Ben Pratten: This session is being presented in association with the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. And the great Debate. So you might be here preparing for a debate, or you might have another research question. So all of the techniques and approaches that we're going to show you today can really apply to any research process that you might be working on.

And it's important that we acknowledge, that we're here on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country. You might be joining us from around Australia. We would love to hear where you're joining us from, but we at the National Library pay respects to Elders, past and present, and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.  

We also keep in mind the tradition of knowledge keeping and storytelling that's been happening on this country for a very long time, so particularly important when we're thinking about research and information here today, and we're going to spend some time thinking about items in our collection.

And while we will be talking about the Great Debate and the 2026 question, which is “that Australian politics is alive and well”, we want to think kind of broadly about the National Library, what's in the collection and that sort of thing. So to start with, I'd encourage you to just have a think about what you want to get out of today, what your research questions or, outcomes might be.

And we'll have some opportunities throughout the session for you to suggest search keywords or phrases or topics that you're interested in as well. So the first part of today's session, I'm going to hand over to colleague Karlee, who is going to have a look at our exhibition galleries to start to get us thinking about what's in the collection here at the library and how we might be able to access it.

Karlee Baker: Thanks, Ben. Hi, everybody. We are here in the beautiful Treasures Gallery. This is our permanent exhibition here at the National Library, and I wanted to show you around so that you could start to think about the range of primary sources that you might be using for your research, but also some of the different ways that exhibitions and gallery spaces can help you with your research.

Now, as you can see behind me, this is an on site exhibition. But if you're not able to come in to Canberra to see the exhibition in the building, we have a virtual exhibition. So I'm going to show you how to access that. So heading to our website which is library.gov.au The first thing that you're going to do is to head to this little tab that says discover.

And then you can find all of our exhibitions. Now because this is a permanent exhibition, it the Treasures Gallery will always be here on this page. So simply click here down to the virtual exhibition, and you'll be able to see pretty much where I was sitting just then in the airlock just before we actually walk in. And I'm going to take you through to this particular display here called Documenting Democracy.

Exhibitions are a fantastic way to get you started in your research, because the curators have usually thought about a story to tell, which might be different to the story that you want to tell. So it gives you a good springboard, but then also chosen a range of items from the collection to give that diversity of sources and potentially diversity of voices as well.

So if we have a look at this display, we have first a painting. Now this painting was created to encapsulate that feeling of Federation. So you can see the kinds of people that would have been there at that moment, the celebration that was happening at that moment. And then we move on in the story of Australia's democratic history, and we have some political ephemera.

So these are items that were probably expected to be looked at, to be used as a how to vote, guide and then potentially thrown away, but instead we've been able to look after them so that you can start to think, well, what was important to voters back in this time? Oh, sorry. Back in this time when Ben Chifley was hoping that people would vote for him, what is he letting people know about his party?

What's the politics going on at that time? If we keep going through the story we have a portrait here of Faith Bandler. Now Faith Bandler was a pivotal figure in the 1967 Referendum. She was a South Sea Islander, and she was one of the key voices in making sure that that referendum happened, but also that people knew what the issues were.

Next to her is a poster from that same referendum. So you can see there's a range of primary source material, but also a range of ways that we get to that material. This particular poster, if I have a look at the information panel.

This particular poster tells us a little bit about the story of the 1967 Referendum, people voting for those two questions [speaker summarises] should Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people be counted? And also, should the states have special provision to make different laws, or should that be encompassed under Federal law for Australia?

We actually get this poster if I have a look right down in this information. The reason we have this poster is because the person here called Gordon Bryant, collected it for us. Gordon Bryant was a politician at the time that Faith Bandler was working and he obviously thought that these things were important enough to collect and keep and then to hand to the National Library, which means that we can preserve these items and make them accessible to you.

Now, I mentioned that this particular exhibition that we are in is a permanent exhibition, but I'm going to take you now to one that has just closed. And the way that we do that is back through exhibitions.

And we’ll head to past exhibitions. Now, the 1975: Living in the Seventies exhibition also has a fantastic virtual exhibition, and I'm going to take us into one particular room so you can see it sort of looks a bit like a doll's house. We could walk all the way through, but I'm going to view the doll's house here and take us into this very end room, which is around politics in Australia.

So whether you're thinking about changes that have happened, whether you're thinking about comparing politics and democracy today to where we've come from, where we might be going, this is a fantastic representation of a really pivotal year in Australia's political history. We have figures like Elizabeth Reid who you can read about here. You can see Gough Whitlam listening to her here.

We also have pivotal moments of protest. The very first International Women's Day protest happened in 1975. This is a photograph taken in Melbourne. We have communication that was put out for people to think about issues that affect younger people. And of course, this is a time when land rights in Australia was at a pivotal time. So we've collected a lot of those posters, photographs and ephemera for you to learn from.

Finally. This was also the year that we had the very first Prime Minister being dismissed. So you can explore these photographs, read the labels and think about how does that compare with what you know around politics and democracy in Australia?

I would love for you now to head back to Ben, who will show you how to access all of these collection items and much, much more through our catalogue.

Ben Pratten: Thanks, Karlee. There's three kind of main categories that I'm going to share with you today. We're going to have a look at our catalogue, which is the main way that we access material held in the National Library's collection.

We're also going to look at a service called Trove, which you might be familiar with, an amazing tool for research. And we're going to look at a collection of resources called eresources. And I'll explain a little bit about what those are as we go ahead. But first up with the catalogue, most libraries have catalogues. They're the main way to interrogate what's in a library's collection.

So that is one way that you can dive into the collection is by searching keywords in the library's catalogue.

But I'm not going to do that first off, because there's another kind of different pathway in that I want to show you, which is our research guides. So we have expert staff and librarians who create these amazing guides that, about such a wide range of topics that the way we have to present them is alphabetically on the website.

So if you have a look here, you can see there, so many of these research guides that relate to pretty well any research topic you could think of. And fortunately enough, for our purposes today, there is the Government and Politics Research Guide. So I thought that might actually be a pretty good place to start to have a look at what we hold in the library's collection related to politics in Australia.

So the research guides set out in a way that it explains all those things. It gives some basic information about, a political system and how it works, but then it almost immediately dives into what can you find in the library. And these are the sorts of things that that we end up often displaying in exhibitions, as you saw with Karlee.

But you can access either physically here at the library or in a lot of cases, digitally from wherever you are in Australia. So they might be things like books, parliamentary papers, manuscripts, oral histories, pictures, ephemera we talked about as well, or newspapers. That's a really big one that we'll touch on as well. So that gives you a sense of what the kind of related library collection material might be.

We've got some kind of examples here as well of of what we're calling featured items. So things like text books and reports and that sort of thing. And then it starts to tell you the sorts of things we're looking at today, which is how to actually search and find things. So you can think about keywords, you can search the catalogue.

It gives you some suggestions on how to refine your results, which I'll look at in a little, a little bit. But the other thing, that can be an excellent pathway into our catalogue is searching by subject, and there's some pre kind of, identified subjects here that we can click through and search. So I'm going to click on the subject here for Australia politics and government and see what we come up with.

So we've got it looks like almost 13,000 results in the library's collection that relate to Australia, politics and government. Often kind of result list like that is more than you can really do anything meaningful with. So what we suggest and what it said in the research guide as well, is that you look to limit your search. So over here on this facet on the right hand side of the page, you can limit your search by format.

Super useful if there's a particular type of source that you're interested in. If you're just looking at pictures or you want, you know, traditional books, that sort of thing. It ranks them by the number of results that are in that category. So we'll leave that for the moment. But what I want to actually limit my search for here, which is particularly relevant for people joining us from away from Canberra, where you can't physically access the Library's collection is digitised material.

So this is material that the library has digitised and is making available to people. Wherever they are freely available. So it's a range of things. You can then go further and you can refine by, year range, which is which. Quite useful if you're thinking about, a particular period in political history or that sort of thing.

But if there's anything in that results list that is now a little bit smaller, that takes your interest, you can click through and it will give you the catalogue page, which gives you more information about that object. It tells you, some details when and where the thing was published. Often, the extent of it, how this is a little two page report, of, a royal commission into electoral matters that was published in 1914.

And the great thing is because, this is digitised. So if we did want to say the physical object, we can access that through the main reading room here in the National Library. But if you're somewhere else, because it's digitised, you can view it straight away. So you can click through to the, and you'll land in the trove viewer where you can zoom in, you can flick page to page.

You can do a nifty little two page view here as well. That kind of makes the thing feel a little bit more like a book. And you get some really key information as well. You get citation information really important for research in general. If you're preparing for a debate, you probably won't be citing your sources directly in your debate speech, but it's still really important to know where you've gotten your information from and to keep track of that.

If you're conducting a kind of more, you know, traditional research project, then absolutely a reference list, is probably going to be part of what you need to do. So the fact that you can copy and paste a citation using lots of different, referencing methods straight into a reference list, super handy. You get a link to get back to that material, and you can actually download a [high] resolution version of it as well, which is awesome for keeping as a record for yourself of what you've read or for including embedding in an assignment or another kind of research output.

So that's a kind of look at the catalogue and how you can access things that the Library holds in its collection.

Main tips, as I said, start with either a subject search or a just a straight keyword search on all fields. Search like that, and then look to narrow your search down to a useful set of results. Using the facets on the right hand side. So that's the catalogue I'm going actually gonna look at eresources next.

So eresources. It's a bit of a kind of catch all term. It's hard to know what an eresource is. But the description on this page here is pretty good. Online journals, ebooks, newspapers, papers, databases and more. So if we're thinking about what the, that brings in, it's things like academic journals, which are an amazing source of research materials, but also e-book databases.

We subscribe here at the Library to a range of these services, which are usually commercially, which are commercially available. So you would normally have to pay for these things as an individual. But the great news is that libraries, including the National Library, subscribe to these databases, these huge databases on your behalf. So it means you can, log in with a free National Library membership from wherever you are in Australia and access the full text of a lot of these journal databases, e-book collections, and other really high value resources that we kind of put under the umbrella of a resources.

So I'm going to show you a couple of pathways into our eresources collection here. But first, I would suggest if you don't, it's time to think about joining the National Library. Really easy to do that. Do you have a library login? To access most library eresources you need a login. There are some that are freely available.

You don't have to log into, but it's worth doing anyway, I think, just so that you don't run into any roadblocks, further along into the process. So I'm just going to click through to the join page to show you what it looks like. And it's really easy. You have to. Yeah. All you have to do is fill in a form, and it's a quite a simple form.

It's only a few boxes, some contact information, and you have to have an Australian residential address. And with all that information, you can access your, you can access your login details pretty well straight away, which is excellent. So you can just get started. We'll send you your password and your information by email.

Pretty well immediately. And you can begin. So let's have a look at the eresources portal. This is where you start. I'm going to log in. I'm in the National Library building so it knows that I'm here. Which is great. So I don't actually have to put my credentials in, but if you, elsewhere, you'd have to log in at that point. And we can, like the other resources we will look at today, we can interrogate them through a search box with keyword searches, but similar to the research guide that I showed you earlier, we can also search by subject.

And this is particularly useful when we have a defined research topic like we kind of do today. So you can see these publications that are in the air resources collection have been bundled by subject. And if we scroll down, we can see there's a political science tab that drops down and then has even more specific categories. And from there we can look at political institutions and public and administration. Asia. Africa. Australia. Pacific area. We can drop that down one more and see. We've got Australia and New Zealand and Pacific Ocean Islands, and this will be where we will find Australian and region political material. And our first result on here is enabled from the Ebsco e-book database. And this is a really high quality set of resources because it gives you access to full text of ebooks that, recently published, and generally, quite reliable and useful sources.

So this one that's come up here is activism and digital culture in Australia. It gives you some basic catalogue information about it. But then you can click through to the e-book database itself. It'll land you on that page. And from there you can access under the access Options tab, either PDF or in a pop. I'm going to go for the PDF today, and it lands you in a viewer of the full text of that resource, which is great. So this is a kind of academic chapter book, of edited, peer reviewed, academic essays. So a good resource to think about these kinds of topics. So as we've said, looking at the other categories of resource that we've explored today, you can search with keywords as well. But sometimes those subject headings is another way to go. The next resource I want to show you today is trove.

Now you may have used Trove before. If you're not familiar with it, Trove is a search engine, but it doesn't search websites or just websites like your kind of traditional search engines. Google and the like. What it does search is catalog records of collecting institutions. It searches every library catalogue in Australia as well as other places that collect things historical societies, museums, art galleries. If they partner with Trove and format their collections in the right way, they get sucked into the big database that can be searched by this one search box here. That's pretty powerful, because it means that you're not bouncing around between different, interfaces and collecting institutions. You can search a lot of them all in one go. So I'm going to this time go with a keyword search.

We've done the subject searches previously, but this time I'm going to go with quite a broad keyword search, which is for Prime Minister. Trove is probably most well known for its access to digitised newspapers. Trove gives you access to around about the first 150 years of Australia's newspapers. Digitised and full text searchable. So what that means is your keyword search can drill down to individual words in that database of newspapers.

So you can say, my search here for Prime Minister has returned me results in that Newspapers and Gazette's tab. If I click on the first result you'll see how it works. So you get on the right hand side the scan of the physical newspaper on the left hand side is electronically translated text that's been generated by Optical Character Recognition.

So the scan of the newspaper is translated into the text. And that's where my keywords are found. You can see them highlighted in yellow here. And what that means is you can find every mention of the words prime minister or for other research, or keyword searches. It could be people's names, places, dates, streets. The possibilities are almost endless.

From there, you can say the article view has the rest of the page of the newspaper kind of faded out. If you'd like to kind of put the newspaper into a little bit more context. You can do that by zooming out here. And so we can say that this newspaper article is actually a message from the Prime Minister in 1925, who was Stanley Melbourne Bruce, on the occasion of Anzac Day.

So this is from 25th of April, 1925. It's published in the Newcastle Sun. And we've zoomed out now a little bit to say that it looks like this is a kind of page spread that talks about local commemorations for Anzac Day. Now, if any of those other articles were of interest, we can click on those and go read this article.

And it'll give us the article for you from there. From there you get a few options that are similar to looking at digitised objects in the library's collection through the Trove viewer, which, that you can download for newspapers. An article view, as an image, a jpeg, as a PDF or a text file, or you can get a PDF of the whole page or even the entire issue of the newspaper.

So you can go back and read the entire thing as it was created. Really, if that's what you're interested in, you can do that in the viewer itself as well. But flicking through page views this way, and you can see the great thing about the way that we digitised newspapers in its entirety, often from the the physical newspaper or a microfilm scan of the newspaper.

So you get all the, all the ads. It's the entire newspaper right down to the front page. You also still get all the citation information, which you can copy and paste into a reference list, as we said before, but also a unique identifier that will link straight back to the newspaper article or page in this case.

And that's really useful for assignments where you're referencing a particular newspaper article to make sure that whoever's marking that assignment can find the source easily and, verify how you've used it and how you've used it to build your argument. So I'll jump back to my search for prime minister at the front page of trove here. Now and say, yes, we've had a great set of results under the Newspapers and Gazette's tab.

But there are other results that will come in almost all of these categories for a good set of keywords. So I'm going to look now at the images, maps and artifacts tab and say that we've got a range of different types of things. A lot of images that have picked up on my keywords of Prime Minister. A little note here, though, to think about how keywords can influence your search results.

We haven't specified at any point so far that we're looking only at the Australian Prime Minister. So we've actually returned some results from the National Library's Asian collection, which are Chinese Qing dynasty paintings of officials in the government, including the the equivalent of the prime minister or, you know, lead official in that government. That's just something to think about is if you want more specific results, more specific keywords can achieve that.

What we also get is results from, as we mentioned, not just the National Library of Australia's collection. So we've got things from the National Archives here, the Australian War Memorial and the State Library of Queensland as well. So this photograph of, of Prime Minister Curtin is in their collection. And if you click through to it.

You get the Trove page here. But once you click through the view tab, it will take you through to the State Library of Queensland's website and give you the object in the way that they deliver it, to their users. So quite a straightforward way to land on objects that are held in collections all the way across Australia. With one single search, which is fantastic.  

So that's kind of the the way Trove works is you start with these kind of broad searches, and then you can narrow down to objects that are held in lots of different places, but there's a bit of an, I guess, unheralded part of Trove, I think, or a less well known part of Trove anyway, is that it gives you access to the Australian Web Archive, which is maintained here at the National Library, and it's basically a snapshot of .au websites since the start of the internet in Australia, in the middle of the 1990s. So an amazing resource for all sorts of things, and something we're often not used to thinking of websites as historical documents, but archiving them in this way and keeping them in a collection here at the library, absolutely treats them that way as historical documents.

So a search for Prime Minister under the websites tab in Trove has returned to me. This top result here, which is for the URL, pm.gov.au Now that URL has belonged to quite a few Australian Prime ministers. The result that it's going to land me on here is from 2014, and at that time that URL belonged to Prime Minister Abbott. But using the tools here, we can fast forward in time to the most current snapshot of the PM archive website, and you can see the current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese. The next thing you can do with a URL that has such a long history is bounce up this little timeline bar here, and then you can think about years.

So it's quite a big long timeline here. And you can see multiple snapshots per year, per month, that sort of thing. So we could jump back to 2013 and we could see that the at that time the URL belonged to Australia's first female prime minister, Julia Gillard. Or we could go right back to the start. This is going to be an interesting one.

We can have a look at the very first page to be uploaded to PM after year, which is from February 1998 and belonged to Prime Minister John Howard at that point. So one of the things you can say is the changes in web design, but, the sophistication of web design and that sort of thing, but also the different kind of messaging as, as politicians, as, political parties and governments came to grips with what sorts of information people were looking for on the internet and how that changes over time.

So really, really interesting. I think, to think about as historical sources, because they're designed, to work as live websites. So you can kind of go through and go all the links, as long as they're internal to the website will still work. You can navigate around the, the website. This I was looking at this earlier today and, this is quite interesting is that you can leave a comment.

But they're quite clear in this one that the comments on the page are about the website, not, not kind of official correspondence with the prime ministers. They're still asking you to write to the electorate office, or the Prime Minister's office in Parliament House to do that. But again, a change in the way, you know, we think about communication perhaps as well through the website, what a website is aiming for.

So that's another example, I think of maybe some unexpected objects in the entire collection of resources that are, accessible through Trove.

So that brings us to the end of our session today. What remains is to wish you the best of luck with your research journey and whether that be putting together an entry for the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia's Great Debate, or something else that might use the the National Library's collection. Another thing to remember is that we're always here. You can use our amazing Ask a Librarian service, where we have expert reference librarians ready to help you with any roadblocks that you might have, finding things in our collection, using our resources or Trove.

But you can also get in touch with the learning team by emailing us at learning @nla.gov.au Or on our website library.gov/learn.

Thanks for joining us.