Papers Past — A brief history

What’s Papers Past?

The Papers Past website is a goldmine of information, with millions of pages of digitised historical content from all over New Zealand. Papers Past first saw the light of day in August 2001. Over its 20 year life-span there are have been a number of iterations. Let's take a wander down memory lane and have a look at them.

Papers Past 2001

How many of you remember this? Version 1, which delivered page images only, with titles from the 19th century. Users were required to use special software for viewing files.

Whilst well received, the key message from users was that they wanted to be able to search the text. So we put together a pilot project and captured the text of around 90,000 pages using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This was delivered via a pilot website. On 23 September 2001, Papers Past had over 300,000 pages from 20 publications.

Judged a success, this was turned into Version 2, released in 2007.

Papers Past 2007

At time of launch, not all the titles were full-text searchable; over the next couple of years we worked our way through the backlog of page images capturing the text, as well as adding new titles. 2009 was a special year, when we could finally remove all mentions of browse-only titles from the site.

Meanwhile, the National Library had been digitising other full-text content, delivered in their own websites. We realised that we needed to rationalise and deliver all full-text content through Papers Past.

This led to Version 3, what you currently see when you visit Papers Past. There are multiple formats, not just newspapers, and it is also much more mobile-friendly than the old site.

Papers Past current

We've come a long way since 2001 and currently the Papers Past that you now see has more than seven million pages of full-text newspapers, magazines and journals, manuscripts and Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives.

The newspapers range in date from 1839 to 1951, and stretch from Northland to Southland and the range of subjects covered by magazines and journals includes science (we have 7 Royal Society of NZ titles), nursing, religion and building.

As of July 2021, Papers Past delivers:

• more than 82 million individual articles

• more than 167 different newspaper titles, as well as 35 magazines & journals

• 21 newspapers published in Māori or for a Māori readership, as well as 11 journals

• four newspapers from Samoa.

Partnership is key to Papers Past

All this has been done in partnership with others — we borrow source material, microfilms and even scanned images to process.

We have an annual collaborative newspaper digitisation programme, running since 2011, which allows community groups, and even the odd committed individual, to collaborate with us in adding more local newspapers to Papers Past.

We also run an on-going partnership programme that enables the large major daily newspapers to be digitised over multiple years. Partners include Auckland Libraries, Christchurch City Libraries, and Dunedin Public Libraries, plus many more.

We have worked with organisations such as the Royal Society of New Zealand, Te Puni Kōkiri and Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, to digitise their journals.

Papers Past also works with New Zealand newspaper publishers to get permission to digitise their historic titles and make them available under Creative Commons licences.

Who is using Papers Past?

Papers Past is used by family historians, academic and professional researchers, librarians, and teachers as well as the general public.

• it has roughly 30 million page views annually

• Papers Past has been cited in a number of recent books on New Zealand’s history and culture as a major resource for this research

• the digitised data is preserved in the National Digital Heritage Archive, ensuring its availability for all time.

And what next?

A recent agreement with Stuff Ltd. will allow Papers Past to expand its newspaper coverage beyond 1950 for some titles (the Press up to 1995, to be followed by the Auckland Star up to 1991), noting that this will take some years.

We are also working on a multi-year project to digitise material listed in Books in Māori/Ngā Tānga Reo Māori, 1815-1900: an annotated bibliography. This will be delivered in a new Books section in Papers Past.

Thank you

Here’s to the next 20 years, and here’s a big thank you to all those who have contributed to Papers Past over time:

Gordon, Sam S., Steve, Catherine, Dave A., Frederick, Daniel, Stefan, Michael D., Mahendra, Jitendra, Vishal, Clark, Theresa, Ali, Sue, Sam M., Greig, Janine & Janine, Ian G., Mel, Em, Graeme, David R., Karen, Richard, Jenny, Donna, Michael L., Kelly, and countless others.