A world without Trove

The National Library at Canberra under suitably stormy skies (photo from Pinterest by Jared Adamo on 500px)

Remembering the last funding cuts (see Treasure Trove: why defunding Trove leaves Australia poorer) it seems that once again Trove is in the gun sights.

Without additional funds the National Library of Australia is threatening to pull the plug on Trove or reduce it to a service focused on the National Library’s collections. 

Trove (as detailed in previous posts) is the bestest resource Australia has for finding stuff, and not just for librarians and academics. There are Average Joes and Janes out there who may never visit or consider joining a library, but who access Trove regularly.

Any service (‘service’ as distinct from providing a search engine) that boasts more than 22 million visits per year is on the right track. If not for Trove delivering access & consolidation to over six Billion digital items, these items would be either not be available digitally or scattered around all the organisations that contribute to Trove.

The daunting aspect is already past – it has been created and embellished and improved over the years. Digitising more items – newspapers, photographs, ephemera… is an ongoing process that will continue to add to Trove’s importance (and a Shout Out to all the volunteers who make Trove even better by correcting text and making our search results more accurate). 

How good is Trove? Try an experiment - search Trove’s newspaper collection then, do the same for British newspapers. What, access to the British is not free! The Search results and functionality is not as easy or as clear! Thank goodness for Trove.

Want to raise the issue or help campaign - check out Speak up for Trove.