The Niupepa Collection: Opening the Blinds on a Window to the Past

This paper describes the construction and initial usage of a digital library collection of historical newspapers written in the Maori language. The newspapers (Niupepa in Maori) total over 17000 individual pages from 35 separate periodicals, and were published in New Zealand during the period 1842 to 1933. They not only form a large and much needed source of Maori language text, but also provide a unique histbriial record of the Maori Language, and of New Zealand's early encounter history as seen from a Maori perspective. Images of these newspapers have been digitised and the text extracted from these documents using OCR techniques. The two formats (document image and text) have been linked together as the Niupepa Collection in the New Zealand Digital Library (NZDL) at the University of Waikato. The newspaper collection, previously constrained to the browsing limitations of a microfiche reader, is now freely available over the Internet with a full-text search capability.