Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Kauri Timber Company catalogue in pageflow

A core part of Te Ara is the wealth of images and other resources we include with each entry. Some of the resources include digitisations of physical objects such as maps, books, and letters, and our clever designers have been hard at work making and tweaking whizzy interfaces to bring these to life on the web.

As Helene Coulson (who was Te Ara’s lead designer until she recently abandoned us in the pursuit of higher education), says:

Online environments can feel really sterile, stripped of context and physical sensation. When we transcribe a document or display a tiny version it can be difficult for users to get a sense of the age, beauty and decrepitude of the original, and therefore its history and life in the real world. These interfaces are about trying to preserve some of that, while also offering new ways of interacting. We’re able to use new technology to better deliver old artefacts to more people.

The two new interfaces you can already find on Te Ara are Pageflow and Zoomify. Pageflow, built entirely in-house by Heath Sadlier (now our lead designer), allows you to browse through pages in a book, as in this example of the Kauri Timber Company Catalogue from 1906.

Illustration of a kōwhai in zoomify

Zoomify, which our designers have customised for our needs, helps you to explore very large, detailed images by zooming in and out, and moving up, down and sideways. This is primarily used for historical documents, such as this illustration of a kōwhai printed in an 1791 magazine; and maps, like these maps showing the location of New Zealand sawmills in 1907.

Later this year you can look forward to the introduction of PDF facsimiles that will give you the ‘flavour’ of the original historical document but with the added features of searchable and selectable text.