About the text

Every issue of Pacific Islands Monthly held by the National Library of Australia, 840 issues from September 1930 to 2000, rebuilt into a browsable, searchable archive. Nothing here is newly written. It is the magazine's own pages, re-presented. This note explains where the text comes from and what we changed.

Where the text comes from

The National Library digitised the print run and made it available through Trove as record nla.obj-310385031. During digitisation each scanned page was run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which turns the image of a page into machine-readable text and groups it into articles. That OCR is the Library's, produced when the magazine was digitised. We did not re-scan or re-read the pages.

We took the text from Trove rather than scraping the reading interface. The per-issue text came via the GLAM Workbench trove-periodicals tools, and the per-page layout data (word positions, article grouping, advertisement zones) from Trove's page OCR, which lets us reassemble articles in reading order and keep advertisements out of the contents lists.

What we changed

Our changes are structural. We reshaped how the text reads without altering the words themselves.

• Reflow. The raw download breaks text at page edges rather than paragraphs. We rejoin lines, mend words hyphenated across a line break, and re-form paragraphs.
• Articles. Each issue appears as its articles, in reading order, using Trove's zoning, with advertisements collapsed out of the tables of contents.
• Headlines. OCR sometimes garbles a headline or cuts it off mid-phrase. We drop unreadable ones from the contents list, and where a headline was truncated (“Influenza Epidemic at”) we complete it from the article's own opening line (“Influenza Epidemic at Rabaul”).
• Names. The people, places, organisations and ships in the Names index were found automatically by a language model reading the article text. It is a machine reading of uncorrected OCR, so expect some noise, with names merged or split, the odd wrong category, and advertisers sitting among people in the news. Names appearing fewer than three times are kept out of that index to hold the noise down, though they stay findable in the full-text search.

What we did not fix

• The characters themselves are still the original OCR, not hand-corrected.
• Around 29,000 pages were scanned with the right-hand edge cut off, concentrated in the 1960s. No re-reading can recover text that was never captured.
• A few pages returned no text from Trove at all, and one 1951 issue is truncated at the source. Affected issues carry a note.

Using the archive

The text is good for browsing the run, full-text search, and tracing who and where the magazine wrote about across seventy years. Treat quotations as approximately accurate. Before relying on an exact wording, figure or spelling, check the page scan, linked on every issue. The scans are the record, and this text sits on top of them as a finding aid.