Index to the Melbourne Argus newspaper (for the period 1870-1889)

coverage: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

The Argus was a major Australian metropolitan daily, published in Melbourne from 1846 to 1957. It is the primary resource for data on 19th century Australia and is widely recognised as the general Australian newspaper of record for this period. In size, range of news, accuracy and objectivity of reporting and its literary content, the Argus is without peer. Australia lacks a continuous index to any of its quality newspapers. Researchers in Australia spend many hours searching for material that an index can guide them to in seconds. Researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States can consult indexes to The Times and the New York Times that cover the whole period of their publication. This is the service that the Argus Index will provide to researchers on Australia. The index will provide all Australians with access to their history which is buried in the pages of the paper. Through the identification of dates of significant events, the index will also serve as a guide to the contents of other newspapers. The years 1846 to 1859 were indexed by the late J. A. Feely who was Chief Librarian at the Melbourne Public library (now the State Library of Victoria). The Argus itself produced an index to the paper for the years 1910 to 1949. For a long time the desirability of filling the fifty-year gap between 1859 and 1910 had been recognised. In 1983 the History and Heritage committee of Victoria's 150th Anniversary Board took up the idea and the Argus Index Project was born.

The funding provided by the Anniversary Board was only enough to launch the project. It was sustained by a wide variety of funding bodies, but never with enough to allow rapid progress to be made. It took fifteen years for the first decade of indexing (1860-69) to be completed. In 2001 the project was recognised as worthy of support by the Australian Research Council (ARC) under its infrastructure program. This has allowed the project to advance much more rapidly. The first grant from the ARC allowed the indexing of the second decade (1870-79) to be completed in a little over two years. The funding provided in 2003 will allow for the completion of the third decade (1880-89) by 2008. We hope that with the ARC's continued support to have the project complete by 2010. By that time, the newspaper itself may have been digitised so that users of the index will have online access to the articles that the index has identified. Under the ARC research infrastructure scheme, universities and other public bodies across the country are encouraged to work co-operatively on projects. Our project, based at La Trobe University, has been supported by the University of Melbourne (where Stuart Macintyre is chief investigator). Monash University (Marian Quartly) Curtin University of Technology (Richard Nile), Australian National University (Ann McGrath) Griffith University (Patrick Buckridge) and at the National Library (Warwick Cathro). The National Library is a central player. It has been responsible for refashioning the index so that it can be delivered online. The decade of the 1870s is the first to be made available in this form. As further decades are completed they will be made available online, (as is now the case with the 1880s), as will the 1860s which so far has been issued only in hard copy. The project is greatly indebted for the efforts of the library staff and in particular Judith Pearce and Bronwyn Lee.

The provision of more generous funding allowed the project to hire more staff but it continues to rely on the volunteer work of those who read and record the contents of the paper. The manager of the reading program is Diana Phoenix whose outstanding work is also provided to the project free of charge. In 2004 she received an Arts Portfolio Leadership Award for her outstanding volunteer contribution to the State Library of Victoria. The State Library has been the place where much of the work has been done and through Alannah Kelly has been a consistent supporter of the project. More recently through Shane Carmody it has officially become one of the ARC partners. Geraldine Suter has been the chief indexer almost from the beginning. The high standard of her work needs no endorsement; it is evident in the quality, consistency, and accessibility of the index. All those involved in the project have seen its value and it could not have survived and prospered without their dedication. A former Vice Chancellor at La Trobe University, Professor Michael Osborne, was a consistent supporter and kept the project alive when it hit hard times. (John Hirst, Editor-in-Chief.).

The Argus Index website was hosted by the National Library of Australia from 2005 until 2012. Prior to the decommissioning of the website the indexing data was reformatted into a set of PDF publications which recreate the "look and feel" of the earlier print indexes and which include links to digitised Argus pages in the Trove system.