Contribute your collection

Trove is a single point of entry to a treasure trove of cultural material, curiosities and stories from hundreds of partner organisations across Australia. Organisations can become Trove Partners to make their collections findable in the full Australian cultural context online. There are number of ways to do this, from syncing your collection data to digitising and preserving collections or, making collections on your own organisation’s website findable on Trove. We want to work together to share our rich history and stories with the curious.

  • Are you an Australian collecting institution or organisation?
  • Do you want a digital presence that can be accessed by the national audience?
  • Do you want your online collections discoverable to maximise your reach and investment?
  • Do you use a cloud service for describing your collection, and want to add it to Trove?
  • Do you want to set up automatic updates to add your catalogue records to the national cultural collection?

 

Then Trove wants to hear from you!
 

Two staff members at a desk covered in books 1982

Daphne Fegan and Yeow Phang at desk, library workroom, 1982, Library & Archives NT, trove.nla.gov.au/work/249712764
 

Our service

There are many ways collections can appear in Trove. Collections can be large or small, from a library catalogue, museum database, image collection or other source. It’s easy to share your collections with Trove – you don’t need to be the experts. 

We collect:

  • Online content – where the physical collections or objects have been digitised
  • Born digital publications – that were created in an online format only, and
  • Bibliographic metadata – describing the item and its location.

You will always be the stewards for your collection and will maintain ownership of description and management. We can bring your collection into Trove in a way that is suitable for your formats and systems. We can automatically check for updates, so you don’t have to.

National edeposit (NED) provides a single deposit service for publishers. Learn more about NED.

 

Get started

We can accommodate many different systems and workflows. 

  • Contact us and our dedicated and experienced service and technical support team will work with you to find the best way to add your collections to Trove and the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD) based on your workflows, systems and format of collection material.

 

Partner experiences

Bega Valley Shire Council and Trove: Working together to sync their library data
Screenshots of Bega Valley Shire council website and Take 20: Sync your library data

Bega Valley Shire Council worked with Trove to sync their library data set with the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD) and Trove by using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

The set up was not without a problem but Cat McLean, Acting Systems and Collection Librarian, Bega Valley Shire Council found that the Trove team was responsive and provided fantastic support. Talking about the set up she said that:

The Trove Team really helped us solve a huge puzzle. We had this amazing collection of oral histories and we had all thought that they had migrated. We did the change across to Trove and automatic harvesting, about a year and a half ago and we thought that everything was flowing fine.  We hadn't had any error reports. So we assumed everything was tracking along quite well and I had run into one of the people in town who I'd done the recording of. And they had wanted to direct their friends to this recording like: "Oh it's on Trove, you can find it" and they were really thrilled. But then they came up to me and they said: "I can't find it" and I thought: "Okay so we'll have a look into it" and I was really impressed with the support that we received from the Trove team after we contacted them and said: "Look we can't find these records"  

The person who had done all that cataloguing before, had since moved on. So we didn't really know how all that had come to pass, but the Trove team was able to identify the issues with the harvesting. And went right back and was able to identify that when the connection had first been set up, that there was a password mismatch.

So they did some fantastic detective work. And of course we hadn't been receiving the error records because the harvester wasn't able to send files to say that it wasn't quite working. So all of the detective work and that initial inquiry meant that now our oral history is becoming more readily available, which is fantastic. But it's also, helped with our whole collection. 

So I really did appreciate the time and effort. And the Trove team was so responsive, and got back to you when they said they were going to get back to you. Followed up and followed through. And that was just fantastic support. So we're incredibly grateful for all of the support and assistance that we received. And, it resulted in making our collection more accessible and more visible to everyone.

 
 
Syncing library data for efficiency and accuracy at the State Library of Queensland 

The State Library of Queensland building and foyer full of people

The State Library of Queensland recently worked with Trove to sync their very large library data set with the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD) and Trove by using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). They had formerly been using the Record Import Service (RIS) process. While the set-up was not without its challenges it proved to be well worth the effort. Rachel Merrick, Lead of the Metadata Services at State Library of Queensland has found many benefits changing from RIS to OAI. 

The main one is obviously that records are updated daily. We also saw this as an opportunity to review our current workflows using Alma as our library management system, and changing over to Primo VE as our new discovery system, and set up a more streamlined approach.

It also let us clean up a lot of existing records that we found might have had duplicates. After we had everything loaded, the Trove team went through and got rid of records that hadn’t gone through on the OAI harvest. The team at Trove was really responsive and we now have a fast and smooth workflow and a really up-to-date set of our records available to users.

 
 
Significant saving in both time and cost: automating Brimbank Libraries' contributions to the ANBD

One of the Brimbank library buildings and the Brimbank Libraries card

Brimbank Libraries made the move to using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) for daily holdings updates in the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD) in 2020. They had been previously using the Record Import Service (RIS) process and found it to be time-intensive, requiring significant manual handling.


Through a smooth process involving minimal configuration of their Koha Integrated Library System (ILS), they worked with the Trove Partner team to set up daily harvesting of their records.


The ‘snapshot’ or ‘historical’ nature of our holdings under the RIS process meant items that were no longer available to borrow could still be viewed in the ANBD until the next infrequent update; this was detrimental to our customer service, and further contributed to staff workloads.


The harvesting was flexible enough to filter based on criteria we specified, ensuring only relevant content was harvested. 
Our contribution to the ANBD is now a completely automated process. All records are now updated daily, basically eradicating any issues from outdated data. Customers, both locally and nation-wide, are able to view and access our resources with confidence.


There has also been a significant saving in both time and cost, as the automated process no longer necessitates manual contributions to the ANBD on our behalf from suppliers, which often had an associated cost.


We would highly recommend moving to OAI-PMH for any ANBD contributors, both large and small.


Ayden Said, Library Collections Team Leader, Brimbank City Council