From the Editors

Inaugural KS Inglis address: making Australian media history

“…The sheer scale of mass digitisation is complicated by issues around total storage capacity, copyright and tensions between public and private institutions (Phillips and Osmond, 2015: 286). In 2014, the British Library, which has been impressively active in promoting digitisation of its holdings, estimated that only about 1% of its holdings were available in digital form (Akami et al, 2014: 6).…”

“…The life of the researcher has been made easier and more efficient by the emergence of digital – some of them full-text – Australian and indeed international resources (GLAM Peak, c. 2016–2017). An editorial, and some articles, in History Australia in 2014 considered ‘how new vistas [were] opening up as so many records including newspapers are digitised and made available to researchers’ through databases (Akami et al, 2014: 5; see also, for example, Crabb et al, 2014). It is interesting to note that the Trove portal was so popular by 2017 that all NLA digital delivery systems were branded ‘Trove’ (Ayres, 2015: 8–9).…”

“…We need to be mindful that the convenience of digitisation does not make us lazy press researchers and that we do not allow technology to determine our research agendas. Adrian Bingham (2010: 229) warns that keyword searching can be a blunt instrument; I would add that manual searching has the capacity to bring us serendipitous findings (Akami et al, 2014: 7; Smits, 2017: 94; Wijfjes, c. 2016–2017: 3). Then again, Australian researchers are fortunate that Trove supplies not just the full text of articles, but an image of the whole page (Crabb et al, 2014: 179).…”

“…We need to be aware that research may be distorted by the availability of certain titles and the absence of others. Cultural institutions and digitisers need to work closely with scholars about research priorities and methods, and we need to be mindful of cultural assets becoming monetary assets behind paywalls that are difficult to breach by researchers and members of the public (Akami et al, 2014: 6; Bingham, 2010: 229–231).…”

“…The library and the archive still have critical parts to play as physical spaces for historical research (Akami et al, 2014: 7). 37 In 2018, the Fairfax Media Business Archive has become available at the State Library of New South Wales.…”