'Trove was never one thing. When version 1.0 of Trove was released by the National Library of Australia in November 2009, it brought together a range of existing discovery services. Some of these had their own long histories. Libraries Australia, for example, contributed millions of catalogue and holdings records from libraries around the country to Trove. But Libraries Australia itself was only the latest incarnation of the Australian Bibliographic Network, established in the early 1980s. Picture Australia was one of a series of specialised portals absorbed into Trove. Launched in September 2000, Picture Australia was an early example of how metadata could be aggregated from multiple collections to provide a single search interface. Similarly, Australian Research Online built on collaboration between universities, research agencies, and the National Library to enable users to search across research repositories and collections of digital theses. And then there was Pandora, established in 1996 as one of the earliest efforts to archive the web itself. Pandora was uncomfortably bolted on to Trove, as the National Library sought to provide users with a single point of discovery for Australia’s cultural collections.' (Publication abstract)
