Overview — Collaborative Digitisation Programme

What is the Collaborative Digitisation Programme?

We regularly invite community groups or individuals to collaborate with us in adding more titles to Papers Past. The cost of digitisation is usually split 50/50 between the applicant and the National Library.

Historically the Collaborative Digitisation programme has focussed on newspapers. However, we are now running a pilot to see if there is interest in an ongoing collaborative digitisation programme for magazines and journals.

We run two workstreams as part of the Collaborative Digitisation Programme. They are:

• Collaborative Newspaper Digitisation Programme

• Collaborative Magazines and Journals Digitisation Pilot

Collaborative Magazines and Journals Digitisation Pilot

Running the Collaborative Magazines and Journals Digitisation Pilot will give us a sense of what challenges there are running a programme for magazines and journals, compared with newspapers. In particular, we will be able to assess the time required for partners to obtain copyright permission for digitisation.

You can apply for either or both of the programmes.

Purpose of the Collaborative Digitisation Programme

The purpose of the Collaborative Digitisation Programme is to allow organisations of all sizes the opportunity to get heritage newspaper, magazine and journal titles digitised and published on the Papers Past website.

The Collaborative Digitisation Programme titles are treated as an extension of the National Library of New Zealand programme of work. Participants in the Collaborative Digitisation Programme benefit from the National Library’s established workflows and relationships. At the same time, by working collaboratively we can increase the amount of New Zealand digitised content made available to researchers.

Aims of collaborative digitisation

The aims of the Collaborative Digitisation Programme are to:

Increase the range of digitised content — By working collaboratively, we can provide access to a wider range of newspaper, magazine and journal content. Working together also helps avoid duplicating effort and resources.

Provide better value — At the Library, we maintain best-practice procurement processes. These processes ensure that we use suppliers that deliver maximum benefit and the best value for money. The Collaborative Digitisation Programme is treated as an extension of our existing work and uses these supplier arrangements.

Open and equitable programme of work — All applicants’ titles that are in scope and meet our criteria will be accepted into the Collaborative Programme, within the limits of the size of the programme.

What we consider

Once we receive your applications we will assess the title to ensure it meets the criteria for the Collaborative Digitisation Programme and will look at quality, completeness, and any rights issues. We will contact you to discuss this if required.

We will also consider criteria such as:

• value of content, for example, historical significance, unique content

• Māori and Pacific content

• customer demand

• a topic or theme not already on Papers Past

• source material

• copyright

• sufficient run of material, for example, no significant gaps.

Any supporting evidence of the above you can provide will help your application.

As the programme has limited page numbers we may not be able to include all the pages you have requested.

Where copyright approval is still required, we will discuss the options with you. Copyright approval needs to be obtained before digitisation can begin.

About Papers Past

Papers Past is a collection of digitised full-text items from New Zealand and the Pacific that you can search or browse. It contains millions of pages of material, including newspapers, magazines, letters, parliamentary papers and books.

Papers Past is used by genealogists, archaeologists, writers, students, professional and amateur historians, museum staff, artists, journalists, curators, and more. The content is easily discoverable in search engines and cited in a wide range of resources, both online and printed.

Papers Past contains:

• 180 newspaper titles

• 1,000,000 newspaper issues

• 7 million newspaper pages

• 96 million newspaper articles

• 40 magazine and journal titles

• 400,000 magazine and journal pages

• 900,000 magazine and journal articles.

Papers Past

Need help?

If you need help with your application or have questions email us at collaborative.digitisation@dia.govt.nz