Monday, August 18, 2014

Have you discovered Trove?

If you are new to local and family history – it is your “must know” resource focusing on Australia and Australians. Trove is a free search engine managed by the National Library of Australia (NLA).  Trove searches the print catalogues of libraries around Australia but also sound and music files, digitised newspaper collections, pictures including contemporary and historical images, maps and archived websites, diaries, letters and archives, people and organisations and lists created by Trove users.
The Books category pulls in results of your search from the collections of 761 libraries.  These include the National Library, State Libraries, public, school, museum and special libraries.  Use the Advanced Search function to choose your library of choice.
NLA encourages people to register to use the site. You can then personalise your searches by selecting your local library.
Archived Websites includes the Pandora archive which NLA has been building since 1996.  Many of the significant sites such as the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games website are no longer available on the web. Other archived sites include “First Families 2001” which began life as a user-contributed database of a record of the first member of a given family to have arrived in Australia. 
In the Pictures, photos, objects category - search photographs, negatives, artworks, drawings, posters, postcards and other pictures, as well as physical objects such as puzzles, instruments and clothing. This category also includes contemporary and historical images contributed by the community via the photo sharing website Flickr.
The music, sound and video category includes records of the Hazel de berg oral history collection at NLA. Hazel was an Australian pioneer of the oral history interview recording many people in the arts community such as authors and painters.
A search in the maps category also includes links to digisited maps.
Journals, articles and data sets – includes a gateway to current Australian research.  Publications ranging from theses, to journal articles, public policy documents, and large health and ecological studies are often available for immediate download. Most of Australia’s research institutions including universities, the CSIRO, government and private research institutes, industry bodies, and some Australian peer-reviewed journals are Trove contributors.
Love craft and cookery, enjoy the Royal Family? The Australian Women’s Weekly is there from its inception in 1933 through to 1982. Browse its covers.
The digitized Australian historic newspapers are an essential tool for Australian family history research. The service offers fully indexed and digitized newspapers for all capital cities and many regional and smaller country newspapers.  At the time of writing there were 712 titles included on the service.  New South Wales and Victoria have the most titles contributed, with a concentration of the date range 1914 -1918.
Local papers include:
As a registered user, creating tags and lists make it easy to find your references again. Visit and re-visit as the site is constantly growing.  So what are you waiting for? Search your topic, place or person at Trove  today.

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