Trove: Australia’s National Treasure

Trove is an online platform that shares Australian culture with the world.

Through Trove, the National Library of Australia and its partners have been able to reveal unseen stories, histories and futures to millions of Australians every year.

Launched in 2009, Trove has grown to attract a loyal user base. People visit frequently and spend a long time exploring items related to a great diversity of needs and interests. It provides access to billions of cultural heritage items, sourced from around 900 Australian collecting institutions.

Trove’s cultural heritage collection covers a vast range of topics and formats made possible through partnership arrangements with Australian galleries, libraries, archives, museums, research and community organisations. They are all referred to as Trove Partners. Trove Partners have access to services that support their back-end operations delivered under Trove Collaborative Services.

Trove is a source of trusted data and information and has underpinned Australian humanities and social science research for a decade. Significant research programs based on content on Trove include the Australian Prosecutions Project, the University of Newcastle Massacre Mapping Project and the Australian Literature Database project. It has inspired numerous individual authors, environmentalists, activists and family historians.

In 2022 the National Cultural Policy Revive was released and in 2023, the National Library of Australia was provided with ongoing government funding to support maintenance of Trove. This strategy builds on Revive to provide a vision and priorities for the platform over the next five years.

When this strategy reaches maturity, Trove will have celebrated its 20th birthday.

Between 20 January 2024 and 20 January 2025 Trove had:

• 6,039,839 users
• 35,000 average daily sessions
• 8 min 45 sec average session duration

Vision

Launched in 2009 with a mission for Australian cultural content to be freely accessible, Trove has helped create a sense of Australian identity, foster an inclusive society, grow the information economy and positively impact societal wellbeing.

This aspiration is availability to all - no matter their age, ability, language, financial circumstance or geographic location.

In the next five years, we will work toward this vision by diversifying content and disabling barriers. We will support appropriate and rich pathways for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and enable Indigenous peoples to oversee their intellectual and cultural property.

Trove has the potential to reach across country and generations. It can include new audiences with both existing and added collections. To help us make future structure and access decisions, we will get to know our audiences and their needs even better by using de-identified administrative data, targeted research and respectful community engagement.

Technology will continue to evolve quickly. Trove will use its power to increase accessibility, reveal new knowledge and deliver an optimal experience.

Our community

This strategy outlines the commitments from the National Library of Australia to Trove, but Trove is more than one institution. It has been built from the millions of people who individually contribute and the hundreds of partner institutions who are caretakers of content.

Trove is important to all sorts of people in all sorts of ways: from architects using photographs of historical building facades as reference during city development, to family members sourcing a favourite recipe in a magazine. It is an essential tool for senior academics, creatives telling the stories of Australia, those uncovering untold stories of marginalised peoples and those wanting to win an argument over the dinner table.

Trove benefits from self-organised supporters, including Australians who join together to help each other explore the service, discuss research found within it and encourage local and community engagement.

There are two types of individual Trove users:

1. Consumers, who explore, engage and enhance content in Trove to inform themselves and their work, and
2. Creators, who enrich the whole collection by creating new and appealing content based on already existing content in Trove.

People may identify with one, none or all of these roles. Over time, people’s roles can change as they use Trove for different reasons. Understanding their needs means that services are maintained and developed accordingly.

Caretakers are the partners who manage content accessible through Trove, including those who have partnered to digitise their collections and those who contribute metadata. This strong collaboration is fundamental to Trove’s success.

Trove is built upon Australia’s national, state and territory libraries’ collective digitisation of newspaper and gazette materials. These libraries now jointly run the National eDeposit Service, which, with the permission of publishers, furnishes Trove with thousands of contemporary open access publications each year. Almost all Australian libraries participate in and support Trove in many ways.

A growing number of Australia’s galleries, libraries, archives, museums (GLAM) and historical societies also share content, as well as digitise their collections in Trove.

The Trove Strategic Advisory Committee brings together leaders from across the cultural community to share expertise and plan Trove’s future for all, recognising this collective leadership of the service.

Trove is fortunate to be part of a proud cultural sector in Australia. Trove is complemented by innovative and engaging experiences offered by a wealth of GLAM institutions, both online and in locations across the continent. The National Library supports complementary services to Trove that enable all Australians to engage with their culture in ways that make sense to them.

Strategic priorities

The strategic vision for Trove will be realised through five strategic priorities.

Combined these priorities will bring Trove towards our future vision.

Make it easier for people to explore and engage with content on Trove

Objective 1.1 Reduce barriers

Reducing accessibility barriers will ensure more people can fully benefit from Trove's resources.

Trove is a widely loved and used service, with strong reach across the continent. However, not all audiences are equally able to access it. Improving ease of reading, navigation and accessibility on a range of devices are initiatives which would make Trove more welcoming to more Australians.

Trove will offer accessible support material and promote stories of varied journeys through the service, to encourage audiences unfamiliar with traditional libraries.

Objective 1.2 Make discovery easier through people and technology

Using technology to automate and enrich data will help people find what they’re looking for with greater accuracy.

Trove uses technology in a human-centered way to balance innovative, transparent and reliable pathways to discovery. Rich descriptions allow content caretakers to build, manage and reuse collections according to better practices.

With rapid changes in technology, Trove will continue to combine human judgement with technical innovation to ensure metadata is accurate, fit-for-purpose and shareable. With our partners, we will draw on experts, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, to better contextualise and describe existing and new collections. This effort will be complemented by the people who enhance and improve data in Trove (for example, correct text, transcribe, index and link data), which further aids discoverability. This approach will also include ways to find material in Trove without relying on descriptive data (metadata).

Grow available collections to better reflect Australia’s diversity

Objective 2.1 Develop the partner community

Involvement from a broad range of partners will enhance the collections in Trove.

Many kinds of organisations collect and care for cultural heritage. This includes national iconic institutions, local community organisations, and private and public organisations of all sizes.

Through the Trove Content Contributor program, Trove partners will be representative across sectors, and vary in organisation size, geographic location, culture and collection themes.

Objective 2.2 Develop the collections

Growing the collections in Trove in both volume and variety will better reflect the breadth of Australian stories.

Trove’s heart has been its collection of Australian newspapers. In coming years, completion of this collection will be balanced with introducing a greater diversity of digitised materials. While many partners share descriptive content in Trove, it is digital content that has the highest engagement and delivers the most value to those using it. Trove will encourage partners to share digital content in Trove and participate in its Digitisation Program.

This will be enabled by handwritten text recognition technology and the indexation of a much larger range of cultural materials. This will allow deep and casual exploration of personal papers, correspondence, diaries and more.

Content will grow across formats, from different periods in time, geographic locations and cultural groups. Rare and unusual material, and material from previously underrepresented communities, will also help Trove ensure more Australian stories are told.

Build relationships with existing and potential Trove audiences

Objective 3.1 Interact with community

More interaction and engagement with communities who use Trove help us keep touch with their wants and needs.

How people use Trove has changed over the past decade and that will continue to evolve. Trove will use regular research and case studies to connect with existing fans and those who may not have engaged with Trove before.

Consultation and community engagement with a broad range of users will increase in the short term and become a familiar practice in the longer term.

Objective 3.2 Use data to identify potential gaps

Monitoring a variety of data sources will help identify collections to be digitised and shared on Trove. 

Trove has improved capacity to measure activity. This is necessary to comprehensively identify roadblocks, gaps and other usability issues in a service as well used and complex as Trove. 

Understanding of audiences and their needs will improve by analysing de-identified administrative data. Insights from user research will inform where more support is needed. It will also help identify underrepresented communities and content. This will inform future structure and access decisions.

Deliver connected, efficient, and quality services to Trove partners

Objective 4.1 Provide high-quality services to libraries

Trove Collaborative Services underpins collaboration between Australian libraries.

Trove Partners use national resource sharing and cataloguing infrastructure on a cost-recovery basis for efficient management of their collections. Services are developed with communities for communities.

As the needs of this sector evolve, Trove will continue to balance affordability and quality of offerings to maintain a national collection of data, services and expertise that benefit all Australian libraries. The national resource sharing service will be refreshed within the first three years of this strategy.

Objective 4.2 Support and educate

Trove underpins a national community of practice for cultural institutions.

Trove Partners highly value the metrics and learning resources available through the service. Sector webinars tackling challenges and highlighting new practices for professionals are increasingly well-attended. 

Trove will offer partners input and support through a combination of formal advisory groups, structured gatherings and private feedback.

Support structures will ensure enquiries are resolved quickly and effectively by the right people and resources are available when needed.

Objective 4.3 Standardise and streamline

Providing efficient, established system connections to Trove for partners makes contributing easier and ensures cost-effective operations. Utilising clear standards for metadata, systems and content enables a good user experience and efficient operations.

Trove will maintain a small suite of well-supported and maintained contribution mechanisms and outdated manual systems will be deprecated. This will be achieved through collaboration with partners and vendors over time to ensure all partners can maintain contributions.

Transparent guidelines also make it easier for content caretakers to share their collections on Trove. This will be regularly refreshed to reflect modern practice, including appropriate recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural and Intellectual Property. These guidelines specify what Trove can share and the minimum requirement for quality (see Trove Content Inclusion Policy). The guidelines also ensure content is ‘Trove-ready’ and compatible with the overall infrastructure.

Renew Trove infrastructure

Objective 5.1 Ensure a stable platform

Improving Trove’s infrastructure now, means focus can move to other high-value initiatives next.

Many of Trove’s systems are at, or near, the end of their usable life. Their replacement is scheduled through a long-term Trove Application Roadmap that will guide planned work to achieve the best outcomes for Trove’s growing audiences.

This will result in a stable platform that will interoperate with other systems securely and meet contemporary cyber security standards.

Objective 5.2 Trove system assets are managed as a lifecycle

Designing Trove’s infrastructure with continual improvements and developments in mind will mean a more robust platform that can evolve over decades.

Technology is constantly changing. Products regularly cycle through being created, used and shut down. Investing in appropriate enterprise architecture ensures that Trove is designed with an ongoing replacement and maintenance schedule.

This will result in a smaller proportion of systems requiring replacement at any point in time, making the lifecycle manageable.

Objective 5.3 Enabling innovation

Innovation enables Trove to reach new audiences, deliver them new content and provide a rich and engaging program that meets evolving expectations.

The systems and products chosen will ensure a platform capable of leveraging new technologies as the Trove service evolves. It is important to ensure Trove is flexible for enhancements that have not yet been imagined.

While short-term efforts will be focused on urgent replacement, new services will be introduced where possible. This will include the large-scale deployment of technologies to deeply search archival materials. Towards the end of this strategy, innovation should deliver exciting new ways of engaging with Australian cultural materials.