Trove for Researchers
Discover tools and guides for using Trove for research.
Those using Trove for research, including:
- higher-degree researchers (HDRs) and PhD candidates
- early-/mid- career researchers (EMCRs)
- senior researchers.
By the end of reading this resource, you’ll be able to:
- gain insights into Trove and its contents
- discover where to access digital research tools for Trove
- explore how researchers across various disciplines utilise Trove
- understand the support provided by the ARDC for researchers using Trove.
About Trove
Trove is a digital platform developed and maintained by the National Library of Australia. It’s used by more than 30,000 people every day, including members of the humanities, arts and social science (HASS) research community, to explore Australia’s history and culture.
While it’s best known for its collection of digitised newspapers, Trove combines a number of different collections and services including:
- an aggregation of collection metadata from Australian GLAM and research organisations
- a repository of digitised content from the NLA and partners, including: newspapers, periodicals, books, posters and ephemera, photographs, maps, manuscripts and oral histories
- an archive of Australian web content from 1996 onwards
- aggregated identity records for people and organisations
- born-digital publications submitted via the National eDeposit scheme
- a platform for user engagement via tags, comments, lists and OCR corrections
- a series of APIs for delivering machine-actionable data.
Digitised content is fully searchable, opening new research questions for Australian HASS researchers to explore.
Trove is consistently recognised as a vital data source for the HASS and Indigenous research community.
The Trove Data Guide
Trove is not just a website, it’s a source of data for new forms of digital research across a range of topics and disciplines. But where do you start? The Trove Data Guide describes what data is available, and shows you how to find and access it. It explores Trove’s possibilities for research, but also documents its problems and limits. The Trove Data Guide will help you approach Trove critically and understand how to integrate it within your research project.
Visit the Trove Data Guide.
Trove Enhancements
In partnership with the National Library of Australia, Trove Enhancements improved Trove pages for researchers and updated the public Trove API to provide better support for Australian HASS researchers.
The project was completed in September 2023 and delivered a number of improvements to Trove in the following areas:
Trove users can now:
- use Trove API version 3.0
- download citations from a Trove list for upload into BibTeX or EndNote
- bulk download search results and manage downloads in Trove account.
The project has updated:
- Trove help contents for:
- the Trove Research landing page with a How to Research on Trove guide.
How Does the ARDC Contribute to Trove?
Trove harvests ARDC Research Data Australia, a catalogue for research data and associated projects, researchers and data services. This means that Trove includes research data from over 100 Australian research organisations, universities, government agencies and cultural institutions that are included on ARDC Research Data Australia.
The outcomes of the ARDC-support Trove Enhancements project are detailed above.
The ARDC continues to foster the development of tools, datasets, and documentation that enable researchers to use data from libraries, museums, archives and other collections through the ARDC Community Data Lab (CDL). The CDL is an activity of the ARDC HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons.
Next Step
Find more tools and guides in the ARDC Community Data Lab.
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