Papers Past
The Papers Past website has a wealth of historical information, with millions of pages of digitised content from New Zealand and the Pacific. Use it to search and explore digitised full-text materials for your research or school project.
Online archive of digitised full-text materials
The Papers Past website is the National Library’s online archive of New Zealand and Pacific newspapers, magazines, journals, diaries, letters, parliamentary papers and books.
Papers Past lets you search through an ever-growing collection, spanning more than a hundred years of New Zealand history.
Papers Past contains millions of pages of material all containing full-text materials. We've organised the material into five collections:
newspapers
magazines and journals
letters and diaries
parliamentary papers, and
books.
Papers Past
Papers Past on the blog
Newspapers
In the Newspapers collection, you can search digitised NZ and Pacific newspapers from the 19th century onwards, including early te reo Māori newspapers. Each newspaper has its own page containing information about the publication and its availability online.
Magazines and Journals
The Magazines and Journals collection contains digitised magazines and journals published in New Zealand, covering topics from building to sports to the arts to science and more. Each journal has its own page containing information about the publication and its availability online.
Letters and Diaries
The Letters and Diaries collection holds the digitised manuscripts from the Sir Donald McLean collection of personal and official letters written between 1839 and 1876.
Parliamentary Papers
The Parliamentary Papers collection contains digitised volumes of the Votes and Proceedings of the House of Representatives (1854-1856) and the Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives (1858-1950).
Books
The Books collection contains digitised New Zealand books, which include the 19th-century te reo Māori material listed in the bibliography Books in Māori/Ngā Tānga Reo Māori.
Currently, only a small collection of New Zealand books are available on Papers Past.
How do we select titles for digitisation?
We use a couple of methods to select new titles to add to Papers Past, including reviewing suggestions from people who contact us and inviting organisations to participate in our Collaborative Digitisation Programme.
Reviewing suggestions for a title
We look at every title that people suggest could be added to Papers Past to find out about the:
copyright status
subject coverage
the quality and availability of microfilm, and
geographic coverage.
With that information, we can decide what titles are suitable for digitisation.
If you have a title you’d like to see digitised, email us at paperspast@natlib.govt.nz
Collaborative Digitisation Programme
The Library also runs a Collaborative Digitisation Programme, when we invite external groups or individuals to join us in digitising a newspaper, magazine or journal of their choice. We share the costs of digitisation with our partners.
Find out about the Collaborative Digitisation Programme
National Library’s Collections
The digitised texts on Papers Past are a small proportion of our collections. Visit us to access the much wider range of newspapers, magazines, journals, books and manuscripts we hold, in print and on microfilm. See the links below for more information about some of our other collections.
National Newspaper Collection
New Zealand Serials Collection
New Zealand Manuscripts Collection
New Zealand and Pacific Books Collection
Related content
A-Z of our collections
Use this A to Z list to explore our collections including the many and diverse collections in the Alexander Turnbull Library.