science

Trove

Trove is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Trove rather than just read about it. In short: Trove is an Australian online library database owned by the National Library of Australia in which it holds partnerships with source providers National and State Libraries Australia, an aggregator and service which includes full text documents, digital images, bibliographic and holdings data of items which are not available digitally, and a free faceted-search engine as a discovery tool. Content The database include…

Key takeaways

Trove belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Trove to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Trove from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Trove is an Australian online library database owned by the National Library of Australia in which it holds partnerships with source providers National and State Libraries Australia, an aggregator and service which includes full text documents, digital images, bibliographic and holdings data of items which are not available digitally, and a free faceted-search engine as a discovery tool.

Content The database includes archives, images, newspapers, official documents, archived websites, manuscripts and other types of data. it is one of the most well-respected and accessed GLAM services in Australia, with over 70,000 daily users. Based on antecedents dating back to 1996, the first version of Trove was released for public use in late 2009. It includes content from libraries, museums, archives, repositories and other organisations with a focus on Australia. It allows searching of catalogue entries of books in Australian libraries (some fully available online), academic and other journals, full-text searching of digitised archived newspapers, government gazettes and archived websites. It provides access to digitised images, maps, aggregated information about people and organisations, archived diaries and letters, and all born-digital content which has been deposited via National edeposit (NED). Searchable content also includes music, sound and videos, and transcripts of radio programs. With the exception of the digitised newspapers, none of the contents is hosted by Trove itself, which indexes the content of its partners' collection metadata, formats and manages it, and displays the aggregated information in a relevance-ranked search result. In the wake of government funding cuts since 2015, the National Library and other organisations have been struggling to keep up with ensuring that content on Trove is kept flowing through and up to date.

History Trove's origins can be seen in the development of earlier services such as the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN), a shared cataloguing service launched in 1981. The "Single Business Discovery Project" was launched in August 2008. The intention was to create a single point of entry for the public to the various online discovery services developed by the library between 1997 and 2008, including:

PANDORA archive (1996) the Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts (RAAM, launched 1997) PictureAustralia (2000) Libraries Australia (the service that developed out of the ABN in 2006); Australia Dancing, a joint venture with Ausdance (2003) Music Australia (2005) ARROW Discovery Service (first Australian Research Repositories Online, then Australian Research Online, launched 2005) People Australia (late 2006) Australian Newspapers Beta service (July 2008) The service developed by the project was called Single Business Discovery Service, and also briefly known by the staff as Girt. The name Trove was suggested by a staff member, with the associations of a treasure trove and the French verb trouver (to find or discover). The key features of the service were designed to create a faceted search system specifically for Australian content. Tight integration with the provider databases has allowed "Find and Get" functions (e.g. viewing digitally, borrowing, buying, copying). Important extra features include the provision of a "check copyright" tool and persistent identifiers (which enables stable URLs). The first version of Trove was released to the public in late 2009.

Implementation The National Library of Australia combined eight different online discovery tools that had been developed over a period of twelve years into a new single discovery interface that was released as a prototype in May 2009 for public comment before launching in November 2009 as Trove. It is continually updated to expand its reach. With the notable exception of the newspaper "zone", none of the material that appears in Trove search results is hosted by Trove itself. Instead, it indexes the content of its content partners' collection metadata and displays the aggregated information in a relevance-ranked search result. The service is built using a variety of open source software. Trove provides a free, public Application Programming Interface (API). This allows developers to search across the records for books, images, maps, video, archives, music, sound, journal articles, newspaper articles and lists and to retrieve the associated metadata using XML and JSON encoding. The full text of digitised newspaper articles is also available. Several citation styles are automatically produced by the software, giving a stable URL to the edition, page or article-level for any newspaper. Wikipedia was closely integrated from the beginning of the project, making Trove the first GLAM website in the world to integrate the Wikipedia API into its product.

2010s Trove has continued to evolve and take on new services and collections. In 2012, Music Australia was integrated with Trove, and ceased to exist as a separate entity. In 2016, in collaboration with the State Library of New South Wales, Trove launched the Government Gazettes zone, and continues to collect the official gazettes of all levels of government (Commonwealth and State and Territory) where possible. In March 2019 PANDORA became part of the larger Australian Web Archive, which comprises the PANDORA archive, the Australian Government Web Archive (AGWA) and the National Library's ".au" domain collections, using a single interface in Trove which is publicly available.

Content and services (extended)

Description Trove has grown beyond its original aims, and has become "a community, a set of services, an aggregation of metadata, and a growing repository of full text digital resources" and "a platform on which new knowledge is being built". It is now a collaboration between the National Library, Australia's State and Territory libraries and hundreds of other cultural and research institutions around Australia. It is an Australian online library database aggregator; a free faceted-search engine hosted by the National Library of Australia, in partnership with content providers, including members of the National and State Libraries Australia (NSLA).

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Trove

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Trove claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Trove before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Trove ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Trove

In research: Trove appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Trove in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Trove is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2009 establishments in Australia, Aggregation-based digital libraries, Australian digital libraries, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Trove outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Trove in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Trove means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Trove out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Trove in simple terms?

Why does Trove matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Trove?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Trove.