DigitalNZ is a service run by the National Library of New Zealand and funded by the New Zealand Government. It is aimed at making New Zealand digital content easier to find, share and use. To date there are over 25 million digital items available to view from over 120 partner organisations. The partner organisations include from the cultural institutions, government departments, publicly funded organisations, educational and research organisations as well as the private sector and community groups. The digital content available to search in DigitalNZ includes photographs, artworks, newspapers, books, other archival material, journal articles, music, film and data sets. DigitalNZ also supports the creation and digitisation of new material, hosts content, advocates for Creative Commons NZ licences and the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework, and promotes and encourages the creative reuse of digital material.
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History
DigitalNZ was officially launched on 3 December 2008. Prior to its official launch, DigitalNZ worked on and launched the Coming Home search experience and the Coming Home Memory Maker campaign. Both of those experiences went live on 11 November 2008 as part of the celebrations of the 90th anniversary of the World War One Armistice.
Finding
DigitalNZ aims to make discoverable New Zealand digital content. Much of the content available via DigitalNZ's federated search function is part of the deep web. Deep web content is not indexed by standard search engines and so does not appear in standard search engine results. The project continues to recruit content-contributing partners and harvests content metadata via auto-updating XML sitemaps, RSS feeds, or OAI-PMH compliant feeds. Contributor's content must have a connection and relevance to New Zealand and also have metadata (machine readable content descriptions).
Sharing
The project is making more digital content available as its partners build on their contributions. DigitalNZ also continues to recruit new partner organisations. It supports digitisation efforts via its Make it Digital site, where it provides guides to assist digitisation good practice and a platform to nominate, discuss and vote on possible digitisation projects. It aims to encourage organisations who are undertaking digitisation work, or who are funding digitisation, to test digitisation against community wishes. DigitalNZ has also provided seed funding to a number of ideas nominated on this platform.
DigitalNZ also provides API access to computer programmers so the programmers can use the metadata to create their own applications.
Using
The project also encourages the reuse and remixing of both the metadata and content (rights permitting). It encourages contributors to open their content to reuse and remix by providing educational guides on rights management and supporting creative commons licenses. As an aggregator of metadata rather than hosting the content itself, DigitalNZ relies on the contributors to check the copyright status of contributions and commit to openness and reuse.
Digital NZ has run two Mix & Mash Competitions, in association with CreativeCommons Aotearoa/ NZ, aimed at promoting and providing examples of community reuse and remixing of digital content. Supreme winners to date are:
Make it Digital
Make it Digital provides good practice guides for creating digital content and identifies elements of good practice based on an understanding of the digital content life cycle. [1]