Australian Media History Database > Databases and Indexes

Contains links to a variety of newspaper indexes, online archives and databases, and registers of archival material in public and private hands. The databases and indexes listed cover a variety of media formats including newspapers, Australian literature, radio, television, country music, and other audio-visual collections.

Full-text searches of many Australian newspapers are available via databases such Factiva and ProQuest ANZ Newsstand, to which many major Australian libraries subscribe.

The Australian Council of Film Societies publishes the ACOFS Film Screening Handbook, a comprehensive 96 page guide to forming and running a film society. It also contains valuable information for groups or organisations screening films non-commercially, including where to obtain films and the technical aspects of good presentation. ACOFS also publishes the National Feature Film & Video Catalogue, the most comprehensive listing of feature length films available on 16mm and VHS in Australia which is a little out of date but could be useful as a reference. Contact the president of ACOFS for a copy (for contact details follow hyperlink above).

The Australian Historic Records Register is a database describing archival material of historical significance held in private ownership in Australia. The AHRR is the result of the Australian Bicentennial Historic Records Search carried out from May 1987 to April 1988. The search was the major heritage project of the Australian Bicentennial Authority and was supported by the National Library of Australia. The Manuscript Section of the National Library now administers the database.

The AHRR contains descriptions of over 3,500 collections of private papers and records of business and community organisations that were identified during the search. New records have not been added to the database since the search was completed in 1988.

The AHRR is a guide to sources on Australian social, economic, business, labour and cultural history at the local level. Strengths of the database include family history, women and children’s history, local history, rural properties, businesses, personal World War I & II histories, migrants and migration, sports and sporting clubs and festivals and celebrations. Brief descriptions of letters, diaries, unpublished memoirs, paintings, sketches, photographs, station records, financial records, minute books, registers, recipe books and other materials can be found in AHRR. Individuals, families, local museums, historical societies, churches, businesses and other organisations hold the papers.

The database describes records held in private ownership in Australia, and relating to all parts of Australia, including such territories as the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Norfolk Island. They record Australian life from the early years of European settlement until 1988. Most of the material listed is held in Australia, with material originally from overseas included when it has relevance to Australia. There is no subject restriction, relevance to Australia’s history being the major criteria for inclusion.

The National Library of Australia, in collaboration the Australian State and Territory libraries, has commenced a program to digitise out of copyright newspapers. The project is a service that enables full-text searching of newspaper articles including newspapers published in each state and territory from the 1800s to the mid-1950s, when copyright applies. The much anticipated Australian Newspapers BETA search service is now available at http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ and from the Search tab on the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program (ANDP) website http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp. The BETA service is freely available to the public and currently contains 73,000 out of copyright newspaper pages (approx 730,000 individual articles) from 1803 onwards. In order to expand the available content approximately 20,000 digitised newspaper pages will be added each week to the Beta service.

The Australian Newspaper Plan is an ambitious, ongoing project designed to collect and preserve every newspaper published in Australia, guaranteeing public access to these important historical records. There are similar plans for New Zealand's newspapers. The Australian Newspaper Plan, formerly NPLAN, was set up in the early 1990s. The aim of ANPLAN is to ensure that newspapers published in Australia are preserved for long term access. At least one hard copy of every Australian newspaper should be collected by a State or Territory Library or by the National Library of Australia and stored in such a way to ensure its long term preservation.

The National Foundation for Australian Women established the Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP) in 2000, to enhance public knowledge and appreciation of the contribution women and their organisations have made to Australia. The Register includes women with career involvement in the mass media, including journalism, radio and television broadcasting.

The Women's Pages: Australian Women and Journalism since 1850 highlights the achievements of Australian women journalists and their contributions to the nation's public life and culture. Women from around the nation, across time and all forms of media, have been included. A list of women Walkley Award winners is included to demonstrate the range and quality of women's journalism that has been produced since the inaugural awards in 1956, a time that roughly coincides with the emergence of the second wave feminist movement.

The Index is part of a larger research project and was conducted as a preliminary task to the writing of a cultural analysis of the Australian Women's Weekly over the period 1946-71. It has been created principally to suit the research project which has generated it. That project was conducted at the Flinders University Women's Studies Department by Chief Investigators Professors Lyndall Ryan and Susan Sheridan. A book that analyses this material, Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women's Weekly in the Postwar Years, was published in 2002 by University of New South Wales Press (by Susan Sheridan, with Barbara Baird, Kate Borrett and Lyndall Ryan).

The Australian Women's Weekly 1946-71 Index offers a detailed index of the Australian Women's Weekly in the years 1946, 1951, 1956, 1961, 1966 and 1971. Our decision to adopt a 'slice approach', to index only one year in every five for the period 1946 to 1971, was to place priority on a detailed index of six years over the twenty-five year period rather than a much less thorough index of all twenty-five years.

AustLit is a non-profit collaboration between eleven Australian Universities and the National Library of Australia providing authoritative information on hundreds of thousands of creative and critical Australian literature works relating to more than 94,000 Australian authors and literary organisations. Its coverage spans 1780 to the present day. AustLit indexes and describes Australian literature published in a range of print and electronic information sources. It also makes available selected critical articles and creative writing in full text. For example, AustLit includes Australian literary content from over 1,000 periodicals and major Australian newspapers. AustLit also funded a special research project to map the history, span, editorship and content of around 100 twentieth century Australian magazines. The collection also houses a subset on Drama dating from the late 18th century which includes records for nearly 6,000 plays including radio plays, musicals and operas, and about the creators of these works, including full bibliographical records for published plays by Australian writers. The collection also includes a subset entitled 'Banned in Australia' which describes publications that were prohibited imports in twentieth-century Australia, from 1900 to 1975. The subset aims to comprehensively list the titles that were banned, or allowed restricted circulation only, by the practices of federal censorship.

Bonza is a fully accessible and searchable online Australian and New Zealand film history database compiled by Cinema Studies students at RMIT University. The database is idiosyncratic and evaluative in a way that most databases-of-record are not. Students gather information on self-selected areas of interest from either the New Zealand or Australian film industries. The information they collect is recorded into any of the three related databases (for biographical, bibliographical and production based material) which make up the entire bonza database. The students then prepare hypermedia essays that incorporate words, sounds and image and link this work to each other’s projects, additional online sources and the information gathered in the bonza database.

EarsDB is a computer based database that lists Australian Radio Shows of the Golden Age and beyond. The aim is to list all Australian radio shows aired during the Golden Age of Australian Radio and beyond. Over 5700 shows are listed as are nearly 1900 people involved. It is administered by the Australian Old Time Radio Shows group.

Information site about Sir Geoffrey Syme, who was an Age journalist from 1892, first as a cadet, later as a senior journalist. In 1902 he became Editor of the newly founded weekly paper Every Saturday, the forerunner of the Saturday Age. On the death of his father David Syme on the 14th February 1908 he became Managing Editor of The Age and responsible for the editorial policy of the paper.

A website dedicated to preserving and promoting the history of Australian country music.

An online history of WIFT (Women in Film and Television) researched and written by Mia Treacey.

This history is based on a series of interviews conducted with the women who coordinated Women In Motion over the years, it combines their reminiscences with the documentation still held by WIFT (Victoria), the AFI Research and Information Centre, and some of the personal files of the women interviewed.

Indexes in Australian libraries: A Towards Federation 2001 Survey, by Margaret Henty and Rachel Jakimow. National Library of Australia, 1995. ISBN 0642106576

Libraries and other collecting institutions are the guardians of the nation’s past, of its social, intellectual, artistic and cultural heritage; they also provide the information springboard for the nation’s development. This publication arose from the conference Towards Federation 2001: Linking Australians and their Heritage held in Canberra on 23-26 March 1992. Invited participants were drawn from across the nation’s libraries, archives, national collecting institutions and a range of other organisations concerned with publishing, collecting and preserving Australia’s recorded documentary heritage. By the year 2001, the aim is to have in place a comprehensive plan for collecting, conserving and communicating Australia’s documentary heritage, enabling Australians to have maximum possible bibliographical and physical access to their recorded documentary heritage. Resolutions arising from the conference deal with collecting issues, bibliography, political issues, physical access, preservation, issues relating to special communities, and copyright. The resolutions are providing a working agenda for action by libraries and other collecting institutions. The complete papers consisting of the Final Report, Agenda Papers, Working Papers and Background Papers are now available in one consolidated volume published by the National Library of Australia.

Provides access to Leader Group community newspapers for the Greater Melbourne region of Victoria.

The National Registry of Audiovisual Collections is a unique initiative of the National Film and Sound Archive—an eclectic listing of collections of moving image and recorded sound materials, as well as related documents and artefacts, from across Australia. The first edition was published in June 2007, describing over 80 collections held by institutions as diverse as libraries and museums, community groups, political parties, historical societies, research centres, film societies, broadcasters, distributors, production companies and foreign legations, as well as individual collectors.

A subject index to the Newcastle Morning Herald, the Newcastle (NSW) newspaper since the 1860’s containing valuable information about the development of the Newcastle area. The index has been compiled by the Newcastle Region Library and provides access to over 160,000 articles of local significance for the years 1869-1943. This is a freely accessible site.

Newstext contains nearly 30 million articles from 150 News Corporation newspapers worldwide, and is updated daily. Most of the newspapers are published in Australia. The archive for some newspapers begins in 1984. Click here for archive dates for individual newspapers. Newstext is a user-pays site, and you must subscribe to download articles. Newstext is a text-only editorial archive, and contains no advertisements, classifieds, public notices, photographs, graphics or tables.

This website is based on a new documentary of the same name by award-winning filmmaker Naomi McCormack. It provides details about the film, messages from its makers, and information about the history of women in the American media. While the film focuses on five women significantly involved with American media production from the 1940s, the website provides further biographical material on a number of women media-makers active in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It provides both teaching resources and new materials on these pioneering women with the aim of ‘documenting, understanding, and honoring the work done by this long-marginalized and largely forgotten group of women.’

Papers Past is a service hosted by the National Library of New Zealand. It contains more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1840 to 1915 and includes publications from all regions of New Zealand (also includes much reporting of Australia).

Picture Australia is an Internet based service that allows you to search many significant online pictorial collections at the same time. When you do a search on Picture Australia, thumbnail images are retrieved from participating institutions and inserted into the search results. Picture Australia is a service hosted by the National Library of Australia to provide a single access point to the digitised pictorial collections of a range of cultural institutions. Picture Australia provides access to images that cover all aspects of Australiana:

RAAM provides researchers with a convenient, centralised register of locations for primary research material. It does not provide detailed descriptions of the collections themselves; rather, it alerts researchers to the existence of collections and enables them to pursue further enquiries about the material, either online or through direct contact with repositories. A user can search the database using a name, an occupation or any other indexed term. The repositories whose holdings are listed in RAAM can also be browsed by name or by State or Territory location. Some entries include links to detailed lists for the content of the collection described.

This site is aimed specifically at genealogists, and is an index to death, funeral, and probate notices, plus some obituaries, published in Australian newspapers. We concentrate on contemporary notices, because information about recent deaths is one of the most difficult areas for genealogists. We currently include notices from 132 newspapers - predominantly NSW, but with Vic toria, South Australia and Queensland also well-represented. Within NSW, the bulk of the entries are from the two Sydney papers, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph. The collection expects to exceed two million entries in the second half of 2009.

With over 24,000 entries - the result of 16 years of research - Scoop! represents the most comprehensive biographical dictionary of British and Irish journalists ever compiled and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in newspaper history. Subscription required.

The National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia is a public registry of recordings that celebrates the unique and diverse recorded sound culture and history of Australia. It was launched in February 2007 with a foundation list of 10. Each year, public nominations are called and 10 recordings added to the Registry, selected from the nominations by a panel of experts from the recorded sound industry and cultural institutions.

Search every edition of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald between 1955-1990 in our unique online archive. All articles, captions and advertisements are fully keyword searchable and full-text results are returned in an exact digital reproduction of the printed pages as they were originally published. Search birth, death and marriage notices. Explore Australia’s history through the big stories of the day. The SMH Archives contains 820,000 pages in almost 13,000 issues spanning 1 January 1955 to 31 December 1990. The contents of all issues are fully text searchable and reflect the full context and layout of each page as it was originally published.