Introduction

The New Zealand Electronic Text Collection comprises significant New Zealand and Pacific Island texts and materials held by Victoria University of Wellington Library. This encompasses both digitised heritage material and born-digital resources. The NZETC supports the teaching, learning and research activities at Victoria University of Wellington through: The digitisation of historical works held uniquely by the Victoria University Library with an emphasis on works created by Victoria; The support of the creation of born-digital resources created by Victoria. The texts made available on the NZETC are freely accessible to all researchers regardless of their affiliation with Victoria University of Wellington.

New resources are added to the NZETC according to a collection development policy which can be accessed on the Victoria University of Wellington Library website.

History

The NZETC, formerly known as the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, was created in 2002 as part of the School of English at Victoria University of Wellington. In 2004 the NZETC became part of the Library at Victoria University working on a range of digital initiatives alongside the Digital Services team who managed the library management system, web presence, intranet and specialist application support. In 2010 a new Library Technology Services team was established which took on strategic and operational responsibilities for all Library technology services and projects including the NZETC collections.

The Collection

The New Zealand Electronic Text Collection is a large and ever growing resource comprising of:

• Digitised historical texts (such as The Cyclopedia of New Zealand, and The Railways Magazine)
• Digitised manuscript documents (such as John Cawte Beaglehole's letters)
• Digitised or born-digital contemporary texts (such as the Sport literary journal)

These texts are presented as they were published, making no attempt to correct or amend texts for reasons of spelling, factual correctness or otherwise. The aim for digitised texts is a character accuracy of 99.95%. Scanned images of the pages are available with some texts, so these can be checked alongside the digital text. Please contact us if you notice any errors in the transcription.

New texts are added to the collection regularly, often as part of collaborations with partners within the University. These partners include:

• The International Institute of Modern Letters, to publish Turbine, and the annual collection of Best New Zealand Poems.
• The School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies, past collaborations include an electronic edition of the poetry of William Golder, and Kotare, an online journal of New Zealand Studies.
• Va'aomanū Pasifika to establish Tidal Pools, a joint project to make available texts of interest to those researching Pacific islands history, language, culture and politics.
• The School of Biological Sciences to make available Tuatara: The Journal of the Biological Society.
• The Victoria University Press, past collaborations include an online archive of the Sport literary journal
• The J C Beaglehole Room is an important partner and a major source of the heritage material that is digitised to form the online collection.
• Wai-te-ata Press, past collaborations include the Print History Project.

Library Technology Services no longer seeks contract projects with external partners, but we continue to work as a partner with other libraries and digital content projects including Matapihi, Digital NZ, Creative Commons NZ, and the Kiwi Research Information Service.