The NZETC is suffering from technical difficulties

The NZETC is suffering from technical issues and many resources are not available at this time. We hope to have this resolved in January 2014.

We apologise for the inconvenience.

Exploring the Digital Landscape: Looking For Input

We are starting a process of looking at the New Zealand Electronic Text Collection.

Over the last couple of years we have tinkered around the edges giving it a new url, rebranding and shifting to a new server environment. We are now however due for an overhaul of the site from the bottom up.

We have a number of aims with this overhaul:

• Presenting our information in a better more user friendly manner.
• Making the site more responsive to corrections.
• Ensuring the future of the environment so that the underlying core infrastructure is robust and flexible.
• Enhancing the usability of the resources.
• Engaging with the users through the ability for community annotations and comments.
• Ensuring that the site delivers metadata in a way that engages with the semantic web. 
• Better integration with the library web presence.

So nothing too ambitious there. 

What I am looking for with this post is twofold.

Firstly I am looking for comments from users about what they currently use the NZETC for and also what they dislike about the NZETC. What would users like to see the NZETC do?

Secondly, as I am researching our options for the NZETC, I am interested in other sites that are doing similar things. If you know of any cool sites let me know. Also I would be interested in hearing about people’s experiences with different types of infrastructure.

Please post any comments to our blog or email Michael Parry, Digital Initiatives Co-ordinator.

He Papakupu Reo Ture: A Dictionary of Māori Legal Terms

He Papakupu Reo Ture: A Dictionary of Māori Legal Terms is now available. He Papakupu Reo Ture was produced by the Legal Māori Project research team based at Victoria University’s Law Faculty. The team’s aim was to “provide a resource to speakers of te reo Māori that will assist such speakers to use Māori vocabulary to describe Western legal concepts”.

In 2008 we digitised hundreds of historical legal documents that were written in the Māori language. This data was used to help build a corpus of Māori legal language which the research team analysed to write the dictionary. These formed the He Pātaka Kupu Ture or Legal Māori Archive. Researchers can access the original documents or download the corpus of texts published before 1910 here: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-legalMaori.html

For further information on the Legal Māori Project refer to project homepage on the Victoria University of Wellington Law Faculty Website.

Experiment Magazine now on the NZETC

Amongst the expanding collection of VUW student publications we have digitised, is a literary journal called Experiment. Published by the Victoria University College Literary Society, and running from 1956 to 1969, Experiment aimed to publish original poetry and prose contributed by Victoria's students and other local writers.

One regular contributor and editor was Renato Amato, who died suddenly in 1964. Experiment published a lot of Amato's work, including his short stories and extracts from his novels. His talent for story telling was recently acknowledged in The Listener.

Other contributors to Experiment have gone on to become established writers, including:

• Gordon Challis (Poet. See NZETC page, see Wikipedia page)

• Albert Wendt (Samoan-born novelist, poet, and academic. See NZETC page, see Book Council page)

• Norman Bilbrough (Poet, novelist, children's writer. See NZETC page, see Book Council page)

• Peter Bland (Poet and actor. See NZETC page, see Book Council page)

• Barry Mitcalfe (Writer and printer. See NZETC page, see Wikipedia Page)

Experiment will no doubt be of interest to readers and researchers of New Zealand Literature, and making it available in the NZETC allows researchers the opportunity to easily explore individual writers progress over time and across different publications.

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The Victoria University of Wellington Library has published its collection level statement for the NZETC. The statement provides guidance for collection development and management activities for the NZETC. By publishing the statement, the Library illustrates how the NZETC sits beside its other collections, in supporting learning, teaching, and research.