Early New Zealand Books Online

October 18, 2005 2:41 PM

Early New Zealand Books Online Keyword searchable texts, all illustrations, and links to images of original pages. The collection currently comprises 20 books (23 volumes) including the majority of those published in the first half of the 19th century. It is hoped to expand the collection over the next few years to cover more significant nineteenth century books.
posted by Catch (14 comments total)

Good site, with text as well as page images of the books. And check out this guy. Nice catch, Catch.
posted by LarryC at 3:20 PM on October 18, 2005

LarryC, I've seen guys like that in my local shopping mall. Minus the feather coat, of course, and plus jeans and t-shirt.
posted by The Monkey at 4:20 PM on October 18, 2005

He looks like the guy who stations himself outside New World Newtown...

Back on-topic, I like the ENZBO interface a lot. Displaying html as default with the option of page images makes it so much easier for keyword searching and, ahem, dial-up. Wish ECCO were like that.
posted by Sonny Jim at 4:43 PM on October 18, 2005

Newtown in-joke filter!
posted by Catch at 5:04 PM on October 18, 2005

Back on-topic, I like the ENZBO interface a lot

Me too. I often work on projects in which archival books are to be presented online. It's tough to convince the clients that while yes, the original scan of your material is important for some types of researchers, almost everyone else would prefer to read clean, searchable HTML from an XML source.
posted by nev at 7:34 PM on October 18, 2005

The search function has some neat features that I have not seen before. I like the "large sample size" option where on the results page I get about a paragraph of the text around my search term. This gives you a fair bit of context.

Monkey, I had heard that facial tatooing was becoming more popular in New Zealand. I didn't see much when I was hiking around down there in the 80s. Is it just Maoris who do it?
posted by LarryC at 7:38 PM on October 18, 2005

My mate Jamie's been doing sterling work at the NZ Electronic Text Centre, a masterpiece in singing dancing XML-enabled goodness, based on topic maps.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:12 PM on October 18, 2005

Larry, facial tattoos are still very rare and confined to the criminal classes and a few political activists. Opinion differs over whether modern facial tattooing can ever be authentic or legitimate when done without the sanction of kaumatua (tribal elders) or the involvement of tohunga (in this context, all but extinct traditional experts in Maori knowledge).
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:15 PM on October 18, 2005

PPS: and the usual term for traditional tattooing is "ta moko".
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 8:16 PM on October 18, 2005

Thanks Catch! Excellent post. I've been despairing at the seeming dearth of digitized kiwi goodness and have spent way too much time looking. This is perfect. Cheers.
posted by peacay at 8:39 PM on October 18, 2005

... and I doubt that there are many today who have the pain threshold to have facial tattooing done in the traditional manner anyway.
posted by dg at 8:42 PM on October 18, 2005

Oh, excellent site, catch.
posted by dg at 8:43 PM on October 18, 2005

Larry, while joe's spleen is right about political activists (like Tame Iti) and criminals being most visible, I don't it's exclusive to those groups. Particularly amongst women, where moko wahine seems to be (while still unusual) growing in popularity. Of course, that's much less intimidating than some of the guys.
posted by The Monkey at 10:15 PM on October 18, 2005

The Monkey is quite right, and I over-generalised.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:49 PM on October 18, 2005