Delivering the Maori-Language Newspapers on the Internet

Although any collection of historical newspapers provides a particularly rich and valuable record of events and social and political commentary, the content tends to be difficult to access and extremely time-consuming to browse or search. The advent of digital libraries has meant that for electronically stored text, full-text searching is now a tool readily available for researchers, or indeed anyone wishing to have access to specific information in a text. Text in this form can be readily distributed via CD-ROM or the Internet, with a significant impact on accessibility over traditional microfiche or hard-copy distribution. For the majority of text being generated de nouveau, availability in electronic form is standard, and hence the increasing use of full-text search facilities. However, for legacy text available only in printed form, the provision of these electronic search tools is dependent on the prior electronic capture of digital facsimile images of the printed text, followed by the conversion of these images to electronic text through the process of optical character recognition (OCR). This article describes a project undertaken at the University of Waikato over the period 1999 to 2001 to produce a full-text searchable version of the Niupepa or Maori-language newspaper collection for delivery over the Internet. Fundamental to this project has been the New Zealand Digital Library (NZDL) and its associated Greenstone software, developed at the University of Waikato. The Greenstone software architecture has been developed to support heterogeneous, multilingual, distributed digital libraries. Although it was motivated from a technological research perspective, it is a real system delivering real digital library technology, with a broad community of users internationally. The NZDL currently supports about 20