More of Katherine Mansfield's works available online

The NZETC is pleased to announce the addition of 15 new texts to the online collection.

Katherine Mansfield

We already have a number of Mansfield's short stories online and we're expanding this part of the collection with more fiction, letters, extracts from her notebooks and diaries and an early "Life of .."

• "The Aloe"
  
  
• "Something Childish and Other Stories"
  
  
• "The Life of Katherine Mansfield", by Ruth Mantz and J Middleton Murry
  

We plan to add more letters and poetry from Mansfield to the collection in the coming months.

J C Beaglehole

Thanks to kind permission from the current VUW Chancellor, Emeritus Professor Timothy Beaglehole, we are able to republish some of J C Beaglehole's essays on Captain Cook. Again we will be adding more of these essays to the collection in the coming months.

• "Captain Cook and Captain Bligh"
  
  
• "Some Problems of Editing Cook's Journals"
  
  
• "On the character of Captain James Cook"
  

New texts by authors already featured in the NZETC collection:

• Te Rangi Hiroa: "Vikings of the Sunrise" (1938)
  
  
• George Pratt: "Some Folk-songs and Myths from Samoa" (1891)
  
  
• James Cowan: a letter from Cowan to Horace Fildes and "Fairy Folk Tales of the Maori" (1925)
  
  
• James Drummond:"The Life and Work of Richard John Seddon" (1907) and "Life and Work of Samuel Marsden" (editor 1913)
  
  
• Thomas Brunner: "The Great Journey: An Expedition to Explore the Interior of the Middle Island, New Zealand 1846-8" (1872)
  

Other new texts:

• "Plume of the Arawas" by Frank Acheson
  
  
• "The First Ascent of Mount Ruapehu New Zealand" by George Beetham (1926)
  

As always we are keen to receive any feedback on the new texts or suggestions for future projects.

New text, including Buller's Birds and Kendall's Grammar

Kia ora koutou!

There are several new texts online at the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre and I'd like to draw your attention to a few of them.

• A History of the Birds of New Zealand, By Walter Buller (1888)
  
  New Zealand's most infamous ornithologist, Dr Walter Buller published this enlarged edition of his history of the birds of New Zealand in 1888. It became a New Zealand classic, especially for J. G. Keulemans's chromolithographic plates and these plates are still the standard images of New Zealand birds. According to Ross Galbreath's book about Buller "Although 1,000 sets of the 1888 edition were produced, a total of 251 copies were lost in the wrecks of the Matai and the Assaye in 1890" (Galbreath p.172). One of the remaining copies is held in the Fildes Collection of the JC Beaglehole Room and the project to digitise the book was a collaboration between the NZETC and the J. C. Beaglehole Room at VUW. All the images are now browsable alongside the full text of Buller's work. Have a look at the beautiful huia.
  
  
• A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language of New Zealand, by Samuel Lee and Thomas Kendall (1820)
  
  This book laid the orthographic foundations of written Maori. According to one report "Kendall's first rough list of 1815 was revised and sent off to Samuel Lee, Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. Kendall and two Maori chiefs, Hongi and Waikato, joined him there in 1820, and together they produced the text. It was printed later that year by R. Watts, printer to the Church Missionary Society in London. Kendall, unlike Marsden, was determined that Maori should not be anglicized; c, q and x were dropped for a start, but the Grammar at that stage still included letters for non-Maori sounds thought necessary for foreign words -f, hard g, j , v, z - and so it still ran to five vowels, eighteen consonants, and one digraph ng (as in Ngaio Marsh). It included sample sentences such as 'the performance of the white man is good, the performance of the white man is exceeding good', but linguistically at least the performance of the white man still left room for improvement." (D. F McKenzie "The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy and Print in Early New Zealand"). As for the Buller text, the source copy used is part of the Fildes Collection in the JC Beaglehole Room.
  
  
• Nineteenth Century New Zealand Artists: A Guide & Handbook, by Una Platts
  
  This guide is regarded as the finest single source of information on early New Zealand artists. It has long been out of print and is made available online with the kind permission of the late author's family and Christchurch City Libraries who initiated the digitisation of the book. A PDF of the page images is available on the CCL website.
  
  
• New Zealand Bird Songs, by Eileen Duggan
  
  "Eileen Duggan was the first New Zealand poet to gain an international reputation ... Her poetry is characterised by its conspicuous religious dimension, which ranges from simple devotional writing, through poems that celebrate the sacredness of the created world, to more spare and sombre meditations on the moral implications of human actions."(From the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography). These poems are made available with the kind permission of the estate of the late author.
  
  
• The Old Whaling Days: A History of Southern New Zealand from 1830 to 1840, By Robert McNab
  
  "Robert McNab's historical method was unashamedly that of the compilation historian, unearthing fragments of information and documents from a painstaking search of the primary sources and presenting them in a chronological narrative." (From the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography). The NZETC already has online two other McNab histories ("Murihiku" and "From Tasmen to Marsden"). He assiduously gathered primary sources for NZ's early history and "The Old Whaling Days", which was published in 1913, covers the years 1830-40 and deals with the bay whaling period of southern New Zealand's history. We also have available online the first volume of the "Historical Records of New Zealand," edited by McNab's.
  
  
• The Journals and Correspondence of the Rev. John Butler, compiled by R. J. Barton
  
  John Butler (1781-1841) was a pioneer, missionary, farmer and New Zealand's first ordained resident clergyman. Butler's journal of his years at Kerikeri gives many arresting details of his contacts with Hongi, Te Morenga, and other chiefs, and of the contemporary Maori culture. His entry for May 3rd 1820 records the first use of the European plough:
  
  'The agricultural plough was for the first time put into the land of New Zealand at Kideekidee, and I felt much pleasure in holding it after a team of six bullocks brought down by the "Dromedary." I trust that this day will be remembered with gratitude, and its anniversary kept by ages yet unborn. Each heart rejoiced in this auspicious day, and said, "May God speed the plough."'
  

We would be grateful to receive feedback from readers: comments both positive and negative, suggestions, and errata.

Iconic Cook Book Online

New Zealanders can get a taste of the past, with the third (1914) edition of the iconic Edmonds Cookery Book now in cyberspace, thanks to Victoria University.

The University's New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has converted the book, lent by publishers of the modern text, Goodman Fielder, into a digital format. It is now freely accessible to the world via the New Zealand Electronic Text collection.

Alison Stevenson, Director of the Centre, says the project has been very exciting. "There aren't many families in New Zealand who have grown up without a copy of the Edmonds Cookery Book, so it's been great to see what it was like almost at the beginning."

The Edmonds Cookery Book started life in 1907 as a 50-page pamphlet of recipes promoting Thomas John Edmonds' baking powder and jellies. The marketing ploy proved so successful that the second edition, in 1910, had a print run of 150,000. It is not known if any first editions survive, however some second editions do. Today, more than three million copies of the book have been sold.

The Centre has scanned and digitised all 50 pages, including advertisements and testimonials for the baking powder from happy housewives, for example Mrs A.T. Phillips of Taranaki, who wrote: "I use 1½ tins a month, and always refuse any other offered to me."

Recipes include more typical treats such as rock cakes, Christmas cake, and the Kiwi favourite, pikelets. More peculiar are Marmalade Cheese Cakes (which don't in fact contain cheese) and several recipes without eggs, including Egg Drink (without eggs).

The Centre, which is part of the University Library, hosts an ever-expanding free internet archive of New Zealand and Pacific Island texts and materials at www.nzetc.org. In addition to its own digitisation of important New Zealand history and literature, the NZETC provides digitisation and consultancy services to other cultural heritage institutions in New Zealand.

The Edmonds Cookery Book can be accessed at http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-EdmCook.html For further information, contact Alison Stevenson on 04 463 6847 or email Alison.Stevenson@vuw.ac.nz"

New texts, including Tutira and Sir Peter Buck's Ethnologies

Kia ora kotou,

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre is pleased to announce that a number of freshly-digitised New Zealand and Pacific books are now freely available online.

These titles include:

• First Lessons in Maori, by William Leonard Williams
  
  Writing a review of this book in Te Ao Hou in 1968, the reviewer had this to say:
  
  "Although the last ten years or so have seen a very rapidly growing interest in Maori, a great improvement in teaching techniques and an increasing number of modern textbooks, this Grammar, in spite of certain weaknesses and omissions, is still the most valuable book of its kind for those interested in the structure of the language. All teachers should own and study it for, apart from the modern works of such trained linguists as Dr Bruce Biggs, Dr Pat Hohepa and J. Prytz Johansen, no subsequent grammar book of this type has added anything of significance to this pioneering work; these modern linguists would undoubtedly each acknowledge his debt to 'First Lessons' as a major reference."
  
  
• Tutira: A New Zealand Sheep Station, by H. Guthrie-Smith
  
  Written in 1921, this book is a loving and detailed account of the ecology of a 40,000-head sheep station on the shores of Lake Tutira in the Hawkes Bay, and the impact of land-clearances and farming practices on the environment. It has been called "one of the great English-language classics of environmental history".
  
  
• The Early Journals of Henry Williams 1826-1840, by Lawrence M. Rogers
  
  A major figure in the drafting and signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, Henry Williams was the leader of the Church Missionary Society mission in the Bay of Islands from 1823, and was instrumental in helping to familiarise the early missionaries with the Maori language.
  
  
• Legends of the Maori, I and II, by Maui Pomare:
  
  "In 1911 Pomare, Ngata and Buck had agreed to divide between them aspects of the study of Maori history and ethnology; Pomare's portion was to be myths and legends. The two-volume Legends of the Maori, written in collaboration with James Cowan, was published posthumously." (from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography)
  
  
• The Past and Present of New Zealand; with its Prospects for the Future (1868), by Rev. Richard Taylor
  
  A contemporary of William Williams, Richard Taylor conducted missionary work in the central North Island, particularly around the Wanganui. According to the 1966 Encyclopedia of New Zealand, "Although much of Taylor's life was devoted to his missionary work, he was an acute observer of, and a prolific writer upon, natural and ethnological phenomena."
  
  
• Through Ninety Years 1826-1916, by Frederic W. Williams
  
  Notes on the lives of William and William Leonard Williams, First and Third Bishops of Waiapu.
  

Other books hopefully of interest to readers in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands now online include:

• Aureretanga: Groans of the Maori (1895), by G. W. Rusden
  
  
• Ethnology of Tokelau Islands, by Gordon MacGregor
  
  
• Ethnology of Manihiki and Rakahanga, by Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa)
  
  
• Ethnology of Tongareva, by Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa)
  
  
• Report of the Commission to Inquire Into and Report Upon the Organization of District and Village Government in Western Samoa
  
  
• An Account of Samoan History up till 1918, by Te'o Tuvale

Any feedback on these titles, including suggestions for future digitisation, errata, and general comments are most welcome.

Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand

In November 2006 the NZETC completed a large project with the National Library of New Zealand to make 100 years of New Zealand science available online. NZETC was responsible for both managing the transcription and encoding of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand from 1868 to 1961, and the design and implementation of the delivery system for the digitised content. With the project ultimately delivering over 65,000 pages of digitised content, this has been the biggest project in which the Centre has been involved

Williams' "A Dictionary of The Maori Language" now online

Kia ora koutou!

It's my pleasure to announce on behalf of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre that A Dictionary of the Maori Language (1957 edition), by Herbert William Williams, has been digitised and is now freely available online.

The NZETC is a unit within the VUW Library, whose mission includes building a free online library of NZ and Pacific resources. As well as the Williams dictionary, the NZETC's online collection also includes the Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary by Edward Tregear, as well as a number of works relating to Maori history and culture, mostly by 19th century Pakeha historians and ethnographers.

At present the Williams dictionary can be browsed like any other text on the NZETC website, chapter by chapter, though in the future we intend to use this and our other dictionaries to offer online word-lookup services like that offered by Learning Media using the Ngata dictionary.

We would be grateful to receive feedback from readers: comments both positive and negative, suggestions, and errata.

The NZ Electronic Text Centre has recently added several other digitised books to our free online collection

This batch consists mainly of more texts on New Zealand colonial history, and the New Zealand Wars. The new texts since our last announcement are:

• Check to Your King, by Robin Hyde
  
  
• The Maori Race, by Edward Tregear
  
  
• Soldiering in New Zealand, Being Reminiscences of a Veteran, by Major Frederick Gascoyne
  
  
• The Maori King, by Sir John Eldon Gorst
  
  
• History of NZ, Volume 1 and Volume 2, by George William Rusden
  
  
• From Tasman to Marsden, by Robert McNab
  
  
• The Long White Cloud, by William Pember Reeves
  
  
• Maori Wars of the Nineteenth Century, by Stephenson Percy Smith
  
  
• New Zealand and the War, by William Swainson
  
  
• Kōtare 2000, Volume Three, Number Two

As usual, we have identified the names of many people (and places, etc) within these texts, in order that each mention of a person's name is hyperlinked to an index page containing a thumbnail gallery of images related to that person, links to other texts which they wrote, or in which they're mentioned, as well as links to relevant pages on other sites such as the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara, Wikipedia, and the National Library of New Zealand. An example is the page on Hone Heke

This update brings to 48,800 the number of pages on the NZETC website. Of these, about half are pages about authors, or about people, places, and organisations mentioned in the texts, and the other half are chapters and sub-sections of books, including over 8,500 figures.

We've just recently installed a rather flash new server for running our website software. This means we can now update the site more frequently, fixing errors more promptly, publishing new texts as soon as they're digitised, and introducing some new features. The first new feature to be added will be a high-level index of the site by subject and genre.

Links with Early New Zealand Books website

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