Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Fight To Save the Australian Digital Archive Trove (abc.net.au)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the cherish-your-treasures dept.

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.

2 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. National Library of Australia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Trove is a National Library of Australia project, not the National Archives of Australia.

  2. Re:I'll host it for free by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.