New Zealand Electronic Text Collection

The New Zealand Electronic Text Collection is a freely accessible online archive of New Zealand and Pacific Islands texts and heritage materials that are held by the Victoria University of Wellington Library. It was named the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre until October 2012.
At the beginning of 2012 the collection contained over 1,600 texts and received over 10,000 visits each day. It is one of two similar collections of older New Zealand publications that have been digitised, the other being the Early New Zealand Books collection from the University of Auckland Library.
The New Zealand Electronic Text Collection was transferred from Victoria University of Wellington to the National Library of New Zealand on 2 July 2024. The National Library makes it available in its web archive.

WWW nzetc.victoria.ac.nz

Projects and activities

The Library worked with partners within Victoria University on projects for the NZETC including:Turbine, a literary journal Best New Zealand Poems Tidal Pools, to make available texts on Pacific islands history, language, culture and politics Design Review, a Wellington architecture and design magazine from the late 1940s and early 1950s
The NZETC worked with external partners, such as:

Digitisation and e-publishing of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand 1868–1961 Learning Media
''La Trobe Journal''

Copyrights

When original texts are out of copyright NZETC provides the digitised version under a Creative Commons Share-alike License.

Methodology and technology

The NZETC is a part of the Text Encoding Initiative community of practice. They encode all their textual content in TEI XML which is transformed dynamically into HTML using XSLT. Authority files are maintained for works, people, places, organisations and, unusually, ships. Topic Maps are used for the main website structure.