Trove
Trove is an Australian online library database owned by the National Library of Australia in which it holds partnerships with source providers National and State Libraries Australia, an aggregator and service which includes full text documents, digital images, bibliographic and holdings data of items which are not available digitally, and a free faceted-search engine as a discovery tool.
This article is about the Australian online service. For other uses of the word "trove", see Trove (disambiguation).
Type of site
Australian library database aggregator
English
no
Optional
2009
Online
Content[edit]
The database includes archives, images, newspapers, official documents, archived websites, manuscripts and other types of data. it is one of the most well-respected and accessed GLAM services in Australia, with over 70,000 daily users.
Based on antecedents dating back to 1996, the first version of Trove was released for public use in late 2009. It includes content from libraries, museums, archives, repositories and other organisations with a focus on Australia. It allows searching of catalogue entries of books in Australian libraries (some fully available online), academic and other journals, full-text searching of digitised archived newspapers, government gazettes and archived websites. It provides access to digitised images, maps, aggregated information about people and organisations, archived diaries and letters, and all born-digital content which has been deposited via National edeposit (NED). Searchable content also includes music, sound and videos, and transcripts of radio programs. With the exception of the digitised newspapers, none of the contents is hosted by Trove itself, which indexes the content of its partners' collection metadata, formats and manages it, and displays the aggregated information in a relevance-ranked search result.
In the wake of government funding cuts since 2015, the National Library and other organisations have been struggling to keep up with ensuring that content on Trove is kept flowing through and up to date.
Content and services (extended)[edit]
Description[edit]
Trove has grown beyond its original aims, and has become "a community, a set of services, an aggregation of metadata, and a growing repository of full text digital resources" and "a platform on which new knowledge is being built". It is now a collaboration between the National Library, Australia's State and Territory libraries and hundreds of other cultural and research institutions around Australia.[25]
It is an Australian online library database aggregator; a free faceted-search engine hosted by the National Library of Australia,[26] in partnership with content providers, including members of the National and State Libraries Australia (NSLA).[7]
Content and delivery[edit]
Trove "brings together content from libraries, museums, archives, repositories and other research and collecting organisations big and small" in order to help users find and use resources relating to Australia and therefore the content is Australian-focused.[25] Much of the material may be difficult to retrieve with other search tools, for example in cases where it is part of the deep web, including records held in collection databases,[7] or in projects such as the PANDORA web archive, Australian Research Online, Australian National Bibliographic Database and others mentioned above.[3]
Since 2019, Trove has included access to all electronic documents deposited by Australian publishers under the legal deposit provisions of the Copyright Act 1968, as amended in 2017 to included such publications.[27] These resources are identifiable by a display in the top right-hand corner in both the ebook and pdf viewers, saying "National edeposit collection". Many of these are readable and some are downloadable, depending on the access conditions.[28]
The site's content is split into "zones" designating different forms of content which can be searched all together, or separately.[29]
Budget cuts[edit]
In the wake of the Australian Government's 2015 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook Statement, Trove funding was cut with the result that the National Library of Australia would cease "aggregating content in Trove from museums and universities unless ... fully funded to do so".[71] In addition, it was argued that the cuts would further "result in many smaller institutions across Australia being unable to afford to add their digital collections to this national knowledge infrastructure".[72] Those smaller institutions would include local historical societies, clubs, schools, and commercial and public organisations, as well as private collections.
In March 2016 ten major Australian galleries, libraries, archives and museums (commonly referred to as the GLAM sector) signed a statement of support for Trove, in which they warned that the budgetary cuts would "hamper the development of our world leading portal and will be a major obstacle to exposing the collections of smaller and regional institutions" and that "without additional funding, Trove will not fulfil its promise as the discovery site for all Australian cultural content".[73] Similar statements were issued by the Australian Academy of the Humanities[74] and the National Trust (NSW).[75]
Tim Sherratt, a former manager of Trove, warned in early 2016 that fewer collections would be added and that less digitised content would be available – "not quite a content freeze, but certainly a slowdown".[76]
Following extensive campaigning, including a public campaign on Twitter, Trove received a commitment of A$16.4 million in December 2016, spread over four years.[68][77]
By early 2020, with the surge in demand for all types of digital services, the National Library was having to cope with increasingly dwindling staff resources to develop services on Trove and National edeposit, and undertook a restructure of its staffing and operations.[78]
The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald revealed in 2022 that the current funding arrangements for Trove would cease at the end of June 2023, leading to its closure.[79] In April, it was announced that the federal government pledged emergency funding of $33 million over the next four years to the NLA.[80][81][82]
