books
Trove books (NLA)
The National Library of Australia's discovery service for books, newspapers, images, and Australian material, spanning billions of items. You can search it on the Trove website, or through its API with a free key. It is the principal resource for Australian published and historical material; note this covers books and catalogue records, not web-archive captures.
Why it’s useful & how it works
Trove is the essential starting point for anything published in or about Australia: it aggregates books, newspapers, photographs, maps, and manuscripts from around 900 Australian collecting institutions. You can search the books and catalogue category on the Trove website or, with a free API key obtained from the NLA, query it programmatically. The newspaper archive, with over 29 million digitised pages, is particularly rich and widely used by historians and genealogists.
What’s inside
Billions of items across all categories, including 29 million digitised newspaper pages and books and catalogue records from hundreds of Australian libraries, galleries, and archives.
API access
https://api.trove.nla.gov.au/v3/result?q=...&category=book (X-API-KEY header)
An API key is required (usually free); see the endpoints above for where to get one.
What we measured
Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.
Reachability
- Direct request
- Responded HTTP 200 1.6 s
- Through a datacenter proxy
- Unreachable 340 ms (fetch failed: Request was cancelled.)
- API, direct
- Blocked HTTP 401 1.5 s
- API, through a proxy
- Unreachable 228 ms (fetch failed: Request was cancelled.)
Reachability measured 2026-08-22.
Access
Programmatic API access (a key may be required, see the API tag).