Turnbull unpublished collections metadata

Search the unpublished collections

The Alexander Turnbull Library creates finding aids and descriptive records for its unpublished collection materials.

You can search the collections both through the Tiaki catalogue for unpublished materials, and the National Library’s aggregated search.

Tiaki catalogue for unpublished materials
National Library’s aggregated search

Export EAD xml files for Tiaki catalogue

From the Tiaki catalogue, you can export Encoded Archival Description (EAD) xml for individual collections by clicking on the ‘Export EAD’ button that appears at the top of the finding aid.

Download the EAD dataset

The Alexander Turnbull Library has also made the full EAD dataset for all unpublished collections available to researchers as a downloadable file. This dataset is released under the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing Framework.

New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing Framework.

We know it can be tricky to download the datasets and we are working on providing instructions for this. At the moment we have some instructions for Mac users, see below.

Download the EAD dataset — updated 2 June 2024 (tbz2, 80MB)

Instructions for Mac users

For Mac users, in the Terminal run the following three command lines. This will also work for Linux users.

curl -O https://natlib.govt.nz/files/data/ead-full-extract.tbz2
mkdir ead-full-extract
tar --directory=ead-full-extract --strip-components=2 -xjf ead-full-extract.tbz2

Copyright and licensing

This dataset is a Crown Copyright dataset licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. In essence, you are free to copy, distribute and adapt the work, as long as you attribute the work to Alexander Turnbull Library and abide by the other licence terms.

The dataset contains Alexander Turnbull Library descriptive metadata for unpublished collections in xml compliant with the Encoded Archival Description 2002 standard.

Please note that this licence relates to the metadata only, not the collections or items described.

Suggested attribution

If you publish, distribute or otherwise disseminate this work to the public, you can use this attribution:

Source: Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 New Zealand Licence.

If possible, please also link back to this page.

Contact us

We love hearing how people are using our data, so please do let us know!

Email ATL@dia.govt.nz or @NLNZ on Twitter.