What is the Trove API?

People come to the Trove website, or its user interface, daily to search and find records of printed documents, objects or recordings physically stored in cultural organisations across Australia, as well as to digitised and born-digital items. They access and critically engage with these items to produce new research into Australia’s past and living history.

The power of Trove is the very large size of the data that it aggregates. People often uncover very large search results when undertaking their research, which it would not be possible for them to read or engage with themselves.

For this reason, research can also be conducted on the data at scale. People use or create a variety of technological tools to interrogate very large data sets.

The first step for this work is building a search. Creating, evaluating, refining, adjusting and re-evaluating a search has always been at the heart of research.

When conducting data analysis, mapping, topic modelling, or producing data visualisations or online tools for further exploration or public engagement, the methodology of building a search becomes even more important.

This is where the Trove Application Programming Interface (API) comes in. It allows you to build a complex search query and delivering it in a machine-readable form which can be used in your code when creating new applications or other interfaces.

What can I do with it?

With Trove's API, the possibilities are endless. You can use data to build and create applications, tools and interfaces. Here are some of the things you can do:

  • Export and display Trove records on your own website
  • Harvest Trove records to include in your own database
  • Capture large datasets for research and analysis
  • Retrieve tags or comments added to records contributed by your organisation
  • Create new tools and visualisations

Who can use it?

Everyone can use Trove's API. If you want to use Trove's API for commercial reasons, you'll need to get explicit permission. Read the Trove API Terms of Use for more information.

Access and Terms of Use

On-going use of the Trove API will require an active API key. See Using the API for instructions on how to get an API key. You may explore the Trove API without an API key, in accordance with the Trove API Terms of Use. You will be limited to 10 requests per minute unless you provide an API key.

By using any Trove API functionality, you agree to the Trove API Terms of Use.

Data

Metadata from most of Trove's categories is available through the API, including public lists created by other Voluntroves. You can also access the full text of Trove's digitised newspapers. Content from Archived Websites is not currently available.

And then there’s the newspapers...

...Lots of them. Trove provides access to more than 160 million newspapers articles from close to 1000 different newspaper titles.
The API can deliver the full OCR text of every article or just the article metadata — to access the OCR text add the "include=articletext" parameter to your query.