Digital New Zealand is a programme of work funded through the Digital Content Strategy and led by a team at the National Library in collaboration with digital content providers from around New Zealand. It aims to help make New Zealand digital content easy to find, use and share, and bring to light content from the deep web and databases that search engines can’t find. It’s doing this by working with organisations to harvest information (metadata) about their content from existing websites and incorporate it into a much larger pool of metadata. It then exposes all the information for re-use and re-mixing through the tools that the team have developed.

To date those tools include the Memory Maker (an interactive online video remix tool) and the Coming Home search and search widget. The Coming Home search is an example of how the larger pool of information is intended to work: users themselves can decide which areas of information they’re interested in, generate their own smaller sample of content (in this case all the information related to Coming Home war commemoration theme), and then share that sample for others to search and re-use.

Digital NZ will officially launch on 3 December and the accompanying website will have sections for organisations that want to contribute their metadata to the project, or simply need some advice and guidance on digitisation, content creation and the all important issue of making good metadata.

For more on the project, see the site (note, still in development), or read some blogs: from the National Library, First Digital New Zealand products go live and an interesting take on the educational uses of the tools, Get ‘Coming Home’ on your school’s website, wiki or blog.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 9:49 am and is filed under Building audiences, Culture online, National identity, New in the sector, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.