Below is an email sent to the Director General of the National Library of Australia and the Minister for Arts about the revocation of Tim Sherratt’s Trove API keys. Many cultural and research tools produced in the last 15 years rely on Tim’s API key, such as the GLAM Workbench , QueryPic , The Trove Newspaper Data Dashboard  and the The Trove API Console. These works have won awards, been cited in research papers and used as guides for development of other tools internationally.

You can see Tim’s original post from last week, 15 years of work on Trove threatened by the NLA; plus the update after a meeting with National Library of Australia, Trove API users beware! – the latest in the saga of my cancelled API keys.

Last week, the National Library of Australia, without discussion or forewarning, cancelled Dr Tim Sheratt’s Trove API keys.

Reinstating Dr Tim Sherratt’s access to Trove API keys is essential to restore a set of cultural, educational and research tools that enhance access and usage for National Library resources.

I write in two capacities.

As a former university lecturer of 13 years in Libraries Records and Archives, I’ve used Tim’s work to teach students about the Trove API, developing valuable data skills sought after by cultural institutions. Tim’s efforts in developing tools and models using the Trove API significantly motivated students to learn and understand. His work provided rich and important context for an assessment where students designed a procedure to use the Trove API to present harvested data in an Excel spreadsheet. 

The second capacity is as someone whose current employment involved presenting Tim’s work with the Trove Data Guide  to an audience of researchers at the ResBaz research bazaar at Monash University in November last year. Researchers found the 

Trove API console  an accessible way to understand how the Trove API works. It made it far easier for them to understand why they should apply for an API key for themselves.  The guide itself relies on Tim’s API key for the many practical examples included. More researchers conducting data-enriched research using resources of the National Library is surely the outcome the library wants.
The National Library’s Mission is:

to ensure that documentary resources of national significance relating to Australia and the Australian people, as well as significant non-Australian library materials, are collected, preserved and made accessible either through the Library itself or through collaborative arrangements with other libraries and information providers

(emphasis mine)

Tim’s work is pivotal to this mission by making the works of the National Library far more accessible to librarians, researchers and the general public. Restoring Tim’s Trove API is crucial to continue supporting this mission.