How to become a content partner

Join DigitalNZ to make it easier for people to find and use your digital content. Your collection sits alongside others from across Aotearoa New Zealand, increasing visibility and creating new knowledge and tools.

How DigitalNZ works

We collect and organise metadata (information about digital content like videos, images, and articles). This metadata is then made available through tools like DigitalNZ.org and our API.

DigitalNZ is a free service. You just need to cover your own time and effort.

Diagram showing how the DigitalNZ API works showing people and organisations contributing content on the left, contributed metadata in the centre being added to a magic hat in the centre, and a range of uses for the content on the right (search tools, remixed content, mashups). — 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.

Content scope for DigitalNZ

DigitalNZ includes content:

about New Zealand, New Zealanders, or New Zealand subjects, issues, or communities
created in New Zealand or made by a New Zealander or a New Zealand community
that has metadata (machine readable content descriptions) that point to a freely accessible digital object that is not behind authentication or passwords.

This includes internationally held content that follows these guidelines.

DigitalNZ doesn't include indexes or finding aids for physical, real-world stuff.

Become a content partner

1. Talk to us about your collection

If you need help with the digitisation of your material, check out our guides for digitising and managing content.
Make it Digital guides

Let us know what kind of digital content you have (eg images, documents, multimedia).
Email: info@digitalnz.org

2. Agree to our terms of use for contributing metadata

If we’re a good fit, we’ll share the partnership requirements and ask you to agree to our terms of use.
Terms of use for contributing metadata

3. Contribute your metadata to DigitalNZ

Once you have agreed to participate, we will work with you to share your collection metadata and connect to the DigitalNZ services.

Consider allowing commercial use of your metadata — it can increase exposure of your collections.
Examples of how developers use the DigitalNZ API

4. Review your content on digitalnz.org

We’ll give you access to a staging site to preview how your content looks. Then we can work together to fix any issues before going live.

Once approved, your collection will be published on DigitalNZ.org and we'll welcome you as our newest content partner. Nau mai, haere mai!

It’s not necessary to share your entire collection with DigitalNZ. We can work with you to reject sections or specific items in your collection, based on their metadata.

We use our API and a tool called Supplejack to gather and arrange the content partner collection metadata. Therefore it is not possible to opt out of the DigitalNZ API and still be part of DigitalNZ.org.

Our metadata dictionary provides detail about the most common metadata fields used by DigitalNZ to describe items from content partner collections.
DigitalNZ metadata dictionary

Removing items from DigitalNZ

To remove content — whether it's a single item or your whole collection — contact us and we’ll process it within three business days. Your agreement with DigitalNZ is reversible, so we can remove metadata if requested.

We can also block developers who breach our API terms of use. If you spot misuse of the Developer API, let us know and we’ll block access where needed.
Email: info@digitalnz.org