The New Zealand Digital Library project is a research programme at The University of Waikato whose aim is to develop the underlying technology for digital libraries and make it available publicly so that others can use it to create their own collections.

Our demonstration web site provides many document collections, including historical documents, humanitarian and development information, computer science technical reports and bibliographies, literary works, and magazines. All are available over the Web, and can be accessed through searching and browsing interfaces provided by the Greenstone digital library software. Behind the query interface lies a huge collection providing gigabytes of information. We hope you find what you want, or at least something intriguing!

The goal of our research program is to explore the potential of internet-based digital libraries. Our vision is to develop systems that automatically impose structure on anarchic, uncatalogued, distributed repositories of information, thereby providing information consumers with effective tools to locate what they need and to peruse it conveniently and comfortably. Our research objectives are to

• develop technology for creating and automatically maintaining collections;
• monitor usage to study library users' needs;
• look at novel interfaces that cater to a wide spectrum of users;
• find ways to abstract layout and bibliographic information from document files;
• use this information to enhance presentation and for bibliometric research;
• assess potential subject areas for public-domain collections;
• survey and critique other digital library projects.

The New Zealand Digital Library Project is based in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Waikato, but comprises contributors from universities all over the world. A directory of current and past members is available on the people page.

Our project members are actively researching a diverse range of topics. These projects are described on the projects page.

Our research is regularly published in academic publications. Most of these papers may be viewed on our Publications page.

In the course of our research, we have developed a range of practical software packages, many are listed on the projects page, and are available for download.