The NZETC Collection Accessing the NZETC Collection Representation of Texts Quality Standards Updating of the Collection Collection Links Formats Licensing and Conditions of Use Information about web browsers Suggestions for Additions to the Collection

The NZETC Collection

The NZETC collection is a large and ever growing resource currently (as of May 2009) around 185,000 web pages, equivalent to approximately 160,000 pages of printed material. Although much of the collection is comprised of previously-published material, significant parts of the collection (such as Kotare and Turbine) are born-digital, having no print incarnation. Of the previously-published material, much is historical (such as The Cyclopedia of New Zealand, and The Railways Magazine) and therefore doesn't represent contemporary opinion or fact; however, in the interests of textual fidelity, we present these texts as they were published, making no attempt to correct or amend texts for reasons of spelling, factual correctness or otherwise. We consider that it is important that researchers are able to access the text as originally published, and in doing so they may learn about various features of editorial and print production as well as historical opinion and social mores.

The collection also includes significant amounts of more contemporary material (such as the Sport literary journal), and we continually endeavour to provide balance to the collection by augmenting our contemporary content. However, although there is much contemporary material which would be of interest to readers, we are often constrained by copyright considerations, often meaning that simply the effort involved in determining who has the ability to offer permission for online reproduction — let alone the time and effort involved in the actual negotiations with the copyright holder — precludes us from including such material in the collection.

Most of the historical material in our collection is sourced from printed resources, though there are some parts of the collection which are based on manuscript documents (such as the John Cawte Beaglehole letters and Cox's Diary). However, the effort involved in transcribing manuscript material (which must be done manually) precludes us from presenting a large amount of manuscript material on our site. We hope that visitors to this website find that we have faithfully respresented online the texts that we have included in the collection.

Accessing the NZETC Collection

We have endeavoured to provide a collection which is easy to access and navigate through, and this is acomplished by a variety of means:

our collection is regularly indexed by search engines, and material on our site often appears listed near the top of search engine results; we provide a search mechanism, allowing site visitors to search our collection via a number of criteria; we provide a number of links on our home page which allow site visitors to access all works in the collection by the title of the work, by author, and by a simple subject classification scheme; we also segment the collection into distinct projects; we provide hyperlinking such that many of the names of people, places, organisations etc appearing in texts will link to a topic page for that entity describing where else they appear in the collection.

We find that the majority of visitors to our collection find material on our site via a search engine, therefore we try to provide information about a given text in the side-bar appearing next to the digital text.

Representation of Texts

We aim to faithfully represent the structure of each text included on our website. As such, the starting point for a text included in our collection is what we call the derived table of contents which, as the name implies, is derived from the structural makeup of the text. For example, contrast the derived table of contents for Rachel Barrowman's Victoria University of Wellington: 1899—1999 A History with the actual printed table of contents for the same text.

We attempt to capture certain features represented in our texts, including:

special characters such as macrons, non-Latin alphabetic characters etc; line breaks when representing poetry or manuscript material; structural differences between passages of text; italicisation, bolding and capitalisation.

However, there are certain features appearing in our texts that we don't attempt to represent:

words hyphenated across a line-break, when not representing line-breaks; exact representation of point-size differences in various parts of the text; the actual measure (width) of the text; the original placement of footnotes and endnotes.

Due to the vagaries of HTML representation, certain features such as indentation of particular lines may not exactly match the printed counterpart. Unfortunately, these differences are often outside of our control and represent the fact that it is very difficult if not impossible to present an exact facsimilie of a printed document in HTML.

Representation of certain features, such as special characters and the measure of the text depend on the web-browser that is being used to view our collection, and as such may be under your control (for example, by altering the width of your browser window, you will alter the measure of the text displayed).

Quality Standards

We aim for a character accuracy of 99.95%. What this means in practical terms is that there may be around an average of one error per printed page, depending on the number of characters on that page.

With some texts we make scanned images of the pages available as well, so these can be checked against the digital text if anyone thinks that we have made a transcription error. If the error existed on the original printed page, then we consider it necessary to represent this error in the digital version (see above).

If you discover an error in one of our texts that you think did not exist in the printed original, please feel free to email us details of the error. We would appreciate it if you could quote the passage of text containing the error, as well as providing us with the address or link to the page containing the error (which can be copied from your browser's address bar).

Updating of the Collection

Because of the size of our collection, we only do updates on a periodic basis, as a lot of computational work can be involved in refreshing the collection on our production server. As such, although we may have been informed of particular errors or added new texts to our collection internally, it may take a few weeks before we are able to represent the changes on our live website. We normally advertise significant updates to the collection on our home page, as well as on our weblog

Collection Links

We attempt to provide a means of navigation through our collection by linking mentions of significant names of entities such as people, places and organisations. These will typically link to a topic page for that entity, offering links to other occurences of the entity elsewhere in the collection. For example, the topic page for Samuel Marsden contains information such as:

works by Samuel Marsden in our collection, including texts, letters, etc.; works where Samuel Marsden is the subject of the text; works that mention Samuel Marsden; works that cite the work of Samuel Marsden; images featuring or connected to Samuel Marsden; links to external collections that contain definitive information about Samuel Marsden.

It is very possible that these topic pages do not contain all mentions of a particular entity in our collection; using the search mechanism may reveal other occurences not captured on the topic page, however we endeavour to represent all significant mentions of the entitiy on the topic page.

Formats

As well as providing texts in HTML format, we also attempt to provide alternative formats:

eBook formats, allowing people to download and read the text on their eBook reader. Where possible we make our texts available using the open ePub standard. EPub ebooks can be read on a range of devices such as the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch using readers such as LexCycle's Stanza. Information about transfering ePub texts to your iPhone or iPod Touch can be found on LexCycle's site. More information about downloading ePub texts from the NZETC site and transferring them onto your device is available on our blog. fascimilie PDFs of page images, where there are no copyright restrictions and where it is considered important to be able to refer to the original page, such as the Nineteenth Century Novels Collection; text-based PDFs, where the original material is manuscript, for example the John Cawte Beaglehole letters; the underlying TEI XML, showing the markup that we employ to represent the text;

If there are particular formats that you would like us to support, please contact us with the details.

Licensing and Conditions of Use

Where possible, we make the texts on our website available under a Creative Commons license, typically Attribution Share-alike, although other more restrictive licenses may be used. This will be noted in the sidebar, and we are typically only able to use an Attribution Share-alike license where the original printed text is out of copyright in New Zealand.

The Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license allows anyone to re-use material in our texts that feature this license under the following conditions:

attribution to the source of the material is included by marking the material with our name ("The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre") and the link to the material as found on our website; the re-use of the material is licensed under the same license, allowing others to further re-use the material. This means that the re-use of the material must be marked with the same Creative Commons license.

Use of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license allows us to make material freely available to the community for re-use, and also ensures that:

any errors in the material can be traced back to the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre as the originator of the digital reproduction; such material continues to be freely available to the community after subsequent re-use.

If a more restrictive Creative Commons license other than Attribution Share-alike license is used, then you will need to refer to the license text (available by clicking on the license logo) for the specific restrictions and re-use allowed. These restrictions may prohibit such actions as the making of derivatives or use of the material in a commercial context.

We should make it clear that, with material that we make available under Creative Commons licenses, to the best of our knowledge the material may be copied and otherwise re-used without copyright-related restriction other than that expressed in the Creative Commons license.

While the NZETC has sought to ensure there are no intellectual property rights in the material that would prevent copying and other re-use, please note that material on this website marked with a Creative Commons license is released on an as-is basis and with no representations or warranties of any kind, to the greatest extent permissible by law. Subject to any liability which may not be excluded or limited by law, the NZETC shall not be liable on any legal basis (including without limitation negligence) and hereby expressly excludes all liability for loss or damage howsoever and whenever caused to you.

For texts that do not feature a link to the Creative Commons License in the sidebar, you should refer to our standard conditions of use. Typically, this will mean contacting us directly for that material in our collection not marked with a Creative Commons License, and that you wish to re-use.

Information about web browsers

In providing our collection online, we have no control over how a given webpage is rendered by your web browser. Different browsers render certain material differently, and modern web browsers normally feature a variety of features which you as the user can control, and which can make your browsing experience more enjoyable, such as:

control over the colour and size and typeface of the text presented in the browser window; control over the width of the text presented in the browser window; control over whether or not images appear in the browser window; control over quick navigation to the top or the bottom of the page;

We suggest getting familiar with the features of your chosen web browser, as this will very likely make your use of our website and others more enjoyable.

Suggestions for Additions to the Collection

We are always interested in hearing of suggestions for further works that should be digitised and made available online, however we also need to know that there are no complications regarding copyright permissions for online reproduction of the material. If you think you have a suggestion for a text that should be included in our collection, and it appears to meet the criteria stated in our mission statement and in our Digital Selection Policy, then please feel free to contact us with the details.

We are also interested in hearing from organisations working in the cultural memory sphere that would be interested in collaborating with the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre to digitise material from their own collections.