Overview and History

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Introduction

This guide, designed for non-technical users, provides a background and history of National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ) (https://natlib.govt.nz/) software development.

Contents of this document

Following this introduction, this Overview and History Guide includes the following sections:

  • Overview - Provides an overview of software development at NLNZ.
  • History - Covers the history of software development at NLNZ.
  • License - Covers the license used.

Overview

The National Library of New Zealand has a legal mandate, and a social responsibility, to preserve New Zealand’s social and cultural history, be it in the form of books, newspapers and photographs, or of websites, blogs and videos. Increasing amounts of New Zealand’s documentary heritage is only available online. Users find this content valuable and convenient, but its impermanence, lack of clear ownership, and dynamic nature pose significant challenges to any institution that attempts to acquire and preserve it.

NLNZ develops software to assist in its mission. This software is developed by a variety of people, from in-house dedicated software developers to library staff writing code for their specific workflow to projects developed in collaboration with other institutions to external vendors.

History

TODO The history of software development at NLNZ.

Software development objectives

As NLNZ’s mandate is to preserve its collection for decades and centuries, software development needs to have a standard of quality and longevity commensurate with that mission.

  • Meets the needs of the National Library of New Zealand.
  • Written with a standard of quality and usability and functionality.
  • Possibly provide helpful functionality to other users and institutions.

License

In general, contributions to the NLNZ in-house developed software is under the MIT (2019) License, which can be found at: https://mit-license.org/ .

TODO There may be other licenses in use. List them here.

The code is open-source software and is freely available for the benefit of the international archiving community.

See the Contributing section of the Developer Guide for more details.