The funding threat to Trove - Australia's online archive hosted by the National Library of Australia

The threat to Trove has been looming and will be either carried out or mitigated at the end of this financial year.

Yes, of course it is all about money and that matters.

But of course that is not the only thing that matters. So we thought we’d add our own 2 cents worth (haha) to this controversy and write to our elected parliamentarians explaining just why Trove is so important.

Here is what we wrote:

Trove is a magnificent cultural institution used by professionals, academics, family history researchers, students, teachers, journalists, writers and the general public both in Australia and overseas.

It is the envy of researchers in other countries.
It stores more than 6 billion documents, photographs, maps, webarchives, newspapers and newsletters from just about any community and period across Australia’s post-contact history.
Over 900 cultural institutions use Trove to make their collections accessible to a global audience.
Usage of Trove is also evidenced by the text corrections in digitised newspaper articles voluntarily provided by thousands of users – nearly 440 million lines of text.
While the site requires government funding to support and maintain it, its value to us all attracts this huge voluntary effort, making the site even more efficient and reliable as a research source. It is a perfect example of something people are willing to give back to in time and effort.
Trove underpins many other cultural institutions funded by government and many educational, historical, cultural and creative processes undertaken in Australia.
Collecting institutions in this country have long been encouraged to digitise and make accessible their collections, and Trove is the platform that provides this access nationally and internationally.

If you have not had the pleasure of using Trove it is difficult to understand why it is so important. So, from the perspective of professional historians, we thought we’d share some of our Trove stories. We describe just four treasures, a tiny but broad sample, that changed the outcome of our work making it more meaningful and beneficial to our clients and to their communities.

We are a Melbourne-based history and heritage consultancy. Most of our work is in Victoria – urban, regional and rural – and we have been working with communities, places and historical collections for over twenty years. We are probably on the platform several times a week, and really don’t know how we could continue to do the work we do without it.

If we didn’t have Trove, the depth we could go to in our research would be greatly limited. The time required to visit libraries and archives and search for data and evidence, much of which we can find so quickly on Trove, would become totally unmanageable for us and extraordinarily expensive for our clients.

To date nearly 30,000 people have signed a Change.org petition and there are six ePetitions open on the Australian Parliament website pleading for this magnificent resource to be retained and maintained. Together they also have nearly 30,000 signatures. You have probably also received hundreds of pro-forma letters. There are so many good reasons for this community effort.

The examples of Trove success stories we share here will give you a glimpse of how Trove can work. We also encourage you to explore Trove yourself – you could type in your family name or your street name and see how you go with some family history or local history research.

Trove is a world-renowned resource. Let’s keep it that way.

Yours sincerely

Emma Russell, Historian, Director, History At Work Pty Ltd

Susan Faine, Historian and Curator

Claire Levi, Historian

Cherie McKeich, Collections Consultant

Madeline Pentland, Historian