On behalf of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre and the Early New Zealand Books project at Auckland University, I'm pleased to announce an update to the NZETC website, to provide integrated access to all the digitised texts published online by the NZETC and the ENZB.
The NZETC website now includes pages for the authors of all texts digitised by either the NZETC or the ENZB, and these pages provide access to those digitised texts on whichever site they are available.
For one example, see the page about William Colenso:
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/name-207684.html
This page now includes links to digitised editions of two of Colenso's
works:
1) "Notes on the Ancient Dog of the New Zealanders", from the NZETC collection, and
2) "The authentic and genuine history of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi", from the ENZB.
We hope that this data integration will make it easier for people to find early NZ texts online, and also to discover related texts and related personalities, just by browsing the site.
We hope in future to extend the exercise to cover related resources in other online collections. Any feedback is welcome.
I'd like to personally thank John Lawrie from Auckland University for his work on the Auckland end of this data integration.
Con
The blog of the New Zealand Electronic Text Collection (www.nzetc.victoria.ac.nz).
Thursday, 4 May 2006
Thursday, 1 September 2005
Te Ao Hou
In September 2005 the NZETC assisted the National Library of New Zealand to make Te Ao Hou available online. Te Ao Hou / The New World (1952–76) was a bilingual quarterly published by the Maori Affairs Department, and printed by Pegasus Press, 'to provide,' as its first issue said, 'interesting and informative reading for Maori homes ... like a marae on paper, where all questions of interest to the Maori can be discussed'.
The Te Ao Hou website
The Te Ao Hou website
Friday, 1 April 2005
Relaunch of NZETC collection using Topic Maps
The website of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has beenon a new foundation - a topic map.
re-launched, with a new topic map infrastructure based on TM4J.
http://www.nzetc.org/
The website is a digital library, providing access to a couple of
hundred digitised books and manuscripts. The site has been running for
about 3 years, but this week we've upgraded it significantly, putting it
The topic map presently contains 46807 topics, 192492 associations, andbetween web pages.
43942 occurrences; roughly 150Mb of XTM. We are using TM4J as out topic
map server, using TM4J's "in-memory" back-end, running on Java 1.4.1 on
Windows 2000. The topic map consumes approximately 1.3GB of RAM.
The source material for the site is a collection of TEI (Text Encoding
for Interchange) XML files, each of which is an encoding of a source
object (i.e. a book). Most of the topic map is harvested from these
files using XSLT. Each book, chapter, subsection, figure, author,
publisher, etc, is represented by a topic, names are harvested from
headings and captions in the text, and the containment hierarchy is
represented by associations. These associations are used to generate
tables of contents, as well as to provide "next" and "previous" links
For each fragment of TEI text, we harvest 2 HTML occurrences which aremarkup to the TEI.
alternative representations of that piece of text. One is a "scholarly"
(fussy) view, in which page numbers, errors, deletions and corrections
(in manuscripts), etc are all rendered, and the other is a "basic"
(simplified) view, in which spelling errors are silently corrected, page
numbers are not displayed, etc. These alternatives are distinguished
with "basic" and "scholarly" scoping topics. At present only the
scholarly view is visible on the public website, but we plan to make the
basic view visible during next week. Cocoon XSLT pipelines are used to
transform the TEI into HTML (and some other formats).
Names of people, places, etc, are also marked up in the TEI, and these
are also harvested as topics, with associations linking each person to
the places in the texts where they are mentioned, the figures in which
they are depicted, and to the texts which they wrote. We use a MADS XML
file to maintain an authoritative list of names, from which we also
harvest some biographical notes and links to external websites.
Consequently, the system can generate a web page to represent each
person, providing links to all the places in the library where they are
mentioned, all the texts they wrote, and a thumbnail gallery of the
pictures in which they appear, and links to relevant external sites.
e.g. http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/name-207418.html
The ontology used is a subset of the CIDOC CRM (a museum ontology).
The front end of the site uses Cocoon to render pages (each of which
represents a topic, and some "neighbouring" topics). We use Cocoon's
templating system "jxtemplate" to render each topic. JXTemplate is
designed to be very like XSLT, with an expression language called
"JXPath" which is more-or-less a superset of XPath, but which also
allows for traversal of Java objects via path expressions, e.g.
"$topic/occurrences[type=$ontology/html]". This avoids the conceptual
mis-match that can occur when using XSLT, which is tree-oriented, to
style XTM, which really represents a cyclic graph. We had to write a few
Java functions to add JXPath support for topic sorting, traversal of the
type hierarchy, and a few other features, but nothing too hard. We use
several different templates to render the different types of topics.
In future we plan to harvest dates from the texts, and provide
timeline-based access to the texts. Our main technical concern is to
replace the in-memory topic map with a database, since we need to scale
up the topic map as our collection grows, and as we add more semantic
Thanks very much to the members of TopicMapMail who have been an
invaluable resource during the (several month) gestation of the new
website.
Conal.
Sunday, 1 August 2004
Kotare NZ Notes and Queries Project Launched
Kōtare quite deliberately draws on the example of Notes and Queries, the English periodical which, for well over a century, has printed brief articles and notes on language and literature, on history and society, together with readers' queries, and reviews of works on related topics. Similarly, Kōtare will include short factual notes, reports and comments on archival and manuscript material, hitherto unavailable or rediscovered texts, bibliographical and lexicographical observations, and reviews of relevant publications.
Kotare
Kotare
Wednesday, 5 May 2004
Prime Minister launches online war history
The official history of New Zealand’s contribution to the Second World War is to reach a worldwide audience thanks to Victoria University and some generous donations.
The Prime Minister, Helen Clark
The Online Official Histories of New Zealand in the Second World War were launched by the Rt Hon Helen Clark at 5pm on Wednesday 26 May. The Vice Chief of the Defence Force, Air Vice-Marshal David Bamfield, was also a guest of honour at the launch.
The project, which is managed by Victoria University’s New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, has digitised and placed on the internet all 50 volumes of the Official Histories of New Zealand in the Second World War, which were published in the decades following the war.
The volumes include accounts of battalions, campaigns, prisoners of war, and details of war surgery and field medicine. The information, which includes 25,764 pages of text, as well as thousands of photographs and maps, is searchable online at www.nzetc.org/projects/wh2/index.html.
Vice-Chancellor Professor Stuart McCutcheon said the University was delighted to have completed a project with such intrinsic value to New Zealand history.
Vice-Chancellor Professor Stuart McCutcheon
“The online official histories will give people all around the world, and across generations, easy access to rare accounts of this crucial period in New Zealand’s history. It’s a major achievement to have developed this substantial out-of-print series into a digital history that is globally available, free of charge to the user.
“With the recent rise in attendance at ANZAC Day parades and a general increase in interest in the War, the Online Histories will provide an unparalleled tool for historians and students, not to mention the friends and relatives of those who lived and fought in this time.”
The success of the project was ensured by significant donations received through the Victoria University of Wellington Foundation. These included a UK£20,000 donation from Mary Weston, the daughter of New Zealand war hero Major General Sir Howard Kippenberger, who oversaw the production of 23 volumes of the official histories. Support has also been received from the New Zealand Community Trust, the University, and the New Zealand Defence Force.
Air Vice-Marshal David Bamfield, Vice Chief of Defence Force emphasised the value of this project.
Air Vice-Marshall David Bamfield
“New Zealand’s armed forces have played a hugely significant part in the development of the country’s identity and culture. The endeavour, commitment and sacrifice demonstrated by Kiwi servicemen and women during the Second World War set the example for the long held values and characteristics consistently demonstrated by our people today.
“This project is an excellent initiative and will provide ready insight into this outstanding chapter of the New Zealand Defence Force’s ongoing contribution to the nation.”
The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre is the University’s research centre devoted to XML-based electronic publishing and the development of online libraries. Earlier in May the centre announced an alliance with Wellington-based web development company 3months.com to provide a comprehensive new range of electronic publishing solutions and services.
The Prime Minister, Helen Clark
The Online Official Histories of New Zealand in the Second World War were launched by the Rt Hon Helen Clark at 5pm on Wednesday 26 May. The Vice Chief of the Defence Force, Air Vice-Marshal David Bamfield, was also a guest of honour at the launch.
The project, which is managed by Victoria University’s New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, has digitised and placed on the internet all 50 volumes of the Official Histories of New Zealand in the Second World War, which were published in the decades following the war.
The volumes include accounts of battalions, campaigns, prisoners of war, and details of war surgery and field medicine. The information, which includes 25,764 pages of text, as well as thousands of photographs and maps, is searchable online at www.nzetc.org/projects/wh2/index.html.
Vice-Chancellor Professor Stuart McCutcheon said the University was delighted to have completed a project with such intrinsic value to New Zealand history.
Vice-Chancellor Professor Stuart McCutcheon
“The online official histories will give people all around the world, and across generations, easy access to rare accounts of this crucial period in New Zealand’s history. It’s a major achievement to have developed this substantial out-of-print series into a digital history that is globally available, free of charge to the user.
“With the recent rise in attendance at ANZAC Day parades and a general increase in interest in the War, the Online Histories will provide an unparalleled tool for historians and students, not to mention the friends and relatives of those who lived and fought in this time.”
The success of the project was ensured by significant donations received through the Victoria University of Wellington Foundation. These included a UK£20,000 donation from Mary Weston, the daughter of New Zealand war hero Major General Sir Howard Kippenberger, who oversaw the production of 23 volumes of the official histories. Support has also been received from the New Zealand Community Trust, the University, and the New Zealand Defence Force.
Air Vice-Marshal David Bamfield, Vice Chief of Defence Force emphasised the value of this project.
Air Vice-Marshall David Bamfield
“New Zealand’s armed forces have played a hugely significant part in the development of the country’s identity and culture. The endeavour, commitment and sacrifice demonstrated by Kiwi servicemen and women during the Second World War set the example for the long held values and characteristics consistently demonstrated by our people today.
“This project is an excellent initiative and will provide ready insight into this outstanding chapter of the New Zealand Defence Force’s ongoing contribution to the nation.”
The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre is the University’s research centre devoted to XML-based electronic publishing and the development of online libraries. Earlier in May the centre announced an alliance with Wellington-based web development company 3months.com to provide a comprehensive new range of electronic publishing solutions and services.
Sunday, 18 April 2004
Tuesday, 1 April 2003
Launch of Future Technology to Preserve the Past
A collaborative public and private sector relationship has established New Zealand's most technologically advanced centre for the preservation, archiving and retrieval of precious historical and cultural records. The Heritage Materials Imaging Facility (HMIF) launched by the Hon Marian Hobbs, Minister responsible for the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, on Friday 23rd May at the National Library. The facility has installed a Cruse colour digitising camera, only the second in the southern hemisphere, which has been brought to New Zealand through the collaboration of Victoria University's New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, NZ Micrographic Services and the National Library. The digitising camera greatly enhances the ability to reproduce artworks, photographs, letters, newspapers, manuscripts, fragile books and other important documents. Apart from being the largest scanner of its kind in Australasia, weighing more than one tonne and able to scan originals up to 1.5 metre by 1 metre in size, it generates a superbly accurate and high resolution image using the least invasive methodologies available worldwide. The scanner evenly illuminates the image but only projects minimal heat and light that to avoid harming sensitive originals.
Cruse scanners are in use in places as diverse as NASA's Johnson Space Centre, the Vatican Secret Archives and New York fashion houses. Andy Fenton, Director of NZ Micrographic Services, says there has already been keen interest in the Heritage Materials Imaging Facility's scanner from Dunedin's Hocken Library, home of many first editions of New Zealand rare books, which has commissioned the facility's first job. "The quality of the scans and the location of the facility in the secure and climate controlled National Library Building in Wellington was a key factor in the Hocken allowing the work to be done outside Dunedin." Elizabeth Styron, Director of Victoria University's New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, says having such manuscripts in digital format will make them accessible to researchers all over New Zealand and worldwide. "The images that are created are easily retrievable, supporting future research, education and understanding of our New Zealand history. Ultimately the benefits to libraries, galleries, publishers, museums and collectors are very significant," she says.
The launch featured speeches from the partnership leaders: Penny Carnaby, National Librarian at the National Library; Elizabeth Styron of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre and Andy Fenton of NZ Micrographic Services, and was hosted by Victoria University Chancellor Rosemary Barrington. Examples of the scanner's work were on display, and can be viewed on the HMIF website
"With the National Library Act 2003 just passed by Parliament, this is a strategic time for archiving and preserving New Zealand's documentary heritage," Penny Carnaby says. "Technologies such as the HMIF facility will help ensure that memory institutions have the world's best technology. We're very pleased to collaborate."
Cruse scanners are in use in places as diverse as NASA's Johnson Space Centre, the Vatican Secret Archives and New York fashion houses. Andy Fenton, Director of NZ Micrographic Services, says there has already been keen interest in the Heritage Materials Imaging Facility's scanner from Dunedin's Hocken Library, home of many first editions of New Zealand rare books, which has commissioned the facility's first job. "The quality of the scans and the location of the facility in the secure and climate controlled National Library Building in Wellington was a key factor in the Hocken allowing the work to be done outside Dunedin." Elizabeth Styron, Director of Victoria University's New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, says having such manuscripts in digital format will make them accessible to researchers all over New Zealand and worldwide. "The images that are created are easily retrievable, supporting future research, education and understanding of our New Zealand history. Ultimately the benefits to libraries, galleries, publishers, museums and collectors are very significant," she says.
The launch featured speeches from the partnership leaders: Penny Carnaby, National Librarian at the National Library; Elizabeth Styron of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre and Andy Fenton of NZ Micrographic Services, and was hosted by Victoria University Chancellor Rosemary Barrington. Examples of the scanner's work were on display, and can be viewed on the HMIF website
"With the National Library Act 2003 just passed by Parliament, this is a strategic time for archiving and preserving New Zealand's documentary heritage," Penny Carnaby says. "Technologies such as the HMIF facility will help ensure that memory institutions have the world's best technology. We're very pleased to collaborate."
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