Celebrating 15 years of Trove
Trove was launched in December 2009, making this month Trove’s 15th anniversary. From humble beginnings as an aggregator for a range of library services, Trove has grown into a home for freely accessible cultural content that reflects our vibrant contemporary and historical cultures. Trove's vision is for Australians to have their culture at their fingertips – now and decades into the future.
The Australian Web Archive – which, yes, is in Trove – has captured the history of Trove. The first snapshot from 12 November 2009 shows Trove as a Beta website. You can also discover Trove’s origin story in this blog written when Trove turned 5. For a short and sweet history, read about Trove’s early history on the current website.
Today, Trove has grown into one of Australia’s most popular websites with an enormous and diverse community of users. Pillars of this community are our Trove Partners, who contribute to the vast collections in Trove, and our Voluntroves, who help us make these collections more searchable and accessible.
Text correcting has been a part of Trove since its first days, and some of our top text correctors have been contributing since the very beginning. In Trove’s 15-year history, our community of Voluntrove text correctors has corrected over 513 million lines of text – and this number increases every single day. You can check the exact number of lines in the text correcting hall of fame.
If you think the text correcting numbers are huge, wait until you learn the size of the collections in Trove. There are over 6 billion records in Trove, contributed by around 900 Trove Partners across Australia. Learn more about our Trove Partners and their contributions to Trove. Keep an eye on our news page or subscribe to our monthly Trove Treasures newsletter to find out about what’s new in Trove.
When speaking to our community of Trove users, we’ve discovered just how diverse the research and projects made possible by Trove are. From writing books to exploring family history, professional academic research to pursuing a personal creative project, Trove really does have something for everyone. As comedian and radio broadcaster, Sammy J once said on ABC Melbourne:
‘Trove is a beautiful, beautiful thing for any amateur nerd like myself.’
15 reasons to love Trove
Earlier this year we asked our Trove Treasures subscribers to share their top 10 reasons for loving Trove. In celebration of 15 years of Trove, we’ve combined these responses into a shortlist of 15 reasons to love Trove:
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A never-ending source of wonder
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Helps me with family history research
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Easily accessible from home
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Celebrating other cultures
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Being able to look at other states newspapers of the past
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Something totally unexpected on a page which triggers a long lost memory
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To catch up on 19th century gossip
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News of the day for the date I am researching
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Getting lost in days-gone-by which are part of my history
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Being drawn down the rabbit hole of correcting text
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Investigate news reports on particular historical events
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Verifying local history claims
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Finding old photos
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Recipes of times past
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Wonderful free resource full of treasures giving hours of pleasure