Europeana Joins Digital New Zealand

DigitalNZ aims to make New Zealand Aotearoa’s digital content easier to find, share and use. Like Europeana we aggregate metadata relating to our geographic area. We look for content about New Zealand and New Zealanders and bring its metadata into one place for discovery via DigitalNZ Search. We also have an API so that developers and programmers can build new discovery tools to help expose our partners’ content in innovative and exciting ways.

'Moa a ruhatárban' from the Hungarian Natural History Museum, CC-BY-NC-ND

DigitalNZ is just over four years old and we currently point to over 25 million items from our 120+ content partners of all types. Our partners include television and radio companies, government agencies, a myriad of community organisations, as well as the GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums).

To support our “Share” and “Use” goals we also run Mix and Mash which aims to show what is possible when data and content is released for reuse. We also want to encourage the creation of more New Zealand digital content. Make it Digital is where you can ask questions about digital content creation and learn about digitisation good practice from the Make it Digital guides.

'Detalhe da flor de metrosideros excelsea do jardim botânico do museu nacional de história, lisboa - portugal' from the National Museum of Natural History, University of Lisbon, CC-BY-NC-ND.

New Zealand is a small country but we have wide reach. We know there is relevant New Zealand content all over the world. So over the last couple of years we’ve been identifying kiwi content held internationally and working with organisations to harvest that metadata into DigitalNZ. We have content from our closest neighbours at the National Library of Australia, State Library of Victoria, Museums Victoria and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. We also used the Victoria and Albert’s API to bring in a small but beautiful collection of New Zealand related objects.

So of course we’ve had our eye on Europeana’s API for some time because we knew that there was a goodly amount of kiwi treasure in that fine ship! Since the API was launched for more open use we’ve been experimenting to see how it would work with our harvester and how the metadata would look in the DigitalNZ search interface. We completed that work last week and now almost 1,400 stunning New Zealand related items can be discovered through our services.

We’ve made a DigitalNZ set of beautiful Europeana items that we thought you might enjoy.

Thank you to all the Europeana content partners for opening up your metadata for everyone around the world to discover, share and use. New Zealanders can now learn more about themselves and their country because of you. We are looking forward to unearthing more New Zealand treasures in your wonderful collections. Kia ora!

'Der Isthmus von Auckland (der Hauptstadt von Neu - Seeland) im Maassstabe 1:500000: [generalkarte]' from Biblioteca Virtual del Patrimonio Bibliográfico, public domain.