Historical legislation digitisation programme
The PCO has started a programme to digitise historical New Zealand statutes, from 1841 to 2007. The aim is to provide free online access to all New Zealand Acts in their original form (as enacted), thus making available copies of statutes many of which are currently only held in printed volumes in a limited number of libraries around the country. The format will be searchable PDFs, after completion of the first project.
Background
In 2008 the Law Commission, in conjunction with the PCO, published "Presentation of New Zealand Statute Law", a report that identified the need to preserve access to historical statutes. Repealed Acts are consulted by the legal profession, to establish what the law was at a particular time; by historians and researchers, since legislation is part of our social history. But access to older statutes is problematic. Library collections are often incomplete, and some volumes may be damaged or fragile. Online, the gaps are much larger. The PCO's New Zealand Legislation website provides Acts that go back as far as 1275, but its collection of repealed Acts only includes Acts that were repealed after August 2007. The Knowledge Basket holds Acts that were repealed from 1987 to 2007 (and the shattering statutes, preserved by the PCO). Commercial publishers provide repealed legislation for a fee.
The "Government Response to Reports of the Law Commission: Presentation of New Zealand Statute Law and Review of the Statutes Drafting and Compilation Act 1920" states as follows:
10. The repealed statutes are an important component of New Zealand's history and are used in legal argument in court and before the Waitangi Tribunal. PCO has recently scanned, into PDF format, the most vulnerable statute books of the 19th century, the so-called "shattering statutes" of 1888–1894 (of which 6 public, 42 local and 4 private Acts are still in force). These statutes, which in hard copy extend over 2976 pages, can now be consulted on the Internet, on a website separate from the New Zealand Legislation website.
11. The Government notes that there are a number of options for implementing the Law Commission's recommendations, either in whole or in part, and that some options are more costly than others.
12. The Government agrees that all of the repealed statutes should be preserved in electronic format, and authorises PCO to seek funding for a project that will allow PCO to outsource conversion and digitisation into PDF format, and to host the content on a website that is linked to the New Zealand Legislation website.
The PCO is intending to carry out this project within its existing resources. Consequently, given the need to simplify the manipulation of the legislation involved in the digitisation project, the collection that will be produced will include all historical Acts in their original form (as enacted), not just the Acts that have been repealed. This will also include the shattering statutes (already digitised).
Outline of programme
First project
Stage one: Acquiring a complete collection of volumes suitable for scanning. No one institution has a complete "clean" set (not annotated), so we will assemble volumes from various sources. The National Library is assisting with volumes for many of the years. Where clean volumes are not available, we will use annotated volumes.
Stage two: Dismantling, scanning, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) processing of the volumes. OCR software will permit the output to be searched. Given the need to deliver this project within existing resources and following the precedent set in other jurisdictions, the OCR output will not be checked or corrected. The quality of the final scanned text will depend on how clean the original volumes are.
Stage three: Making the collection available online. We will add metadata to identify title and date before hosting the scanned statutes online. The output will be PDF facsimiles with searchable metadata and content. The website location for this collection of statutes will be confirmed at this stage.
Second project
(Note: This is a separate project and no commencement date has been set for this.) Our long-term objective is to produce XML documents that will be integrated into the New Zealand Legislation website. This will be a major project involving resources beyond the PCO's current budget.
Progress
Work on stage one of the first project started in March 2010. Progress will depend on the demands of meeting the PCO's key priorities, as the work will not interfere with delivery of those core outputs. However, the PCO intends to make the digitised historical statutes collection available online by December 2012.
