Trove from the National Library of Australia is an amazing free resource. It is more than just the wonderful digitised newspapers that we all know and love.
In fact as is shown in this image Trove contains more than 500, 005,853 Australian and online resources books, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives and more.
Certainly we know that trove’s funding has been cut so their ability to digitise special community collections has been greatly lessened which is a major shame as it will slow the rate of new additions and potentially may mean access to some collections may be lost to the national and international communities. We all hope that this funding decision will be reconsidered.
Australia is the envy of the world in having Trove and the free access it provides to so much at any time of the day or night to anyone, anywhere with an Internet connection. Scholars, students, historians, sports fans all have found items of interest to them.
What is even more special are the volunteers from around the world who correct the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) which at times depending on typeface and age of the paper can give some very interesting results! Just today there were, at the time of writing this, 9706 newspaper lines corrected by the wonderful volunteers.
The Hall of Fame shows the top correctors and I will never be in the top five (I don’t think they do anything but correct!) but I am pretty happy at number 639 and 42, 246 lines of text corrected, which has been done intermittently over five years. It is one of the ways I choose to give back and “pay Forward” all the help I have received over the years.
Those who read my blog regularly will know of my George Howard Busby.
On the Discovering Anzacs site, his entry shows the photos of him from the Queenslander, his Attestation papers and if you look down on the bottom right hand side you will see some links to articles in Trove from my tagged list for him. Other web links include a link to his Repatriation file and to the high resolution images from the Queenslander and also to his Embarkation file.
This integration of records together from across the digital sphere is what makes research today extremely exciting.
I wonder how long it will be before Trove has one billion reources?
Trove we all love you!