Trove, as the name suggests, is chock full of treasure for genealogists with family ties to Australia.
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What is Trove?
Trove is an Australian website that aggregates extensive collections from libraries, universities, museums, galleries and archives from all over Australia - including newspapers, images, books and ephemera. It is free to use and accessible online any time. Creating a free Trove account allows you to edit inaccurate transcriptions, create lists, and tag articles of interest.
Trove is managed by the National Library of Australia (NAA) and supported by Federal Government funding. There is also an extensive collection of partners and associated cultural institutions working at a State and Local level to ensure Trove has access to their collections. A full list of Trove Partners can be found on their website.
The content in Trove is divided into Categories[1]:
- Newspapers & Gazettes
- Magazines & Newsletters
- Images, Maps & Artifacts
- Research & Reports
- Books & Libraries
- Diaries, Letters & Archives
- Music, Audio & Video
- People & Organisations
- Websites
When a simple search is done, the first three results in each category are displayed.
Newspapers & Gazettes
Newspapers
Trove holds millions of digitised pages from thousands of Newspapers and Government Gazettes published in Australia from the very early days of the colony. The text has been scanned as OCR and transcribed by machine. Volunteers, called Voluntroves, help correct inaccurate transcriptions. Many of the newspapers in Trove's collection are also available at OldNews.com
Newspaper & Gazette search results can further refined by subcategories:
- Article (includes news, feature articles, serials, advice columns, cartoons, etc.)
- Advertising (includes classifieds and advertisement spreads)
- Family Notices (includes births, deaths and marriages)
- Detailed lists, results, and guides (includes casualty lists, sport and racing results, television guides, etc.)
- In addition, articles which contain images are further categorised as:
- Illustrations
- Photographs
- Cartoons
- Maps
- Graphs
- Trademarks
Copyright: Newspapers published more than 70 years ago are considered out of copyright. Newspapers published within the last 70 years remain in copyright. Trove does hold some titles within this 70 year time frame by arrangement with the publishers.
Gazettes
Gazettes are publications issued by the government that detail important legal and civil information, including:
- Appointments and employment (Appointments to government positions including probations, transfers and retirements)
- Appointments by government and under various Acts for a range of officers, trustees, board members etc.
- Budgetary papers (Government budget statements)
- Government notices (includes land and mining notices, registers of medical etc. professionals, licencing, honours, electoral notices, trade registrations, population and trade statistics, government and colonial notices, employment advertisements, general notices and notices not included in another category)
- Private notices (from Private Advertisement section include legal notices such as bankruptcies and estates, company registrations, local government matters and stock impounding notices)
- Proclamations and legislation (proclamation notices and published text of some Acts and subordinate legislation and changes to text for statutory instruments including regulations, rules, by-laws, rules of the court and ordinances)
- Tenders and contracts (includes requests for tender and notifications of approved contracts)
Foreign Language Titles
As a multicultural country, many non-english speaking communities published material in foreign languages. Trove has digitised an extensive collection of these publications. The platform does have the capacity to translate this material internally.
The collection is not exhaustive and some gaps remain. These appear for a variety of reasons, including:
- Newspaper was not published during the date range
- Issues for that newspaper are missing for the date range
- Master microfilm for the date range is missing
- Date range has not yet been digitised
The process is ongoing and new titles are constantly being added to the collection
Magazines & Newsletters
Magazines and Newsletter includes digitised pages of Australian serial publications, including popular magazines, literary and special interest journals, as well as born-digital publications. Publications from smaller organisation are also included, including school yearbooks or newsletters from special events.
Images, Maps & Artifacts
Images Maps & Artifacts contains a diverse range of visual, artistic and cartographic collections in physical and digital form, including photographs, prints, drawings, watercolours, cartoons, miniatures, paintings, architectural plans, sculpture, printed ephemera and maps.
The collection is subdivided into:
- Posters and charts
- Photographs
- Maps (includes atlases, braille maps, large print maps, and globes)
- Aerial photographs
- Digital Files
- Objects (includes artefacts, medals, and sculptures)
- Art works (includes paintings, posters, drawings, sketches)
- Government publications containing images
Sometimes a preview image is not visible in search results. Click on the result to see if the item is available to view on an external site.
Research & Reports
Research & Reports contains links to a wide range of publications from Australia's academic and research communities, in both physical and digital form.
The Research & Reports collections are further subdivided into:
- Datasets (from research publications)
- Periodicals (includes journals, magazines and newspapers from research communities)
- Articles (includes abstracts, book chapters, conference papers, full-text journal or magazine articles, reports, reviews and working papers)
- Theses
- Conference proceedings
- Government publications
Books & Libraries
Books & Libraries contains information and links to 30,000 digitised and electronic books and library collection items from across Australia in both physical and digital form.
The Books category includes Braille, large print, illustrated and audio books.
The Libraries category contains information on the locations of physical collections commonly held by libraries, including:
- Government publications
- Periodicals (includes journals, magazines and newspapers)
- Articles (includes book chapters, conference papers, reports, working papers, and articles from journals or magazines)
- Theses
Diaries, Letters & Archives
Diaries, Letters & Archives contains links to unpublished materials from special collections such as organisational records, personal papers and handwritten manuscripts.
The collection is further subdivided into:
- Unpublished (includes content from the Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP), letters, diaries, handwritten notes, personal photographs, scrapbooks, draft manuscripts and organisational records)
- Published (includes biographical files of press clippings, ephemera collections such as menus, programmes and advertising material and organisational documents)
- Government publications (includes published reports and reviews on subjects of interest to community organisations for their records)
Music, Audio & Video
Music, Audio & Video contains links to oral history, folklore and interview recordings, sheet music, and information on other audio and video media collections, in physical and digital form.
The collection is further subdivided into:
- Sounds (includes recordings of interviews, lectures, talks, music, and other sounds such as radio segments or field recordings)
- Printed music
- Audio books
- Videos (includes captioned films)
- Government publications with audio-visual material attached
People & Organisations
People & Organisations contains links to the biographical information of over a million individuals and organisations across Australia. The material is sourced from Trove Partners including:
- National Library of Australia
- Australian Dictionary of Biography Online
- Australian Parliamentary Library
- The Australian Women’s Register
- Design & Art Australia Online
- Encyclopedia of Australian Science
The collection is further subdivided into:
- Biographical information (includes dates and places of birth and death, occupation and life achievements)
- Links to records for associated people (such as relatives, collaborators and partners)
- Lists of items in Trove by or about that person or organisation (includes books, images, newspaper articles, maps, sheet music and oral histories)
Websites
The Trove Websites collection contains links archived websites from over 8 billion records stored on the Australian Web Archive. This includes material relevant to the cultural, social, political, research and commercial life and activities of Australia and Australians.
Lists
Lists are a collection of links to Trove pages related to a specific subject or person. Lists are created by Trove users and can be private, public or collaborative.
- Private lists are only visible to the people who creates them;
- Public lists are visible to everyone but can only be edited by the people who created them;
- Collaborative lists are visible to everyone, and can be edited by anyone on the platform.
You need to have a Trove account and be logged in to create and manage lists.
Copyright
Not all the material available on Trove is out of Copyright. If you wish to use material sourced from Trove for commercial activity it's important to check the copyright status of the item. The copyright status for items in Trove is listed in the record. Items held by external sites may display copyright status differently. For more information, see the Trove Copyright and Re-Use page.
Voluntroves
When Trove launched in 2011 an group of enthusiastic volunteers, called Voluntroves, stepped up to help correct transcriptions, add tags to manage the collection and create public lists to help researchers find links to pages on specific subject areas. Anyone can sign up to become a Voluntrove.
Trove for Family History
Trove offers a huge opportunity for family history researchers with links to Australia. Newspapers published births, deaths and marriage announcements, bankruptcy notices, and court dockets. Newspaper and magazine articles illuminate triumphs and scandals from the magnificent to the mundane. Maps and photographs contextualise where and how someone lived. If your ancestor wrote an academic paper or published a book that's now out of print, a copy may be held in the National Library. Searching is simple: you just start with a search for a person's name.
See also
Explore more about Trove
- Trove: An Australian and Beyond Genealogical Treasure - webinar at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Introducing OldNews.com, A New Website for Exploring Historical Newspapers - on the MyHeritage blog