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The Fight To Save the Australian Digital Archive Trove (abc.net.au)
Slashdot reader sandbagger writes: A digital archive and research tool developed by the Australian National Archives may be the victim of upcoming budget cuts. Used by an estimated 70,000 users per day, the system may be eliminated thanks to a $20 Million (AUD) budget cut to the agency's budget. Since its 2009 launch, Trove has grown to house four million digitised items, including books, images, music, historic newspapers and maps. Critics of the cuts say that such systems should be considered national infrastructure because there's literally no replacement service.
Trove is a National Library of Australia project, not the National Archives of Australia.
Much more likely, this is a move by the bureaucrats controlling this area, who are having their budgets squeezed because central government (rightly or wrongly) feel they need to spend less, so are planning to cut the most newsworthy part of their service to get attention and protect their budgets.
Disclaimer - I work in the Australian Public Service
As I understand it the prototype and early work on TROVE were funded from the NLA's own budget not as an NPP (New Policy Proposal).
TROVE has become part of the NLA's strategy (https://www.nla.gov.au/corporate-documents/annual-report/2014-2015/strategic-direction-two-make-the-librarys-collections-and-services-accessible-to-all), however the government have never decided to directly funded it and it doesn't appear Government feels it's an explicit part of the NLA's core mandate (the latest NLA KPI's I could find are here https://www.nla.gov.au/corporate-documents/annual-report/2014-2015/cross-agency-key-performance-indicators).
I personally find TROVE to be a valuable tool and feel that disbanding the group who update it's data is a poor decision. However, rightly or wrongly if you are cutting services as part of your Efficiency Dividend the projects that have a large cost and are not directly connected to a core KPI would have to be your first option, even if it does interfere with your current strategic plan.
If I can put up banner ads. Seriously I don't see how that thing is worth $20M.
Obviously you didn't read TFA. And I'm not sure the submitter who wrote the "summary" understood what it said either. A couple clarifications:
(1) The $20 million refers to budget cuts to a number of cultural institutions, which include the library. The library cuts are only one portion of this $20 million, and I'm assuming that this Trove thing is only a small portion of the total library cuts. The real problem, as explained in TFA, is that the library is cutting 22 staff positions.
(2) Now, you might say, "but why do they need 22 staff positions to maintain an online archive?" They don't. And that's the second misleading thing here: No one appears to be talking about eliminating the online archive completely. TFA explicitly explains that all they will do is cease to add new materials. Basically, the library has to eliminate staff due to budget cuts, so they can't afford to keep the people that ADD new stuff to this archive and update it:
Although Trove, which was launched in late 2009, is funded by the library's budget, without government funding the library will not be able to update the material in the database.
So there's no need (at least at this point) for people to go around offering to host or creating torrents or whatever.
TL;DR -- TFS is BS. NOBODY is talking about elimination of material already in the archive. Budget cuts may just prevent adding future materials.