Thursday, July 02, 2020

New Trove available


A favourite resource for local and family historians and just the curious, Trove brings together a vast range of collections from almost 1,000 cultural, community and research organisations all over Australia. It includes specific content that cannot be easily found via a typical search engine. Trove has re-launched with a refreshed logo, colour, overall design and new features. 
What are the new features?
• Landing pages in Trove provide helpful information and articles to make the most of your Trove visits. They are: ExploreCategoriesCommunityResearch and First Australians. They include tips on more ways to browse collections, what’s in the new categories, how to become a Voluntrove, highlights of research that uses Trove and how to find items about and created by First Australians.
• Trove brings together a vast range of collections from cultural, community and research organisations all over Australia. To help you find what you're looking for, there are nine categories for you to search in. If you're searching for something specific, or just curious about what you might find, this is an excellent starting point for your Trove journey.
• Cultural Sensitivity notifications are a new feature and their visibility can be adjusted to suit you. This includes options to blur certain thumbnail images and a form to alert the Trove team about items that should be considered culturally sensitive. A First Australians collections indicator has also been added to Trove, to make it easier to identify items created by or about First Australians. These notifications are a part of a series of changes aimed at making Trove more culturally safe for all Australians.
• Collection Features are a new way to browse items in Trove, grouping by themes or showcasing whole collection shared by Trove Partners. Collection Features will have the options to see data visualisations about the collections and explore further.
• News brings together the latest events, blogs, and new items in Trove – including newspaper, gazettes and journal titles coming soon. See the news feed in the top right-hand menu of each page to stay up to date.
• Collaborative Lists are a new way to work with friends and colleagues who also use Trove. Create a list together to collect items along particular themes. Lists can now also be filtered, reordered with drag-and-drop functions and downloaded.
• Trove Accounts will be fully functional, with enhanced privacy settings, greater functionality for browsing and filtering your lists, tags and notes, and the ability to create new accounts and delete accounts you no longer wish to use.
What has remained the same?
• Newspapers & Gazettes. Search, browse, view, download and text correct to your heart’s content. Some colours have changed, but it works much the same way.
• Text correcting also works in the same way, with a few colour changes. New guide information will help more Voluntroves get started with this fun and addictive activity.
• Viewers for online digitised Maps, Images, Journals and Sheet Music are functionally the same, besides the colour changes common to each page. Some navigation tools have been moved to make it easier to find and explore this content.
• All the content you know and love in Trove are still there, plus new material added every day!  
What has changed?
• Trove logo, colours and the overall design have been refreshed across all Trove pages.
• The homepage is still where you begin searches. But you’ll also find information about how to get started in Trove, as well as the latest news, events, blogs and trivia.
• Categories is the new name for zones in Trove. Some categories will be familiar, such as Newspapers & Gazettes (though together for the first time), and others like Magazines & Newsletters are new. Your search term is highlighted in the search results but it is no longer highlighted on the digitised newspaper itself in the viewer. Other categories are images, maps and artefactsResearch and reports, Books and Libraries (which include journal articles), music, audio and video, people and organisations and websites. Dedicated pages describe further what you can find in these categories.
• Search results have a new look. Basic searches across all categories return the top 3 results for each category. You can then choose a category to search further.
• Advanced Search now requires you to choose a category before choosing keywords and more filters. This will save you having to select a category later in the search process.
• Filters have sometimes been called facets in Trove. They are used for narrowing down search results both in advanced search and searches within categories. Filters include title, date range, location and more.
• Records for individual items have been redesigned to highlight actions you can take – such as Read, Borrow, Cite and Buy. These records still contain all the usual information you’d expect to find in a library catalogue.
• Trove Accounts are now more customisable. This includes options for changing privacy settings, adding profile information and ways to view and sort the contributions you make to Trove.
• Comments are now called Notes, but are otherwise the same.
• Lists are now able to be filtered, reordered and downloaded in your Trove Account.
The How-to use Trove video is a good first step to get acquainted with the new site
Not sure where to start? Try these ideas to know the new Trove.
Search for an item you know you have located in the past.
Search the family name with and place name of where your grandparents lived
Search the name of your World War One ancestor
Create an account (if you had one in the old version, it will carry over) and add items to a list
Explore and find stories about Australia.

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