ALIA NATIONAL 2014
TROVE AT 5: ARE WE THERE YET
MARIE-LOUISE AYRES
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR-GENERAL, RESOURCE SHARING
17 SEPTEMBER 2014
Yesterday Karen Visser - who before she was a data librarian, was the excellent
Miss Visser at my girls' high school - said proudly of Australian research data
management that 'we are there already' when compared to research data
management around the world.
Today I want to ask of Trove - 5 years old this November - Are we there yet?
Who is we?
And where is there?
In this audience - of Australian librarians - we is 'you', we is 'us'.
It is you that for decades have shared a river of bibliographic metadata to
Libraries Australia and its predecessors, a river that flows effortlessly through
to Trove so that our national collection can be discovered by all - including
those who don't yet know that they need something in one of our libraries.
It is NSLA libraries, cooperating for more than 20 years on the Australian
Newspapers Plan, seizing the opportunity to unlock the value in carefully held,
preserved and microfilmed newspapers, unleashing them on a hungry
Australian public. NSLA libraries have funded half of the 13 million + pages of
newspaper content currently available through Trove - a massive investment in
a funding environment not known for its rivers of gold.
It is your libraries, digitising your unique treasures - pictures, maps, archives,
sound recordings, rare books, 19th century serials - and making sure that they
can be discovered in Trove. It is your local studies collections, your historical
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societies - you in touch with your local communities - that have lobbied and
fundraised to get local newspaper titles digitised and available through Trove.
It is librarians at Australian universities who have made sure that Australia's
research data sets and research outputs are contributed to Trove, so that the
general public can easily find publicly funded research on just about any topic.
And of course 'we' is also our community of Trove users.
Today I want to tell you something about what we learned about our audience
last year, when we conducted the first full and independent evaluation of
Trove customer satisfaction, what that has told us about where we are now,
and the questions it raises for our next 5 years.
We were delighted to learn that use of Trove is absolutely in proportion to
Australian population distribution - giving us, probably for the first time - truly
national reach. This is hugely important to the National Library of Australia home of Trove. We may be a stone's throw from the heart of Government, but
we are not sandwiched between Flinders Street and Southern Cross stations,
and we are a long, long way from most Australians.
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Whether they live in sleek, chic and black-wearing Melbourne,
Damian McDonald, Eureka Tower, Southbank, Melbourne
or in the suburbs,
Greg Power, 2005, London Road, Clayfield
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or in regional cities,
Louis Seselja, 2005, Cleveland Street Townsville
or in country towns,
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Louis Seselja, 2005, Macquarie Street Dubbo
or in very remote communities,
Louis Seselja, 2005, Aerial view of Coonamble[?]
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- Australians are using Trove to connect themselves with culture and
knowledge.
Louis Seselja, 2005, Aerial view of Longreach
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Wherever they are, our users are very happy with the service. With 42% rating
the service Excellent, 42% Very Good, 14% Good, 2% Fair and 0% Poor, we are
hitting the mark.
For those with a commercial bent, Trove also achieved an 81% net promoter
rate, something I'm told major banks would kill for.
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But of course, the heart of the Trove story is not that its users are satisfied. It is
that it is part of their lives, something that is changing their lives and their
lexicon. I still remember the thrill - a couple of years ago - when we first heard
people using Trove as a verb, and I love the sense of play around our service
name.
Our users are generous enough to share some of their stories with us. These
are often intensely personal stories, connecting deeply with memory and
identity. I'd like to let these folk speak for themselves:
Dreamt I got into a physical fight over free access to digitised old newspapers.
Trove, the love of my life, where were you yesterday? I arrived at your house
and found a small note on the door saying 'temporary technical problem.
Please Trove, do not go out, wait for me faithfully, be my best friend forever.
Some days I think I love you more than life itself.
[I will interject here and say that we have received a marriage proposal and a
promise to name a firstborn after Trove].
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Dear Trove, yes I know you are a big computer at NLA but just wanted to say …
thanks, thanks, thanks, …love it, love it, love it.
More seriously, and at some length:
Through perseverance, patience and possibly some encouragement from forces
unseen, I chanced across an article about the four boys, and (seemingly) hidden
away on a different page of the same edition of the Queenslander Newspaper
of 23 June 1917, some months after finding the original article, there looking up
at me from my ipad was my grand-father, but not only him, there too were his
three brothers staring up at me from the same Trove digital page. This moment
will stay with me forever, and to the team that made Trove a reality, I will be
forever indebted to you, it is a wonderful gift you have given our country. I only
wish my mother and more especially my father had still been alive to lay eyes
on these ghosts from almost a century ago.
As a devoted Trove member, I have now corrected 158,000+ lines of text in
Trove and sit at #128 in the Hall of fame ranking. But nothing I have seen or
read so far, comes close to the blood thumping thrill I got when I met my
grandfather and his three brothers right here at Trove.
Blood thumping thrill – I am pretty happy with that!
And with this similarly visceral response:
To say that the advent of Trove was like a parched man in the desert suddenly
coming across a lush oasis is a gross understatement.
And I will admit that when the team sent this one through to me on the
morning of 24 June, in the wake of the Forgotten Australians and Former Child
Migrants commission and program, I just teared up.
My dad was raised in a children's home in Victoria, just said he wished he could
get in touch with the newspaper that came out and took his photo, when he
was 10 years old. Jumped on Trove, typed in the name of the home, the
newspaper and year! Bingo, within a few seconds, my dad now has the only
photo taken of him during his childhood.
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But Trove's impact is about much more than deeply held emotions and play although I think we underestimate the importance of both at our peril. It's also
about community, altruism and work.
Most of you will know that Trove's newspaper text correction has been a
runaway success, but even so, these statistics never cease to astound me.
Many of those participating in the 2013 evaluation were passionate about their
ability to 'give back' by correcting text, and this was especially so for retired
people some of whom described correcting as their work. They have formed
teams and taskforces to resurrect their community identity by ensuring that
local newspapers are fully corrected. They also told us they love the simplicity
of the task, that they find it relaxing. And - as any struck down with Troveitis
will know - addictive.
Just when we thought we'd heard it all about text correction - our evaluation
told us about occupational therapists using Trove as a rehabilitation aid for
people who have suffered strokes, rewiring connections between words,
fingers, memory and meaning. I'm sure many in the audience have - like me used photos and newspaper articles sourced from Trove to connect with
beloved older relatives whose memories and identities are slipping from them.
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All of Trove's user engagement features are heavily used. More than 2 million
tags have been added by users. Nearly 60,000 public resource lists have been
created - on everything from Australian lawnmowers to live animal export, to
stained glass created as memorials to Australia's war dead.
There are so many kinds of work going on around Trove. What can I say about
the husband and wife team who have systematically sought out serialised
novels and short stories in Australian newspapers, corrected their texts,
exported them, tidied them up - and have published more than 250 of them on
Project Gutenberg? My long ago Ph.D. is in Australian literature, and I love the
sense that - for no other reason than interest and altruism, and supported by a
good tool - this couple have been able to gather together tiny little fragments
of our literary heritage and put it back together again, freely available to all.
My hat off to them.
And then of course there's all the work and play clustered around the Trove
API, which means that Trove content can pop up almost effortlessly in a myriad
of other services - including Europeana's 1914-1918 portal, which Roly
mentioned yesterday. That is another whole story that I encourage you to
explore via the Building with Trove section of the Trove Help Centre - or by
joining us in Canberra at the end of November for Trove workshops and a
THATcamp hosted by the Library.
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Family history is, of course, a major pursuit of Trove users. But the story is
much more complex than that. While two-thirds of evaluation respondents
used Trove for family history purposes, less than half of our users nominated
family history as their main purpose for using the site.
They were conducting other personal research, they were undertaking
professional research, they were conducting postgraduate research.
16% of respondents said they used Trove specifically to correct text.
Professional librarians used Trove primarily to help their patrons find books,
journals, articles and datasets. In fact, we library folk are such a helpful bunch,
and so many of us participated in the Trove evaluation surveys, that we had to
set the group slightly aside to get a clearer picture of who our non-librarian
users are, what they were doing and why.
We have streams of individual stories that tell us about Trove's impact.
Historians and social scientists asking questions that simply couldn't be asked
in the past. Writers and playwrights telling us about their use of Trove's
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resources - not just newspapers - to add colour, complexity and authenticity to
their works.
Just last week, the University of Melbourne's South Eastern Australian
Research in Climate History team won a Eureka prize for their work in
gathering together and mapping 1000 years of climate records - including
those in newspapers, identified and analysed by their team of volunteers.
New knowledge is certainly being created. New questions are being asked.
And stories matter when we are trying to assess Trove's impact value - we can
never have enough of them, and I'd like you to think about how you can help
us with that.
We also learned more - and in much more detail - about what our users want.
They want more full content. They want more newspapers - always more
newspapers, and we - the NSLA libraries, are still working really hard on that.
They want more library content, they especially want more museum content,
they want archival content.
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And we are determined to see this happening in our lifetimes! We are working
on Government Gazettes now, IP Australia intends to make all their historic
patents available through Trove in the near future, every ABC Radio National
Program turns up in Trove within an hour of its broadcast - links to the sound
file, and searchable transcripts. We work with museums to the extent that our
small resource base and capacity constraints in the sector allow - and are
talking actively about how to increase exposure of these rich collections
through the national service. We add new collections every month, most
recently the amazingly varied cultural collections of the University of
Melbourne.
Our users also gave us many steers on what they liked and didn't like about the
web portal. They wanted better search and retrieval performance and we
achieved that in May, with a move to an upgraded platform. They needed a
better and clearer help centre and we delivered that too.
They wanted a more granular Advanced Search. They got it, and have been
hitting it so hard - with searches that any boolean loving librarian would be
proud of - that it's causing us some performance anxieties. They want a new
newspapers interface - and development of a more modern, mobile first
delivery system is on its way. I've seen that future and I know our users will
love it.
Some wanted Trove to be brighter, some to be more muted. Some liked its
complexity, some wanted simplicity. Most understood that they won't get
everything they want in the near future. And almost all expressed a sense of
profound gratitude that they are able to do in their homes and offices what
was never possible before.
A theme from many of the 1046 people who gave generously of their time and
thoughts to participate in the evaluation was encapsulated by one respondent:
Trove makes research easier and cheaper by orders of magnitude.
We also learned a lot about who are users are.
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Louis Seselja, 2003, Community Heritage Grant Awards
70% of Trove users are female.
65% are aged over 50.
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Jennifer Green, 2010, Audience for Peter
Cundall lecture
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Our total audience is diverse - but if were to look at the average, or perhaps
the median Troveite, she would look something like this. In fact, very much like
this.
Staff photographer, 2011, Marie-Louise Ayres staff portrait
So, while so far I've told you what is undoubtedly a very, very good news story
about Trove's reach and impact, let me tell you the other part of the story, the
one I worry about. Reflecting Susan Benton’s keynote at this conference, I am
not satisfied.
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It is about who we are not reaching, who is not having their lives, their
understandings of Australia and its place in the world, changed by Trove. We
are not reaching the young - primary school students, high school or
undergraduates.
Louis Seselja, 2008, School holiday program
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Greg Power, 2010, Olympic Parade
Damian McDonald, 2008, Crowds watch Young Murph
We are not reaching Australians from non-English speaking backgrounds.
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Craig Mackenzie, 2008, Torch Relay for Beijing Olympic Games
Damien McDonald, 2008, Canberra Multicultural Festival
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Damien McDonal, 2008, Canberra Multicultural Festival
And we are not reaching Indigenous Australians, those whose culture is partly
documented in our collections, elders and youngsters connecting to identity.
Louis Seselja, 1999, Aboriginal Tent Embassy
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Louis Seselja, 2010, Barkindji
Elders
Louise Seselja, 2005, Djakapurra Munyarryun
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Greg Power, 2008, Chooky Dancers
Which leads me to ask - Are we really there yet?
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What would we need to do to open up the Trove opportunity for everyone in
our community?
What new content will we need to collect or digitise or expose through Trove?
How can we engage those communities who would find their lives - or those of
their forebears - mirrored in Trove, but don't yet know that?
How can we help more Australians to shape both their personal and the
national story?
There is one way that I know works.
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This snapshot of the Trove raspberry pi was taken at lunchtime on Wednesday
17 September 2014. As the hours tick through the day, the locus of Trove use
shifts from east to west. At any time, day or night, 365 days a year, between
700 and 800 people are searching Trove, arriving from multiple destinations Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, AustLit, and many other services - and
taking different paths through Trove content.
We keep our users front and centre, making them central to everything we do.
If you visit the small Trove support team at the National Library - around 13
people in total, not an army - you'll see what we see every day when we walk
in the door. We try very hard to maintain a firm focus on those who are using
Trove, engaging with them, learning and delighting with them - because we
know that word of mouth or its digital equivalent is probably the best way that
other parts of our community will explore what's on offer.
But there's another way that I know works.
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It's what we - the library tribe - have been doing for years.
We may have the big Trove machine at the NLA but it is you who know what
content is of most value to your local communities.
It is you who know what services might appeal to those communities we are
not reaching.
It is you who have - as Susan calls it - the market intelligence .
It is you - I hope - who will be honest enough with us to tell us what doesn't
satisfy you and your community, or why Trove simply isn't attractive to those
parts of our community not yet benefiting.
It is you who know more of these stories - in the hard to reach communities that might themselves lead more of their fellow community members to
explore more. It is you who know whether the teenagers at your local
secondary school or their teachers know about this resource.
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So I would like to finish by asking you to continue to work with us on this
adventure. If you are digitising anything, find out how you can get it into Trove.
If you are creating a digital resource - a LibGuide, or an online exhibition - think
about cataloguing it so it can be discovered via Trove.
If you hear a good Trove story - tell us!
Even better, be a Trove story-teller for those audiences who have so much to
gain from exploring our national heritage, but have not yet found that lush
oasis in the desert.
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