The New Zealand Digital Library Project

Ian H. Witten, Sally Jo Cunningham, Mark D. Apperley
1996 D-Lib Magazine  
whose aim is not to set up new libraries but to develop the underlying technology for digital libraries and make it available publicly so that others can use it to create their own collections. We are concerned with large collections of electronic, predominantly textual, documents, physically dispersed on computers the world over, and aim to make them accessible through a uniform interface that allows information to be located and accessed. This article describes the NZDL project, illustrated
more » ... a large example collection of Computer Science Technical Reports. The system is freely available on the World-Wide Web. The migration of information from paper to computers promises to change the whole nature of research, and in particular the methods by which people locate information. The goal of the New Zealand Digital Library project is to explore the potential of Internet-based digital libraries, by which we mean large collections of electronic, predominantly textual, documents, physically dispersed on computers the world over, which are accessible through a uniform interface that allows information to be located and accessed. Our vision is to develop systems that automatically impose structure on fundamentally anarchic, uncatalogued, distributed repositories of information, thereby providing users with effective tools to locate the information they need and peruse it conveniently and comfortably. As a geographically isolated but technologically advanced nation, New Zealand stands to gain markedly from effective deployment of information resources that are freely available on international computer networks.
doi:10.1045/november96-witten fatcat:g47vkqgudbd4bgi2yndc3b5vei