The researcher’s treasure, Trove, is under threat

A few weeks ago, I found myself staring at my laptop feeling unexpectedly bereft. An upgrade was in progress at Trove, the National ­Library of Australia’s world-beating database aggregator and search engine, taking it temporarily offline.

It was only a few days but felt like months, and I wasn’t alone. Trove is the indispensable tool of millions of users, enabling the ­location of nearly a half-billion books, online resources, images, historic newspapers, maps, manuscripts and music. Without it, the researcher feels plunged back into the 20th century.

Relief was at hand: Trove duly returned, better than ever. Now, however, it’s under grave threat from a government that should be acclaiming it as a triumph, an engine of the “ideas boom” it purports to wish for.

In the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook in December last year, the government arbitrarily and without notice demanded “efficiency dividends” of $36 million from the budgets of “cultural and collecting entities”, $20m from the six biggest: the National Library, the National Museum, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Australian Democracy and the National Film and Sound Archive.

Coming on top of cuts in the budget, the result has been full-blown crisis, the abandonment of plans, the termination of long-running publications, the curtailment of existing services, the letting go of skilled staff.

The effects are across the board, but the National Library has felt these blows hardest. It has been subject to “efficiency dividends” since 1987-88 — yes, since the third Hawke ministry.

Yet in that same period its mission has been hugely expanded by the expectation it will encompass the ceaselessly expanding horizons of digital content.

What was one library has had to become, interdependently, two, with less money. Make sense of that if you can.

Anyway, now the library has announced, reluctantly, that Trove, the powerful, simple, democratic and free facility by which the library has chiefly discharged these dual responsibilities, which handles hundreds of thousands of searches a day all around Australia, which has revolutionised research for everyone from social scientists to family genealogists, which overseas peers agree is the best of its kind, will be unable to add new material. And to paraphrase Bob Dylan: a catalogue not busy being born is busy dying.

This should be recognised for what it is: a symptom not of economic austerity but of cultural malaise. For a start, the responsible ministries obviously haven’t a clue what they are doing and imagine collecting institutions to be bureaucracies like themselves that in the event of budgetary constraint will simply use both sides of their memo pads and put cheaper biscuits on the tea trolley.

Politicians, meanwhile, can think no more deeply about the past than consecrating a shrine wherever a Digger had a crap.

It was the government of his hero Robert Menzies who passed the National Library Act, but the only occasion on which John Howard visited the institution as prime minister was to launch his government’s porn filter. And the library that preoccupied arts minister George Brandis was, of course, his own.

Not that one should be partisan about this. In the turbid meander of Creative Australia, the Labor government did more or less squat for collecting institutions. Ironically, its authors praised Trove as a “golden moment for the cultural economy, as the historic obstacles of distance and the size of the local market disappear”.

Yet not one additional dollar was offered during a phase when, again, development work on Trove was all but suspended for want of funds.

Maybe this is a little bit the ­National Library’s fault too. Perhaps spinning golden moments out of straw has become too much of a habit. Perhaps it has been ­altogether too modest about its achievements. Perhaps when Malcolm Turnbull wrapped himself in the flag of innovation, the library should have said: “Nice to have you with us, Prime Minister. Glad you’ve caught up.”

Because Trove is the incarnation of innovation, in its use of open source software, in its ­accessibility, flexibility and intense two-way communication with users, including the crowdsourcing of text correction for its digitised newspaper collection, which extends to 20 million pages from more than 1000 Australian newspapers.

But it’s not like any of this is new or secret. In 2011, the National Library won the top prize in the government’s own Excellence in eGovernment Awards; in 2012, Trove won the 2012 Australia and New Zealand internet award for innovation.

If the Prime Minister wishes to sample its efficacy personally, he could simply look himself up — not that he’s vain or anything like that.

He’d find not only all his books but scores of cartoons and other images of him in a dozen archival collections, hundreds of digitised newspaper articles about him, links to parliamentary library transcripts of all the doorstop inter­views and press conferences he’s done, archived websites dating back to 1996 including of the Constitutional Convention and of his previous election campaigns. All obtainable in a few keystrokes, by anyone, whether they’re in Canberra or Carnarvon, Bundaberg or Berlin.

There had been a plan to digitise The Bulletin, probably the single most important periodical in Australia’s history, and Turnbull’s journalistic alma mater.

But that has had to be deferred, which is what happens when a cultural institution is reduced to rummaging for loose change down the back of the director-general’s sofa.

I’m singling out Trove here, which is a disservice to the library generally, and all the organisations affected.

But Trove is our canary in the coalmine. That a resource so effective, efficient, ­advanced and accessible can be degraded is an indictment of our political and our cultural priorities.

Having established five of the big six, conservative governments have a creditable record of supporting cultural and collecting ­institutions. It’s time it lived up to that inheritance.

Source | http://www.theaustralian.com.au

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Librarian

Khaitan & Co

Upcoming Event | National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) during April 22-23, 2016.

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