The service allows access to newspaper articles in bulk (up to a maximum of 5000 articles), using OAI-PMH harvesting software. To gain access to the collection, point your OAI-PMH harvester to the repository with this URI:

https://papers-past-oai-pmh.herokuapp.com/

If you’re looking for a good harvester, let me recommend jOAI.

Searching

You can harvest records that match a search. Provide your search query as an OAI-PMH set, for example to search for “titokowaru”, specify search:titokowaru as the value of the OAI-PMH set parameter:

https://papers-past-oai-pmh.herokuapp.com/?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=search:titokowaru

Formats available

You can harvest records (i.e. articles) in one of three different formats:

• html — this format returns the full text of the articles, and is likely to be the most useful format. Note that the text available through DigitalNZ has had punctuation and capitalization removed.
• oai_dc — a simple metadata record.
• digitalnz — straightforwardly based on DigitalNZ’s own metadata format.

https://papers-past-oai-pmh.herokuapp.com/?verb=ListMetadataFormats

Happy harvesting!

You may also know about Digital New Zealand, which provides a central point for access to New Zealand’s digital culture.

This post is about using Digital NZ and Papers Past to get access, in bulk, to newspaper articles, in a form which is then open to being “crunched” with sophisticated “data mining” software, able to automatically discover patterns in the articles. In my earlier post How to download bulk newspaper articles from Trove, I wrote:

Some researchers want to go beyond merely using computers to help them find newspaper articles to read (what librarians call “resource discovery”); researchers also want to use computers to help them read those articles.

To use that kind of “data mining” software, you first need to have direct access to your data, and that can mean having to download thousands and thousands of articles. It’s not at all obvious how to do that, but in fact it can be made quite easy, as I will show.

First, though, a brisk stroll down memory lane…

The history of Papers Past

The Papers Past website can trace its origins back to its pre-digital ancestor the National Newspaper Collection, an archive of paper and microfilm. But the website has its own history, with two distinct phases. The original Papers Past was essentially just a collection of giant images of newspaper pages, organized by newspaper title and by date. It was a fabulous resource, but the tricky thing was knowing where to look.

Then in 2007 Papers Past was reincarnated in a much more sophisticated form, featuring full text search for individual articles.

This crucial improvement in usability came about through converting the page images to text. The Library extracted the full text from each newspaper page image using Optical Character Recognition software, which they had primed with lists of NZ words including placenames and Māori familial names, in order to more reliably recognize these words. Finally they had every headline manually checked and edited for accuracy. The current website is built around an index of all that text, linked to page images. By searching that index, you can retrieve a list of articles that might interest you, pick out a selection, and actually read them.

It’s notable that each of these development stages delivered a new way for researchers to work with the archive. The original website expanded the accessibility of the archive by exposing it to the entire internet, and the modern version of the website dramatically improved the discoverability of that information by allowing researchers to search within full text.

Since then there’s been a third change in the digital environment around Papers Past — where it has become linked up to a broader system called Digital New Zealand — and it seems to me that this change opens up yet another new way for researchers to engage with the archive.

Digital New Zealand

Digital New Zealand is an aggregation of information about NZ cultural items; books, movies, posters, art works, newspapers, and more, drawn from the catalogues and databases of galleries, libraries, museums, and other institutions. There amongst the contributors to Digital New Zealand is our friend Papers Past.

Digital New Zealand is more than just a website, though; its core offering is a so-called “Application Programming Interface”, or API, providing third-party programmers (i.e. people like me) with a way to access the data contained in Digital NZ. Using the Digital NZ API we can search, download, and even create new information resources.

The Digital New Zealand API is a custom-built thing, but functionally it’s not too different to many other APIs in use on the internet. In particular, some parts of it are very similar to a standard mechanism called OAI-PMH, which has been used by libraries and archives for over a decade.

The Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol (i.e. a set of conversational conventions, but in this case it’s essentially synonymous with “API”) for machines to send each other large batches of structured information (e.g. library catalogue records) in a variety of formats.

There are two roles defined in the protocol; the “provider” which manages and publishes a database of records, and a “harvester”, which periodically asks the provider for updates. Over the years a large number of software applications have been produced to function either as OAI-PMH providers or harvesters (or both). Could Papers Past be made implement this protocol (as a provider)? If so, then we could access Papers Past using any of the existing harvester applications.

Retailer

I’ve been a fan of OAI-PMH from way back, and I’ve used it many times. It had struck me that if I built a “gateway” which translated services like Digital NZ into OAI-PMH, then historical researchers could use existing OAI-PMH software to download the articles they need. So I sat down and wrote this gateway software, and I gave it the name “Retailer” because it’s a kind of shop-front, providing “retail” access to data provided by a “wholesale” data provider such as Digital NZ.

The way Retailer works is that it is a generic framework for translating between one API and another. It could be used to translate all sorts of protocols. Each translation is effected by writing a specific script that defines the equivalences between a specific pair of APIs. Having written the generic Retailer, I then wrote some translation scripts: first I wrote a script to translate between OAI-PMH and the API of the National Library of Australia’s “Trove” service, and then I wrote a script to translate between OAI-PMH and the API of Digital NZ.

I have bundled the core “Retailer” software with both these scripts, so you can harvest newspaper articles from both the NZ and Australian newspaper archives.

Installation

First, you will need to register with Digital New Zealand to obtain an “API Key”. This is a random password which they assign to you. Whenever you ask a question of the Digital NZ API, you must provide this API Key with your request, so that they know who you are. Since Retailer will be interacting with Digital NZ on your behalf, you will need to let Retailer know what your key is.

Then you need to set up a Java web server, such as Apache Tomcat. This provides the platform on which Retailer runs.

Once you have set up Tomcat, you can install Retailer in it, and configure it to run the Papers Past OAI-PMH provider script papers-past.xsl.

Finally you need to set up an OAI-PMH harvester. I’ve been using jOAI, which I can recommend heartily. It has the advantage that, like Retailer, it is a Java Servlet, so you can install it inside Tomcat, alongside Retailer itself.

Now you are all set to harvest newspaper articles!

Harvesting

To harvest, you should first go to Digital NZ and do some searching until you have a search query that returns you the results you want to harvest. Click through a selection of results to check that they are relevant; if necessary, refine your query to exclude articles you are not interested in.

Once you have decided on a good query, navigate your browser to your jOAI harvester (e.g. to http://localhost:8080/oai/) and add a new harvest. Set the harvest’s setSpec to be search: followed by your query, e.g. search:new zealand wars. Then run the harvest to actually download the search results. For details, see the Retailer documentation.

Why not give it a try? Any problems, leave a comment here or as an issue on the Retailer github site!

But then everything changed. A humanities researcher once told me that for Australian researchers, the National Library’s of Australia’s “Trove” newspaper archive marked a radical break: “There was a Before Trove, and an After Trove”.

Discovering newspaper articles has never been easier, for both professional and amateur researchers. These days researchers can search through many millions of newspaper articles in a few seconds, from the comfort of their own web browser. Enter your query, retrieve a list of the top 20 hits, click through to read any of them, click for another 20 hits, and so on.

From “resource discovery” to “distant reading”

However, there’s no pleasing some people. Some researchers want to go beyond merely using computers to help them find newspaper articles to read (what librarians call “resource discovery”); researchers also want to use computers to help them read those articles.

If you search and discover an article; a few articles; even a few dozen articles, you can read them yourself and take whatever notes you need. But what if you want to read hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of articles? What if you wanted to analyze the entire corpus of Trove articles? That’s just not humanly possible. Of course, a computer can’t have quite the same “understanding” of a set of newspaper articles as a human being can, but it has the advantage that it can “read” in minutes or hours, what would take a human years, or centuries, to wade through. There are a number of techniques for bulk machine-reading of text; what Franco Moretti called “distant reading”.

Actually this is a part of the so-called “big data” trend in research generally, in which computers are used to find useful information by crunching up vast amounts of data. In humanities research, “big data” generally (though not always) means large corpora of digitized text.

Harvesting text from Trove

At some stage, I have no doubt that the entire Trove corpus will become available to anyone who wants it, but as of this moment, it’s not entirely straightforward to acquire articles in bulk. The Trove programming interface allows for articles to be downloaded, but it needs a little help, because it was primarily intended as a means to discover individual resources, rather than a bulk data exchange mechanism.

A couple of months ago I was looking at the Trove API; the Application Programming Interface that Trove uses to provide automated access to their data. I was struck at the time by how similar it was to another mechanism which libraries use for bulk data exchange (e.g. of library catalogues), namely the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

OAI-PMH is a protocol (i.e. a set of conversational conventions) for machines to send each other large batches of structured information in a variety of formats. The protocol allows a requester (called a “harvester”) to ask a repository (called a “provider”) for data records in a particular format, and updated since a particular date. The provider then responds with a list of records. If there are too many records to send in a single list (more than a few Megabytes of data is typically considered too large), then the provider will return a partial list, and also include a bookmark (called a “resumption token”) to mark how far through the full list it has got. Whenever the harvester receives a resumption token, it knows it can issue another request, handing the resumption token back to the provider, and receive in response another partial list, starting from where the previous list left off, along with yet another resumption token. At any point, the provider can let the harvester know that the list is finished, by returning an empty resumption token. In this way, very large batches of data can be transferred in bite-sized chunks. Typically, libraries harvest data overnight, retrieving just the records which have been created or updated since their harvest the previous night.

On reflection, I realized that if Trove could just support OAI-PMH, then it would be possible to download articles from it in bulk, using any of a number of existing OAI-PMH programs. I wouldn’t need to write software to perform a harvest; I only needed to translate between the OAI-PMH protocol and the Trove API. An easy win!

Retailer

At this point I sat down and knocked out some code, which I called Retailer because it’s a kind of shop-front with Trove as a warehouse behind it. Retailer is able to act as an OAI-PMH provider by translating any OAI-PMH requests it receives into Trove-style requests which it forwards on to the Trove API. Then it takes the response from Trove, formats it as an OAI-PMH response, and returns that.

Because the Trove corpus is so large, it’s not really feasible to harvest the entire thing. So I’ve made it possible to specify a search query, to limit the results to something more manageable. In OAI-PMH, a repository can divide its records up into so-called distinct sets, and with Retailer you can use a Trove query as one of these sets.

How to use it

Let’s go step by step through how to use Retailer to harvest from Trove. For now, I’m going to detail how to do this using Linux. I hope later I will add instructions for Windows and MacOS.

First you will need to register with the National Library and obtain an API key. This is a kind of random looking password which you must provide to the Trove API with every request you make, and hence you have to tell Retailer what it is.

Next you will need to install Retailer. Retailer is a Java Servlet, which means you must first have installed Java and a Java Web Server such as Apache Tomcat. On a Debian-based Linux, this is as simple as:
sudo apt-get install tomcat7

Now you will install Retailer. Download the retailer.war file and save it e.g.
mkdir /var/lib/retailer
cp retailer.war /var/lib/retailer/retailer.war

To install it into Tomcat, you will need to create a file called retailer.xml in Tomcat’s configuration folder /var/lib/tomcat7/conf/Catalina/localhost with the following content. Copy and paste this and edit the trove key.

<Context path="/retailer" 
    docBase="/var/lib/retailer/retailer.war"
    antiResourceLocking="false">
  <Parameter name="trove-key" value="your-key-here" override="false"/>
</Context>

This is so that Retailer knows your Trove API key.

Next you will need an OAI-PMH harvester. There are several of these available. I am going to use jOAI, which has the advantage that it’s also a Java Servlet. Download the jOAI zip file, unzip it, find the oai.war file, and copy it into the webapps folder of Tomcat.
unzip joai_v3.1.1.3.zip
sudo cp joai_v3.1.1.3/oai.war /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/

At this point, you should have all you need to start harvesting. Open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080/oai/admin/harvester.do – you should be talking to your jOAI harvester. Here’s where you set up your harvester. Click the “Add new harvest” button and fill out the form.

Save the harvest configuration, and run it by clicking “All” under the heading “Manually Harvest”. After a few minutes, jOAI should have downloaded your web pages and point you at the folder where they can be found.