Warwick CathroAssistant Director-GeneralResource Sharing and InnovationNational Library of Australia

Trove – a service built on collaboration

OCLC Asia Pacific Regional Council Forum15 April 2010

Libraries Australia and Trove

• Distinct user communities

• Trove repurposes the ANBD

• Libraries Australia is functionally broader

• Trove clusters versions

LA search results

Trove search results

Scope of Trove

• The NLA’s aspiration: to include collection data of all kinds that will meet the information needs of Australian library users and researchers:– Data from library catalogues and other library collection data– Government data– Museum/gallery data– Archives data– Research publications– Research datasets– Other statistical datasets– Digitised book and journal collections (including vendor-supplied e-

resources)– Biographical data

Use case examples

• Nellie Melba• Road safety• The 1983 Australian election campaign• The climate change work of James Hansen• Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

Trove’s “national data store”

• Records from the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD)

• Dublin Core metadata describing digitised pictures

• Dublin Core metadata describing the contents of university research repositories

• The full text of more than 10 million historic Australian newspaper articles

• The full text of the PANDORA web archive

• Metadata from the Open Library and the Hathi Trust – public domain digitised book collections – and a selection of 120,000 books from the Internet Archive

• Tags from Wikipedia

• Manuscript finding aids

• Data from major online biographical services (converted to EAC)

Need to improve the ANBD

• Trove would be improved if the ANBD were more comprehensive

• Collection level descriptions– Reimagining Libraries: The “Lists” Project

– Local history and other special collections

• Trove would be improved if the ANBD were more up to date– Public library de-selection activities are an obvious

case

Getting items from other libraries

• Libraries Australia has had “enhanced requesting” since 2005

• There is a need to resolve how to migrate this workflow to Trove

Collection summaries

Collection summaries

Collection summaries

Trove – built on relationships

• Harvest metadata from contributors

• Build relationships with “aggregator partners”

Libraries

• Libraries Australia is the vehicle for content contribution

• The Libraries Australia Advisory Committee will provide advice on both services

• Libraries also provide Dublin Core metadata, manuscript finding aids, collection summaries

National cultural institutions

• The NLA has strong relationships with:– National Film & Sound Archive– National Archives of Australia– National Museum of Australia– Australian War Memorial– Museum of Australian Democracy

• Think of use cases: Australian Prime Ministers, Nellie Melba, etc.

• Accept metadata in any format• Confer one-on-one and through forums such as

Heads of Collecting Institutions

Government agencies

• Include bodies with a strong “information provision” mandate:– Australian Bureau of Statistics– GeoScience Australia– Bureau of Meteorology– IP Australia

• Think of use case: Australian wine production • Work towards contribution of ABS dataset

metadata using standards such as DDI (Data Documentation Initiative)

Museums and archives

• The NLA may not be the ideal coordinator, despite the success of Picture Australia

• Would prefer to work with “aggregator partners” • Possible example: CAN (Collections Australia

Network)• These bodies must be sustainably resourced to

liaise with museums and archives and to aggregate their data

• The NLA could make its technical infrastructure available to these partners

Research community

• NLA has worked closely with this community since 2004

• Currently harvest university repository metadata for Australian Research Online and Trove

• Currently working with ANDS (Australian National Data Service) on the Party Infrastructure Project

• Could regard ANDS as a potential “aggregator partner”

E-resource vendors

• They have extensive and rich collections of article-level metadata

• NLA is seeking to form partnerships with them • The Reimagining Libraries “Open Borders

Project” will develop a framework for users to discover and access e-resources from their multiple affiliated libraries

The public

• There is no Australian equivalent of Digital NZ (yet)

• Contribution pool for digitised pictures in Flickr• Tagging and commenting facilities in Trove• NLA needs to define a collection strategy and

ingest mechanism for contribution of content beyond pictures

Conclusions

• Trove is a powerful tool facilitating access by end users to Australian collections

• There are connections on a number of levels between Trove and Libraries Australia

• There is a need to expand Trove’s content through stronger relationships between the NLA and other Australian collections

• In some cases the “aggregator partner” approach will be pursued

Questions?