NEWS
campusreview.com.au
Online
treasure
Trove in
jeopardy
National Library’s vaunted digital database
faces the threat of budget cuts.
By Patrick Avenell
T
he Australian Academy of the
Humanities has hit out at present
and past federal governments for
failing to fund Trove, an online database
of more than 472 million resource items
related to the study of archaeology, culture
and communication, English, history,
linguistics, philosophy and religion, among
other subjects.
Trove is a portal hosted at the National
Library of Australia and funded from its
operating budget, which is being subjected
to cuts in order to extract so-called
“efficiency dividends”.
“Trove is a major digital innovation in
the nation’s research system, the kind of
development that is central to the spirit
of the ‘Ideas Boom’,” said professor John
Fitzgerald, president of The Australian
Academy of the Humanities. “It has proven
capacity to dramatically reduce research
costs across the sector and enormous
potential to further meet researcher needs.
“These institutions are critical research
data repositories but they are much more
than that – they are custodians of the
nation’s history, identity and culture.”
Anne-Marie Schwirtich, director of the
National Library, sent an email to staff in
February saying the Canberra athenaeum
had to make $4.4 million in ongoing
savings. “Sadly, as half of the library’s budget
is expended on staff salaries, to make
savings, the library will inevitably have to
reduce staff and the activities carried out by
staff,” she said.
Trove allows academics and researchers
to delve into a cavernous collection of
concatenated documents. Search for “Lindy
Chamberlain” and it returns 125 books, 56
images, 920 articles, 129 multimedia files,
36 letters, 517 archived websites and one
map. The database acts as a portal for the
myriad institutions hosting these resources,
meaning that inquisitive minds need search
through only one system, rather than
manually accessing potentially hundreds of
different universities, libraries, publishers,
learning centres and other knowledge
houses. The National Library of Australia
doesn’t house the content but is a onestop-shop for finding it.
GLAM Australia, the peak body
representing galleries, libraries, archives
and museums, has issued a statement
condemning the cuts.
“A consequence of the 2015 Mid-Year
Economic and Fiscal Outlook Statement is
that libraries, museums, archives, historical
societies and smaller institutions across
Australia will be unable to add their digital
collections to Trove without paying,” GLAM
Australia said in a statement to which
11 institutions undersigned. “This will hamper
the development of our world-leading portal
and will be a major obstacle to exposing
the collections of smaller and regional
institutions. Without additional funding, Trove
will not fulfil its promise as the discovery site
for all Australian cultural content.”
Funding cuts to Trove will be manifest in
several ways. Huge portals with hundreds
of millions of documents to sift through are
notoriously unwieldy and require constant
technical maintenance to stay online,
meaning cuts to spending could increase
downtime. The rate at which new content is
added to the portal might also slow down.
Without regular upkeep, Trove’s usefulness
as a resource centre could decline.
A number of academics and media
personalities, including Peter FitzSimons,
Mark Colvin and Lenore Taylor, have been
lending their name to a grassroots campaign
to fund Trove, employing the hashtag
#FundTrove on Twitter and Facebook.
“I’ve been using Trove a lot,” said
ABC radio’s Colvin. “It’s a genuine
national treasure.” ■
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