Week 13: Service Review

[Bronwyn Linthwaite]

Week 13 – Service Review

For this week’s reflection I decided to review Trove’s virtual library as unlike others in this unit, I have had minimal exposure to it and was interested to explore more. Trove is a virtual library service provided by the National Library of Australia with full access for members of the public. It is a metadata aggregator as well as a content repository. It contains over 186 million newspaper articles and digital content of other types is growing.

I learned that signing up to Trove and creating an account has many benefits. It basically gives you the tools you need to take full advantage of the millions of resources this service provides access to.

The benefits of signing up are summarised below:

• Users can link any Australian library for which they have access to their account and can limit search results to these collections if desired.
• Trove provides a dynamic list of libraries which can alert you to public libraries you may have been unaware you had access to such as SLQ.
• Online service facilitates user-generated content through commenting, tags and corrections to records, potentially increasing the relevance of the resource.
• Create lists of items you discover, create your own tags in order to organise your content
• Avoid captcha challenges!

In addition, people with programming experience can play with Trove’s data, formatting programmatic queries using the Application Programming Interface (API). There are some interesting examples in Trove’s help centre of applications and interfaces built with Trove data.

You can set your libraries and see the tags and comments you’ve added to Trove from your user profile page enabling you to manage the information you discover in your research. The creation of lists is a particularly good feature and reminds me of youtube playlists and user recommendation systems on some level. There are over 30 000 public lists, which are searchable. Lists can also be made private if that is desired.

I had a very positive experience with this interface and can’t wait to explore more in the future. My local library collection is relatively small and I cannot always access the reading material I’m interested in. I really enjoy short stories are there are a grand total of five available on the shelves. I took the opportunity to search for my favourite author Alice Munro and was thrilled with the comprehensiveness of the results, even when limited to libraries I have access to. I was able to peruse some interesting book reviews in archived newspapers going back to the 1970s, which were also feminist critiques of the society in those times and places. I also found some fantastic audio broadcasts such as “A homage to Alice Munro from the Edinburgh International Book Festival” as well as archived website material with reviews and interviews. I also managed to source a film of her work which I have been wanting to see but was unsure where to access. I’m looking forward to exploring Trove more in the future.

[Steven Walker]

I am amazed at how skilled we are as  ateam and that  for you by that signing up to Trove and creating an account has many benefits. It basically gives you the tools you need to take full advantage of the millions of resources this service provides access to a vast collection of resouces. Well done

[Robynne Kilborne Blake]

You won’t regret it Bronwyn although I have to add a warning – Trove is adictive! Thanks for the detailed overview – although I’ve been a Trove user for a while, there always seem to be avenues I haven’t explored, just waiting for me around the next corner. A lovely experience.

I understand the person who was in charge of setting up Trove is now at Europeana so that might be your next port of call!

[Author]

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