Digitising
The National Library of New Zealand recently announced that it was beginning a project to digitise the Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (AJHRs). The AJHRs are important official records of New Zealand’s social, economic and political history, but they are difficult to access and are not freely available online.
In the darkened shelves or back rooms of many libraries sit a set of old nineteenth century law books that are seldom allowed into the public eye. Although New Zealand's paper stocks have generally been of a better quality than in the U.S., for a period through the 1880s and 1890s our law statutes were printed on low quality acidic paper. Today these are so brittle that just turning the pages of many editions causes them to crumble. They hit the headlines in 2004 after an Auckland District Law Society article led to them being nicknamed the "shattering statutes", and it wasn't long before digitisation was being promoted as a solution.
Thinking about digitisation on any great scale tends conjure images of archives, libraries and museums, whose job it is to collect and retain the records of our culture and history. But just as there is a growth of contemporary user-generated content online, a growing number of amateur and private collectors and historians are presenting a digitised view of the past online without involving a professional curatorial eye.
