NZETC scheduled mainenance on Tuesday 21st June

The New Zealand Electronic Text Collection will be down for an extended period of time on the morning of Tuesday the 21st of June due to scheduled maintenance. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Carnival Student Graduation Programmes are now live

To mark the first graduation ceremony of 2016 the Carnival collection of Victoria student graduation programmes is now live on the NZETC.

The collection contains official ceremony programmes, revue performance scripts and other capping ephemera from 1903 to 1993. Interestingly the early performances included songs in Te Reo Māori.

Victoria's graduation ceremony was initially known as 'capping day' before becoming a week long celebration. Like today a formal capping parade and ceremony was held which was then followed by a student revue performance.

The first Carnival began with a performance at the Sydney Street schoolroom in 1903 and soon moved to the Town Hall. By the 1950s productions were held at the Wellington Opera House. A notable feature of the student revue performance were songs that teased the University and lecturers. In later years the targets of these songs included local and national personalities.


http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-carnival.html

Complete Prose of James K. Baxter digitised for free access

A lifetime of prose by celebrated New Zealand writer James K. Baxter covering over a million words and four hefty hardback books is being released free on the internet by Victoria University.

Baxter’s prose is now accessible through the NZETC (New Zealand Electronic Text Collection), Victoria University’s large and ever-growing digital resource comprising historical texts, manuscripts, and contemporary texts.

Complete Prose was published as a four-volume set last year by Victoria University Press. It is edited by Baxter scholar John Weir, who began working on the publication 40 years ago. Its publication was met with praise by scholars, critics and Baxter fans.

In his review in the NZ Listener, Baxter scholar Paul Millar said, “Reading Baxter’s Complete Prose en masse offers new and unexpected perspectives on his life and work.”

The four volumes draw on Baxter’s prose writing from his first draft of ‘Before Sunrise’ as a teenager in 1942 to his ‘Confession to the Lord Christ’ shortly before his death in 1972. Reviews, essays, lectures, journal articles, interviews and correspondence with friends and critics are some of what readers will be able to browse. The volumes are a chronicle of Baxter’s life and times, his preferences and prejudices, his crises and turbulent occasions.

Fergus Barrowman, publisher at Victoria University Press, says Complete Prose is a significant addition to Baxter scholarship.

“Complete Prose is a testament to Baxter’s huge contribution to New Zealand literature, culture and society. In its digital form, it will be readily accessible to many more readers, which will allow a continuing engagement with Baxter’s work.”

The collection is accessible here: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-baxter.html

Remember these? The Ready to Read Collection is now live

Get ready for a trip down memory lane as the Ready to Read books that many New Zealand children used to learn to read are now online.

The Ready to Read series was developed for students learning to read and was first published in 1963 by the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education.

The series was ground-breaking in that it was the first attempt to provide early reading materials that were also interesting stories reflecting New Zealand children’s real lives and that used natural language.

The 1963 collection consisted of twelve “little books”, graded by colour (three books at each of four levels: red, yellow, blue, and green) and six longer anthologies.

The little books and the first two of the anthologies are available on the NZETC website at http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-readytoread.html.

The Legal Māori Resource Hub is now live

To mark Māori Language week a new Māori resource called the Legal Māori Resource Hub has been launched.

The hub contains a dictionary of Māori legal terms and a searchable Māori language corpus compiled from our Legal Māori Archive. These resources were produced by the Victoria University of Wellington Law Faculty.


The dictionary can be searched for in Māori and English for Māori terms that describe Western legal concepts and law-related vocabulary. Each dictionary entry contains usage examples from contemporary and historical Māori language resources.


You can also browse the corpus Māori words and examples of how they have been used. Once you have found a word you can view frequency, form and collocation data by clicking the > next to your search word.


We think the hub will be a great resource for students of Māori Studies and Law, and also those wanting to improve their written Māori.


Access the hub at http://www.legalmaori.net.

WW1 and Victoria University

To mark Anzac Day and the centenary of the 1915 Gallipoli landings, the Library has created a digital collection of World War I material.

The material, which is publicly available, includes the Victoria University Archive’s Honour Roll, which lists the names of then current students and former students who were killed during World War I.

The collection also includes archival material related to Professor von Zedlitz, one of Victoria’s founding professors, who was forced from his post at Victoria due to the Alien Enemy Teachers Act 1915.

You can view this archival material online at http://library.victoria.ac.nz/files/exhibit/wwi/.

These works have a permanent home as part of the NZETC history of Victoria University collection available at http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-VUWHistory.html

The Spike marks the outbreak of World War One

Our hearts are with these men, wherever they go.

To mark the outbreak of World War One The Spike: or, Victoria University College Review, October 1914  recorded the names of the first group of Victoria University of Wellington students who volunteered to serve in World War One: Students with the Expeditionary Force

In the coming months Spike recorded the activities of students serving through letters to the editor, soldier diary entries, a growing list of students who enlisted and, sadly, an honour roll of those who were wounded or passed away. All of these articles are available from the Spike project homepage.

The NZETC is also happy to make available a collection of official and unofficial histories of New Zealand troops involved in World War One. This collection is available here: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-WH1.html