Presentation by Rose Holley to historians using Lachlan Macquarie as an example search in Trove. For the Royal Australian Historical Society Conference in October 2010.
Today I am going to talk about Trove. It has the highest usage of any service at the National Library of Australia. Extremely positive feedback Being cited internationally as an exemplary service Over a million users Thousands of volunteers contributing data Of interest and relevance to all Australians
Outcome of this is Trove. Search engine. Not just NLA resources – any resource. AN was test bed for Trove. You may be familiar with the homepage
There are currently fantastic opportunities for libraries. Technology has turned discover on its head: Anyone can Create content… describe content… recommend content… Libraries are still needed/relevant because: Vast amounts of data Information expertise Gatekeepers – can OPEN doors with technology. Unique role of libraries: Long term preservation and access No commercial motives Universal access “ Free for all” A LWAYS and FOREVER…. NLA has firmly acknowledged that in order to give users the best service, collaboration and data sharing are key. But more than this. The two direction statements the NLA is working towards are as follows: We will explore new models for creating and sharing information and for collecting materials, including supporting the creation of knowledge by our users . “ “ The changing expectations of users that they will not be passive receivers of information, but rather contributors and participants in information services.”
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.
The key features of Trove are that 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, letters, 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.
Results are unbiased – best and most relevant info possible – relevancy ranking. Similar to values of a good reference librarian (subject to initial choices made by user eg location, immediacy). Results are returned in 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.
If you click those buttons, this is what you will see. We are supplying several different citation formats.
This is the article view. Users can zoom in or out and choose to view the article in the context of the entire page. They can also navigate to any other page within the newspaper issue. The electronically generated text created through the OCR process is displayed on the left hand side. This is also where the users can use the 3 enhancement features. They can drag the viewing pane to see more of the or less. Users can tag the article with keywords and they can write comments and notes about the article. If users login they will be able to choose to make their tags and comments public or private. So they can share their comments with all users or they can add their own private research notes that only they can access. One feature that we believe is innovative and not available in any other online newspaper service, is the ability for the user to correct the electronically generated text. There are a number of reasons why the electronically created text is not always 100% accurate, mainly due to the quality of the original newspaper that the image was created from. Users can correct the text by clicking on the ‘Help fix this text’ button. We will now use these features on this article. The article we are looking at is the first report in an Australian paper of the sinking of the titantic.It’s in the Northern Territory Times on 19 April 1912.
Show more of the list
For example users can comment on items as well as newspaper articles now eg images, books and archives and share valuable information, and rate items.
We are enhancing the user profiles. 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 compulsory 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.
18 million lines corrected, 9000 comments, 400,000 tags
Thank you for listening to me today. I am happy to take questions.