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