Home

Advertisement

Previous Entry | Next Entry

Trove: search all things Australian

  • Nov. 8th, 2009 at 12:21 PM
butterfly
I'm unreasonably excited about Trove (aka the National Library's 'Single Business Discovery Service') - this is the cross-search platform which allows you to do a keyword search and get results from Picture Australia, historic  newspapers, People Australia (bios and identities - under development), Libraries Australia (books held throughout Australia), Australian research repositories and archives and other sources.

They're also going to have the Australian Women's Weekly digitised (next year?) up to about 1982, so that'll be a nice inclusion.

The particularly exciting bits are:
* user tagging - add tags so you can find the data again. If you set them as 'public' they are included in the keyword search index, which helps other researchers
* FRBRised displays - basically this library jargon means that results are nested so that the different editions or reprints of the one book (for eg) will call come up in a single record rather than filling up your results screen. After you click into that you can select the French edition, the audio book, etc and see where that's held in Australia.
* crowdsourcing - they're already letting people fix badly OCRed articles in the digitised newspapers, and they're also letting people loose on combining works together (for the FRBRising)
* set your home libraries - when signed in, it'll flag the results in your preferred libraries. By default it shows which results are available online

Still to come
* article search links through to the full text at your home library - this is under discussion, but could potentially save libraries a fortune if they get it implemented.
* user trails and lists - create a 'story' within the data

(Can you tell I've just been to a conference?)

Comments

( 4 comments — Leave a comment )
[info]murasaki_1966 wrote:
Nov. 8th, 2009 06:25 am (UTC)
We are looking forward to this. Not sure if it will be much help in the medical line at present, but we often have to do research outside the strictly clinical areas. You'll be amazed at what people need to know, or maybe not.
[info]curufea wrote:
Nov. 8th, 2009 07:39 am (UTC)
It's an aggregator of the various databases we have, so it's basically a sum of its parts. Which generally means the lowest common denominator of metadata provided by the various cataloguing areas around Australia :)

Within their areas (ie books, pictures, archives) relevance of search results is pretty good. It's across the various media it isn't so relevant currently.

But it is a most excellent start of research.
[info]kaffles wrote:
Nov. 8th, 2009 08:09 am (UTC)
I think I'll be using it more for my own interests than for work. The old newspapers are very viral - I learned what 'flash in the pan' actually meant this morning when reading an article about one of Curufea's distant rellies (while confronting a bunch of louts who'd jumped ship, his pistol didn't go off but only flashed in the pan).
[info]exp_err wrote:
Nov. 8th, 2009 10:32 am (UTC)
Still to come #1 sounds like it could be similar to qhat CSIROlink does for us.
( 4 comments — Leave a comment )