Digitise your collection
Trove is Australia's one-stop-shop for searching and accessing digital collections from across Australia. Our history is rich and we want all our stories and collections to be findable – digitally – in Trove to everyone, everywhere.
- Do you want to digitise your physical collection, but don't know where to start or don't have the capacity?
- Do you want your important historical information available for searching by Trove's wide audience?
- Is there a local newspaper or journal title important to your area that you want to be accessed and preserved over time?
- Do you want your collection to be discoverable among Australia's cultural context online?
Then Trove wants to hear from you!
Our service
The National Library of Australia is a leader in digitisation and innovative online delivery of Australian heritage for all Australians. Hundreds of partners have already participated in our digitisation program and have contributed content to Trove.
Digitise with us to preserve the documents, curiosities and stories important to your community and your organisation.
When you digitise with us, we will:
- estimate the work for you to review and accept
- arrange the logistics to transport and prepare your material
- digitise and return your material
- upload and make your material discoverable by the national audience on Trove.
Our standard digitisation service covers:
- a minimum of 2000 pages. Small orders are considered at our discretion.
- transportation of the source material including insurance coverage
- digital scanning of the source material by our qualified contractors
- optical character recognition (OCR) processing of the source material to allow full-text searching on Trove (books, journals and newspapers). Engage your community to text correct the processed material.
- quality assurance of the scanned source material and OCR processing
- direction on how to meet your rights obligations
- enabling discovery and delivery and long-term access of the source material in Trove
- long-term digital preservation of your collection
- promotion of the digitised material
Get started
You may be getting started or well on the way, or have a large or small collection. We support all partners in our commitment to growing the Australian cultural collection.
- Contact us and our dedicated and experienced service and technical support team will work with you to develop options to meet your specific digitisation goals and provide an estimation.
- Find out more about our digitisation services by reviewing our Digitisation scoping form (DOCX 68 KB).
- Trove Partners receive a member rate of 20% off the standard rate. Pricing is based on cost recovery. Different rates will apply to fragile or non-standard material based on an assessment of the material.
Partner experiences
Digitise with Shoalhaven Libraries: making local newspapers available.
Shoalhaven Libraries approached Trove when they were planning to digitise a collection of their local newspapers. Trove provided a range of options and pricing available to Trove Partners to assist Shoalhaven Libraries to assess the scope of this project against available funding. After working through priorities and options, we were delighted that a project to expand access to these resources began.
Four mastheads were originally included in the Shoalhaven Libraries Digitisation Project, but a surprise masthead appeared at the end of the reel of one of the other newspapers. In total, 5 mastheads were digitised dating from 1880 – 1907. The resulting digital resources are available on Trove for our community to search, view and text correct, having been highlighted in a New in July 2024 blog. Trove aims to publish a ‘New in Trove’ blog every month to draw the attention of our wonderful Trove community to newly digitised items.
Megan Crook, a Local Heritage Librarian at Shoalhaven Libraries, shared with us a bit about her experience digitising these newspapers with Trove.
Trove has provided an industry-recognised reliable service, and their high-quality, freely accessible and text searchable images bring more of regional NSW’s history out of the geographic restrictions of microfilm and into the wider public realm online.
The digitisation of these newspaper titles will encourage new audiences to engage with our significant local history and complement the outreach efforts of the Shoalhaven’s local museums, historical societies, and the library. Working with Trove to ensure the long-term preservation of our historical resources and encourage broad community engagement, has been a rewarding process.
We hope this will be the first stage in an ongoing project to digitise other significant local newspapers, preserving them online on Trove’s national platform and improving accessibility to all.
Soil restoration images and technical documents now available on Trove.
The Soil Knowledge Network (SKN) - a group of retired soil scientists dedicated to passing on their knowledge and passion for soils - teamed up with the NSW Soil Conservation Service (SCS) to partner with Trove for the digitisation and publication on Trove of a large number of legacy technical documents and historic photos.
One of the collections now available includes photographs from the iconic Summit Area Works Program, one of Australia's first ecological restoration projects. The Summit area which encompasses land in the snowy mountains was severely degraded by grazing in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Work was carried out between 1956 and 1986 to combat this. The collection that has been digitized includes photos showing the damage before the project commenced and the measures that were taken during the project to control erosion and re-establish vegetation.
Peter Fogarty, a member of the SKN and volunteer custodian of many legacy photos and documents of the Summit Area Works Program, worked with Trove staff and the SCS team to get these items digitised. Peter said:
By scanning the collection of forty historic Soil Conservation Service photos into the Trove collection, the public will have the opportunity to appreciate the incredible work that was carried out by these pioneers of ecological restoration in Australia.
When inspecting the sites of these old reclamation works today there is immense gratitude for the foresight and expertise of the NSW Soil Conservation Service. The partnership with Trove has made this important collection of historic photos available to everyone with an interest in sustainable land management.
SKN and SCS hope to expand the collection on Trove with photos of some other iconic soil conservation works including rangeland management and mine site reclamation.
Digitising with the State Library of Victoria: Getting the Sun News-Pictorial a highly used research tool for researchers online.
The State Library Victoria, as a Principal Partner of Trove, has contributed, funded and facilitated the digitisation of many Victorian Newspapers, newsletters and more.
As part of their 2023 Save Our Stories appeal, The State Library Victoria began looking at digitising the Sun News-Pictorial. The Sun News-Pictorial, which began in 1922 and ran until 1990 when it merged with The Herald to form the Herald Sun, is a highly used research tool for researchers and more in Victoria, Australia and overseas.
Trove became involved in the process early before the campaign officially began. The Trove team and the State Library Victoria meet monthly to discuss digitisation projects and more. This ongoing collaborative partnership ensures that the digitisation of Victorian newspapers runs smoothly, whether it is their digitisation project or someone else’s.
These early discussions before the campaign began allowed both sides to discuss timeframes, how soon the images could be up and other parts of the project to ensure the digitisation project could be set up to run smoothly and meet deadlines.
During discussions, we mentioned we had an event planned – an end of the year event for donors. Trove offered to ensure a sample of newspaper issues would be up online, which was really nice as rather than an update we could show that some of the images were already up.
The Trove/Digitisation team were really communicative, giving us monthly updates and quickly responding to any of our questions. They arranged a time to do a presentation that went through the whole process from scanning to OCRing to getting the images up on Trove, which will help us explain the process to our staff, donors and patrons. This will also help us streamline our own workflows.
We are really happy with how the project is going. Our staff are excited the Sun News-Pictorial is a highly requested item and such a great research tool for people researching Victorian history.
Monika Osang, Digitising and Document Delivery Manager, Collection Access, State Library Victoria
Working together: digitising the Sunraysia Daily with Mildura Rural City Council Libraries.
Mildura Rural City Councils Libraries started looking into digitising newspapers relevant to their community as part of the State Library of Victoria project “Digitising Victorian Newspapers.” They contacted Trove to start their digitisation journey in 2022.
Through a collaborative process involving Trove Partnership staff working with them throughout the digitisation process they successful digitised The Sunraysia Daily which is now available on Trove.
From quoting and giving advice to arranging transportation, digitisation and OCRing the Trove Partnership team worked with Mildura Rural City Council Libraries to ensure that the process was as smooth as possible and to ensure all stakeholders were aware of the details they needed.
The communication is excellent now and the process is streamlined. We did have some disruption during Covid, and staff changes but was minimal.
We have received valuable positive feedback from the public and other organisation expressing how easily the information is to access. They especially like being able to access the paper from anywhere which saves them time and money.
Local History so important to our community to know how their towns and places commenced and to know about more the people in their own communities. Local history needs to be preserved and accessible to all.
We are continuing to digitise our newspapers as funds become available.Sue Kelly, Library Service Coordinator, Mildura Rural City Council Libraries
Sue Kelly, Library Service Coordinator, Mildura Rural City Council Libraries
Digitising Dubbo: digitising the Dubbo Dispatch and more with Macquarie Regional Library.
Trove and Macquarie Regional Library have recently collaborated to digitise the Dubbo Dispatch and other titles to allow local and far away end users a larger insight into the history of the area, New South Wales and Australia.
Macquarie Regional Library and the Trove team worked together to create a quote, including liaisoning with the State Library to evaluate the microfilm and then passed the accepted project onto the Trove digitisation team to digitise and upload the newly digitistised title.
As a Trove Partners they receive a member rate of 20% off the standard digitisation rate and overall Macquarie Regional Library have found the process a great experience with easy detailed communication with the Trove team.
Macquarie Regional Library recently had the Dubbo Dispatch January to December 1942 newspaper issues digitised and made available on Trove. This compliments the existing coverage by a Dubbo newspaper, the Dubbo Liberal, as previously only issues of the Dubbo Liberal for January to June 1942 were available.
The addition of the Dubbo Dispatch for all of 1942 will be very valuable to those researching Dubbo during the Second World War.
Being able to partner with Trove to digitize and make available these historical newspapers to a wider audience is a great experience. The process was easy, with communication detailing progress at every stage along the way, and being able to see the issues now available in Trove is a fantastic outcome. This is just one of the digitised newspapers we have been able to contribute online working with Trove.
Other contributions include digitizing issues of:
The Bligh Watchman and Coonabarabran Gazette (NSW : 1898 - 1910)
Coonabarabran Times (NSW : 1950-1954)
Anne Barwick, Technical Services Coordinator, Macquarie Regional Library