Paranormal Research: National Library of Australia’s TROVE (Part 2) - Advanced Search

Paranormal Research: National Library of Australia’s TROVE (Part 1)

"Advanced Search"

Prior post on this topic:

Manning Index of South Australia

Trove Part 1

Head to Trove at this location: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/search?adv=y

Now, just under the search window is a couple of checkboxes, which let us search Australian content only or through library holdings, but let's go to the last option though, 'Advanced Search'.

This search window allows us to search in another way that can be much more helpful than basic newspaper search.

 In the top search box:  “All of these words” window, lets type in “Adelaide Arcade” in inverted commas.

In the box “Any of these Words” window lets type in 'Murder, Suicide, death, crime' – then hit search

Trove has now searched every newspaper in its catalogue for the term 'Adelaide Arcade', and the terms we used. As you will see in your results, there is now a ton of deaths, crimes and suicides to look through for this one location – including the death of Sydney Byron Kennedy and a number of others.

For the murder of Florence Horton, which happened at the Rundle Mall end of The Adelaide Arcade, we would change our search to “Rundle Street” instead of "Adelaide Arcade" in inverted commas, as her death, and subsequent haunting of the Arcade were reported as a crime on the street rather than in the Arcade.

Let’s just jump back to our Advanced search window, in the top search "All of these words" write “Adelaide” in inverted commas, in the “Any of these words” section type;  'ghosts, paranormal.' Now in our “Without these words” window we will type;  'theatre, movie'. then press "search"

We’ll refine a little more by selecting South Australia from our “place” limiter and now we have a ton of reports of ghosts, and UFO’s from South Australia.

If we scroll down to number 8 “Ghosts and Skeletons” you will see one of the stories I used, as a jump-off point for more research for my book The Haunts of Adelaide, which involves Sir Arthur Conan Doyle looking for a photo of a skeleton displayed in Rundle Street Adelaide.

As you can see we get a lot of newspaper stories, some are about published poems, but many are local ghost sightings.

Next Week: How to Reference your book, blog or writing using Trove.

Because of the layout of Blogger, I cannot add the content of this talk in its entirety in one blog post. This transcript was originally presented as an interactive video presentation at the City Library in Adelaide and does not transcribe well to this format.

 Next week I will look at Advanced searching options on Trove.

© 2017 - Allen Tiller - originally presented by Allen Tiller as part of the 'Haunted Buildings in Adelaide' - Paranormal historian in residence project at the Adelaide City Libraries in conjunction with the City of Adelaide.