Government announces $16.4m funding for Trove in MYEFO
The National Library of Australia (NLA)’s digital archive Trove will receive $16.4m over four years from 2016-17 in the federal government’s Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), announced in December.
The funding is provided for the digitisation of material and upgrade of critical infrastructure. The NLA had stopped funding the digitisation of newspapers and other content in July, after the government’s 2015 MYEFO revealed the NLA and other cultural and collecting institutions had to impose a three percent efficiency dividend.
ALIA CEO Sue McKerracher said ALIA is ‘pleased that this funding injection will assist in the further development of the Trove platform and resources that have already proved to be of enormous value to researchers in the humanities, science and industry, and which have added to Australia’s reputation for world class knowledge infrastructure overseas’.
ALIA has advocated for Trove funding over the past year.
Vince McDevitt from the Community and Public Sector Union told the ABC the funding boost ‘would be cold comfort for the 22 NLA employees who had already lost their jobs this year’. ‘Unfortunately this funding will do nothing to address the unsustainable budget cuts that have been inflicted on the library over a number of years now,’ McDevitt said. ‘It’s not going to add any staff to the library. They’re already overworked, underpaid—they’ve been on pay freeze for three years.’
Category: Library news