National Library's Trove is an amazing database containing a huge amount of information on social sciences, literature, and local or family history, plus more. Family and local historians, librarians and students are sure to find it useful in their search of materials.
Trove was designed to:
- provide a single point of access to the resources of the deep web
- facilitate access to a significantly greater range of resources from major sources, including selected digitised material freely available online
- support searching of, and access to, full-text content
- enhance ease of discovery by providing improved relevance ranking, refinement by facets, grouping of all editions of the same book (this is known as FRBR-like grouping) and exploitation of thesauri
- engage with communities and individuals through annotation services
- ensure that relevant information is not missed in a search by reducing the need to search material-specific discovery services separately
- provide a platform for niche services to query a vast resource of Australian metadata and adapt if for their own needs.
You can search for books, manuscripts, maps, journals, articles, music, sound and video - and my particular favourite - digitised newspapers. A lot of the old local papers for Geraldton region are now being digitised and you can find more and more online. The word searches use a word recognition program, so they are dependent on the original condition of the newspaper and the text. It is possible for the users to correct incorrectly interpreted words to make the searches more efficient.
Have a go and learn more at: