Trove community news: July 2024

Learn how we're growing and improving Trove

Last year we celebrated the announcement of ongoing and indexed funding for Trove. Since that time, the Trove community has continued to grow and provide support through Voluntrove activities. We’ve also worked with our Partners to make new collections available on Trove, and we’ve listened to your enquiries to deliver improvements to the site

Community contributions 

Trove turns 15 years old in November this year! In that time our community of Voluntroves has corrected over 500 million lines of text. This includes over 497 million lines from newspapers, and over 5 million lines from gazettes. We also expanded text correcting to include books and journals in 2022. You can view text correcting contributions by month in the hall of fame

Voluntroves also contribute to Trove by adding knowledge, organising research, improving Trove's metadata, and sharing discoveries with others. In addition to text correcting this includes: 

Handwritten text recognition 

In October 2023, we announced that we were pilot testing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for handwritten and unpublished materials in Trove. This includes personal papers, letters, and diaries. 

We have now tested this functionality on over 55,700 pages in Trove. 

In the first phase of pilot testing, completed in December 2023, we successfully piloted the functionality on over 12,500 pages. This included pages from the personal papers of former Prime Minister of Australia Sir Robert Menzies, General Sir John Monash, and the first two women elected to the Australian federal parliament: Dame Enid Lyons and Dame Dorothy Tangney. We also trialed the text recognition software on the handwriting of Jane Austen, James Cook and Banjo Patterson in Trove. 

In the second phase of testing, completed in June 2024, we rolled out the functionality to a further 32,000+ pages in Trove. This included pages from the personal papers of former Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, record-breaking female pilot Maude “Lores” Bonney, author Patrick White, composer Miriam Hyde, artist Nora Heysen, and the diaries of photographer Frank Hurley.

screenshot showing Jane Austen's letter in Trove with a transcript next to it
Help us text correct Jane Austen's letter to her sister Cassandra (1799).

New collections in Trove 

Each month we publish a list of items that have been newly digitised and made available in Trove. This includes new newspaper titles from around the country and extended date ranges, manuscripts from notable Australians, page-turning magazines, and much more. 

Catch up on what’s new in Trove so far this year: 

You can also see what’s new and coming soon from the National Library of Australia

Sharing your stories 

Trove is used by millions of people every year for countless research, creative and personal projects. For almost 15 years, our community has shared with us some of the ways they use Trove and the new knowledge they have created from it.

We are now publishing more of your stories through the Trove blog and sharing them with the community through our Trove Treasures newsletter – landing in over 10,000 inboxes every month – and social media