Digital Encyclopaedia Conference - Call for Presentations / Demonstrations / Workshops

The Australia and New Zealand Digital Encyclopaedia Conference will be held in Wellington on 25th and 26th November 2008 and we'd like to hear from anyone who is interested in presenting this year.

Please email me with a title, a short description of your topic and whether you have any special needs for the presentation beyond the usual computer, projector and internet access. If you would like to run a demonstration, tutorial or workshop requiring a computer lab please let us know as soon as possible. Deadline for expressions of interest in presenting: 1st September 2008

About ANZDEG:

The Australia and New Zealand Digital Encyclopaedia Group is a loose affiliation of people working on, or associated with, online reference collections. We include people working on small, individual projects and members of large institutions - the definition of "digital encyclopedia" is deliberately vague so as to encompass a broad range of projects and interests. The group includes people working in eResearch and digital humanities, libraries and archives, museums, web publishing and computing science.

Our annual conference has covered such topics as:

* resource discovery services
* incorporating maps and spatial data into encyclopedia applications
* topic maps
* searching across multiple collections
* handling maintenance and workflow issues in growing projects
* metadata and tagging
* authority control
* showcases of particular digital projects

There is a more information on ANZDEG at http://jod.id.au/anzdeg/events.html

Conference Details:

Dates: 25th and 26th November 2008 with additional capacity for workshops on the 27th (Note that the National Digital Forum will be held in Auckland on the 27th and 28th November)
Location: New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
Cost: There will be a $75 fee to cover hosting costs.
Details of accommodation options to follow.

A rare slice of NZ railway history now online

A contributor to the last issue of the New Zealand Railways Magazine in 1940 wrote that those who had not experienced a railway train had been “cheated” and “failed to share in one of the grandest experiences of life”.

All issues of the magazine, an official publication by the New Zealand Government Railways Department from May 1926 to June 1940, have been launched online today by the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) at Victoria University.

“The launch of this online archive is particularly interesting and important considering recent debates in New Zealand about the future of rail, and the KiwiRail ceremony in Wellington today,” says Alison Stevenson, director of the NZETC.

The magazine was produced during the economic expansion of the late 1920s, the Great Depression, and the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War.

“It was the brainchild of Prime Minister Joseph Gordon Coates, who saw it as a way of improving industrial relations within the railways, and disseminating ‘useful knowledge’ to railway workers, their families, and the public at large,” says Ms Stevenson.

In his address to railway staff in the first issue of the magazine, Prime Minister Gordon Coates said: “The object of the Magazine should be to bring more interest into Railway life, to expand its possibilities not only for personal profit but for public appreciation, to help towards conditions which make for satisfaction in all ranks within the Department, by reciprocal and mutual service, benefiting each other by the improvement of the conditions of service for all”.

Later issues broadened the Railways Magazine's horizons. Wellington journalist Pat Lawlor was engaged to write a regular literary column, 'Among the Books', and, from 1927, the magazine included a women's page, entitled 'Of Feminine Interest'.

As time went by, the Railways Magazine evolved into a general interest publication, with articles on tourism, literature, local and British history, and Maori mythology, as well as short stories and reader-contributed poetry.

By 1940, when war-time paper shortages forced it to cease publication, the Railways Magazine had published work by some of the most prominent New Zealand writers of the day, including Robin Hyde (Iris Wilkinson), James Cowan, Alan Mulgan, and Denis Glover.

The online archive also includes a brief introductory extract from Neill Atkinson's Trainland (2007), reproduced by permission of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. The publication will appeal to railway enthusiasts, as well as anyone interested in social and women's history, design, advertising, and the shape of New Zealand's pre-war literary culture.

This project was run in partnership with Wellington City Libraries and the Alexander Turnbull Library, and can be viewed at http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-railways.html

TEI XML guru wanted

Lead Architect, NZETC, Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Campus

This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced technical specialist with outstanding semantic web programming skills and an enthusiasm for all aspects of text digitisation and information representation to join the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC).

The Role: The Lead Architect will lead the technical development at the NZETC, working on projects that are at the forefront of digital content generation and delivery efforts in New Zealand. The purpose of the role is to maintain and further develop the NZETC as a centre of excellence for the scholarly encoding, management and web-based representation of digital resources and particularly of electronic text. The NZETC, which is part of Victoria University of Wellington Library, is the provider of a sophisticated digital library, a partner in digital humanities research projects within the University, and a contractor for the digitisation projects of other cultural heritage institutions in New Zealand and overseas. This role is engaged in each of these areas, providing technical expertise, working collaboratively with other staff and delivering positive results for our client and partners.

The Person: Your excellent technical skills in XML, XSLT and web programming will be matched by your knowledge of TEI and a range of knowledge representation technologies and metadata standards. You will have a proven ability to lead the development of creative, robust solutions to complex issues around the online delivery and sharing of digital content. You will have a keen interest in the application of emerging technologies to the digital cultural heritage domain and will enjoy working a part of a small, highly skilled team. As an experienced technical leader you will be innovative in your approach and have excellent people skills.

Please see the Role Description for the full requirements and competencies essential for this position.

To view details of this position and to apply, please go to:
http://vacancies.vuw.ac.nz/
Ref: G246-08B

Applications close: 2nd July 2008.

Legal Maori Archive

A senior lecturer in law at Victoria University has attracted funding worth $673,000 for a research project that aims to produce an online archive of 19th century legal Maori texts with the NZETC and New Zealand’s first Legal Maori dictionary.

Mamari Stephens has received a $5,000 New Researcher's Fund grant, $20,000 from the University Research Fund, $55,000 from the University Library Contestable Fund and $593,000 from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology - the first time a project from the Law School has been funded by the Foundation.

"We have a bilingual legal past - at least until the late 1800s - but much of it is hidden in the Alexander Turnbull Library, says Stephens. Early Acts of Parliament and many other legal documents were translated into Maori - mainly because Maori became a written language very early on."

The first stage of the research is gathering and accessing any texts in Maori from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries about any legal topic. Those texts in print format will be digitised and en estimated 10,000 pages of 19th century texts will be made freely available through the NZETC collection.

The second stage involves seeing where gaps exist and what new terms might need to be made. A steering group which includes Maori language experts, legal academics and members of the judiciary has been formed to inform this process and develop principles for the adoption of new terms.

A third stage is the compilation of the dictionary and putting it together in a useable form. "The aim of the project is to have work that is user friendly and helpful to those working in areas involving Maori language. This is an ever increasing sphere - the Maori Affairs Select Committee, for example, now have their reports in Maori as well as English," says Stephens.

"It is my sincere wish that this project results in a key resource that not only allows us to understand our bilingual legal history, but provide a frame of reference for the future."

Creative Commons license for some NZETC content

We’ve just updated the NZETC website to use a Creative Commons license for those digitised works where the original is now out of copyright. There are now 433 individual titles available under the New Zealand Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC BY-CA) license including Walter Buller’s “A History of the Birds of New Zealand”, the 1914 edition of the Edmond’s Cookery Book, Katherine Mansfield’s fiction, Elsdon Best’s monographs, and the many 19th century New Zealand novels.

We hope this will encourage more use of the resources by making it obvious to our users that in many cases they can take the digital editions to share and transform as they like (as long as the attribution and share-alike conditions are met).

Of course much of the material in the NZETC collection remains in copyright to the original author and/or publisher. For those texts we have retained a conditions of use statement which advises users that they must seek explicit permission to re-use the digitised material.

The information as to which conditions apply to a given text will appear in the left sidebar. If you go to a digitised text at the moment and don’t see the license information you might just need to force the page to refresh as the old copies of the pages will still be sitting in our cache.

We look forward to seeing what creative uses people put the material to ….

The Collected Parliamentary Reports of Robin Hyde

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre would like to announce the publication of the Collected Parliamentary Reports of Robin Hyde, edited and annotated by Dr. Nikki Hessell (Massey University).

On the 25^th of June 1925, the then nineteen-year-old Robin Hyde sat for the first time in the Ladies’ Gallery overlooking the New Zealand House of Representatives. Employed by the conservative Dominion newspaper, her job was to produce a daily column about events in the House—‘Peeps at Parliament’. Using the pseudonym ‘Novitia’, Hyde wrote in the persona of a naïve but sardonic female observer of New Zealand political life. After she left the Dominion, Hyde would reprise her role as parliamentary reporter for the Mirrorand New Zealand Observer newspapers.

These columns have now been collected, edited, and extensively annotated, and are freely available through the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. Dr. Hessell has also written a scholarly introduction to Hyde’s political journalism, and provided a biographical key to the figures mentioned in the columns. The Collected Parliamentary Reports of Robin Hyde provide both a valuable addition to Robin Hyde scholarship, and an illuminating insight into New Zealand’s social and political culture in the years leading up to the Great Depression.

The Parliamentary Reports and their supplementary texts are hosted here.

NZETC wins "Topic Maps Project of the Year" award at Topic Maps 2008

At the Topic Maps 2008 conference dinner in Oslo tonight, the NZETC picked up the annual "Topic Maps Project of the Year" award for its online library website http://www.nzetc.org/, described as a model for other digital libraries.