About DigitalNZ

DigitalNZ is the search site for all things New Zealand. We connect you to reliable digital collections from our content partners, including:

  • libraries

  • museums

  • galleries

  • government departments

  • the media

  • and community groups.

On DigitalNZ you can discover more than 30 million digital items from more than 200 organisations on any topic, all for free. You'll find:

  • videos

  • newspapers

  • maps

  • photographs

  • audio recordings

  • artworks

  • news reports

Check out this short video to see how easy and intuitive DigitalNZ is to use:

Collect items and share your research

It’s easy to explore DigitalNZ using the intuitive search and filters. It’s also easy to save things in DigitalNZ. We call the saving function a ‘Story’.

Stories allow you to group information, add titles and text, and organise your items as you like. You can create as many Stories as you want, about any subject, in a way that works for you.

It's easy to share your Stories with friends, family and classmates. Learn more about creating Stories.

Our history and goal

DigitalNZ began in 2008 with a purpose: to bring the wealth of Aotearoa's digital content into one easily searchable place. Learn more about our history here.

We aim to be the simplest public website through which people can access reliable New Zealand material, some of which is trickier to find in other search engines.

What else do we do?

DigitalNZ's API (application programming interface) is an integral part of our work to share NZ content freely. The API acts as a key to content on DigitalNZ; it's a way developers can simply plug in and extract information from our site for their own use. 

How it works is that DigitalNZ gathers metadata from 200+ institutions from around Aotearoa, including community groups, the cultural sector, government departments, and many others. This metadata describes all sorts of digital material, such as videos, images, maps, and data. We then structure this metadata and make it available via our API, which is free to use and loved by programmers all over the world.

Diagram showing how the DigitalNZ API works

Much of New Zealand's rich content is hidden or buried. We're working on new ways to create, describe, licence, store, surface and share New Zealand digital content.

In addition to our API, we add metadata to our collections through our own, purpose-built tool, Supplejack. Supplejack gathers and arranges metadata simply from the collections we share on DigitalNZ.

We're a digital service, and we've collaborated with, and run many initiatives over the years to support wider awareness and use of digital collections. We support:

  • the National Digital Forum, donating time to help organise the annual conference

  • GIF IT UP, a yearly competition that encourages creative reuse of digital collections to make GIFs

  • Impkt Tools, a new resource run by Europeana to help the cultural sector measure its impact

  • Make It Digital, a guide the National Library developed to assist people to make digitisation choices.