It provides access to digitised images, maps, aggregated information about people and organisations, archived diaries and letters, and all born-digital content which has been deposited via National edeposit (NED).

In the wake of government funding cuts since 2015, the National Library and other organisations have been struggling to keep up with ensuring that content on Trove is kept flowing through and up to date.

Tight integration with the provider databases has allowed "Find and Get" functions (e.g. viewing digitally, borrowing, buying, copying).

Important extra features include the provision of a "check copyright" tool and persistent identifiers (which enables stable URLs).

[21][22][23][24] Trove has grown beyond its original aims, and has become "a community, a set of services, an aggregation of metadata, and a growing repository of full text digital resources" and "a platform on which new knowledge is being built".

[27] These resources are identifiable by a display in the top right-hand corner in both the ebook and pdf viewers, saying "National edeposit collection".

[29] The book zone allows searching of the collective catalogues of institutions findable in Libraries Australia using the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD).

[31] The results can be filtered by format if searching for braille, audio books, theses or conference proceedings and also by decade and language of publication.

[37] The extent of digitised newspaper archives is wide reaching and includes now defunct publications, such as the Australian Home Companion and Band of Hope Journal and The Barrier Miner in New South Wales and The Argus in Victoria.

On 25 July 2008 the "Australian Newspapers Beta" service was released to the public as a standalone website and a year later became a fully integrated part of the newly launched Trove.

This is the primary search portal of the PANDORA web-archiving service, and also includes the Australian Government Web Archive (AGWA) as well as websites from the ".au" domain, which are collected annually through large crawl harvests.

[57] Digital humanities researcher and Trove manager Tim Sherratt noted that in relation to the Trove Application Programming Interface (API) "delivery of cultural heritage resources in a machine-readable form, whether through a custom API or as Linked Open Data, provides more than just improved access or possibilities for aggregation.

[60] Since 2018 the Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet) has provided a dedicated Jupyter Notebooks environment that enables researchers "easily explore and analyse data held in the National Library of Australia (and Cloudstor) using Jupyter Notebooks created and openly shared by Associate Professor Tim Sherratt via the 'GLAM Workbench'.

What distinguishes it from the other three is that it also delivers content, and engages with the general public, which has created a form of virtual community amongst its text correctors.

Users can log in and thus create their own lists, and also correct the text of newspapers scanned using Optical character recognition (OCR), with an honour board for the top correctors.

[71] In addition, it was argued that the cuts would further "result in many smaller institutions across Australia being unable to afford to add their digital collections to this national knowledge infrastructure".

[72] Those smaller institutions would include local historical societies, clubs, schools, and commercial and public organisations, as well as private collections.

In March 2016 ten major Australian galleries, libraries, archives and museums (commonly referred to as the GLAM sector) signed a statement of support for Trove, in which they warned that the budgetary cuts would "hamper the development of our world leading portal and will be a major obstacle to exposing the collections of smaller and regional institutions" and that "without additional funding, Trove will not fulfil its promise as the discovery site for all Australian cultural content".

[78] The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald revealed in 2022 that the current funding arrangements for Trove would cease at the end of June 2023, leading to its closure.