Quietly launching in the last week of June was a major update to Papers Past, New Zealand's largest free online digitised resource. Papers Past, featuring newspapers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is now bigger, faster and fully text searchable thanks to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology.
Papers past was first launched in 2001 with quarter of a million digitised pages of New Zealand historic newspapers. It now has five times that many pages (1.3...
Since Make It Digital launched, we've had a lot of questions from people, wondering whether they should post on behalf of their company/agency or as an individual.
The protocols that apply when you are acting as an official representative of your agency are the same whether you are talking to the media, speaking at a conference...
On Saturday the 20th of June, we ran a small DigitalNZ HackTest, a bit of a test-run before we start with the HackFests. We invited people to come along and:
Give our API a decent thrashing
Whip up some code samples to help other developers kick-start their own creations
Make nice stuff
Consume pizza, beer and sugary confections
We are really pleased with how the the day turned out.
On 24-25 June, I attended the Future of the Book conference organised by the Digital Publishing Forum in Auckland.
For the sake of expediency, here are some occasional thoughts and things I took away. Hopefully the presentations will be up on the site soon so you can get a fuller picture.
Talkingtothecan (who I sat next to) has also done an excellent job of summarising some key themes. You can track back through the tweets at #nzdpf too.
As the word of our Make it Digital site launch starts to spread, it is a great opportunity to point you to a new resource available on the site which we are really proud of. The Make it Digital Scorecard has been in development and testing over the past six months, and makes its public debut for the first time on this new site. The scorecard is designed to help organisations decide and prioritise what materials they should digitise. Now it's out there, we're really keen to...
By natlib.
Can you recommend a free software for cataloging a family photograph collection? Some of them are born digital, some are slides, negatives or prints that I have scanned.I would like to enter basic information of each photo, such as description, date, place, photographer, subject key words and formats that I keep (slide, negative, print, and file format of digital photo eg. tiff or jpeg). Would also be good of course to attach a digital image. A feature like tagging and search with keywords...
We're all quite excited because our new site, Make It Digital, launched today.
The site is focused on creating and sharing New Zealand digital content, which we're tackling in two ways:
1. The Guides and Ask a Question sections are designed to help people who are trying to create new digital content, or digitise their stuff. A lot of you will have questions on how to go about digitisation and this is the place where you can ask. We hope that some of you will be able to share your expertise by...
One of the questions we get asked most when working with New Zealand content creators is ‘what’s an API’?. Quickly followed by… ‘so, why would you do this?’
In short, an API (Application Programming Interface) is a way for applications to talk to each other; and a way for developers to talk to applications.
By natlib.
If your family has some correspondence from a famous dead person, and that person has an estate that actively controls their copyright - can you digitise your family heirloom under a CC license?
By natlib.
An author is seeking my permission to add to his publication a photograph that I have given to him as part of his research. I have no qualms about given him this permission. Can you please advise on how I can write this in a letter. [Originally asked by R A Stephens on April 06, 2009, on www.digitalnz.org]
