Selecting
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.
Quietly launching in the last week of June was a major update to Papers Past, New Zealand's largest free online digitised resource. Papers Past, featuring newspapers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is now bigger, faster and fully text searchable thanks to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Papers past was first launched in 2001 with quarter of a million digitised pages of New Zealand historic newspapers. It now has five times that many pages (1.3 million) covering 52 different New Zealand publications from as far back as 1839. In fact, Papers Past currently has more digitised pages online than Chronicling America, an equivalent project in the U.S. for historic newspapers.
As the word of our Make it Digital site launch starts to spread, it is a great opportunity to point you to a new resource available on the site which we are really proud of. The Make it Digital Scorecard has been in development and testing over the past six months, and makes its public debut for the first time on this new site. The scorecard is designed to help organisations decide and prioritise what materials they should digitise. Now it's out there, we're really keen to hear from people wanting to use it out in the real world.
