Trove API lets developers delve deeper 

The recently launched application programming interface (API) for Trove provides programmatic access to the metadata and some full text in Trove.

The API can be used to search and retrieve metadata records for Trove’s books, images, maps, music, sound, video, archives, journal articles, newspaper articles and lists created by other users. The full text for most digitised newspaper articles can also be downloaded.

The metadata and/or text can then be re-used in creative and useful ways, such as:

• including results from Trove on another website
• including copies of Trove records in another database
• for organisations contributing their records to Trove, retrieving tags or comments added to those records by Trove users.

The Trove API joins Digital NZ’s API in the quest to make Australasian data more accessible for repurposing in new and innovative ways.

One example of how these APIs might be used is QueryPic, an online tool that allows users to graph historical newspaper searches over time. QueryPic accesses data from either Trove or Papers Past (NZ). For example, this graph showing the proportion of newspaper articles about flood and drought in Australia between 1803 and 1954.