Frequently Asked Questions
Text correcting questions
Digitised newspapers and some digitised magazines, newsletters and books in Trove are accompanied by a transcript of the original material. These transcripts are created by a computer process called Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Although the best available OCR software has been used, the resulting transcript text is not always correct, especially if the original source was blurry, faint or in otherwise poor condition.
This is why we have text correcting – to transcribe the automatically generated content so that it matches the original article. No changes are made to the material’s original content.
Learnhow to text correct.
For instructions on how to text correct transcripts in Trove, please see thetext correcting help page.
No, please avoid rewriting history when you text correct.
With great power comes great responsibility. Please follow these guidelines to ensure that text in Trove is edited correctly wherever possible.
Match your edits to the exact text of the onscreen article wherever possible.
Don’t delete text from the transcript if it appears in the onscreen article.
Include only the text of the onscreen article in your edits. If you have more information or thoughts to share, put them in atag ornote.
You don’t need to match the visual style of the article with bold or italic font.
If you find an edit that obviously doesn’t match the onscreen article, feel free to re-correct the text. If you prefer to advise Trove,get in touch.
Read our fullediting guidelines.
You don’t need a Trove account for everything - searching, browsing and even text correcting can be done anonymously if you’d prefer. Butsigning up for free Trove account is handy for tracking contributions, including text corrections, tags, notes; saving favourite items in lists and collaborative lists; and connecting with other Voluntroves.
You can choose whether to make your Trove account public or private. Learn more aboutmanaging your Trove account.
Trove is home to approximately 35,000 fully digitised books and approximately 51,000 magazines and newsletters. There are currently over 5 million images of magazines, newsletters and books available for text correction We are collaborating withTrove Partners to add more material each year, and have existing digitised material processed for OCR and made available for text correcting.
Everything you would find on a visit to a library or museum can be found in Trove. It brings together billions of pieces of information.
For the best experience, we recommendfinding articles on topics that interest you, such as your hobbies or family history.
To find magazines, newsletters and books that can be text corrected, look for the ‘item can be text corrected’ label or add has:correctabletext to your search.
All digitised newspapers can be text corrected. To find a newspaper that has not been corrected yet, add NOT has:corrections to your search.
Example: To find unedited articles that contain the word: jazz, enter in the Trove homepage search field: jazz NOT has:corrections
The Trove community has a strong culture of self-moderation. We trust our community to follow our text correctionediting guidelines and correct text that does not match the original article.
You canget in touch to share your Trove stories, feedback, or report an issue.
Trove community and volunteering questions
When you search for keywords and phrases in Trove, the search engine checks the original article text AND the transcript to try to find a match. By editing a transcript to match an article, you’re improving the chances of keywords in the article being found.
Editing text to match articles = making Trove searches more successful for everyone.
Transcripts can also bedownloaded, so by editing a transcript to match an article you are also editing the downloadable transcript.
Text correcting is just one of the ways you can help Trove. Learn more about our community of Voluntroves andhow you can join in.
The contributions of theTrove community are a crucial part of what makes Trove so special. YourVoluntrove contributions add to our collective knowledge, lead to new research, and help improve search results.
Thetext correction hall of fame celebrates and acknowledges the huge text correcting effort our Voluntroves. Together you have corrected over 430 million lines of text in Trove!
You can also track your personal achievements with aTrove account. When you have reached certain milestones, you will also receiverewards in your activity feed as you make text corrections, add items to lists, or add tags and notes to items in Trove.
Find out how you can help us make Trove even better, bybecoming a Voluntrove.
Yes. Just like with newspapers, text corrections for books, magazines and newsletters will appear in thetext correction hall of fame leaderboard. You have the option to view ‘all articles’ together in the leaderboard or toggle to just view the leaderboard rankings for each category - ‘newspapers’, ‘government gazettes’, ‘books’ and ‘magazines and newsletters’.
No prior knowledge, skills or experience is required to become a Trove volunteer and start contributing. All you need is a passion/hobby/research interest of your choice!
There are several ways to connect with and stay up to date with the Trove community:
Sign up for a freeTrove account;
Subscribe to our monthlyTrove Treasures newsletter;
See all thecommunity content on the website.
Got a great idea for the Trove community? Want to share your favourite Trove tale? Feel free toget in touch.
Trove accessibility questions
What do you mean when you say Trove is accessible?
The new design of Trove meets required accessibility criteria – colour contrast of elements (font/background/images) is suitable for people with visual impairment, pages can be navigated with either a keyboard or mouse, files can be downloaded in a variety of formats and images have suitable text descriptions for screen reader software. Trove meets more WCAG web accessibility criteria after the June upgrade.
Your internet browser can also further change settings such as colour contrast, screen/cursor size and font type/size, so Trove no longer needs to duplicate these functions.
Trove’s design has also considered the needs of neurodiverse people and those with different ways of processing information. Screens are less text heavy, contain images and icons to convey some information and overall aim to minimise visual “noise”. Work in this area could always be improved, but it is important that Australians of all ages and backgrounds feel encouraged to explore the site.
Training and general questions
Will you always be offering training on how to use Trove?
We want everyone to feel they’re capable of learning how to use Trove. Training sessions have always been a very popular request
The Trove team is aware of many organisations who have run their own Trove training sessions for years. Our small team cannot respond to frequent requests for in person training, but recent improvements in online webinar software have helped. Webinars about Trove have been extremely well attended since the National Library began trialing online learning in early 2018.
Training sessions conducted in July 2020 were aimed towards visitors who learned to use the previous version of Trove over many years and are now having to adjust their ways of searching and finding content.
The URLs in Trove are now simpler and shorter. The length of previous URLs meant item records usually had to have a separate field that contained the item’s permanent link/URL.
The easiest way to retrieve this information now is to navigate to the item you want, and simply copy the URL in the address bar up to the end of the number after “work/” - for example: https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/233169486 or https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/15930609
All permanent URLs from the previous version of Trove still link to the same records and items, as the Trove team designed them to be persistent identifiers. This means your previously bookmarked permanent URLs all still work.
We’re making Trove safer for the community by improving cybersecurity. To prevent malicious hyperlinks from being added to Trove lists and notes, we have removed the ability to add hyperlinks to external websites and have limited HTML functionality.
All non-approved HTML will be removed from Trove. This includes any text inside angle brackets (e.g.: < this text will be removed >) and all text after an opening angle bracket (e.g.: < this text will be removed).
Yes. When youcreate a list in Trove, you can still add links toarchived websites from the Australian Web Archive in Trove.