Have you discovered Trove yet? It is the National Library's well-named unified search service, which combs a huge range of Australian collections all at once. Here at the Dictionary of Sydney we use it every day, especially the Digitised newspapers collection which has revolutionised historical research in newspapers. I usually open a tab at the Newspapers search page first thing in the morning and it stays open all day. It's better than having a complete run of the Herald at my desk, because it is searchable, even the ads.

Not all Australian newspapers have been digitised yet, but more come online regularly. Our image researcher, Linda Brainwood, is very excited that the Illustrated Sydney News is soon to join the Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney Gazette and others that we use every day. The papers are scanned using optical character recognition, and the project relies on readers to help correct the rough transcriptions that this makes possible. I try to correct any article that I use in our research, and I've corrected the sorry total of 805 lines. The real star is the legendary annmanley who has corrected 697,162 lines, and there are others up over the half-million mark. Thank goodness for their industry and dedication!  (They've inspired me now to try harder). If you have a spare minute and an interest in history, you should join in. It's remarkably absorbing. This amazing volunteer effort means that every article, advertisement, birth, death and marriage announcement, shipping list, editorial and letter to the editor is now searchable. Some of the articles in the Dictionary of Sydney that have been influenced by this near-miraculous new resource include Joseph Fowles and Edward Flood, as well as a great many of our descriptions and dates for people and organisations in Sydney's history.

The National Library is a national treasure and Trove is one of its best creations. It relies on the support and cooperation of the State libraries around Australia who have provided the originals and microfilms of newspapers, and of many other institutions and collections who have made their catalogs available. These also deserve national treasure status. We certainly couldn't do without them.

I'm definitely buying the t-shirt!

Local history, city history, regional history, national history and global history all have different concerns and tend to have varying depths of field -- details which are crucial in one area are not so crucial in another. Because no historian can be completely comprehensive, writing history is always a case of choosing what to notice. Combine this with the different concerns of historians who study particular activities, such as sport or brickmaking, or social themes, such as health or religion, and the complexity increases. The Dictionary of Sydney hopes to bring a range of these points of view, and depths of field together, creating a composite history of Sydney that joins family histories to local histories, city histories and thematic histories. It's our hope that this whole will be more than the sum of the parts. We've just had a small example of how this can happen, when you shift the field of vision and connect with a wider history. In a blog post some days ago, I mentioned George Smith, a mayor of Sydney about whom our consultant historian Terri McCormack was able to find little information, not least because of his maddeningly common name. (Parents, remember to call your children by outlandish monickers. Historians will thank you.) I called him 'a shadowy figure', and our biography of him says: "he was probably the civic-minded George Smith who, in 1844, signed a petition to the mayor of Sydney to convene a meeting..."

Shortly after that post we received an email from a contributor, local studies librarian for Manly, John MacRitchie. He knew that our George Smith was a prominent figure in the early history of Manly, and sent us a fuller biography and a lead to this picture of him. Some of his information came from researcher John Moore, who had been working on the history of the property Bungarribee which was purchased by George's father in 1832. George was the son of a convict, Charles Smith, pickpocket and butcher, who had been transported in 1819. We now know so much more about George, including his dates of birth and death (1826-1889), and his role as backer and manager of the tour of Aboriginal cricketers to England in 1869. After marrying Ann Smithers, a Manly girl, in 1851, with whom he later had 12 children, George lived in Manly for at least the last 25 years of his life, and was active in building that community as patron of the local school, and a signatory to the petition to the Governor applying for incorporation of Manly in 1876. He must have been socially connected with the emerging political aspirants of the place as two of his daughters married future mayors of Manly. All this will appear in a new article in the Dictionary soon. We anticipate more stories like this, as word gets out, because many Sydney identities had interests all over the Sydney basin, and did not confine themselves to one area. George Smith's father, Charles, for example, when he died in 1845, left property in George Street, at Brickfield Hill, Eastern Creek, and Windsor as well as in rural New South Wales. He had strong links with the new council, apart from his son later being an alderman, as another of his properties was the Sydney Council Chambers, then in York Street. John Rose Holden and George Hill, who were both also early City of Sydney aldermen, were executors of his will. The Dictionary has the ability to link family, local and citywide history. We look forward to telling lots more of the stories that tie us all together.

It isn't all facts and figures, or straightforward historical topics, here at the Dictionary of Sydney. We've also invited some very imaginative writers to come up with different viewpoints on the city's history, and they have obliged us.

One is Megan Hicks, whose work you can follow at her blog Pavement Graffiti,  here. She has written two entries for the Dictionary, Reading the roads and The decorated footpath. Both will inspire you to look again at the surfaces you are walking and driving on, and to wonder about the ephemeral markers that people create around them.

Of course, the ground of the city has changed over time. From leaf litter and native grasses, to dust and mud when it rained, then gravel, woodblocks, stone, concrete, asphalt and stone again, the walking and driving surfaces of Sydney have interacted with feet, shoes, hooves, wheels, rails and tyres. Every now and then, a relic is uncovered, as when in 2010 a patch of woodblock paving was uncovered by workers who were fixing the drainage in a lane off Druitt Street. All the City History Program and Dictionary staff rushed over the road to take a look. Despite having been in the ground for over 100 years, they were still as hard as iron, as we could tell when a worker dropped one, and the clang echoed off the walls. The blocks were carefully sealed and left in place.

There are also lots of places in Sydney where the tramlines sometimes resurface through the asphalt. What other relics might be hidden under the roads and footpaths?

One of most important tasks of the Dictionary is to document the histories of Sydney's many different cultural communities, and we've made a good start. The most recent community articles, on the Maori and the Russians, have just been released, and while the words and connections are all there, we are still working on the images and multimedia for these. Among the first articles commissioned were pieces on the Germans in Sydney, by Jurgen Tampke, and the Italians in Sydney, by Gianfranco Cresciani. Our web statistics indicate that these have been very popular with readers. Gianfranco's account of the Italians in Sydney tells the story of the waves of adventurers, political refugees, missionaries and skilled tradesmen who emigrated to Sydney from the Italian peninsula before Italy was unified. Comrades and supporters of the revolutionary Garibaldi were prominent among them, and many settled around Hunters Hill. By the late nineteenth century, Sydney's small Italian community was established, with newspapers, clubs and restaurants, and focused in East Sydney. Between World War I and World War II a larger Italian community began to mirror the political changes at home, and several groups supporting the Italian Fascist government emerged. Anti-fascist activities by militant Italians in Sydney led to the banning of their newspaper, Il Risveglio.

World War II led to the internment of many of Sydney's Italians as enemy aliens, regardless of the anti-fascist stance of many of them, including those who had come to Australia because of their opposition to Italy's government. It was a difficult and damaging experience for many. Sydney's Germans are a lesser-known community, although they have a very long history in this place. The colony's first governor, Captain Arthur Phillip was the son of a German teacher from Frankfurt, and by the 1830s German merchants, winegrowers, shepherds and scientists had made their presence felt. Sydney's brewing industry benefited from the expertise of Edmund Resch and his brother, whose beer became the taste of Sydney for many years. The rivalries and wars of the first half of the twentieth century complicated the lives of German-born Sydneysiders, who faced internment and rejection during both World Wars. Many of the German speakers who arrived between the wars were Jewish Germans and Austrians, escaping the Nazi racial laws. The Dictionary's article on Jews in Sydney also details some of their great contributions to the city. Postwar, many Germans emigrated to Sydney, building flourishing set of community organisations and making a considerable contribution to the city's cultural life. The number of Dictionary articles on communities continues to grow, and now includes Brazilians, Cambodians, Chinese, Croatians, Dutch, East Timorese,  Egyptians, English, French, Germans, Indonesians, Italians, Jews, Koreans, Lao, Latvians, Lebanese, Malaysians, Maltese, Maori, Mauritians, New Zealanders, Russians, Scots, Tibetans and Vietnamese, with plenty more to come.

Technical education is all important today, and it's hard to imagine a time when it needed advocates and activists. With the generous help of the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts who sponsored their research for the Dictionary during 2009 and 2010, Catherine Freyne and Mark Dunn have produced a number of articles that set out the various histories of Sydney's institutions of technical learning, and indeed the very idea of technical education itself, as it developed in the growing city. There are more of these articles to come, later this year, but here are few to be going on with. The Mechanics' School itself, founded in 1833, grew out of a belief that working men needed more than on-the-job training and that classes for adults would enable workers to hone their skills and expertise and provide useful knowledge for the colony. Out of the Mechanics' School grew the Technical and Working Men's College, the Erskineville Bootmaking School, the Sydney Technical College, the National Art School, and ultimately both the University of New South Wales and the University of Technology, Sydney. Along the way the SMSA occupied various city premises, and the technical college mushroomed at Ultimo, eventually swallowing Ultimo House. From the 1830s, leading men  such as Henry Carmichael,  Joseph Fowles, Norman Selfe and many others fostered the idea of technical training as an addition to the classical education offered after 1853 at the University of Sydney, lobbying the colonial government and education department. Their influence on education more generally in the colony is examined by Geoffrey Sherington and Craig Campbell in their article on Education.

At the same time, the School of Arts movement grew across the city, with people joining together to organise their own local schools, raise money to build rooms, and as always, to squabble over their organisation's proper role and function. In many suburban communities, Schools of Arts were the first local libraries, social clubs, entertainment venues and sites of learning. The Sydney Mechanics School of Arts is at 280 Pitt Street today. The SMSA offers a regular public program of talks on issues of current affairs, literature, science, the arts and history (several Dictionary of Sydney contributors have spoken at their Tuesday Talkabouts) for its members and the public. Membership is only $15 a year (full rate) and also gives you access to the SMSA library, the oldest lending library in Australia. It has one of the largest fiction collections in central Sydney and is well worth a visit - tell them we sent you!

One of the most exciting entries in the new batch of material just added to the Dictionary of Sydney is Mark St Leon's richly illustrated essay on Circus in Sydney.

Mark is the acknowledged expert on Australian circus and comes from a famous circus family, many of whom are mentioned in his article, including the Five St Leons, pictured. He's been generous with his private collection of circus images, multimedia and ephemera, and we've also gathered a range of images that show Sydney enjoying circus entertainment over a very long period. Circus offered employment and artistic opportunities to women, Aboriginal and migrant performers, and combined a showbiz life with travel as well as performing animals, such as the talking horse, Mahomet, described in the article. Mark St Leon's new book Circus: The Australian story will be published by Melbourne Books in May this year. Keep an eye out for it.

The most recent set of additions to the Dictionary includes biographies of the first 14 mayors of Sydney, written by consulting historian Terri McCormack, and they are certainly an interesting and varied bunch. Sydney was incorporated as a city in 1842, and the first council sat on 9 November of that year. (You can find extensive history of the City at the City of Sydney website, prepared by the City's excellent historians). Most of the early aldermen were businessmen, but at least four were the children of convicts whose families had made good very quickly in their new country, and at least seven started out as manual workers. Here's a taste:

John Hosking was the first mayor, in 1842, when his business was riding high. His wife was Martha Terry, daughter of Samuel Terry, 'The Botany Bay Rothschild', a convict who became the richest man in the colonies. Hosking's business acumen, or luck, was not as good as his father-in-law's, and he was driven out of public life because of bankruptcy in 1843.

George Allen was the first solicitor trained in Sydney, and founder of one of Sydney's oldest law firms. He was mayor in 1844-45. Thomas Stafford Broughton was an orphan at the age of nine, who became a successful tailor, property owner and slum landlord. He was mayor in 1847, but he lived to see the twentieth century, dying in 1901.

Edward Flood was the bastard son of a convict, and apprenticed as a carpenter when he was still a boy. He became a fine cricketer and a founder of Sydney's first cricket club, as well as a prosperous builder and businessman. A foundation councillor in 1842, the next year he punched another councillor who called him an idiot, and was fined £50, but it didn't stop him becoming mayor in 1849. In his long life, he served in both houses of the parliament, and was a director of many of Sydney's early companies. At a testimonial dinner given for him in 1865, he was described as "a man, trained as a mechanic, occupying at one time a humble position, and proud to acknowledge that position, yet, by his own continuous and steady industry he has elevated himself to a position in which he is admired as a politician, loved as a friend, and trusted as a statesman". George Hill was also the son of convicts. He became a butcher like his father, but built a business empire of pubs and later pastoral land. He was mayor in 1850, and later went into parliament. Daniel Egan was born in Windsor and trained as a boatbuilder, later becoming a shipping agent and merchant.   He was mayor in 1853, and later went into the New South Wales Legislative Council, and later Assembly. His wife Mary Ann (or Marian) drowned in the wreck of the Dunbar in 1857, New South Wales's worst maritime disaster. We'll be adding more city aldermen and mayors and linking them up to all of their other exploits and connections, over the next few years. To see what connections the City of Sydney Council already has in the Dictionary of Sydney, follow the links from this page, and see what you can find! The Dictionary of Sydney is proud to acknowledge the enormous support that the City of Sydney provides to the project, as our Major Government Partner.

The regular quarterly update to the Dictionary of Sydney has been made public at www.dictionaryofsydney.org today, and there's a lot of new material to have a look at. New thematic essays Circus by Mark St Leon, with illustrations and multimedia from his private collection, and a wealth of detail. Russians by Mara Moustafine Maori by Jo Kamira We are still working on the illustrations for these two essays, but they outline surprisingly early and interesting histories in Sydney for these two groups.

New work on Sydney's Aboriginal history Arabanoo by Keith Vincent Smith, telling the story of one of the Aboriginal men who experienced first contact with the settlers. Biddy Lewis, and the Aboriginal settlement at Narrabeen Lagoon, by Peter Read, detailing some of the hidden history of Aboriginal Sydney. Sydney's first 14 mayors Stay tuned for a blog post on these worthy citizens of the City of Sydney, who worked their way up to Mayor in the mid-nineteenth century. Other people, place and organisations entries New work on Sydney's roads, north, east and west, by Garry Wotherspoon, which tells the stories of Sydney's gateways. The Royal Society of New South Wales by Peter J Tyler, outlining the history of an eminent scientific society. The Technical and Working Men's College by Mark Dunn, tracing the beginnings of technical education in Sydney, part of a project supported by the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts. Eastwood by Beverley McClymont, giving an account of the changing fortunes of this northern suburb Yaralla and Thomas Walker by Patricia Skehan, covering the philanthropy and patronage of Walker, and his beautiful estate. As well as these new entries, we've been beavering away behind the scenes for three months, adding and linking over 1000 new entities, with timelines, descriptions and facts, and also researching and captioning over 200 new images and multimedia. Hop on over and have a look!

Now that the Dictionary is so big and complex, it can be hard to see how it is changing. The raw figures are quite daunting: the Dictionary contains 572 articles totalling nearly 800,000 words, and has information on nearly 5,000 entities. However, this is only a fraction of what it will one day contain, and we add new material to the publicly available Dictionary of Sydney every three months. In between, we work away in the background, adding new images, captions, descriptions, and connections, which are all revealed when the site is regenerated four times a year. How does the Dictionary grow? Let me count the ways... New commissioned material

We commission authors to write essays and entries about a huge range of topics. When they come in, they are edited, some are peer-reviewed and revised by their authors, and all are copyedited, fact-checked and proofed before they are reformatted and made ready to go into the system. The files need to be completely consistent and free of those pesky hidden characters and code that can creep into Word documents. Each batch of material is at least 50,000 words in total, and some are larger. New images and multimedia

At the same time as the editor is getting the text ready, the multimedia team is finding images and multimedia for the previous upload of text, so that the pictures can catch up. This involves a lot of online research, following up leads, requesting permission and clearing copyright with all of our generous and wonderful contributing institutions. Oh, and captions, always captions, which are specific to the location of the image. Don't be surprised if you see the same image in two different articles, but with different captions. (These all get edited and proofed too!) New people, places, events, organisations, buildings, structures and natural features. Oh, and artefacts! Every entity that is mentioned in any of the text is researched, confirmed, created as a record in the Dictionary database, and linked to its mention. We then try to find out more, adding milestones, relationships and connections, and writing a description for each and every one. If we can find an image that sums up the entity, we add that too. Felicity, one of our invaluable editorial assistants, calls this Speed Research, on the analogy of Speed Dating, as you can't get too caught up in any one entity. There are always more fish in the sea! At present the Dictionary has more than 7700 entities, and we have written more than 4000 descriptions. New facts, connections, relationships and links And of course, when we create new entities, we also find new links, facts and connections for lots of old entities.

Each one needs researching and confirming before we make the link. But the connections are the fun thing about the way the Dictionary works, and the more we put in, the more we can see the benefits. Overall, there are more than 14,ooo links between entities and text and the number increases with every regeneration of the site. Of course when the numbers are this big, we can't be experts on every single aspect of the Dictionary's material and we rely on our readers to help us improve the accuracy and range of our work. Luckily, with a contact button on every page of the Dictionary (at the bottom in the middle), we get lots of helpful emails correcting any mistakes we might have let slip through. So, if you've written in to tell us something we've got wrong, thanks!

One of the unusual things about the Dictionary of Sydney is that entries are only one of several kinds of historical resources we include. You can find maps, video, audio, timelines, images and combinations of these. We can also include more than one entry on any given topic, allowing us to look at different historical facets, or enable debate on controversial subjects. Each entity within the Dictionary has a page where everything we know about it is aggregated, which may include an entry, or more than one entry. This is where to start, but you never know where you will end up. Let me show you an example. Hyde Park Barracks is one of Sydney's iconic sites, a survivor from early convict days, right in the centre of the city. It is now a museum, part of the Historic Houses Trust, and World Heritage listed. Designed by Francis Greenway and built on the orders of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, the building was used in many different ways over the centuries as the city changed around it. Here is the top half of its Dictionary page: Hyde Park Barracks. But this is just the portal to the range of resources we have gathered about it. The map shows an accurate polygon of the site and you can zoom out to get a sense of the building's place in the modern city, or look at a satellite image. The timeline provides a visual rendering of the facts we have gathered about the site, some of which will connect elsewhere in the Dictionary. Drag to see it in more detail. Down the right hand side you can find both the entries about this place, one of which focuses on archaeology. Underneath that is a list of the images we hold. Roll over them to get thumbnails. But there's more! Scrolling to the lower half of the page means you can see the other connections of the building. On the right is a list of all the entries in which this building is mentioned, throughout the Dictionary. Each one has a preview that pops up on rollover. In the centre are the facts gathered about the building, many of which link directly to other entities in the Dictionary. These are all structured data in the Dictionary's working database. You can roll over any links to get an idea of where they might take you. Below these are the introductions to both of the articles we currently have about the Barracks -- a building history by Laila Ellmoos, now with the City of Sydney history program, and a piece on the archaeology of the Barracks site by Peter Davies, of LaTrobe University. These articles are substantial illustrated pieces that take very different approaches, and are filled with links that will take you further into the colonial history of Sydney. Enjoy!