Are you interested in contributing content to Digital New Zealand in the future?

There are a few things you might like to keep in mind in addition to your own needs as you work to get your content online:

1. Metadata quality
2. Clearly stated rights status for content
3. Harvesting options
4. Brand identity

Our philosophy is to make it as easy as possible for you to contribute though, so we will try to find a solution based on your situation when the time comes.

Metadata quality

Two things here:

• the structure of the metadata (i.e. the fields or tags you set up to describe different aspects of the content) and
• the data values inside each of those fields or tags.

Here is some general advice about describing content.

Making the license and rights situation of the content clear

This is really important in terms of what DigitalNZ is trying to do - especially because we are encouraging use of some of the new licenses available such as New Zealand Creative Commons (for content in copyright), "no known copyright restrictions" (for content out of copyright), and so on.

You can find out about some of the different licenses and their applicability on the Digital New Zealand Kete.

Make it Digital guide to rights information

Decide how you want us to gather your metadata

There are a number of technical options here, which depend a bit on how you are delivering your digital content to your users.

You may want to talk to your vendors about solutions that would enable easy harvesting by Digital New Zealand early in your project.

Brand identity

Users can arrive at your content from anywhere on the Web, so you may want to consider how they will know it comes from you.

Some ways you might maintain your institutional profile include:

• Ensure the URLs for your content objects are good ones. Compare http://hdl.handle.net/10179/163 (which has no identification of an institution) with http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-JCB-031.html.
• Is your institution listed as the ‘publisher’ of the content in the metadata (where relevant)?
• Is your institution credited as the creator where that is relevant?
• When a person arrives at any part of your site, or your collection object, is it clear who has provided  the content on-line, and how you can get back to your collection or website home page?

Get in touch

We're happy to answer questions about contributing to DigitalNZ even if you're not ready to participate yet. Just drop us a line.