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. 

The National Library and DigitalNZ are providing seed funds, totalling $100,000 in 2009/2010, to initiate the digitisation programme. However, the complete digitisation of the AJHRs is a long-term project that will take several years of effort, and will need contributions from many stakeholders to be successful.

The DigitalNZ connection

DigitalNZ has a particular interest in exploring how many organisations can work together to tackle large-scale digitisation projects. There are small and very finite resources available for digitisation projects in New Zealand, and the pooling of resources to reach economies of scale may sometimes be appropriate.

We are working with the National Library to pilot this as a collaborative digitisation project. The project team is already working with Parliamentary Library, with significant contributions from the University of Otago and Hocken Library. A big thank you for your early offers of collaboration!

Get involved

We are still thinking about options for involvement, but possibilities include:

• AJHR volumes - Do you have access to volumes of the AJHRs that could be used in the digitisation process? 
• Existing digital copies - Do you know of any existing digital versions of any AJHR volumes?
• Distributed digitisation - Could your organisation digitise some of the volumes using local staff and resources?
• Funding - Would your organisation or your customers benefit from online versions of the AJHRs? Does your organisation have funding it can contribute?
• Specialist staff - The project team is looking for people with specialist knowledge of image quality assurance. Does someone at your organisation have these skills to contribute?

Want to know more?

If you're interested in getting involved, it would be great to hear from you. For those who are attending the 2009 National Digital Forum in Wellington, you can find out more from Fiona and Gordon at the DigitalNZ and National Library stands. Alternatively please drop us a line at info@digitalnz.org.