Trove Online Newspapers

What do you get when you combine an open-source search engine, five dedicated software engineers, and the combined artistic resources of over 1000 libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions? In this case, you get Trove – a National Library of Australia (NLA) initiative whose creators are calling it the Google of cultural heritage institutions.

Three years in the making, Trove is an offshoot of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program, a massive effort that has digitised and made available online 17 million historical articles from Australian newspapers between 1831 and 1954. That program is set to catalogue 40 million articles by next year.

Trove, developed by many of the same staff, manages metadata on over 90 million historically significant items including pictures, unpublished manuscripts, books, oral histories, music, videos, research papers, diaries, letters, maps, archived Web sites and newspapers from 1803 to 1954.