Trove - A Treasure Trove of Australian Content
Trove is an Australian website run by the National Library of Australia and several partner organisations.
It allows you to search for physical copies of items held at libraries and archives around Australia, and is a great way to find whether your local library has a particular book.
Trove also holds digital copies of newspapers, government gazettes, maps, magazines and newsletters, and links to pictures, photographs, archived websites, music, and interviews.
Launched 14 years ago, Trove has become an incredibly important tool for researchers in Australia and internationally.
Trove is also heavily used by Wikipedia contributors, with Trove/National Library of Australia in the top 15 most referenced domains on English Wikipedia in 2018.
This shows close to 100,000 references linked back to the National Library of Australia website at the time.
Searching the past on Trove
Trove has a large archive of digitised newspapers which are searchable thanks to the hard work of volunteers who have added and corrected text.
Searching for Australian jazz musician Don Burrows brings up 2,271 newspaper results, including this 1993 article from The Canberra Times which mentions Burrows' career began at age 14.
Looking at Don Burrows' Wikipedia page there were no references about his career starting at 14, but thanks to Trove this can be easily added and the information is preserved and accessible for all.
Trove and Wikipedia
Between 2012-2013, Trove and the State Library of NSW ran a project to created Wikipedia pages for Australian newspapers and add links back to Trove. You can read more about this project in Marking up NSW: Wikipedia, newspapers and the State Library (PDF).
This saw an increase in traffic to Trove, and the Wikipedia page descriptions were then integrated into the newspaper's page on Trove. For example, The Uralla News (NSW : 1904 - 1907)
Adding references from Trove to Wikipedia is also very easy because each page allows you to cite it using Wikipedia's style guide, alongside other styles like APA or Harvard etc.
Trove on Wikip Commons
Trove on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trove