Creating a digital New Zealand: New Zealand's Digital Content Strategy, opportunities and challenges for the education and research sectors

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva 2000 http://www.itu/int/wsis/geneva/index.html and Tunis http://www.itu.int/wsis/tunis/index.html set the agenda for the development of e-strategies in a number of countries. Drawing from the strategic vision and inspiration of WSIS New Zealand launched its own Digital Strategy in May 2005 http://digitalstratregy.govt.nz. This was a far reaching all of country digital vision impacting on communities, business and local and central government throughout the country. The NZ Digital Strategy argued that there were three components that would define the digital environment. These are referred to as the 3 C’s framework these are connection, content and confidence http://www.digitalstrategy.govt.nz. The focus of this paper is on digital content. In September 2007 New Zealand launched one of the cornerstones of the NZ Digital strategy the NZ Digital Content Strategy (NZDCS) http://www.digitalstrategy.govt.nz. The NZDCS takes a strategic view of digital content and looks at how New Zealand has begun to connect content from repositories across the country including sound, vision and textual content as well as content created by individual citizens in the Web 2.0 environment. The discovery and explore experience connecting New Zealand content is called Digital New Zealand (DNZ). The NZDCS shows how New Zealand is moving from high-level strategy into practical solutions for creating accessing, protecting and preserving the digital assets of the nation. In essence DNZ is a celebration of New Zealand ideas, creativity and identity in an only line environment. In the context of this conference the international influences and partnerships which have assisted in the development of the NDCS have been described particularly those relevant to education and research.