For local history buffs and Lithgow Library staff the addition of the Lithgow Mercury to the Trove website will make searching Lithgow’s history through the old copies of the newspaper much easier with a simple keyword search online.

The Trove website trove.nla.gov.au is the National Library of Australia’s portal to provide easy access to resources relating to Australia.

Issues from 1954 onwards are protected by copyright, so are currently unavailable for digitising under this project.

The NSW State Library’s Manager of Collection Strategy and Development Jerelynn Brown attended the Trove celebration at Lithgow Library and told guests that the Lithgow Mercury’s digitised pages were getting good traffic.

“The first issue of the Lithgow Mercury to be digitised went live on February 19 this year and now all 55,251 pages are freely accessible over the internet. 

As of June 30 figures indicate that in the short period the Lithgow Mercury has been accessible through Trove there have been 81,360 page views or around 616 per day.”

The Trove celebration at the library also had  a couple of special guests.

Len Ashworth, retired editor of the Lithgow Mercury reminisced about his long service at the paper and Jan Saundercock from the Lithgow Family History Society talked about using Trove to assist with family history research.

The digitisation of the Lithgow Mercury is part of more than 1.4 million NSW newspaper pages in 2015-16 alone, funded by the State Library of NSW, bringing the Library’s contribution to NSW newspapers available through Trove to 4.2 million pages.

Ms Brown was delighted to report that as at June 30, 2016, 411 NSW newspaper titles were live on Trove.

“This is of around 2060 NSW newspapers ever published.

“That is nearly 20% of all newspapers ever published in NSW  and a 70 per cent increase in only four years.”