on the right side of the line. Select  +  to add a new line below, or  -  to remove the current line. Lines removed in this manner will not disappear until corrections are next saved, until then the line can be restored by clicking the undo button that will have appeared next to the + and - buttons.

If text in a digitised article appears to be out of order, this is often due to a digitisation processing error. Unfortunately, text order in an article can’t be changed after the page is loaded into Trove.  

When editing a transcript for an article with out-of-order text, match the text to the article and don't use the transcript to correct the order. This is because each line of the transcript is linked to a specific location in the online article and changing the order will break these links. If a word or phrase isn’t searchable due to the order of the text, please add a note to capture this.

If the boundaries of an article have been incorrectly identified on the screen, and some of the text in the transcript belongs to another article, it should remain in that transcript so as not to break the links between the transcript and the article (as explained above). Once an article is loaded into Trove, it can’t be re-split or replaced. Add a note to explain which text belongs to which article.  

Page numbers in Trove are considered to be page sequence numbers, indicating the order that pages appear in a newspaper or gazette, rather than reflecting the actual page number. This may be due to an error in processing, where a second edition or supplement with separate page numbering has been included within the sequence of the newspaper, or the use of non-standard numbering for the newspaper eg 4a.  

Articles in Trove are usually digitised using an original master microfilm. This means if the pages used to create that microfilm were of poor quality, damaged or were oriented the wrong way, then they will also appear that way in Trove. Currently, it’s not technically feasible to replace individual pages in Trove, so it is unlikely that these issues can be corrected, even if it is possible to find a better-quality copy of the original page.  

Poor quality text often means poor quality transcripts. If you are unable to decipher the article text, either leave it as is, or use your best guess as to what the words are. Others may also be able to assist or may have information that allows them to better determine the correct word.

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It may take up to 5 minutes for the Trove search database to update and for your edited text to appear in Trove searches.

The amount of lines you have edited are updated in your Trove account if you are logged in while editing. If you make edits while you are not logged in to your Trove account, they cannot be added to your account later.

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