(Good morning, I am Rose Holley the manger of Trove). In the next ten minutes I want to tell you about a new service called Trove. (as in Treasure Trove ). The service was released at the end of 2009 by the National Library of Australia . It is a free search service. Our aim is to make finding and getting information easier. The Trove service searches across a rich data repository which currently contains 47 million items from over 1000 Australian libraries and other organisations, and it’s growing in size.
Trove -NLA --Aggregation of 90 million items from over 1000 libraries and other organisations Single search. Explore like never before. Finding information just got easier. I am now going to talk briefly about Trove – the search engine for Australian resources. The Library had a master plan and the Australian Newspapers service was in fact a test bed for the idea to transform service delivery and our internal IT infrastructure in the future. Because Australian Newspaper worked so well the beta model of software development, the underlying IT infrastructure and the application of user engagement has been applied to all the other discovery services the library manages which are rolled into Trove.
Trove is an aggregation of 90 million items from over 1000 libraries and other organisations It’s key feature is the single search across different types of content. Trove has social and data engagement features. Two of our most heavily used services are included in Trove (AN and PA). Trove aims to help you find and get unique Australian resources, and although predominantly features lib, archive, museum and gallery data is not limited to this.
This is the home page of Trove and I will now point out to you the key features of the service with the aid of the red arrows. 1. Firstly, and most importantly it is a single search. In one click you can simultaneously search across several groups of information- books, journals, magazines and articles: images: australian digitised newspapers: diaries, lettters, archives: maps: music, sound, video: archived websites, about people and organisations. 2. Secondly you can browse through these groups or zones one at a time if you prefer to only seek one type of content for example newspapers. 3. Thirdly you are able to restrict your searches to – online content only, and/or content held in locations near to you. This is very useful feature for the large majority of users.
We are now viewing the search results after I typed “ethel turner” into the search box. Note that instead of a single search results list appearing the results are grouped into the same zones that we saw on the home page. You can see in each zone how many results are found. Most searches retrieve vast numbers of results because of the wealth and richness of the repository that is being searched. It is likely that you will want to refine or limit your search results and you can do this by using the facets on the left hand side of the screen. The facets change depending what content you are looking at, so for example the book, journal, magazine and article zone has a facet to refine by braille book or audio book. We recognise that many people just want items that are immediately accessible ie digitised or online, as fast as possible, so the links to online content appear immediately at this stage although we haven’t yet drilled down to a detailed results screen. The check boxes to restrict the content to online or Australian are always visible so that they can be checked or unchecked at any point in the search. Here is a concrete example. Suppose a scholar is researching the life and works of Ethel Turner, the author of “Seven little Australians”. Through Trove that scholar is able to discover books by and about Ethel Turner, with information on the location of those books in Australian libraries, and with access to the full content where the work is out of copyright; articles, conference papers, theses and other research dealing with Ethel Turner, including content from university open access repositories pictures of Ethel Turner from libraries, museums and archives newspaper articles dealing with Ethel Turner, and published prior to 1955; archived web sites that refer to Ethel Turner; music, sound and video resources, including audio books and information about the ABC television series of Seven little Australians ; information about papers, letters, diaries and other records relating to Ethel Turner that are in archival collections; and biographies of Ethel Turner from sources such as the Australian Women's Register, the Dictionary of Australian Biography Online, and Wikipedia. Note that last point. Trove includes biographical data: its serves as the online interface to the data contribution program called “People Australia”. I am now going to drill down further into the results in some of the zones to show you some other features of the service, starting with the books, journals, magazines and articles zone. Let’s start with selecting the first book in the list – seven little australians by ethel turner.
To simplify results for books we have applied the structure of works and versions. Therefore at the top of the screen you can see the details of the work – seven little australians. Beneath this all the different editions (121 in this case) are grouped together in a box. Grouping them together like this makes it much quicker for users to find items, rather than having every single item being listed as a separate record as is usual in a library catalogue. The online versions are always listed first in this version box which helps users who want to ‘find and get’ as quickly and easily as possible. All versions are expandable and collapsable if you want to see more detail. On the right hand side are works which may be related. For books, at version level you can check the copyright status and have the citation provided in a variety of formats.
If you click those buttons, this is what you will see. We are supplying several different citation formats.
In addition we have also enabled direct linking through to bookshops that sell the item you are looking at. If no match for the item is found suggestions of bookshops that may have it are given. We have pre-populated versions with tags and reviews from Amazon, and users can also add their own tags and comments to versions. Because of the difficulty we have had in correctly putting items into version/edition groups due to inconsistent data, users can merge or split versions or works if they notice they are grouped incorrectly. Guidance is given on this in the help.
We are now looking at the diaries, letters and archive zone results. It is important to mention that we have information from archives around Australia. When viewing results in zones you have the option to expand a zone so it fills the page by using the arrow, or to minimise some or all of the other zones by using the minimise icon.
We are viewing the original diaries of Ethel Turner now which are held in the State Library of NSW. You can see that I have now minimised the other zones on the right.
We are now viewing the music, sound and video zone, and by refining my search on the left using the facet ‘interview, lecture or talk’ I can find an oral history recording made by Ethel Turners son Adrian Curlewis.
When clicking the link to get the item, you can see further details which confirm that he talks about his mother Ethel Turner. I can then listen to the interview. That brings us to the end of the search on Ethel Turner.
We have now moved to the newspaper results view. There are over 1000 newspaper articles in the results.
Now we are viewing a user profile (mine actually). In order to be able to find items in libraries near you the service needs to be able to know where you are, so you set your library preferences in your profile after registering. It is not compulsary to register to use the service, only if you want to. Your profile also keeps a history of your data enhancements such as tagging, commenting, corrections, merging and splitting.
In the case of newspaper enhancements it will also show your overall ranking in the text correctors community. (the hall of fame on the right). This is an enhancement that users particularly asked for. Much of the development of the system to date has been based on user feedback.
The recent interactions are also displayed on the homepage for everyone to see. On Trove’s home page you can see the number of searches in the last hour, newspaper article corrections so far today, works merged or split this week, items tagged this week, and comments this month. User engagement with the Australian Newspapers service is very successful and with Trove is proving likewise as you can see. These were the counts at 5 January this year. You can see lists of each of the searches, comments and so on behind these by clicking on these links. I would encourage you all to use Trove for searching if you haven’t already, and then you can discover for yourself how easy it is to find a wealth of high quality Australian information. Then please pass the word on. Whether you are tracing your family history, researching a topic, reading for pleasure, teaching or studying Trove will help you. Trove is a free service for all Australians.
Comments on essay, picture, article. We want libs to make their collections accessible via Trove. The layers of user activity sit in the database.
Tags/recent searches eg tag started after sinking of centaur in the news.
Rich results, tagged results – highlight specific items
The Library is currently working on improvements to Trove, such as RSS feeds, enhanced sorting of results, more external targets, full text from more sources, an API so that others can leverage off Trove, and bug fixes. The Library then plans to develop the Australian Newspapers collection view to meet priority enhancements identified during the Australian Newspapers Beta phase.
(Good morning, I am Rose Holley the manger of Trove). In the next ten minutes I want to tell you about a new service called Trove. (as in Treasure Trove ). The service was released at the end of 2009 by the National Library of Australia . It is a free search service. Our aim is to make finding and getting information easier. The Trove service searches across a rich data repository which currently contains 47 million items from over 1000 Australian libraries and other organisations, and it’s growing in size.