Trove Partners and digitisation
Becoming a Trove Partner is an opportunity to bring your organisation’s collection into Trove alongside hundreds of other collections and on a trusted national platform. Including digital images of your imported collection records or working with Trove Collaborative Services (TCS) to digitise collections enhances their visibility and accessibility to our Trove audience.
Benefits of digitisation include:
- preserving your collection for future use with a digital copy
- increasing visibility of and access to your collection to a wider audience
- assist with promoting your collection and organisation through our Trove Partner communication services.
Trove provides an accessible pathway into the digital world for your collections, with options for small community groups through to large libraries.
Two ways that your collection can appear on Trove are via collection records and Trove Digitisation.
Collection records
Trove Partners contribute collection records that appear in Trove, via a data harvest from their online collection management system (CMS). If there are digital photographs of the item attached to the record, they will appear as a thumbnail image on Trove. Anyone accessing the record can follow the link back to the Partner’s online library or CMS for the full catalogue record and to view the original digitised image of the item.
Detailed collection records accompanied by images are more likely to engage anyone interacting with the item. This is a low-cost, accessible way to share your collections with the Trove community. Cataloguing and digitisation can be undertaken in-house and at your own pace or through a professional contractor.
For example, this record from Fire Services Museum of Victoria has been imported and is searchable on Trove. When clicking into the record, a thumbnail of the digitised image is shown along with item information that has been catalogued.
For information about the item along with the original digitised image, click on the link under the ‘view’ tab. This link will take you to the Partner’s online CMS to view the full catalogue record and the original digitised image.
Trove Digitisation
Trove Partner organisations can also access competitive partner rates to digitise collection material with TCS, which then becomes available for viewing on Trove. This has worked well with rich primary source materials, such as newspapers, journals or newsletters that are in high demand among researchers, though can be done with other collection items like images.
Once the project is scoped and the quote is accepted, the Library’s digitisation team arranges for material to be scanned by authorised contractors or the Trove Digitisation team, who undertake scanning and enhancements to industry standards. For text-based materials, the digitised images are then processed using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to create a searchable text layer.
The digital copy is checked, collection records added and the final content uploaded into the Trove Digital Library Collection and protected by the digital preservation system. Once this process is finalised, collection items can be discovered and immediately viewed in high resolution within the Trove platform. The OCR text is also made available for the public to view and corrected, ensuring the highest possible accuracy for researchers.
For examples of this kind of digitisation, all the newspapers available on Trove are digitised with TCS. You can also find digitised images. The Soil Knowledge Network, with funding from Trove Partner Soil Conservation Service, digitised a collection of images that is now available for Trove researchers - Soil Conservation Service Summit Area Works Programme.
Partners should note that digital content not produced by Trove Digitisation contractors, will not meet the platform’s technical and cataloguing requirements and cannot be uploaded onto Trove.
For more information, check out our digitisation service page or reach out via Trove Partner Support.
Access some of our Partner spotlights to hear more about our Partners’ experiences with Trove Digitisation:
- Building Trove’s collection of newspapers
- Soil restoration images and technical documents now available