If you haven’t used Trove already, you’ll be amazed by what you can find (trove.nla.gov.au). Trove is a free, online discovery service focused on Australia and Australians, created by the National Library of Australia. It brings together content from libraries, museums, archives, universities, and many other organisations. More than 15 million newspaper pages are fully searchable in Trove thanks to the collaboration of national and state libraries and the generosity of many supporters.

In collaboration with the National Library of Australia, we wanted to give our readers the opportunity to select which newspaper would be digitised next.

In November 2014 Inside History magazine asked, and you voted. You chose from a shortlist of six titles from across Australia. Over 31,000 votes later, the Hamilton Spectator from Victoria was triumphant.


Now we need your help in raising funds so that the National Library of Australia can start digitising the newspaper. Contribute to our fundraising campaign and you'll be helping to add thousands of pages to Trove. Just $25 will digitise a full week.

If you love Australian history, support the digitisation of the Hamilton Spectator.

Image: Grant Ellmers, 'Hamilton Spectator Office, 1873. 59 Grey Street. Hamilton, 1994' nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an11278679-3

Funds raised through this project will be donated to the National Library of Australia to digitise a portion of the Hamilton Spectator from 1860 to 1913, and make it freely available online through Trove.

The following gives a guide for the cost of digitisation:

$25 will digitise approximately one week of the Hamilton Spectator

$100 will digitise approximately one month of the Hamilton Spectator

$1,000 will digitise approximately one year of the Hamilton Spectator

This cost covers scanning the Hamilton Spectator from microfilm, the direct costs of the digitisation process – scanning, OCR processing, content analysis and quality assurance - project management and all systems infrastructure required to ingest, store and manage the digitised newspapers for long-term access.


$10,000 will fund digitising 10 years of the Hamilton Spectator. The more funds that are raised, the more pages of the winning title can be digitised.

Supporters will receive collective digital acknowledgement on every page and article view of the Hamilton Spectator digitised through this campaign.

Image: Greg Power, 'Chris Brothers, Library staff, digitising a collection item', 24 May 2011

This is the first time we have undertaken a crowdfunding campaign but we believe Trove is worth it. We acknowledge the challenge of reaching our target of $10,000, however, it's a project that we're excited to launch, knowing that it will benefit thousands of people. It’s our mission to engage and empower our readers, and we hope that supporters Australia-wide will get behind this worthwhile and exciting initiative.