Remember these? The Ready to Read Collection is now live

Get ready for a trip down memory lane as the Ready to Read books that many New Zealand children used to learn to read are now online.

The Ready to Read series was developed for students learning to read and was first published in 1963 by the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education.

The series was ground-breaking in that it was the first attempt to provide early reading materials that were also interesting stories reflecting New Zealand children’s real lives and that used natural language.

The 1963 collection consisted of twelve “little books”, graded by colour (three books at each of four levels: red, yellow, blue, and green) and six longer anthologies.

The little books and the first two of the anthologies are available on the NZETC website at http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-readytoread.html.

The Legal Māori Resource Hub is now live

To mark Māori Language week a new Māori resource called the Legal Māori Resource Hub has been launched.

The hub contains a dictionary of Māori legal terms and a searchable Māori language corpus compiled from our Legal Māori Archive. These resources were produced by the Victoria University of Wellington Law Faculty.


The dictionary can be searched for in Māori and English for Māori terms that describe Western legal concepts and law-related vocabulary. Each dictionary entry contains usage examples from contemporary and historical Māori language resources.


You can also browse the corpus Māori words and examples of how they have been used. Once you have found a word you can view frequency, form and collocation data by clicking the > next to your search word.


We think the hub will be a great resource for students of Māori Studies and Law, and also those wanting to improve their written Māori.


Access the hub at http://www.legalmaori.net.

WW1 and Victoria University

To mark Anzac Day and the centenary of the 1915 Gallipoli landings, the Library has created a digital collection of World War I material.

The material, which is publicly available, includes the Victoria University Archive’s Honour Roll, which lists the names of then current students and former students who were killed during World War I.

The collection also includes archival material related to Professor von Zedlitz, one of Victoria’s founding professors, who was forced from his post at Victoria due to the Alien Enemy Teachers Act 1915.

You can view this archival material online at http://library.victoria.ac.nz/files/exhibit/wwi/.

These works have a permanent home as part of the NZETC history of Victoria University collection available at http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-VUWHistory.html