Discover the stories of your ancestors

Speakers

Joan McCracken, Kelly Dix, Emerson Vandy

Welcome

Joan McCracken: --joined us today to learn more about two of the libraries most treasured services: Digital New Zealand and Papers Past.

To open our talk today, we have as our whakataukī, a verse from the National Library's waiata, Kokiri, kokiri, kokiri, na our Waikato Tainui colleague, Bella Tarahiti.

Haere mai e te iwi
Kia piri tāua
Kia kite atu ai
Ngā kupu whakairi e

Before I introduce our two presenters, Kelly Dix and Emerson Vandy, I have a little housekeeping.

As you'll have seen when you joined the webinar, it is being recorded. And as this is a webinar, your videos and microphones are turned off. However, if you'd like to share where you're joining us from, or have any general questions or comments, then please add them to the chat. If you have any questions for Emerson or Kelly, then please add those to Q&A. You'll find both buttons at the bottom of your Zoom screen. My colleague Celia and I will be monitoring chat and Q&A. At the end of the presentation, we'll pass on any questions we receive to Kelly and Emerson.

We will also be adding some links to chat during the presentation. If you want to save those links, click on the ellipsis, the three dots beside the chat button, and select save chat.

And now it's my real pleasure to introduce my colleagues Kelly Dix and Emerson. Vandy. Both are part of the National Library's Digital Experience team. Kelly is the online engagement manager, working with Digital New Zealand, and Emerson is the digital service manager for the Papers Past site. Welcome to you both. And over to you, Kelly.

About Digital NZ

Kelly Dix: Tēnā kotou katoa. Ko Kelly Dix tōku ingoa. Ko Te Whanganui a Tara aho.

As Joan said, I am the online engagement manager for Digital NZ. And thank you for joining Emerson and I for this Connecting to Collections event during Family History Month.

I'm going to talk for about 20 minutes about Digital NZ, and then Emerson will be showing you some tips about how to research your family history on Papers Past.

Digital NZ launched in 2008. It's a search service coordinated by the National Library. And it aims to make New Zealand digital content more useful and easily discoverable.

We pulled together more than 30 million items held by 200 different organisations, a number which is growing daily as new data is created and added to our partners' sites or as new partners come on board, which happens on a regular basis.

In fact, so far this month, we've welcomed the Waipu Scottish Migration Museum, Pahiatua Museum, and from Archives New Zealand, a collection of more than 30,000 photos taken by the National Publicity Studios. The fact that we pull this data together is what makes Digital NZ a popular tool for researchers looking to quickly find information from multiple sources.

To search Digital NZ, you enter keywords into the search box. You can see I've. entered 'Thordon' and came up with a whole lot of images from Alexander Turnbull, Te Papa and more.

You can filter by content partner. And the magic of Digital NZ is it makes these collections searchable. And you don't have to go to all these different places to find material. It's a perfect place to start.

You can find artworks, archives, newspapers, research papers, photos, sculptures, maps, audio, and more.

You can filter by date. You can filter by usage. You can find births, deaths, and marriages. And then you can find other information such as house plans, if you are researching the places that your ancestors lived.

You can find unusual things, such as a driver's licence from 1928, issued to G M Tombs, a builder from Roxburgh in Central Otago. You can find Margery Brook-Smith's wedding dress from 1948. You can find audio files, such as this interview with Monty Wikiriwhi, who fought at the Battle of Cassino. You can meet the locals with Selwyn Toogood in this TV show from 1964.

There's photos of pets. And there's family photos. Many, many family photos, including this unidentified house and family from 1905. If you are searching Digital NZ and you come across photos of someone that you recognise, or you can add more information to, you can click on the comment tool at the bottom of the record page.

You can see that James Munro has added more information about M Z Woller. That she worked in telephone exchanges most of her life, and she passed away in 2017 at Paraparaumu.

People might ask why they shouldn't just use Google to find the content on Digital NZ. Well, we service in collections that are trickier to find on Google. And we include a trustworthy link back to the source of the content. It's always easier to find where items come from.

So if you click 'View original item' button on this record, you go to Te Toi Uku, the website of the Crown Lynn factory. You can find out information such as the description of the photo, black and white print showing Crown Lynn staff leaving the factory after a day's work. You can find the date, the 1960s. And also the copyright and use information, which this is a Creative Commons licence, attribution noncommercial, which means you can use it for non-commercial purposes with credit.

But one of the most wonderful things about Digital NZ is the stories tool. Tou can create or curate your own stories and items from more than 200 different content partners. So you can bring in images, audio, video, newspapers, books and more.

We have more than 7000 stories already on Digital NZ. They range from a story about Saint Luke's shopping mall to one about the suburb of Naenae in Lower Hutt. There are stories about events, places and people in Aotearoa, New Zealand. But there's so many more stories. You can use Digital NZ to tell your own.

You don't need to sign up to search Digital NZ, but you do need to have an to create stories. So you can see that you sign up in the top-right corner. You add your name, a user name, e-mail address, and a password. It's your username that will appear on any stories that you set as being public. We can talk more about that soon.

You confirm your account on the link in the e-mail. And now I'm gonna head over to the live site.

Stories on Digital NZ

Right, so this is Digital NZ. I'm just going to show you a few different stories. We're going to start with a story about Alexander Turnbull and his Library.

You can see that it's got a title. You can see here that this story has been written by Zokoroa. And it's made-up with a number of images pulled in from Alexander Turnbull Library, The National Library, and there's text and links as well. So this is a fantastic story about the library where many of us work.

I'm just going to show you how to create a story or how to add a story. So if you come over to the top right hand corner, where your name is. And you can see that you can come down to my stories. Oops, sorry I need to log in. 2 seconds. And you don't have this setting. This is a setting that I have because I moderate your stories.

So back to my stories. So I have a number of stories that I have created, but I'm just going to show you this story here called 'The vege garden'. So you can see that you add in a story title, a description, and some subjects to help people find your story. And then you can see I've already added some stories below from Alexander Turnbull Library and Howick.

And so I was talking before about how you can set your stories to be private or public. And you do this here. So under this button, 'Manage or change access'. And there's three different settings. There's public, hidden, and private. So private means you can only view this story if you are logged in. Hidden, if you send the URL to friends and family. And public means that it will turn up in a search of Digital NZ.

So in this case, it's public, but if I had a story, for example, that was a family history story and had a lot of personal family photos, I would probably consider, unless I had permission from everybody, I would probably set it as hidden.

So it just gives us a little bit of an explanation there.

Uploading your own image to Digital NZ

So I'm just going to show you how to upload your own image, because you may want to do this if you're creating family history stories.

So you browse your image, browse for image. And I'm going to add a photo of my cat, Luna, in the vegetable garden. So you need to add a title and a description. And then you need to set the copyright for this photo. So if it was a photo that I wanted to set as All rights reserved, where it could not be used without my permission, then I would click that. If it had no known copyright, so if it was a really old photo, I'd select that one. In this case I'm gonna give it a Creative Commons Attribution licence, which means that other people can use this photo if they want to, as long as they attribute me as the copyright owner. And you need to read and agree to the contributed terms of use, which are here. Agree to that. And now you can see my photo appearing in this story. And there it is.

And so you can drag photos around. And you can click and drag to do that. So you can move things around. And you can also add text. So I'm going to add some text here. And what you can do is you can actually use the text editor to do things like change your heading. You could add a link to another website if you like. And this is really important if, for example, you are referencing, you want to include references to other sites, you may want to add links. And of course there's quotes and bullet points and other sort of editing things that you can use here. And to do that, to save your text, you just push save. And you can see the text here. And if you want to come back later and edit it, you just click on the edit button.

But I may want to add some more images. So you can see I've got quite a few. But to add them to my story, I come over to 'Explore'. And I might want to search 'carrots'. And I'm looking for an image. So I'm filtering by image. And I might choose this photo here, from Wairarapa archive, of a young boy holding a large carrot. So I'm going to click on this button here, 'Add to story'. Now all of my stories will come up. And so I'm going to select the story that I would like to add it to and click 'Done'.

And you do have the option, if you're adding multiple images, to always add to this story. And that kind of lasts for as long as you're in this session. So we'll just go always add.

So then if I go back to the top, and come back to my stories. And new photos always come in down the bottom. So if you scroll down, you'll see it down here, but I want to move that up. So, as I showed you before, you can just move that out to underneath the carrots, underneath the text, sorry, that I'm writing about carrots.

It does take a little while to get used to, sort of, dragging the photos. But you do get the hang of it, so you can do that.

And you can also make an image full width by clicking on these three dots and make it full width. You can see down here. And you can also write your own caption. So if you want to add something to the thing, it comes up, and you can see it comes up in quite a large font. So yeah, it's just really useful to be able to do that.

Right, so now I'm going to show you some, since it's Family History Month, show you some other family history stories. And we've got one here written by Fiona G. it is called 'Potto, McCaul, and Pollock Families from Whanganui and Wellington'. And it's written by Fiona G from the Alexander Turnbull Library.

So she has written about the Potto family, who migrated to New Zealand on the ship Oliver. And she has these fantastic photos, such as Jemima Potto wearing some jet jewellery. And she's actually added her own captions. So you can see this is Alexander Turnbull's caption, and Fiona's added that she's wearing jet jewellery, which may indicate that she was in mourning.

You can see down here she has added a link. So if we click on that link, we're going through to Papers Past, where there will be some text relevant to this story. In this case, it was an advertisement where [INAUDIBLE].

And Fiona has also, if we go to the end of this story, included a number of resources. She has included references for that story. You don't need to include texts. So for example, Sarah Hewitt, in this she's written a number of family history stories about this one. She has just included seven images that relate to her Callaghan family. So you can kind of just group content together, you don't always need to tell a story.

And this family history story about the Higgie Family is really lovely. It's a three-part story written by Dan. And he has taken a family history book, or pamphlet, and he's actually created context to his family history story by adding things such as the posters and advertisements that his family may have seen to sort of encourage them to emmigrate to New Zealand. Because we don't always have family photos or portraits of our families.

They arrived in Wellington in 1840s, and so he's found some paintings of what Wellington looked like at the time to kind of add context. He has added a pamphlet, because they later went to Whanganui. And some things that were going on around the time. Some fires that they were involved with, when that occurred. That affected the family, and the earthquake, of course, in 1848.

He's pointed out, in the bottom of the story, that "Perhaps the troubled times that Thomas and Mary were having in their eight years in Wellington, made them decide to look further north to settle."

And he's actually created two more parts to his story. And the second part is where the Higgie Family arrive in Whanganui. And you can see here that yes, he arrives, there's now a map showing Whanganui and Wellington, and he's included a lot more stories there.

So I'm going to stop there and hand over to Emerson and he's going to share some tips about searching Papers Past.

Papers Past tour

Emerson Vandy: Are we on? Kia ora koutou. Ko Emerson ahau. Kei te Kaiwhakahaere Ratonga ahau i roto e Te Puna Mātauranga tuhono.

Hey everyone, I'm Emerson. I manage the Paper Past service here at National Library. And I'm going to give you a quick tour through the Papers Past website today and hopefully share a few things with you that will help you get a better, get better use out of the site. Now, I know it's Family History Month, and Papers Past is a really handy resource for family history, but everything I share with you today, I encourage you to think about it in a broader context as well. A lot of the tips I'm gonna share are equally valid for any research field. I won't be focusing just on family history, but I do have a few tips, certainly it would help those of you who are doing some family history stuff.

So, this is the Papers Past homepage. Now the collection that you probably might be most familiar with would be the newspapers collection. Once again, the tips I'll share are equally relevant in all the collections on the site here, but we'll work with this.

This collection in particular is quite large, so it does encompass a huge amount of material. So that means a lot of subjects, a lot of types of information, and a wide date range. It's the richest resource on Papers Past, so we'll do our tinkering through here.

So I'll give you just a very quick overview of how to find your way around the site. There's two main ways to use Papers Past. You can browse to material. And that's the scenario whereby you might know that you need to see page two of a particular newspaper on a particular date. Now it's up to you to maybe have an awareness that that is the right thing for you to do. You might be looking up a historical event, or potentially you might be trying to find something like a birth notice or a death notice. In either case, typically you're gonna be looking for something that has a very fixed point in time. So here's how to find things that come from particular pages or dates in the collection.

You'll see the section on the top of this page. It says 'Explore newspapers'. You've got three buttons here. You can explore by title, or by region, or by year. You can click on any one of these three. It's going to take you to this page.

Now this page is a large, sortable list of all the newspapers that were digitised. So we've done about a 170 or 180 newspapers so far. So this is displayed alphabetically, but you might also want to sort them by region. You click on the region column and it resorts them for you. You might want to sort them by year. We'll just stick with alphabetic for now.

So I'll just give you a little bit of context. We've got about 170 newspapers here. There are about 150 newspapers known to have been published in New Zealand. And so by that metric we've done maybe just over 10% of those. Now, of the ones we've digitised, we haven't necessarily digitised the whole thing. We might have started from the start, but we might not have digitised the most recent dates. There might be reasons for that, like copyright. But to give you an understanding of some of the characteristics of the collection, we might have something like 5%, 5 to 10% of the newspaper pages published in New Zealand on the site. Even so, it's a pretty decent sized resource.

Finding a newspaper on Papers Past

Let's have a look at how you would find your way to a very particular page within this collection.

Now you might start with a date. Or you might start with a newspaper. I'm gonna start with the newspaper. Now let's come up with a hypothetical example. I need to get to April the 13th for a particular year within the Evening Post. So you'll see that on that previous page, I selected Evening Post from the list of newspapers. You select the year that you're looking for. Let's say 1941. And you've got this calendar here. So from that, you can then choose the date that you will be looking around.

You can see from these calendars here, there are some dates that don't-- that are not coloured in. These are the dates when the newspaper wasn't published or maybe wasn't available. So you can click on the available dates and go directly to that issue. And from this page — this page represents the entire issue of that newspaper, that day — you can either click on one of the images of the pages, if you want to read the whole page. And on the left hand side here, you've got a list of the individual items on that page.

There's several ways to get to an individual thing. You can either click directly on that thing like this. I'll come back to that births column in a moment. Or you can click on one of the pages. And you have the same experience you would have in the library where you're browsing microfilm or looking at an old newspaper.

Couple of navigational tools here I'll just make you well aware of. We're looking at a page here. What say you want to look at the next page? Click on the 'Next page'. You can then skip, obviously, you go to page 2. Click again again, go to page 3. So far so good. Same kind of thing exists for issues of newspaper. So we're looking at the 14th of April 1941.

Let's say, hypothetically, we didn't find the thing we wanted in this newspaper by reading it. Let's look at the next issue. Maybe it's in the next date. So you click on the 'Next issue', the button up here on the top-right, or 'Previous issue' up here on the top-left. Either of these will take you to the next issue in the sequence. So hypothetically, you could keep reading each newspaper, issue after issue after issue, if you wanted.

So in the case of hunting for things like those birth notices or death notices, for those of you that are family historians, this is a handy approach. If you know the date, but you're not able to find it by searching, browsing to the material and actually reading the newspapers is a really handy thing to do.

I'm gonna back track very briefly and show you something specific. Family history. You'll see these birth notices. Now you'll see with each of these names printed here, a few characters printed directly after the names. You've got a full stop with a long dash and you've got the word on. Keep that in mind in just one moment.

And we're now going to look at the other part of how to use material on the site. So we've just discovered how to browse through the site, how to browse through the material. What if you want to search through the material? This is really handy 'cause we've got 90 million articles on the site. Google only knows about 5,000,000 of them and probably want more material than what Google can give you sometimes. Being able to search Papers Past directly will give you many, many more results.

Now when you do search, what it's going to do is if you type in a word, it's going to find articles that contain exactly that word within them, exactly the way that you've spelt it, if it can recognise exactly that spelling.

So a word is, well, we know what words are. There's a few letters in a row, and then there's a space where there's another word after it. So there's a bunch of letters and then a space.

Now if you remember just a second ago-- I'll show you how search works. Great, got an article about trout. Let's say I want an article about trout, but not about Taupo. Let's say the article should not include the word 'Taupo' in it. I want different results. So you could type in a search term like that. Give me results for trout minus articles that include the word 'Taupo'. You'll see it goes from 258,000 results, to 242,000 results.

You could also add more search terms in there. I want articles that contain 'trout', but not 'Taupo', but they do include the word 'rod'. Just makes it a bit more exclusive. So the pool of results gets smaller 'cause you're adding in more keywords. And the things that are in common with each of these results, that it will include the word 'rod' and it will include the word 'trout' and doesn't include the word 'Taupo'.

So that's a very, very quick, simple look at doing searches.

Searching for names on Papers Past

So you'll see with each of these words, we've got a word here and then there's a space. That denotes is a word. Remember the birth notice scenario we saw just a minute ago? We had a name, and then there was a dot, and then there was a long dash, and then there was another word. That's a problem specific to birth notices. Printers who printed birth notices use that type of format, that printing format. And that causes an issue for computers like we use here, because there's no space after the name.

So you have a name, there's no space, there's a dot, there's a slash, there's an on. How do you search for those names? If I was to search for a name from one of those articles, one of those birth notices-- I'm going to backtrack to it in my browser just so we're looking at exactly the right thing.

Let's see. We've got the word or the name 'Cookson'. If I search within this issue, by clicking on the search bar down there, and type 'Cookson', you'll see that we get no results. It's because of those extra characters after the word. So instead, if you search for 'Cookson' and you put an asterisk after it, which some of you will know that an asterisk is a stand in for any other letters or any other characters that occur at the end of that word, Cookson. If I search that, I should get some results. And there we go, there's your birth notice.

So that's for you family historians out there. If you want to find more birth or death notices, you're going to be dealing with this typographic problem where you've got the name, and you've got some extra characters directly bolted onto the end. And it prevents our search from recognising that name as a word. So it means those names don't show up in your search results. So this little simple trick, putting an asterisk at the end of a name, is specific for those of you doing family history research, and will help more names from those types of notices turn up in your results.

Now those of you who aren't family historians, just file that little trip away, because any search you do on Papers Past is going to be-- you're going to get really variable results, and that's going to vary according to the nature of the word you use. Maybe the word is a synonym for something else.

For example, you might be searching for, well, a person. They might have the surname 'White'. You know the word 'white' is gonna be mentioned around so many other things, you know, colours, paint, etc. How do you disambiguate the things you're looking for from these other things filling up your search results? And this is where, I think, your search methodology and your search approach is important for you to think about, irrespective of what type of research you're doing.

Let's use an example like-- the example I'm going to use is one that was introduced to me by a person doing search into a person. They had an ancestor called George Day. So when they were doing searches, they were getting heaps of results for Saint George's Day. And you'll see we've got results here that contain the word day and the word George. And you'll start seeing there's lots of Saint George stuff. And the Saint George stuff is not going to be relevant to what this person was looking for. But George Day, it's gonna surface results about Saint George's Day.

So you're going to need to think carefully about how you do this. Perhaps your George Day was known as Mr G. Day. So in the articles, he's mentioned as Mr G. Day. You might be better off searching for Mr. G. Day. One universal trick I'd share for all of you, irrespective of your type of research, is to be mindful of what-- the material that you're looking for, what that material looks like, and how the words appear in that article.

Now, depending on how the terms-- how the language is used in that article, your search terms are going to need to echo the words that appear in that article, they need to kind of match. If they don't match, those items aren't going to show up in your search results.

So you need to be a little bit sensitive. And what's going to give you the best results is just being methodical. Do a search. And then look at the results and consider what's relevant and then have a look, think about what's not relevant, and how do you focus in on the more relevant things? I would think about it, personally, along these lines.

Finding a shipping list on Papers Past

If I was looking for, for example a shipping list, list of passengers who arrived in the country, what are the words that will have to have appeared in that article? Now, off the top of my head, I know it's going to include the people's surname. I don't know what else would absolutely appear. But a good way to find out is to use the browse section again.

Let's go to a newspaper that might have published a lot of passenger notices, and let's look at what a passenger notice might have looked like. Let's go for the Lyttleton Times. Port of Lyttleton bought a lot of people into the country.

So let's start with something, let's say 1878. We'll go to a random date. Now, you see 'Article, Shipping'. Maybe this is a-- Oh, there we go, list of names. So what we've got here is an example of what a shipping notice looks like.

So now we know what this type of material looks like. So because we know what it looks like, we can refine our own search term. It looks like the word shipping is a bit of a giveaway, so my search term is going to include the word shipping. It's going to include the surnames of the people that I'm looking for. And if I knew the port, which looks like, in this case at least, the port is mentioned, so maybe that's a good thing to include. It might not be, but at least this particular example shows us that it is. It's what this newspaper used.

So those 3 bits of information should give us something relatively targeted to a shipping notice. And it looks like also the word 'passengers'. Now, that's distinct to this type of item. So if I was to search for shipping notices, I would throw the name of the people in, and I'm going to cheat and use a very common name. We want the word 'shipping' because those passenger lists include the word shipping. We're gonna throw the name of the port in, because we've seen that for that particular notice, they did include the name of the port. And-- I might have spelt that wrong. I always get that wrong. I'm just going to try both. [INAUDIBLE]. But the other word was passengers.

So there, you'll see, we've got 100,000 results. And these articles do look fairly related to passenger notices. You can see how that works. Choosing terms that are often used in the type of article you're trying to find is the best way to find the things that you're really, really looking forward in Papers Past. And that's universal. It's irrespective of whatever type of research you're trying to do. That is the approach that will give you the best results.

You can kind of treat it as a little word puzzle. It's almost like you're thinking of a fingerprint for the terms that are specific to the thing that you're looking for. And it's not just about having certain words, it's also about excluding certain words, like we saw in the first search I did with 'trout', and '-Taupo'. You might want to remove some types of results so you can use that minus trick. Minus keyword gives you articles that don't include that keyword.

You might also have other patterns of words that are distinct from the thing you're looking for, like phrases. So you can also include phrases in your search query and you might do that by-- let's focus on this one we've got. 'Latest shipping' looks like it might be a good example. so I'll put quotation marks around 'latest shipping', so now it's going to search for the word 'smith', it's going to search for the phrase 'latest shipping', and then it's going to search for 'Lyttleton' and 'passengers'. And that should make it even more specific to that very specific type of-- yeah. You can see here.

These results look much more focused around the terms that we typed in. And there's a passenger list. So I guess the moral of the story is, if you think about what you're trying to find, and you might want to look at the newspapers first to understand how that type of thing was written, find an example of how it was written, and then you can create your custom search term to try and find that item, specific thing that you're looking for.

I think that if there's anything else you-- if there's anything you need to remember from this talk, it would be that single one tip. The other second most useful tip you need to know would be to be encouraged to use the help page on Papers Past, because there are other types of search tricks that we do have. And these are all listed on our help page. They're all listed down here, under different types of search.

When you choose an "All of these words" search on Papers Past, you're effectively getting our advanced search interface, and it allows you to do things like search for multiple words; search for phrases; search for this word, but not that word; search for alternatives; search for two different phrases, this phrase or that phrase.

Fuzzy search on Papers Past

There's other tricks too like fuzzy search. Some of you will have noticed that in Papers Past, not all of the research results-- the text isn't always spelled correctly, the words aren't recognised correctly. Fuzzy search will help you with that. Fuzzy search might be useful if you've got probably a more-- a name which might be harder for a computer to recognise, based on how it's printed. You know, the newspaper itself might be slightly scratchy image quality. So if the image isn't great, we can't recognise the letter well, so the word you're typing in might not be correctly recognised. So the solution is, you can do a fuzzy search.

So if we search again for 'Smith'. Sorry, I know that's really generic and there are a lot of results for 'Smith'. I use this example far too often. If you do a fuzzy search, you're going to get some slightly different results, and that's gonna be a bigger pool of data. The results that we've got so far are exactly for S-M-I-T-H. But what if there are some legitimate Smith results where the paper's not printed perfectly? Maybe there's a smudge of ink in the wrong place and the computer recognition of the word is different and it thinks it's S-M-J-T-H. The original newspaper will still say 'Smith'. The website and the letter recognition has it wrong, but you still want that item in your search results. So this is how you do that.

So the search term I've typed in is 'Smith'. This next character is called a tilde. It looks like a horizontal S, it's usually up in the top left hand corner of your keyboard. Then you type the number one. And what that means is, I want results for 'Smith' where any one letter can be different. So it will include results for things like S-M-J-T-H or S-M-F-H, where the letter is misrecognized. And you'll see examples of this in some of these articles here. On the page, it will still say the word 'Smith' somewhere in here.

Within this article, you can see it's recognised the S as a B. 'Bmith'. Clearly it is still 'Smith'. There it is. You can see the print quality of the S is not great. It thinks it's a B. But we've managed to get that result, even though it's imperfectly spelt, by using that search term with the tilde. So that will help some of you who are dealing with material that has misrecognized letters within it.

Another common question we get asked is, "Are you gonna be doing text corrections on Papers Past at some point?" And the answer is yes, we will be doing text corrections on Papers Past. We've been making quiet progress on this over the last few years, in between other projects. For us, it's really important not just to do this, but also to do it well. So we haven't been able to rush it out alongside our other work. It is something we need to sit down and make sure we get absolutely right before we release it, but I'd just like you guys to know that it is under development.

Q1: Is the OCR in Papers Past automatic only?

I'm gonna have a look in the Q&A now and just see if there are any questions.

Question from Elwyn. "Is the OCR in Papers Past automatic only or are there human eyes also checking for errors?"

At this stage, Elwyn, it is automatic only. But for recent newspapers we've been digitising, we have been getting the article titles corrected as well. So the title text of an article is corrected, full text beneath that won't be corrected, because we don't really have enough hands on deck to do that ourselves within staff. But we're hoping that the text correction feature will help fill that gap over the years ahead.

And I think that's all the key information I have to share with you folks. If you do have any other questions, I would be very happy to answer those. And if there's any examples you'd like me to look at, again, I'd be very happy to look at those as well.

Joan McCracken: Nga mihi nui, Emerson and Kelly. That was such an interesting and useful presentation. And we do have some questions, as Emerson has indicated, which I'd like to pass on to you.

Q2: Complex search strategies on Digital NZ

"I'm a librarian at AUT University and I always recommend Digital New Zealand to our students. It is a great source of historical New Zealand images and multimedia in particular. One thing I'm often wondering about is search operators. I usually just demonstrate simple keyword and phrase searches, but could I use more complex search strategies such as boolean?"

So, Emerson's definitely answered that one for Papers Past. Kelly, can you share that thinking with Digital New Zealand as well?

Kelly Dix: Sure, I think it's-- can you see the help page for Digital NZ?

Joan McCracken: We can, yes.

Kelly Dix: Yeah, so I think that's probably the easiest way to show you. So, like Emerson and Papers Past, we have a really detailed help section. You can see here how to search; how to make a story; how to upload your own images; how to delete them; how personal images and text is moderated; how to make a gif, if you're interested in that; and reusing images, so there's some information in there about copyright.

But if we just take a look at search. You can see if we scroll down, there's a lot of-- there's some search tips and tricks, such as booleans and other complex search strategies. So yeah, take a look at that and hopefully that will help.

Q3: Draft stories on Digital NZ

I can answer the second question as well. "Creating a story"-- this is from Karen. "Creating a story, can you save, as a draft, an explanation?"

So if we take a look at my veggie garden story again, and the access. So they automatically save, but perhaps while you're working on it, you might want to set it as private, and then either make it hidden or public once you're, you know, once you're happy with this story, once you've finished. That is pretty much how that works.

Joan McCracken: Thank you Kelly. I completely dropped out then. So were you just having-- replying to our second question--

Kelly Dix: Yes.

Joan McCracken: --that is about creating a draft story?

Kelly Dix: Yeah.

Q4: Finding birth or death notices for the surname 'Love' on Papers Past

Joan McCracken: Lovely, thank you. And then we have a question here, I think Emerson, "Can you show me an example of how to find birth or death notices for the surname 'Love'? Are you going to be able to try that?

Emerson Vandy: Absolutely. Let me share screen again. Here we go. So birth notices for the surname Love. For the sake of this, I'll assume that I'm looking for a birth result for 'Love' from the 1920s.

So we'll follow the approach that I talked about. Let's first look at a piece of material from about that time period so that we know roughly what the thing we're looking for might look like.

Doesn't look like there's any birth notices there.

Here we go. Here's some. So they're using that same sort of format, okay. So what I would do is maybe loosely look at the date in question, and let's maybe leave it a year or two either side. I won't focus on a region at this point. I'll put the word 'love'. And I will put that wild card. Remember that the wild card lets you search for 'love' when there's any other words after it. And what were the other words that were specifc to that notice? Let's say the word 'son', 'cause that appeared to be used.

Okay, so we're not getting the type of control we want there. We're getting lots of advertisement type material. This looks like mentions of movies. It's important to review these and just suss out how effective our search was. Wasn't that great. But that birth notice did have a word 'birth' and 'births' at the top of it. And look, this looks like a more relevant set of results.

So that's the strategy I would use. Look at an example of the type of material that you're trying to find, maybe one that's not specific to your name, just so you can understand the types of words that appear in those articles. And then create a search that includes those words. We can see that the word 'births' appears at the top of the birth notices. A son or daughter is often mentioned in those, and the surname will be mentioned. So with those three terms, and searching for the wild card at the end of the surname, you can see that gives us some relatively targeted results that are focused on birth notices. So hopefully that covers all of your question.

Q5: What are the options if a page in Papers Past is unreadable?

Now, there's a couple of questions I can see from Ross. Ross [INAUDIBLE], here as well. "What are the options if a page in Papers Past is unreadable?"

Might be tricky, 'cause there are some unreadable pages. Let us know if the page is unreadable. We might have a version of it which is scanned at a higher quality and that might help. But in a lot of cases, we've found the best one we can. And we may not be able to do a better one. But at least if you let us know, we can always keep our eyes open and and maybe try and look for another copy or a different microfilm so we can scan another copy at a better quality. So that would be one thing I would suggest. Get in touch with us.

Q6: Marking previously viewed pages on Papers Past

And I think there was actually another question from Ross. "Have you considered a function that marks for you a page that you may have previously viewed?"

We do have that with search results. If you visited a link before-- let's say we've now visited this one. You go back to your search results, you'll see that the one you've visited, the text is now black and it's underlined. The one that we haven't visited is dark green and it's not underlined. So they are distinct.

And I would admit here that the colour contrast between dark green and black is not great. We're kind of between a rock and a hard place. We have to make the dark green quite dark so that it passes accessibility guidelines. And then we have to make the highlight colour when you've visited it also kind of high contrast against the backgrounds. We have to do something that's between a dark colour and a really dark colour. So it's imperfect.

If you would like a slightly clearer example, there is one that [INAUDIBLE] and that's in the parliamentary section. If you visit a link in there, it does at least come up in a bright purple colour, as you can see on the screen here. It's a work on for us. We do need to improve that a little bit. But hopefully, Ross, that answers your question. At least partially, I know it doesn't answer it in all scenarios.

Q7: Is it possible to bookmark a page for future reference?

Joan McCracken: Thank you, Emerson. I wondered, following on from that, is it possible to bookmark a page for future reference, rather than-- I mean, I can see in the search results that you can see where you've been. But for future reference, what would you recommend to people if they want to keep that page for future research?

Emerson Vandy: Absolutely. I would grab the link, and I'd also make a note of the reference. So let's say that this birth notice here, we want to keep a record of this somehow. Here's what I would do.

I would take a copy of that link. And I would paste that into my research document, which might just be a Word document. It might be an e-mail, might be a spreadsheet. But I would also grab this little piece of information here as well, the bibliographic info, the title of the newspaper, the date it was published on. At a bare minimum, grab those two things. Because that way, independent of Papers Past even, you can go into a library and say, can I have a look at a copy of Star from 9th January 1923 please? So record those two things. Link and grab this little piece of bibliographic information.

A workflow I think is a really personal thing, because there's lots of different ways to skin a cat, but as long as you keep records, then you're going to be in a decent place. So keep them both. Keep that link. Keep that information. And you might want to do other things beyond that point, like perhaps also grab a high resolution copy of that page, which you can do by visiting the page the article's printed on and grabbing high resolution image. You could then crop that image out and, you know, use that nice high-res thing for your notes or more references as well if you wish.

Joan McCracken: Thank you. I have very loud drilling going on in my ear. So I don't know if that's coming through on the microphone. The National Library's got some building work happening.

We're coming to an end, but I think there might be some other comments in chat. Oh, I'm being told I sound fine, so thank you for that. We will make the recording of the session available in time. But if any of you are on Facebook, and followers of the National Library website, you'll see the Facebook recording will be made available immediately, so if you want to share that with people, please do.

Are there any last minute questions from anybody that I've missed? I'm sorry if I have. Thank you to those people who shared links. I would like to share another link with you. Oh, here we are. There's one from Fiona. A question. Can you see that in chat? And Pat, would you be able to type your question into the chat or Q&A? Preferably Q&A.

Q8: Do you recommend the Research Info link on Papers Past?

So we have, from Fiona, "Do you recommend the Research Info link? I'd also like to say the first part of the URL admitting the search string--" I can't see the rest of your comment, but--

Emerson Vandy: Yeah, that's a good point Fiona makes. The Research Info tab is useful. It does contain those things like the short version of the link and the bibliographic info. And you can copy and paste all the info from one place. Now, if you're looking at a page or an article on Papers Past, it's one of the tabs just above the article image.

If you copy the entire address from the top of the page, the address bar does also give you a complete pool of search results that includes that article. It's not just that one article. So you can use that to save a complete set of results, much as you can also do the same thing if you're looking at a whole set of results and you save the address bar from the set of results.

Joan McCracken: And I think Fiona's point about URL, which is very easy to read. If you get to understand the abbreviations for the newspapers, going back to an URL will remind you that it's the Evening Post or the Christchurch Star or something. That's a really useful thing I think.

Papers Past events coming up

Kelly, we've got another Papers Past event coming up this week which we'd like to share with people. Because of the background noise here, would you mind talking about that?

Kelly Dix: Yes, of course. So as you may know, Papers Past is 21 years old this month. So we're holding, as well as this talk, we're holding three panel discussions in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland. So the Wellington event is this Thursday at the National Library from 5 to 7. There's drinks and nibbles beforehand and the event starts at 5:30.

And the Christchurch one is the 12th of September. It's a lunchtime event at Turanga. And the Auckland one's also lunch time event at the Auckland Central Public Library, Central City Library.

So if you want to find that, if you go to the National Library events page, and maybe Joan could pop that in the chat. And if you look at the August and September listings, you'll see that.

And there's also a poetry machine. You may have seen it on TVNZ Breakfast yesterday, I think. Yeah, so you can pull a lever and pull out your own poem from Papers Passed. So they're fantastic events coming up.

And now I will just share--

Joan McCracken: I think all of those events, just before we finish, Kelly, all of those events are being Zoomed as well, are they? So people can join from afar?

Kelly Dix: Not the Christchurch event, but Auckland and Wellington are.

Joan McCracken: So I hope you'll be able to join us then.

Closing

I'd like to finish today by saying, if you are interested in other events at the National Library, there is a way to sign up to our regular What's On mailing list through the events page. We've put the address in chat. And remember, you can save the chat from today and the links we have added by clicking on the ellipsis by the chat button. We look forward to the next time you can join us. Ka kite ano.

Mā te kimi ka kite
Mā te kite ka mōhio
Mā te mōhio ka mārama

Kia ora, everyone.

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Any errors with the transcript, let us know and we will fix them. Email us at digital-services@dia.govt.nz