Summer Scholarship Success

Congratulations to Alex Clark, who won the best poster in the FCA Summer Gold poster competition.

Congratulations to SIM Summer Scholar Alex Clark, who won the best poster prize in the Faculty of Commerce and Administration Summer Gold Poster competition.

Alex’s project, Reclaiming New Zealand’s Digitised Heritage, examined the practices of New Zealand and overseas repositories which digitised early New Zealand books. Exactly half of a sample of 100 New Zealand books published before 1890 had been digitised in at least one repository, but 98% of these (49) were made available under licences which restricted their use in some way.

The results of the project show that New Zealanders’ access to heritage items in overseas repositories is often restricted, particularly for books published after 1870, and the processes used to determine the copyright status of digitised books vary between repositories. Dr Brenda Chawner supervised the project.