Content wrap-up: April–July 2015

Posted on 01 July 2015 by Ting

Over the last few months we have welcomed more great content partners to DigitalNZ. We now have a total of 186 content partners with over 29 million searchable items on www.digitalnz.org. This quarter we were really excited to work with a number of New Zealand museums, a family collection of WW1 photographs, a major international partner, and we have also brought in additional collections from existing content partners.


We are really excited to be working with the New Zealand Fashion Museum and harvesting content from online exhibitions from their website. The New Zealand Fashion Museum is dedicated to sharing New Zealand’s rich fashion heritage and their content explores the stories of designers and their creations that have contributed to New Zealand’s distinctive fashion identity.

A long multicoloured jacket and black skirt on a tailor's form.

Image: Linen day jacket. By Colin Cole. Courtesy of Carolyn McCondach. CC-BY-NC-SA.


We also are now pointing to a fascinating collection of WWI photographs published by the Laurie family through Flickr. These were taken by John Laurie's grandfather in Egypt and Palestine during 1915–1919. John digitised these photographs and has made them available on Flickr under a Public Domain licence.

Two men wearing military uniforms standing in front of a sphinx statue.

Image: Alexandria, Sphinx at Pompey's Pillar, 1915-1919 / WRD Laurie. Public Domain.


This quarter Canterbury Museum has worked with us to make their 10,000+ records searchable on DigitalNZ. As one of our newest content partners, their collection highlights include architectural plans from the Benjamin Mountford Collection, photographs and negatives from the Joan Woodward Collection, digitised biographical entries from the MacDonald Dictionary and a wealth of objects, photographs and stories about the Christchurch Earthquakes. This collection is now also discoverable at www.ceismic.org.nz, a portal to the broad range of material about the Canterbury earthquakes.


We warmly welcomed the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as one of our international content partners. DPLA is the “DigitalNZ for America”; they bring together rich collections from a wide range of cultural organisations across the USA. Like us, they want to share their digital treasures far and wide, so they make the metadata of the collections they aggregate available for anyone to use. This means we can now point you to fabulous New Zealand content from organisations such as the Smithsonian Institute, National Archives, Californian Digital Library and Mountain West Digital Library.

Old map of New Zealand.

Image: New Zealand. (with) New Guinea. (with) Wellington. (with) Dunedin and Otago Harbour. (with) Auckland. (with) Chatham Is. Keith Johnston's General Atlas. Sept. 1910. Engraved, Printed, and Published by W. & A.K. Johnston, Limited, Edinburgh & London. CC-BY-NC-SA.


The award-winning Mataura Museum have been keen to share more widely their 2600+ digital collection. So we were delighted to bring this excellent community collection onto DigitalNZ. This small volunteer-run museum has worked hard to both digitise their collection and open a brand new museum in March 2015. Their dedication was deservedly recognised when they were announced as the joint winner of the Best Museum Project at the 2015 New Zealand Museum Awards.

Cup and saucer with a river scene.

Image: Cup and Saucer, Mataura Flood 1913; Victoria, Schmidt & Co; after 1918; MT2011.181. From the collection of the Mataura and Districts Historical Society Incorporated. All rights reserved.


The New Zealand Medical Journal is the official journal for the New Zealand Medical Association and is the principal scientific journal for the medical profession in New Zealand. This is such important New Zealand material and we are very pleased to make all of the open access journal editions discoverable in DigitalNZ. 


Other new content partners and collections we have welcomed this quarter include Youtube videos on WW100 perspectives from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, the Nelson Provincial Museum W100 website, and two new collections from Otago University Library: the Media Studies 101 textbook (CC-BY) and the Hocken YouTube collection.


We've turned off comments here, but we'd still love to know your thoughts. Visit us on our Facebook Page @digitalnz or on Twitter @DigitalNZ to share any ideas or musings with the DigitalNZ team.