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.
The Library has an ongoing programme of digitisation and feature additions to the current holdings within the NZETC. In 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.

Projects and activities

The Library works with partners within Victoria University on projects for the NZETC including:
The NZETC has previously worked with external partners, such as:
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 XSL. Authority files are maintained for works, people, places, organisations and, unusually, ships. Topic Maps are used for the main website structure.