Alia national 2014 Trove at 5: are we there yet
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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]. 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. 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. 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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