Our newsletter this week arrives during a tragic period in the history of Aotearoa. We extend our love and tautoko to the Islamic communities in New Zealand, the people of Christchurch, and all those affected by these unfathomable acts of violence.

A new look for item pages

You may have noticed that your collections are looking a little different on DigitalNZ. In February we launched a new page design for every item on the site. This includes a general design refresh of colour and layout, as well as more significant changes to the way your metadata is expressed on DigitalNZ. Our users had let us know that they wanted metadata to be communicated in plain English, as well as information at a more granular level about what they can and can't do with material—hence the quite considerable changes to the copyright section.

There are still some issues that we are working to resolve, but we're happy with this first version of the new pages. We welcome your feedback too, so please get in touch on info@digitalnz.org with any queries or ideas.

Students and stories

It's been wonderful to see lots of students making stories recently on DigitalNZ. Students from primary and secondary schools across Aotearoa have been making stories for assignments, and university students have been using stories for visual essays as part of their course requirements, as well as collating openly licensed material for a video editing paper.

Both ourselves and the National Library's Services to Schools team are always looking for ways to promote DigitalNZ to schools (in courses such as this one) and we regularly get feedback that DigitalNZ is an easy way for students to engage with digital collections. We hope you enjoy seeing your content used by young New Zealanders in this way.

Ting is back on board

We were sad to recently farewell our Data Analyst, Emmanuel Delaborde, who has been with us for six months, covering Ting Sun whilst she has been on parental leave. We're delighted though, to have Ting back at DigitalNZ HQ at the National Library in Wellington. Ting works to ensure that all of DigitalNZ's harvesting goes smoothly, so do get in touch with her if you have any questions or concerns about your content on DigitalNZ.

Machine learning and metadata

You may recall late last year that we shared work we were undertaking with post-grad students from the University of Canterbury on a machine learning project. In discussion with the university, this project pivoted a little and the students focussed on the vast Papers Past data set. The students used "topic modelling", an analysis approach that can be used to mine a corpus of documents for subject-related metadata. The projected experimented with news ways to query Papers Past data and therefore make it more useful for researchers.

We remain interested in the potentials of machine learning to add detail and description to the fabulous collections we aggregate and hope to investigate further opportunities in the future.

Image: Artificial intelligence. CC0.

That's it from us. Take care Aotearoa. Any questions, please email info@digitalnz.org
Best wishes from the DigitalNZ team: Rowan, Thomasin, Ting, Dan, James, Tonya, and Fi.