Stronger together: digitisation of early Auckland newspapers

Tuesday November 20th, 1:30pm-1:55pm @ Rangimarie 2 - Breakout Room

In 2015 Paula Legel approached the digitisation team at the National Library with some interesting questions. Auckland War Memorial Museum, along with Auckland City Libraries and the Hocken Library, Otago University were planning to digitise three Auckland newspapers from the 1840s and she wanted to make sure that these could, at some stage, be incorporated into Papers Past.

Eventually this developed into a project that also included the Alexander Turnbull Library and the digitisation team at National Library. The end result is that the New Zealand Herald & Auckland Gazette, the Auckland Chronicle & New Zealand Colonist and the Auckland Times are now freely accessible on Papers Past and digital copies of these fragile papers will be preserved in perpetuity.

From there to here has been a long process, and thrown up some interesting challenges. Collaboration is often seen as a way around some of the issues the GLAM sector faces. Come and hear how collaboration between 4 institutions and 3 vendors worked in practice, from two of the parties involved. We will look at what worked, what didn’t, and what we would do in the future.