Finding Local Content
Historical Glimpses
The "Glimpses from {town}'s past" card on each town's page surfaces historical newspaper mentions of that town from Australia's national newspaper archive. The articles are pre-1955 and out of copyright, so we can link to them and show short excerpts directly.
Time to read: 3 minutes
What You'll See
On a town's main page, scroll down past the contribution graph. When this town has historical mentions in the archive, you'll see a card titled "Glimpses from {town}'s past" with up to six article cards. Each card shows:
- Headline — As it appeared in the original newspaper
- Newspaper title — e.g., "The Argus", "Riverine Herald", "The Border Morning Mail"
- Date — Day-month-year of original publication
- Page number — Where in the original paper the article ran
- Excerpt — A short search-result snippet showing the matched terms
Tapping any card opens the full article on Trove (a separate site run by the National Library of Australia) in a new tab.
Where the Data Comes From
The historical articles come from Trove, the National Library of Australia's digitised collection. Trove holds millions of pages of Australian newspapers from the 1800s to the present day, scanned and OCR'd (optical character recognition).
Loclie polls Trove weekly per town, asks for articles mentioning the town's name in newspapers between 1850 and 1949, and caches the top matches locally so the town page loads quickly.
Why only pre-1955? Anything older than 70 years is out of copyright under Australian law. We can show snippets and link to full text freely. Newer articles would need per-publisher agreements we don't have, so we stay inside the copyright safe-harbour.
Coverage Caveats
Not every town has results
Trove's collection is excellent for cities and large regional centres but thinner for very small towns or recently-established places. If your town doesn't appear in any 19th- or early-20th-century newspaper, the section auto-hides. There's nothing to "enable" — the card only renders when there's content to show.
OCR noise
19th-century newspaper scans have OCR errors. Trove does its best but words can be misread (e.g. "Finley" might appear as "Fmley" in a damaged scan). Loclie's relevance filter requires the town name to appear in the article snippet to surface it, which catches most false positives but occasionally misses a relevant article whose only mention was OCR'd incorrectly.
Place-name ambiguity
Some town names exist in multiple states (e.g. "Springfield" exists in VIC, NSW, QLD, SA). Loclie includes the state name as a soft signal in the search query but Trove ranks by relevance to the term, not strictly by geography. You may occasionally see an article that mentions another town with the same name — tap through to the full article on Trove to confirm context.
Privacy and Attribution
No personal information flows through this feature. The articles cached locally are anonymous historical citations — no contributor data, no user data.
Attribution is shown in the card footer:
Sourced from Trove, National Library of Australia. Articles are pre-1955 and out of copyright.
When you click through to the full article on Trove, you're on the NLA's site under their terms. Loclie isn't between you and Trove for that step.
How Often Updates Happen
The Trove poll runs once a week. Historical newspaper content is static (it's not going to change), so weekly is plenty. Once your town has been polled, results are cached indefinitely and only the relevance ordering can drift as new articles get indexed by Trove.
For Loclie Admins
The Trove integration runs as a feature-flagged Inngest job. The cron polls four pilot Berrigan Shire towns initially (Berrigan, Finley, Tocumwal, Barooga); other towns won't have entries until the pilot relevance filter is validated and the job's scope is widened.
If a town should have historical mentions but the section isn't showing, possible causes:
- The town isn't in the current poll scope (only pilot towns are polled at launch)
- Trove's API key (
TROVE_API_KEY) isn't set in the Vercel environment — the helper returns empty without it - The substring relevance filter rejected all candidate articles (raise this with the dev team if you have a town with obvious historical newspaper mentions that aren't surfacing)
Admin reference: schema lives in migration 0262 (trove_articles), poll function is trove-historical-ingest in the Inngest dashboard, helper code at apps/app/src/lib/trove.ts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why doesn't every town have history showing?
We launched the feature with four pilot towns to validate the relevance filter against real OCR'd archive content before rolling out to all 1,800+ Loclie towns. Expanding the poll to more towns is on the roadmap.
Can I report an irrelevant article?
Not yet — the v1 surface doesn't have a per-article report button. If you spot a clearly off-topic article in your town's section, email team@loclie.com.au with the link and we'll tune the relevance filter.
Will Loclie ever cover post-1955 articles?
Possibly, but it would require per-publisher partnerships rather than the open Trove API. For now, anything from the last 70 years sits with the publisher and you can find it via standard search.
Can I search Trove directly from here?
Tap any article card to open Trove in a new tab — from there, Trove's own search lets you explore the rest of their collection.
Next Steps
- Local News — Recent newspaper headlines from polled RSS feeds (a complementary feature for current events)
- Navigating Loclie — Tour of the town page
Need help?