Melbourne Urban Directories: Putting People in Place

Project

The Melbourne Directories are a rich source of historical information held in the Baillieu Library. Information in the directories reflects the expansion of the metropolis and development of its social and commercial life. The directories contain three types of information: an alphabetical listing of surnames, property-by-property and street-by-street listing across Melbourne's suburb; and trade and professional listings. The directories have recently been fully digitised to PDF format, with accompanying Optical Character Recognition (OCR) generated transcriptions. This internship project focused on further processing to the OCR data to make it useful for the purposes of Digital Humanities research. The project aims to produce a subset of the data from one city block for analysis and geospatial tagging.