New digital stuff from the National Library of New Zealand
Posted 23 February 2009 // Helen Rickerby
A digital lock of Katherine Mansfield's hair
Recently, I went to a forum where staff from the National Library showed off some of the new digital things and projects they’ve been working on.
Here at Te Ara, we’re hoping these projects will make it easier for us to find resources, and to connect our information with other people’s.
No longer concerned only with looking after books and other things made of paper in their bunker-like building (of which I’m very fond), the folks at the National Library have been working hard to make New Zealand material (their own and other people’s) more easily accessible to everyone via the internet. They’ve also started preserving digitally born material, such as websites.
This is just a quick overview of some the things I found especially interesting - click through to the web pages to have a proper look.
Digital New Zealand: http://www.digitalnz.org/
Using this website you can search across the digital material (images, text, videos etc) held by a number of different organisations, including us. You can also make little search widgets to put on your website, and using ‘Memory Maker‘ you can remix things like photos, film clips and music to make your own short video.
Donald McLean Papers/Manuscripts and Pictorial search: http://mp.natlib.govt.nz/
A project to digitise selected papers from the Sir Donald McLean collection in the Alexander Turnbull Library, has also led to a new and much-snazzier interface for searching across the manuscripts and pictorial material the library holds. There are also some objects - one of my favs is this record for a lock of Katherine Mansfield’s hair, which is kept in the library’s curio collection.
Hard-core searchers will enjoy the search filters down the right-hand side of the search-results screen.
Be Heard. Forever: http://www.myspace.com/beheardforever
The National Library has been using Myspace to encourage musicians to legally deposit their albums.
Kiwi Research Information Service: http://nzresearch.org.nz/
If you’re interested in New Zealand research, this is the place to go. It gathers metadata from contributing institutions, and you can get an rss feed about your topic of interest, be it the rubberband algorithm or female imperialism.
Digital legal deposit: http://www.natlib.govt.nz/services/legal-deposit-donations/web-deposit-tool
You can now deposit your digital publications with the National Library via a web-deposit tool. Possibly they don’t want all the holiday snaps you took on your new digital camera, but you could check out their collections policy, just to make sure.
Other things, briefly
The library is also on Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, and has three blogs. Phew!
I’ve always been interested in how that lock of hair got into the Library’s collections before making it digital released it again.
According to the caption, “This lock of hair was left behind in a cottage rented by Murry from Lady Maufe, after Katherine’s death and came to the Library per the New Zealand High Commission, London, 1958.”
How lovely is that? Murry carried around a lock of his wife’s hair following her death. Was it a gift - or did he make it himself?
But why did he leave it behind in the cottage? And how did Lady Maufe know whose it was?
(Lady Maufe also collected over 2000 belt buckles, apparently.)
Anyway, I work on DigitalNZ, and it’s great you’re sharing Te Ara (and other Ministry for Culture and Heritage) content through our tools.
Check it out: someone has even made a DigitalNZ Katherine Mansfield search that includes material from NZHistory.net.nz! If you put *:* in the search box, you can see all the results at once.
We look forward to working with you to make more of your content easier to ‘discover, share and use’ this year!
Hi Helen
Thanks heaps for the shout-out for the Library’s work. You know, I’d completely forgotten about the lock of Mansfield’s hair - I’m going to put that out as this afternoon’s tea-break tweet on Twitter!