DigitalNZ National Discovery Portal for New Zealand Digital Content

History and Founding

DigitalNZ was officially launched on 3 December 2008 by the National Library of New Zealand, which hosts and manages the service with funding from the New Zealand Government. Its origins trace to the New Zealand Government's 2007 Digital Content Strategy, and a beta version preceded the formal launch. The underlying aggregation platform, Supplejack, was developed in-house and released as open-source software under a GNU General Public License; in 2016, it won DigitalNZ a New Zealand Open Source Award. The editorial and technical team operates out of the National Library's Wellington headquarters.

Collections and Holdings

DigitalNZ aggregates metadata from more than 200 content-partner organisations, providing access to over 30 million digital items. Partners span libraries, museums, galleries, government departments, the media, and community groups. The searchable material includes photographs, artworks, newspapers, maps, video recordings, and audio. Much of the content sits in the deep web and is not directly indexed by commercial search engines, making DigitalNZ's federated search function a primary point of discovery.

Notable Materials Related to Journalism and Media

Among the most-used resources accessible through DigitalNZ is Papers Past, the National Library's digitised newspaper collection containing millions of pages of New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. News reports, editorial content, and press photographs from partner organisations including major media institutions are indexed and discoverable through the portal. The platform also aggregates digitised journals and oral histories relevant to New Zealand press history.

Access and Usage

DigitalNZ is free to access and does not require registration for standard searches. Metadata is structured and made available via the Supplejack API, which is free to use for developers building applications or conducting data-driven research. The service encourages content reuse and remixing under Creative Commons licences where rights permit, and provides educational guides on copyright, digitisation good practice, and the public domain. A Stories feature allows users to upload personal photographs and create curated collections. DigitalNZ also ran two public Mix & Mash competitions in partnership with Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ to promote community remixing of digital content.

Additional Details

The Supplejack platform has been adopted beyond New Zealand by several GLAM-sector organisations, including the National Library of Singapore, the Ngā Taonga audiovisual archive, the Pacific virtual museum Digital Pasifik, and a Canadian collaboration between Ontario's OurDigitalWorld and the British Columbia Library Association. DigitalNZ is considered a model digital aggregation service internationally.