Are you looking for an article from the Coburg Leader in 2010? Want the week’s top stories read out to you while you prep dinner? How can you search for articles about affordable housing across many trusted Australian news sources all at once? For all these answers and more, read on for today’s online collection spotlight.
State Library Victoria members can access hundreds of databases from home (if your home is in Victoria). That’s millions of articles, magazines, archives, ebooks, videos, songs, audiobooks and more, available through the catalogue anytime. We’re taking a closer look at new and/or interesting databases as well as hidden gems from our collections. Read on for top picks and tips from Librarians.
Not a member yet? Sign up online first and reward your curiosity.
Today we’re looking at NewsBank’s Access Australia database.
What makes this database so great?
Use Access Australia to explore credible, vetted news sources from across Australia to stay informed on events, people and issues. This databases includes more than 650 influential Australian news sources from every state and territory covering the 1980s to the present day, and all are fully text searchable!
Easy searching
NewsBank has a simple search bar on the homepage that allows you to search across all news sources in the Access Australia collection. Search a name, event or keyword and press the Search button. Below, I have searched for “State Library Victoria” in quotation marks to search these words together, and further narrowed my search by adding the additional keyword Dome.
Select More Search Options to open an advanced search page, or try Date Search or Map Search. These options are located below the simple search bar.
Open the A-Z Source List to find a list of all included newspapers and search for a specific news source.
Below, I’ve searched for all newspapers published in Dandenong. You can see the coverage in the Dates column.
For more help searching and reading articles in NewsBank’s Access Australia database, see their handy how-to video below:
Multiple formats and source types
Access Australia includes various types of news sources, not just newspapers! Search across magazines, journals, newswires like the AAP, even audio newscasts of some of your favourite ABC radio programs (links to audio will open in an external browser).
Newspapers come in either text-only or image formats. Image collections will be a full-page facsimile of the newspaper as it was published, and are perfect for checking photographs, family notices, sports results and advertisements.
Text collections will have articles only, and will not have accompanying images or formatting. Although not as visually appealing, the coverage of text collections is greater – often stretching back to the 1990s or earlier.
See The Age/Sunday Age Collection below:
Accessibility features
Reading articles in text format is great, as you can take advantage of some of NewsBank’s accessibility features.
Select the Text Size button in the top left-hand corner of a text-only article to increase the text size.
Just below the byline you’ll find some more options for accessible reading. Press the green Play icon to the right of Read News Document to hear the article read aloud, or select the hamburger menu on the left to find additional settings, including text highlighting, reading speed, keyboard shortcuts, and page mask – where one or two lines of text are highlighted for you to focus your reading.
Explore by topic
Not comfortable with advanced searches? NewsBank has done the work for you! Have a look through their suggested topics on the homepage, and click through to specially curated sub-topics. Below, I’ve chosen the Environmental Studies topic, and selected Affordable Energy.
You can see on the results page that NewsBank has automatically constructed an Advanced Search of their Access Australia collection based on my area of interest, with 34 articles across a wide range of Australian news sources to choose from.
Access Australia provides access to some of the most popular newspapers in Victoria and around the country, including major dailies and many regional and suburban papers too. Try filtering the source list by location keywords to see what’s available.
More to explore
Check out our latest databases on trial, and see a full list of all new and trial databases, by visiting our A-Z Databases page.
Explore our other current newspaper databases on our A-Z Databases page.
Sign up to Newsworthy – our popular webinar teaching how to navigate the Library’s extensive newspaper collection.
Read other newspaper-themed SLV blogs:
- Online Collection Spotlight: Australian Newspapers Collection (1831-2000)
- Digitising The Sun – read about our end-of-financial-year appeal here!
- Digitising newspapers
- Trove: a treasure chest of family history gems
