National Library of Australia's Trove website celebrates five years of uncovering the past
A website which brings together some of the nation's best library collections in a searchable format is celebrating its fifth birthday.
The Trove website was developed by the National Library of Australia in Canberra to bring together material such as digitised newspapers, photos and documents in a searchable format.
Manager Tim Sherratt said about 70,000 people use the Trove website each day.
"We say that Trove is a discovery service, but it is actually more than that," he said.
"Trove brings together online the holdings of a wide variety of libraries, archives, museums, universities, research agencies and government departments, and helps people find the resources and use them.
"And we also have this phenomenal collection of digitised newspapers that includes about 130 million newspaper articles which are profoundly changing peoples relationship with the past as a lot of detail was recorded."
Trove leading to historic breakthroughs for family historians
The website is particularly popular with academics and family historians.
Researcher Doug Welshe in Queensland said Trove had helped to make ancestors who he had never met more real.
"It's not just the simple data of births, deaths and marriage notices but the little interesting personal stories that come across," he said.
"There was a description in the local Bendigo paper [in Victoria] about the marriage of my grandparents describing in great detail the service that was held at the father's house and the wedding breakfast which was in the barn, the food and the clothes and how the bride and groom caught a train for their honeymoon in Bendigo."
"Quite often the rural papers would have stories that would go for quite a bit, describing the female guests and their attire."
Peter Noone from Sydney said the Trove website had been an amazing breakthrough for historians.
When he began researching his family in the 1980s, he had to look up old Australian newspapers using microfiche films, which was time-consuming and difficult.
"Instead of having to visit museums and libraries to plough through films hoping to find something, suddenly with Trove you could search online using a single word or name," he said.
"In terms of information it was like a parched man in a desert coming across a lush oasis, at the touch of a button. It was an amazing breakthrough.
"And you've got access to all the regional newspapers as well and most of my family research centred around northern New South Wales so it was invaluable."
He credits Trove with discovering the long-lost sister of his Irish great-grandfather after she posted a public notice on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald in 1864.
"By putting in the names, up popped a three-line advertisement that she was searching for his whereabouts to contact her at Parramatta Post Office and this was an enormous breakthrough."
Trove searchers looking for diverse information about the past
Dr Sherratt said one of the largest referral points of online traffic to Trove is a knitting site called Ravelry where long-forgotten patterns are revived.
"Knitters on that international site have shared hundreds of craft, knitting and crocheting patterns that they have discovered in Trove for other people to use and make.
"And so they have built this whole community around some of the content they have found."
The staff behind Trove are not resting on their laurels for Trove's fifth birthday.
There are plans to further expand the collection and what is available online.
"A lot of our work continuing to develop Trove is with new organisations ... from small historical societies to national cultural institutions, to make their material easily accessible and findable through Trove," Dr Sherratt said.
"And of course continuing to digitise more and more newspapers."
Trove's official anniversary is on November 30 but the library has organised events dubbed Trovember across the month to celebrate.
