Democratising access to Australian cultural heritage

The National Library of Australia’s Trove is a free online portal into documentary heritage. For the Australian public, it is a digital public service that offers a single access point to a vast amount of data and information related to the country’s cultural and intellectual heritage.

Trove works with Australian collecting institutions, who become Trove Partners, to provide a digital presence alongside their physical footprint.

A total of 814,574 images were digitised and added to Trove in 2022–23. The images were from historical newspapers, as well as manuscript images (including unpublished letters, diaries, organisational records), and books, journals and pictures. Digitisation is funded by the Australian Government, philanthropists and Trove Partners. It informs research and inspires new learning.
 

Accessing Australian history online through Trove
Image: National Library of Australia

In late 2022, the media began to report that Trove’s future was uncertain as funding to maintain it was in doubt from July 2023. Five parliamentary e-petitions were lodged with the House of Representatives by friends and supporters of Trove in early 2023, totalling almost 30,000 signatures and calling for continued Australian Government funding.

The e-petitions outlined positive impacts of Trove. Common among them was Trove’s value as a free and unique resource, furthering research and discoveries of both national and personal significance:

Trove is an online archive that provides access to a huge range of archives free to all Australians. It is the memory house for the nation and imperative for researchers, genealogists, family historians and students.

Since its inception, Trove has become an invaluable resource to those of us in the study of Australian History. It is a resource which many of us have come to depend upon.

Trove is a world leader in concept and material. It is the envy of archives in other countries.

Part of Trove’s value is how it democratises access to information, as a free service available online:

A large part of its use is because it's free and easily accessible. This accessibility is of incredible value since many don't have the means to get this information any other way.

Trove gives access to each and every Australian no matter where they live.

In April 2023, the Australian Government announced $33 million over the next 4 years to maintain Trove, with $9.2 million ongoing and indexed funding from July 2027. From July 2023, this allowed the National Library to remove membership fees for more than 250 community-led, volunteer-run, rural and regional collecting organisations. These are organisations that upload metadata about their collections to Trove, but do not use any collection management features.

The certainty of this funding decision will allow the National Library to continue to provide this essential service, enrich it with new content, and stabilise and secure the platform, in line with an implementation plan that will be developed to deliver the Trove Strategy.

See also

National Library of Australia (n.d.) Trove, NLA website, https://trove.nla.gov.au/, accessed 5 October 2023.