New Zealand Electronic Text Centre

Description: The NZETC operates with a threefold mission:

  • to create a sustainable, optimally usable, and free online library of New Zealand and Pacific Island texts and materials;
  • to create a community skilled in the use and creation of digital materials through training and faculty projects;
  • to effectively partner with other organisations as a collaborator and as a service provider.

Following upon these ideals, NZETC hosts an ever-expanding free internet archive of standards-based and searchable TEI XML texts and images,

Implementation description: NZETC digitizes documents according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). We deliver these documents and associated material using a semantic framework built from open source compenents and based around the ISO Topic Map technology.

The NZETC employs Apache Cocoon internally to provide a publishing system allowing construction, management, and presentation of a TEI-encoded XML collection of texts, which is integrated in a Topic Map frame to produce a nationally important website containing more than 40,000 pages and over half-a-million hyperlinks. The use of Apache Cocoon allows the NZETC to easily provide multiple outputs (HTML, ePub, PDF, etc) from a single XML source file. Among other benefits of this system, the generation of such a large, well-interconnected website results in a high Google ranking for many of the subjects mentioned in the NZETC's collection. By harvesting not only bibliographic metadata but also references to people, organisations and places, the site provides individual pages for topics of interest, linked automatically to those places they are mentioned or illustrated. Being automatically generated from the source XML files, maintenance is simple and the number and types of topics linked to can be increased simply by adding extra mark-up to the texts.

Contact:

Alison Stevenson

Victoria University of Wellington

PO Box 600

Wellington

New Zealand

Email: director@nzetc.org