Digital New Zealand

What is Digital New Zealand?

Digital New Zealand is one of two major initiatives (along with the Aotearoa People's Network) being implemented by the National Library of New Zealand as part of the New Zealand's Digital Content Strategy.

Digital New Zealand will design, test and develop new ways of accessing, discovering, sharing and creating New Zealand digital content in a constantly changing digital environment.

More about the Aotearoa People's Network

Objectives

The objectives of the Digital New Zealand initiative, drawn from the Digital Content Strategy, are to:

Make collections of New Zealand digital content more accessible to New Zealand communities
Establish agreed priorities for digitisation of significant and important publicly held content
Promote open standards, formats and interoperability as a means of maintaining knowledge and heritage over time
Set up and provide an advisory service for organisations, communities and groups working on digitisation activities.

These objectives are interrelated, and contribute directly to meeting the challenges identified by the Digital Content Strategy in the areas of access and discovery, sharing and using, and managing and preserving digital content.

The Digital New Zealand Wave I Implementation Project

The Digital New Zealand Wave I implementation project is focused on setting up an operational foundation and developing exemplars (example solutions) that will demonstrate the value of improved access, discover, creation and sharing of New Zealand digital content. Digital New Zealand will be working with organisations throughout New Zealand, who will contribute content for the creation of the exemplars.

The Digital New Zealand Wave I implementation project deliverables are:

A Content Exemplar that will focus on solutions to get content into a format and place that can be discovered online.
A Discovery Exemplar that will focus on solutions that will encourage the discovery of digital content that is both newly digitised, already digitised and born digital.
A Digitisation Framework that aims to help New Zealand organisations prioritise digitisation of significant and important publicly held New Zealand content.
Completion of a development model approach and framework for the adoption, promotion and dissemination of accessible and open digital standards that can be used by New Zealand organisations to optimise content for search, discovery and accessibility by New Zealanders. This will be tested with selected content contributors.
A Digital Advisory Service that will be a conduit between the content contributors and the development of the frameworks and exemplars.

Wave I of Digital New Zealand began in early 2008. The exemplars and frameworks being developed in Wave I will be completed by the end of 2008.

What will happen in Wave II?

Wave II of Digital New Zealand will use the lessons learned from Wave I to turn the exemplars and frameworks into national collaborative initiatives. Further solutions will also be identified and developed as part of Wave II. This iterative approach means Digital New Zealand can develop solutions that are agile and responsive to the New Zealanders' needs.