Tim Sherratt

@wragge

I’m a historian and hacker who researches the possibilities and politics of digital cultural collections. My main project at the moment is the #GLAMWorkbench, which […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Tim Sherratt@wragge· Jul 15

I was honoured to get a special award as 'most dedicated Labber' at the GLAM Labs Futures conference in Edinburgh: https://updates.timsherratt.org/2026/07/15/honoured-to-be-the-most.html It really meant a lot after a difficult couple of years...

Photograph of a man with grey hair and glasses holding a scientific flask in front of his face. The flask has a pink ribbon tied around it's neck and silver writing that reads 'GLAM LABS AWARD'. Inside the flask is an orange/yellow substance.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Jul 7

I made it!

Selfie of a 63 year old man with a grey beard and glasses, wearing a broad-brimmed khaki hat and black waterproof jacket. He is sitting on a bench next to a bronze statue of a man rubbing his feet. The statue marks the official end of the West Highlands Way.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Jul 6

Over the past six days I've walked over 100km along the West Highlands Way in Scotland. Another 24km tomorrow and I'm done. It's been amazing. I haven't shared any photos because at the end of each day I'm spent, and I sort've wanted to make sure I could […] [Original post on hcommons.social]

Photo of Stob Dearg viewed from the Devil's Staircase section of the Great Western Way in Scotland. In the foreground are rocks and heath in the background looms the mountain, its peak covered in cloud.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Jun 25

DIY name badges for the #GLAMLabs conference.

Photo of the chest of a man wearing a grey tshirt. A white cardboard cutout person is hanging around his neck on a blue ribbon. The cutout person has googly eyes. Written on the cutout is "Hi! I'm Tim".

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Jun 22

Hello Edinburgh!

Photo of a statue of Adam Smith with a witch's hat (traffic cone) on his head.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Jun 21

Hello London.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Jun 6

Before there was AI, before there were deepfakes, there was the Vintage Face Depot. Currently working on resurrecting my circa 2015 Twitter bot for the Fedi...

Photograph of the face of a grey-haired man, except his face has been overlaid with a grainy, oval shaped image of a face from a digitised newspaper. The opacity of the newspaper face is reduced so that the two faces blend together a bit.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Jun 2

Don't think this is bots, I think it's librarians from the wider local studies seminar today playing around with the NSW, Tas, and Vic directories on https://glam-databases.net

Chart of pageview stats from the past 7 days for glam-databases.net. For most of the week the pageview numbers are around 100-200 per day, but today they jumped to nearly 1,000.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· May 30

Working on adding some extra options and improving the performance of my Trove newspaper images userscript...

Screenshot of the Download panel in Trove's newspaper interface. There's an extra 'Download image' section added by the userscript. Previously this section just had buttons for 'Article' and 'Page', but this screenshot shows that next to the 'Article' button there is now a dropdown widget to set the scale, and a checkbox to set image masking on or off.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· May 24

Achievement for the day -- managed to replace the battery in my old 2015 MacBook Pro. I'd previously loaded Linux Mint, so it should now have a new life ahead of it.

Photo of part of the screen and keyboard of a 2015 13" MacBook Pro. The screen shows the MacBook is running Linux Mint, and a terminal is visible showing upower stats from the new battery. In the background are an assortment of tools and the old battery.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· May 18

Melbourne's Southbank – buildings from the 1950s (recorded on Mahlstedt fire insurance maps in the SLV) on a modern basemap. Maps georeferenced using IIIF and Allmaps. https://viewer.allmaps.org/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fannotations.allmaps.org%2Fmanifests%2F234e397c4ac4341b

Screen capture showing a series of georeferenced maps from the 1950s on a modern basemap. The background colour of the historic maps has been removed so that only the buildings remain.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· May 11

Ever wanted an easy way to save newspaper articles in Trove as high-resolution images? I've created a userscript that makes it easy to download cropped and masked articles, as well as full page images. https://github.com/wragge/trove-newspaper-images-userscript

Screenshot of the Trove newspaper interface with the 'Download' side panel open. The userscript has inserted a new section in the panel headed 'Download images'. Underneath the heading are two blue buttons labelled 'Article' and 'Page'. Underneath the buttons is the thumbnail of a cropped and masked image, and a link to download it.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· May 10

Working on a new userscript that adds an option to the Trove interface to download a newspaper article or page as an image. Seems to be working...

A screenshot of the Trove newspaper interface with the side download panel open. Underneath the standard "Download" options is a new heading "Download image" and a blue button titled "Article". These have been added by the userscript. Underneath the button is a thumbnail version of the cropped and masked article image and a button to download it.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· May 8

I call this work 'Realtime bot blocking'...

Tim Sherratt@wragge· May 6

This was @baibi and me from a few years ago.

Tintype portrait image of a couple. The woman on the left has curly hair and glasses, the man on the right has long grey hair, a beard and glasses. Because of the tintype process there are irregularities around the edges of the image.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· May 6

Known bad bots (I think identified by user agent strings) blocked by Anubis in the last 17 hours or so.

Screenshot of tabular data listing bot names and number of times they were blocked:

bot/meta-webindexer 195331
bot/alibaba-cloud 83220
bot/huawei-cloud 708
bot/ai-catchall 6
bot/ai-crawlers-training 2
bot/ai-crawlers-search 1

Tim Sherratt@wragge· May 5

I've migrated my GLAM databases to a new home with AI bot defences. I have redirects in place so the old addresses will continue to work for now, but if you use any of these apps it would be a good idea to update your links/bookmarks! https://glam-databases.net

Screenshot of the home page of glam-databases.net. The text reads:

GLAM databases

This site hosts a number of databases associated with the GLAM Workbench and Wragge Labs. These currently include...

Directories

- NSW Post Office Directories (54 volumes from 1886 to 1950)
- Sydney Telephone Directories (44 volumes from 1926 to 1954)
- Tasmanian Post Office Directories (54 volumes from 1890 to 1948)
- Sands & McDougall's Directories, Victoria (24 volumes from 1860 to 1974)

Indexes

- GLAM Name Index Search (12 million records from 293 datasets)

Tim Sherratt@wragge· May 5

From the last few hours showing what happened to bandwidth usage when I switched on the redirect, and then the drop off after I blocked 'meta-webindexer'.

Chart showing bandwith usage over time. A purple line shows outgoing data and a green line shows incoming. At about 11am the purple line shoots up dramatically and remains roughly constant for an hour or so before suddenly dropping back to about 20% of the peak value.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· May 2

[Selfie, eye contact] New hair courtesy of Maison de @baibi

Selfie of a bloke in his 60s with grey hair nearly clippered on the sides and back and longer on top where it's swept over to one side.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Apr 28

Archives AND time travel -- two of my favourite topics in one! Looking forward to reading this book by @lynnemthomas

Photograph of a book cover the title of the book is "The infinite loop: archives and time travel in the popular imagination". The authors are Lynne M Thomas and Katy Rawdon. The imprint at the top indicates the book is part of the "Archival Futures" series.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Apr 16

Working on georeferencing some more of the Mahlstedt fire insurance maps of Melbourne from the SLV. Southbank is hard because almost nothing remains to align the maps with! […] [Original post on hcommons.social]

Screen capture of four georeferenced historical maps lined on a background of a modern digital basemap. The historic maps are lined up along the southern bank of the Yarra river, and show streets and buildings that no longer exist.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Apr 13

Hee hee, the icon for 'realia' in the SLV catalogue is a little Ned Kelly helmet...

Screen capture from an entry in the SLV catalogue showing a black and white line drawing in the shape of Ned Kelly's helmet.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Apr 1

I got a trail camera for Xmas and have finally set it up to see what goes on in the backyard at night. No big surprises so far, though I didn't know the possums were raiding the bird feeder, and the pademelons hang around for longer than I expected. Here's some pademelon fun...

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Mar 18

So that's fun – found myself as the author of a presumably AI hallucinated article, cited in a chapter of a book published last year. Didn't write it, doesn't exist. Even has a DOI that not suprisingly, goes nowhere. The chapter is on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/15446620

Sherratt, T. (2019). From collection to connection: Trove and the community. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, 68(2), 133–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2019.1593898

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Mar 3

Tripped in the dark and injured myself, but... (there was a bit of light cloud as well) #bloodmoon

Photo showing a slightly blurry image of a pinky-red moon against a dark sky

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Feb 28

Revisiting my HPS/STS past by getting a copy of this classic (reissued with an extra chapter in 2020). Still very relevant: "technical decisions are political decisions, and they involve profound choices about power, liberty, order, and justice".

Photo of red book cover. The title is "The Whale and the reactor" and the subtitle is "a search for limits in an age of high technology". The author is Langdon Winner. The cover design includes small illustrations of different technologies including oil drums, wind turbines, nuclear weapons, and solar panels.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Feb 12

New blog post describing the interface I've built to explore digitised maps from the State Library of Victoria that have been georeferenced by the public over the past few months. https://updates.timsherratt.org/2026/02/12/exploring-georeferenced-maps-from-the.html #GLAM #digitalHumanities #maps

Screen shot of the Georeferenced Maps Explorer. On the right is a column showing a list of georeferenced maps with metadata and thumbnails. On the left if a digital basemap centred on Wilson's Prom, on top of which four different georeferenced maps and aerial photographs have been layered, creating a digital patchwork Prom.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Feb 12

This is also handy if you've added multiple, similar looking maps (like the photomaps) and want to check which is which!

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Feb 12

I know I said I was going to stop fiddling with the geofreferenced maps explorer, but I had a thought in the shower this morning... Now as you mouseover the results, the map boundaries are displayed.

Tim Sherratt@wragge· Feb 11

Here's 7 photomaps along the Murray from 1980 stitched together, with their opacity reduced to show the relationship with the modern basemap […] [Original post on hcommons.social]