About the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre

Projects with partners within the University

• Each year students from the International Institute of Modern Letters work with the NZETC to produce Turbine, a literary journal, and the annual collection of Best New Zealand Poems
• The School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies has collaborated with the NZETC on several research and publishing projects including an electronic edition of the poetry of William Golder, and Kotare, an online journal of New Zealand Studies
• Tidal Pools is a joint project between the NZETC and Va'aomanū Pasifika to make available texts of interest to those researching Pacific islands history, language, culture and politics.
• The University Library sponsored a project for the School of Biological Sciences to digitise "Tuatara: The Journal of the Biological Society"
• The NZETC has worked with Victoria University Press on several projects, notably the creation of an online archive of the Sport literary journal
• The J C Beaglehole Room is an important partner for the NZETC and a major source of the heritage material that is digitised to form the online collection.
• Wai-te-ata Press, the NZETC and the J C Beaglehole Room collaborated on the Print History Project

Projects with external partners

Library Technology Services no longer seeks this kind of contract work but continues to work as a partner with other libraries and digital content projects including Matapihi, Digital NZ, Creative Commons NZ, and the Kiwi Research Information Service.

XML and TEI are the document mark-up standards which underpin the work of the NZETC. Information on TEI can be found through the Text Encoding Initiative. Other key technologies used at the NZETC include topic maps and XTM, XSLT, Apache Cocoon and Lucene. More information is given below.

Books, images, and collections are navigable through a dynamically-generated semantic framework, which represents the first release of a large-scale XML Topic Map (XTM) site in New Zealand. Users are able to move around the resources on the site tracking topics of interest rather than merely browsing the material linearly or through text searching. In a topic map, web-based resources are grouped around items called "topics", each of which represents some subject of interest. In the NZETC topic map, the topics represent books, chapters, and illustrations, and also people and places mentioned in those books.

Topics in a topic map are linked together with hyperlinks called "associations". There can be different types of association in a topic map, representing the different kinds of relationship in the real world. For instance, in the NZETC topic map, the topic which represents a particular person may be linked to a topic which represents a chapter of a book which mentions that person. This association would be labelled to indicate that it represents a "mention". Similarly, the same person's topic might be linked to a particular photograph topic, via a "depiction" association.

To construct our topic map, we use XSLT stylesheets to extract metadata from each of our XML text files, and express it in the XTM format. In this way we automatically create hundreds of topic maps, each of which describes one of our texts. We also harvest information about people, places and organisations from an entity authority file which we construct from what is mentioned in our collection. Finally we merge the harvested topic maps together to create a unified topic map which describes our entire website.

Each page on the website represents one of these topics, along with any associated topics.

The Topic Map framework for the NZETC website was presented at the launch of the new information architecture on 5 May 2005. PowerPoint slides from the presentation are available.

Papers on the NZETC technical infrastucture are available through the Victoria University ResearchArchive

We use the open source TM4J Topic Map engine for merging and querying our topic map.

We use an XML publishing framework called Apache Cocoon to publish the NZETC website.

Cocoon is a Java servlet and hence it can be deployed on a wide variety of systems. We run Cocoon inside the Apache Tomcat servlet container (the official reference Implementation for the Java Servlet specification), using JVM version 1.6 from Sun Microsystems.

Cocoon offers a flexible environment based on the separation of concerns between content, logic and style.

Cocoon can deliver documents in a variety of formats, including HTML, PDF, RTF, SVG, JPEG, PNG, and any other XML-based format. We have also integrated software to produce Microsoft's eBook Reader format.

We use Cocoon to transform our XML texts into readable documents using XSLT stylesheets.

Cocoon can perform these transformations on demand; i.e. when a request is received from a web browser. Each request is handled by reading the appropriate XML document or documents, and processing the XML data in a succession of stages, first applying logical, then presentational transformations. Each stage is distinct and can be effectively managed by different people. Our web designer can edit the look of the site, the web developer can edit the structure of the site, and the text-editors can edit the content of the site (the e-texts), all independently of each other. To install a new text, the editors can simply upload the XML document and associated image files into the webserver via FTP. The document will then be automatically converted to HTML and divided into separate pages for each chapter, and scaled-down thumbnail versions of the JPEG graphics will be created using the XML graphics format SVG. To change the overall look of the site, the web-designer can upload new design elements such as CSS stylesheets, new versions of the logo, navigation menu, etc, in the same way. When a document is displayed to the reader, the content will be automatically inserted into this new design.

We use Lucene for searching. Lucene is a full-text search engine written entirely in Java, published by the Apache Software Foundation.

Copyright and re-use of content queries

Richard Robertson, Digital Projects Assistant, Victoria University of Wellington Library
Email: richard.robertson@vuw.ac.nz
Phone: +64 4 463 5898
Postal Address: The Library, Victoria University of Wellington, P O Box 3438, Wellington 6140, New Zealand

Reporting an error

Max Sullivan, Digital Projects Officer, Victoria University of Wellington Library
Email: max.sullivan@vuw.ac.nz
Phone: +64 4 463 7418
Postal Address: The Library, Victoria University of Wellington, P O Box 3438, Wellington 6140, New Zealand

General inquiries

Michael Parry, Digital Initiatives Co-ordinator, Victoria University of Wellington Library
Email: michael.parry@vuw.ac.nz
Phone: +64 4 463 9734
Postal Address: The Library, Victoria University of Wellington, P O Box 3438, Wellington 6140, New Zealand