Early New Zealand Books (ENZB) is a project from the library of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, launched in 2005, that aims at providing keyword-searchable text of significant books published about New Zealand in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. It also includes the subsequently published memoirs, journals and correspondence of people active in this era. The project has been funded and managed by the University of Auckland Library and is freely available on the internet.[1][2][3]
Each page is linked to an image of that page from the original book. This provides researchers with assurance of accuracy. There are special searches for captions to illustrations and chapter summaries as well as a general full-text search across the whole corpus. The images are available at original size and extra-large. Books are also available as downloadable ePub ebooks. It is one of a number of projects at the University of Auckland library that use the b-engine rendering engine. In February 2015 three hundred and twenty-seven volumes have been digitized. Twenty-seven were contributed by Auckland Libraries and twenty-four by the Auckland War Memorial Museum.[1]
It is distinct from a similar collection of digitized older New Zealand publications, viz. the New Zealand Electronic Text Collection from Victoria University of Wellington.[4]
It does not include the rarest early New Zealand book A History of the Birds of New Zealand by ornithologist Walter Buller and plates by the artist JG Keulemans.[5]
Key works highlighted.