1. British Parliamentary Papers. Colonies
New Zealand
Vye Perrone
University of Waikato Library
NDF Conference 2011
Digitisation Projects: Purpose Planning Process People

2. BPPNZ Digital Collection
• Covers 1837 to 1882
• Comprises reports, correspondence,
documentation sent to the Government in
Britain and covers all aspects of life and events
in the colony at the time.
• http://digital.liby.waikato.ac.nz/bppnz

3. Why digitise this work?
• Significant source of important and largely
untapped information about New Zealand in
the mid-nineteenth century
• Few libraries in New Zealand hold copies of
the original BPPs – thus little known and little
used
• Increase accessibility – online, free

4. Make it Digital Award
• Funding to outsource part of project – made it
manageable
• Opportunity to do it properly, rather than
‘seat of pants’
• Develop framework, skills and knowledge for
future digitisation projects

5. Collection facts
• 17 bound volumes - about 5,300 foolscap
sized pages
• Approx 100 documents - each comprising a
number (varies from 1 to 100) of despatches
• Despatches vary in size from 30 lines to 40
pages.
• 58 foldout pages of varying sizes
• Marginalia is prevalent

6. Tech specs
• Pages digitised – 300ppi 8-bit greyscale
– TIFF files for master copies
– GIF files created for web display
– PDF files created for downloading, printing
despatches
– TXT files for OCR text (auto converted to html by
Greenstone)
– Filenames created to reflect the documents and
despatches but not the volumes in which they
were bound.

7. Process
1. Volumes dis-bound and relevant despatches
selected & separated ready for scanning and
OCRing & title lists compiled
2. Scanning, file conversion (from TIFF to GIF) &
OCR processing (TXT) were outsourced
(NZMS)
3. Greenstone software used to build digital
collection from GIF and TXT files

8. Process
4. PDF file created for each despatch (in-house)
5. OCR corrections carried out only on
significant names and words (in-house)
6. DC title and date metadata added (in-house)

9. Collection building in Greenstone
• Complexity of work:
How to structure collection in a way that would
work in Greenstone and deliver what we wanted?
• Multiple teams working on different aspects
of the project – access problems
• Unfinished business (PDFs, more despatches)

10. People
• Subject experts: NZ Collection staff
• Library systems consultant
• Library web developer
• Project assistants
• Project Coordinator
• Historians and researchers who provided
feedback
• NZMS, National Library who helped with
technical detail, copyright

11. Challenges
• Creating a new work rather than digitizing an
existing work from start to finish
• Selected despatches relating to NZ from
broader-scoped work
– Complexity of work: how to structure collection?
– Filenaming
• Learning about & troubleshooting Greenstone
on the fly
• Addition of metadata – bit tedious