Make it Digital Award winners - University of Waikato Library are blogging their experience of digitising the The British Parliamentary Papers relating to New Zealand:

Work has been proceeding apace on all aspects of the project. The scanning is all done. Thanks NZ Micrographics!

Here in Hamilton at the University of Waikato Library, two teams have been beavering away.

The busy Waikato University Library Team (with Licorice Allsorts) responsible for digitising the British Parliamentary Papers relating to New Zealand

One has been taking the scanned image files and breaking them up or combining them into their constituent reports and documents to create printable pdf files for each despatch. This is nearing completion though we have noted a small number of images that needed to be rescanned - a few pages with tears and holes and some others with blemishes have been found and new, replacement images are being prepared.

The other team has been reading through the text files after they had been ocr-ed. This has proved a tedious but necessary task and it has shown to staff how much useful and previously unrecognised material is lurking in these pages. We are about three quarters of the way through that proofreading which is correcting only key terms and names, not every word.

Mostly the ocr-ing has produced pages that are true to the original but there have been a few mistakes that we have spotted. We thought you might enjoy some of them:

Finally, we have begun the process of building the collection and creating the web interface using Greenstone software developed by our colleagues in the University of Waikato Faculty of Computing and Mathematical Sciences.

Given that some documents have been completed we hope to have at least part of the collection live and accessible in the very near future. We will then add further material as it is finished.

Hamilton 15 December 2010