Our history

Find out what we've been up to behind the scenes at DigitalNZ.org — from our beginnings as a ‘a gleam in the eye of Cabinet’ to being a home for more than 300 cultural heritage, media, community, and research digital collections.

Redesigning the Explore page

January 2024
We all have our own preferences when it comes to searching DigitalNZ. We revamped the Explore page acknowledging the many ways to explore DigitalNZ. You can still use keywords to search DigitalNZ, but we have added links to popular searches and highlighted our newest partner organisations. Use the slider to explore by date range, and check out the featured record highlighting interesting items from the collections. Finally, at the end of the Explore page, you can discover a random record.

Upload your own images

November 2020
We made a significant change at the end of the year when we launched a new feature that allows people to add their own images to DigitalNZ Stories. People are invited to upload any whakaahua/images of their rohe, their family, or any image that helps tell their story. People can upload images directly from their phone's image library, or scan or re-photograph hard copy photos that are sitting in a shoebox at the back of cupboards. The feature was designed with genealogists and teachers in mind, but is open to everyone.

Security and accessibility

September 2019
Maintenance of DigitalNZ and important security updates were a focus in the second half of 2019. This ongoing work is integral to the technical sustainability of DigitalNZ. The team also engaged Access Advisors (an initiative of Blind Low Vision New Zealand) to conduct an accessibility audit of DigitalNZ.org. They recommended changes that we began implementing, the first of which was to ensure that the login and password change process was easy for people using screen readers.

A new look for item pages

February 2019
We made a major design change early in 2019 when every item page on DigitalNZ was refreshed with a new look. Alongside aesthetic changes, we developed a different way of expressing metadata on these pages, taking a full sentence, plain English approach. The most significant change was in the way that copyright information was conveyed. We developed a traffic-light-inspired model that clearly showed people what they could and couldn’t do with the items they found. Check out Michael Lascarides’s presentation at 2019’s National Digital Forum conference for more detail on this change.

DigitalNZ turns 10

December 2018
This year DigitalNZ turned 10 and we celebrated with a presentation at the National Digital Forum conference about our history and how the internet has changed over the course of our existence, as well as a programme of social media activity, and a morning tea for staff and friends at the National Library. We also produced a new video to better explain who we are and the work that we do.

Moving to the Cloud

June 2018
Over the course of 2018 we began work to move DigitalNZ’s software and data to the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Our hardware was aging fast and we needed a solution to ensure our services were sustainable into the future. This was an ongoing, staggered process, and we were supported by the All of Government Cloud Framework Agreement. Being in the cloud was an exciting opportunity that allowed us to achieve unprecedented reliability, scale, and adaptability for the suite of DigitalNZ services.

Brand new website and stories

August 2017
In the first half of 2017, the team were hard at work developing and testing a new website for www.digitalnz.org, which was launched to the public in August. The new website was not only a full refresh of DigitalNZ’s look, but was also a redesign of the search filters and tabs. As part of the refresh, all pages were made accessible and responsive across all devices and 'sets' were expanded to 'stories'. Now, people could bring together items and also write text, annotations, and resize and reorder content.

200 Content partners

November 2016
At the 2016 National Digital Forum we announced our 200th content partner, The Spinoff, an online news website.

Open source award

October 2016
DigitalNZ won the Open Source Use in Government Award at the 2016 New Zealand Open Source Awards. We were thrilled to win after being nominated three times previously and received great feedback from our peers in the open source sector.

DigitalNZ Day

October 2015
At the end of the year we hosted a number of our content partners and other interested people at a DigitalNZ Day at the National Library. During the day we shared the results of the values research we had recently completed and we also took the chance to workshop ideas with the group about the future of DigitalNZ and areas where we should focus our efforts.

Launch of concepts API

October 2015
Late in 2015 we launched the Concepts API, the first step in our People and Places data enrichment, which allows for linkages between people and items. The first iteration of the Concepts API was launched with the people authority records from five different collections. You can read all about it in this blog post.

A future for the Kete Digital Repositories

October 2015
Early in 2015, members of DigitalNZ and a reference group from around the country met to discuss the future of the Kete digital repositories. The existing Kete software was near the end of its life. It was agreed that DigitalNZ should test bringing National Library of New Zealand's existing APNK Kete features into an updated DigitalNZ service. At the National Digital Forum conference at the end of the year, we demonstrated a prototype of this service, alongside new plans for "Sets" (now "Stories").

We move onto supplejack

February 2015
In 2015 we achieved a significant infrastructure milestone when we migrated our harvesting processes and search APIs to run solely off the new open source software, Supplejack. Also, Ngā Taonga became the first organisation to use Supplejack for their own purposes, for the new aggregated search on their website.

GIF IT UP

November 2014
In November we worked with the Digital Public Library of America to stage the inaugural GIF IT UP challenge. This was a fun challenge calling for GIFs made from openly licensed and public domain material found on either DigitalNZ or the DPLA. The challenge received over a hundred entries from around the world, including this one from Nono Burling which reused material from the University of Southern California Libraries.

Retiring old services

October 2014
In October we reviewed and then deprecated some of our older services. We bid a fond farewell to Matapihi, an aggregated search service which was a predecessor to DigitalNZ, as well as two older versions of the DigitalNZ API. You can see a full list of our retired services.

A behind-the-scenes view

March 2014
We also made the activities of DigitalNZ more transparent by publishing our work plans and the minutes from the DigitalNZ Advisory Board meetings on our website.

Six years old

February 2014
In 2014 we celebrated our sixth birthday by announcing an exciting new 150th content partner, Radio New Zealand.

Commercial metadata pilot

June 2013
June 2013 saw another important initiative; thanks to five content partners—Victoria University of Wellington Library, New Zealand Electronic Text Collection, The University of Auckland Library, Palmerston North City Library, Kete Horowhenua, and Manatu Taonga, Ministry for Culture and Heritage—we were able to make 200,000 metadata records available for commercial re-use. This was the first of a number of commercial releases of our metadata holdings for people to build with and use.

More than one million images

April 2013
In April 2013 we noted that an update of the V. C. Browne aerial photographic collection tipped the number of images in DigitalNZ to more than one million.

New harvesting tools

February 2013
In 2013 we rebuilt our core metadata harvesting tools, taking everything we had learned over five years and building our second generation of technology. Our harvesters are the tools we use to collect data from content partners. They now work much faster, in real-time and at significant scale. We call our harvesting engine Supplejack.

The new National Library of New Zealand

November 2012
In November 2012 the National Library reopened its freshly redesigned building. The Lifelines touch-table was one of its new, exciting offerings. After the opening, visitors eagerly pored over digital material relating to different regions of New Zealand, not at all realising that its service is powered by DigitalNZ's API.

For that matter, most people would never know that the National Library of New Zealand relaunched other key services using DigitalNZ's open source software. The digital front door at natlib.govt.nz, Search Stations for onsite researchers and its AV Pods all run on top of DigitalNZ.

The API at work in the NZ On Screen app

October 2012
A couple of months later, in October 2012, NZ on Screen launched their impressive Reel Choice iPhone app, which was also built using DigitalNZ’s API.

June 2012
Early in 2012, the team were concerned about the amount of material being collected: "DigitalNZ is getting bigger and bigger. Potentially, it could grow forever. It needs a more human connection. How can we help people connect to this overwhelming sea of digital material?" we thought.

"Sets", now called "Stories" were the idea that we came up with as a way for people to curate, collect, and share their favourite treasures. DigitalNZ users can log in and collect together interesting items, and keep them all in one handy place. This one of the first sets ever made, about 1980s New Zealand.

Remembering the Canterbury earthquakes

May 2012
Following the devastating earthquakes that struck Christchurch in September 2010 and February 2011, the University of Canterbury were looking to establish a federated digital archive of material relating to the disasters to "preserve the memories and experiences of the people of the Canterbury region". We were more than happy to help and were delighted when UC CEISMIC was built using the DigitalNZ API and launched in May 2012.

Keeping things running

January 2011
2011 turned out to be a year of consolidation and maintenance. Our hands were full with updating the Make it Digital guides, microfunding of digitisation, Mix and Mash and scaling our infrastructure to support our ever growing content partners. We did however migrate the NZ Research service to the DigitalNZ platform to maintain access to aggregated research outputs.

In August the second Mix & Mash competition was launched at the 2011 Orcon Great Blend event in Auckland, and in September both the homepage and search experience of digitalnz.org were redesigned and updated.

Mix & Mash competition launches

November 2010
2010 was a busy time. DigitalNZ was working with new content partners, spreading the word about DigitalNZ services and facilitating the Make it Digital awards that provided micro-funding to local digitisation projects. Also, we decided to launch the Mix & Mash competition to encourage the creative use of reusable NZ content and data. Pitched as the 'Great NZ Remix and Mashup Competition', it was NZ's answer to the wave of such competitions around the world.

DigitalNZ brings in Papers Past

October 2010
The service was really put to the test in October 2010 when DigitalNZ brought in the entire collection of Papers Past, the National Library’s collaborative digitised newspaper collection; making the total number of searchable items to 19,202,582. This included 663,013 images, 5,661 videos and 112,396 research papers. The digitized collections of historic NZ newspapers are some of the most popular sources of information for family historians and researchers in NZ, and bringing in Papers Past was a huge milestone. A little known fact is that the National Library uses the DigitalNZ API to provide a data feed of Papers Past for developers who may want to data mine this incredible record of NZ history.

The API goes to work

November 2009
DigitalNZ encouraged other organisations to use the open API to build search services using DigitalNZ’s metadata. When Housing Research NZ approached DigitalNZ in 2009 about using their API, we said, "Yes, of course!".

So, Housing Research NZ built a search engine where visitors can find information relating specifically to housing in New Zealand. This was one of the first examples of an organisation using the powerful DigitalNZ API.

A one-stop digital shop

June 2009
In June 2009 we launched Make it Digital our one-stop shop for questions, advice and ideas for creating digital content. Make it Digital was the team’s response to the very complicated digitisation guides and standards that previously existed.

The guides include a scorecard to assist in the digitisation selection process, an easy-to-follow copyright status flowchart, the NZ public domain guide, and advice on how to digitise family history and whakapapa. The advice is modelled on a Digital Content Lifecycle that we developed, and it explains the any aspects of making digital material available and useful.

The service also included a voting tool where the community could vote and comment on what NZ material should be digitised. It brought a customer voice to institutional selection processes, and the suggestions and comments provided a unique insight into people's views at the time. On the basis of public comment, the National Library of NZ decided to raise the priority of digitising the Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives (AtoJs). DigitalNZ provided seed funding for this effort and the Library subsequently launched AtoJs in 2010.

digitalnz.org is launched

December 2008
On 3 December 2008 DigitalNZ officially launched www.digitalnz.org.

Key to the launch of DigitalNZ was the creation of the open Application Programming Interface (the API) which launched a data service that made the many different sources of NZ content available via a single search. This was one of the world's first APIs developed to aggregate a nation's digital content, and is believed to be the NZ Government's first RESTful and public API.

Alongside the launch of the API was the launch of Classic Search, a website demonstration of the API in use that pooled together material that unavailable through other internet search engines.

Coming home as a taste of things to come

November 2008
In November 2008, we launched Coming Home at a National Digital Forum event at the Auckland Museum, our first project as DigitalNZ. Coming Home was a search engine of 30,000 aggregated digital items relating to the Armistice that ended the First World War, and it was the first example of how we could collate NZ material in a focused way.

We also launched the Memory Maker video remix tool in partnership with the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Memory Maker allowed people to drag-and-drop images, audio, and video onto a timeline to create their own multimedia stories. It was based on technology developed by Ideum.

Software development beginnings

August 2008
At the beginning of August 2008 the DigitalNZ team kicked-off its first development. The software development team was charged with building up the search infrastructure, websites and tools.

DigitalNZ became the National Library's first fully Agile Scrum project, and the team has been running fortnightly development sprints ever since.

Project team is established

February 2008
DigitalNZ was fully established and the first team members were assembled. Fiona Fieldsend as Programme Manager, Andy Neale as Technical Lead, and Lewis Brown as Policy Lead. Our numbers were few, but our aspirations were great.

A gleam in the eye of Cabinet

November 2006
DigitalNZ's story begins back in November 2006 when two initiatives were presented to Cabinet:

New Zealand Online
Foundations for Access

These two initiatives were then grouped together to become Digital New Zealand, which became part of government's Digital Content Strategy in September 2007. DigitalNZ was one of the two Digital Content Strategy initiatives to be led by the National Library of New Zealand, the other being the Aotearoa People's Network Kaharoa.