The migration of information from paper to computers promises to change the whole nature of
research, and in particular the methods by which people locate information. The New Zealand Digital
Library project is exploring ways to impose structure on fundamentally anarchic, uncatalogued,
distributed repositories of information, thereby providing information consumers with effective tools to
locate what they need and peruse it conveniently and comfortably. Our goal is to produce an easy-to-
use digital library system that runs on inexpensive computers at information providers’ own sites and
offers a public information service that information providers themselves maintain.
The aim of our project is not to set up new libraries, but to develop the underlying technology for
digital libraries and make it available publicly so that others can use it to create their own collections.
Not surprisingly, the technology required varies greatly depending on the kind of collection and the
source of the information. Consequently, we are making several different substantial collections of
public-domain text available on an experimental basis as test cases. These allow us to investigate the
technical problems of gathering and indexing the material, to assess the useability of our interfaces, and
to collect information on external usage so that we can improve the facilities offered. Perhaps more
important, the provision of a large array of test collections allows us to explore the varying
requirements of diverse collections of information and to develop a software framework that permits
collections of different kinds