New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
Encyclopedia
The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) is a unit of the library at the Victoria University of Wellington
which provides a free online archive of New Zealand
and Pacific Islands
texts and heritage materials. The NZETC has an ongoing programme of digitisation and feature additions to the current holdings. In the beginning of 2009 the collection contained over 2,600 texts (around 65,000 pages) and received over 10,000 visits each day.
Apart from providing texts and materials itself, NZETC also works on creating a community skilled in the use and creation of digital materials, through training and projects and works together with other organisations.
The NZETC has also projects with external partners, like:
Share-alike
License (currently CC BY SA 3.0 NZ).
community of practice. They encoding all their textual content in TEI XML
which is transformed dynamically into HTML
using XSL
. Authority files are maintained for works, people, places and, unusually, ships. Topic Maps are used for the main website structure.
Victoria University of Wellington
Victoria University of Wellington was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a former constituent college of the University of New Zealand. It is particularly well known for its programmes in law, the humanities, and some scientific disciplines, but offers a broad range of other courses...
which provides a free online archive of New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
and Pacific Islands
Pacific Islands
The Pacific Islands comprise 20,000 to 30,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean. The islands are also sometimes collectively called Oceania, although Oceania is sometimes defined as also including Australasia and the Malay Archipelago....
texts and heritage materials. The NZETC has an ongoing programme of digitisation and feature additions to the current holdings. In the beginning of 2009 the collection contained over 2,600 texts (around 65,000 pages) and received over 10,000 visits each day.
Apart from providing texts and materials itself, NZETC also works on creating a community skilled in the use and creation of digital materials, through training and projects and works together with other organisations.
Projects and activities
The NZETC works with partners within Victoria University on different projects, like- Turbine, a literary journal (in cooperation with the International Institute of Modern Letters, also at VictoriaVictoria University of WellingtonVictoria University of Wellington was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a former constituent college of the University of New Zealand. It is particularly well known for its programmes in law, the humanities, and some scientific disciplines, but offers a broad range of other courses...
) - Best New Zealand PoemsBest New Zealand Poems seriesThe Best New Zealand Poems series, begun in 2001 is an annual online selection of poems chosen by guest editors. The program is run by the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand....
(in cooperation with the International Institute of Modern Letters, also at VictoriaVictoria University of WellingtonVictoria University of Wellington was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a former constituent college of the University of New Zealand. It is particularly well known for its programmes in law, the humanities, and some scientific disciplines, but offers a broad range of other courses...
) - Kotare, an online journal on NZ studies (in cooperation with the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, also at VictoriaVictoria University of WellingtonVictoria University of Wellington was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a former constituent college of the University of New Zealand. It is particularly well known for its programmes in law, the humanities, and some scientific disciplines, but offers a broad range of other courses...
) - Tidal Pools, to make available texts on Pacific islands history, language, culture and politics (in cooperation with Va'aomanu Pasifika, the Pacific Studies unit, also at VictoriaVictoria University of WellingtonVictoria University of Wellington was established in 1897 by Act of Parliament, and was a former constituent college of the University of New Zealand. It is particularly well known for its programmes in law, the humanities, and some scientific disciplines, but offers a broad range of other courses...
) - Design Review, a WellingtonWellingtonWellington is the capital city and third most populous urban area of New Zealand, although it is likely to have surpassed Christchurch due to the exodus following the Canterbury Earthquake. It is at the southwestern tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Rimutaka Range...
architecture and design magazine from the late 1940's and early 1950's
The NZETC has also projects with external partners, like:
- digitisation and e-publishing of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New ZealandRoyal Society of New ZealandThe Royal Society of New Zealand , known as the New Zealand Institute before 1933, was established in 1867 to co-ordinate and assist the activities of a number of regional research societies including the Auckland Institute, the Wellington Philosophical Society, the Philosophical Institute of...
1868 – 1961 (in cooperation with the National Library of New ZealandNational Library of New ZealandThe National Library of New Zealand is New Zealand's legal deposit library charged with the obligation to "enrich the cultural and economic life of New Zealand and its interchanges with other nations"...
and the Alexander Turnbull Library) - Learning Media (in cooperation with the Ministry of EducationMinistry of Education (New Zealand)The Ministry of Education , is the primary state sector organisation of New Zealand responsible for New Zealand's education system...
- La Trobe Journal (in cooperation with the Australian State Library of VictoriaState Library of VictoriaThe State Library of Victoria is the central library of the state of Victoria, Australia, located in Melbourne. It is on the block bounded by Swanston, La Trobe, Russell, and Little Lonsdale streets, in the northern centre of the central business district...
)
Copyrights
When original texts are out of copyright NZETC provides the digitised version under a Creative CommonsCreative Commons licenses
Creative Commons licenses are several copyright licenses that allow the distribution of copyrighted works. The licenses differ by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S...
Share-alike
Share-alike
Share-Alike is a descriptive term used in the Creative Commons project for copyright licenses which include certain copyleft provisions. The Share-Alike license comes in two varieties, CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-NC-SA.-Share-alike license types:...
License (currently CC BY SA 3.0 NZ).
Methodology and Technology
The NZETC is a part of the Text Encoding InitiativeText Encoding Initiative
The Text Encoding Initiative is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities. The community runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and maintains a technical standard, a wiki and a toolset....
community of practice. They encoding all their textual content in TEI XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
which is transformed dynamically into HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
using XSL
Extensible Stylesheet Language
In computing, the term Extensible Stylesheet Language is used to refer to a family oflanguages used to transform and render XML documents....
. Authority files are maintained for works, people, places and, unusually, ships. Topic Maps are used for the main website structure.