The National Library of New Zealand recently announced that it was beginning a project to digitise the Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (AJHRs). The AJHRs are important official records of New Zealand’s social, economic and political history, but they are difficult to access and are not freely available online.
The National Library and DigitalNZ are providing seed funds, totalling $100,000 in 2009/2010, to initiate the digitisation programme. However, the...
Has your organisation used (or thought about using) the DigitalNZ Make it Digital Scorecard to help with digitisation decision making? The Scorecard is a decision-making tool to help you select and prioritise content to digitise for increased access. We're looking for examples of organisations who have used this tool so we can produce a case study. If that's you, let us know at info@digitalnz.org.
If you have decided to use the tool but are still uncertain about what is...
In the darkened shelves or back rooms of many libraries sit a set of old nineteenth century law books that are seldom allowed into the public eye. Although New Zealand's paper stocks have generally been of a better quality than in the U.S., for a period through the 1880s and 1890s our law statutes were printed on low quality acidic paper. Today these are so brittle that just turning the pages of many editions causes them to crumble. They hit the headlines in 2004 after an Auckland...
In the news recently was the revelation that researchers in Japan are working on a digital 'Rosetta stone' to back up your digital data for 1000 years. If all that content however is poorly named and organised, the nightmare won't be hardware failure but the inability to find anything - and it won't take 1000 years to be a problem. It has been predicted that by 2011 over 60 billion digital photos will be taken annually. That's a lot of content.
* UPDATED * Congratulations Cle0patra - winner of the prize draw! If you want to keep uploading recipes, no problem. They will still appear in our special recipe search.
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Create a digital version of a handwritten or personally typed recipe with a New Zealand connection and be in to win!
As you may have seen from our various tweets and posts, last week DigitalNZ baked. Analogue is NOT AS HARD AS IT SEEMS. We did good.
In fact, we did better than good. We won a small prize. Now we...
In a little over six weeks time the doors will close on all authors and publishers wanting to opt out of the Google books settlement, the US-based class action lawsuit. The settlement, once finalised, will provide one-time compensation from Google in exchange for a licence for Google to use and sell every in-copyright book they have digitised, whether the authors are known or not.
Photo credit: Ruben Vermeersch, Flickr
Unlike the efforts for mass digitisation of public domain books by...
Thinking about digitisation on any great scale tends conjure images of archives, libraries and museums, whose job it is to collect and retain the records of our culture and history. But just as there is a growth of contemporary user-generated content online, a growing number of amateur and private collectors and historians are presenting a digitised view of the past online without involving a professional curatorial eye.
Quietly launching in the last week of June was a major update to Papers Past, New Zealand's largest free online digitised resource. Papers Past, featuring newspapers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is now bigger, faster and fully text searchable thanks to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology.
Papers past was first launched in 2001 with quarter of a million digitised pages of New Zealand historic newspapers. It now has five times that many pages (1.3...
Since Make It Digital launched, we've had a lot of questions from people, wondering whether they should post on behalf of their company/agency or as an individual.
The protocols that apply when you are acting as an official representative of your agency are the same whether you are talking to the media, speaking at a conference...
