Accessible, digital New Zealand Alpine Journal 1892-2012

$6,080 of $8,000 goal
Given by 21 generous donors in 6 weeks

Digitise the New Zealand Alpine Journal 1892-2012 and make it freely available for users via the NZAC website https://alpineclub.org.nz/.

Nationwide

The goal of this project is to digitise the New Zealand Alpine Journal 1892-2012, and to make it freely available via the internet.

The annual New Zealand Alpine Journal is NZAC’s premiere publication; it is a record of the climbing year, a source for research and a forum for reflection. The NZAJ was first published in 1892 and is an extraordinary treasure of climbing and mountaineering history, and provides information and insights on decades of climbers and climbing. Articles cover a wide range of topics such as reports on first ascents, descriptions of routes, scientific articles from geology, geography, surveying, biology, history, environmental managment. An Index for NZAJ, 1892-2016, contains over 7000 entries and is already freely available at https://alpineclub.org.nz/product/nz-alpine-journal-index/

In 2015 NZAC accepted the generous offer of Innsbruck University, Austria to scan and digitise the NZAJ, and to prepare it for access via the internet. More than 17,500 pages have been scanned and turned into machine-readable text by automated text recognition. This generally worked well, but created some problems which require further work. For example, specks and blemishes from typesetting lead to text recognition errors. Project editors at Innsbruck University and New Zealand volunteers have to semi-automatically correct these errors to get a clean text. The editing task is labour-intensive and the following steps require funding so they can be completed.

1) Minimisation of OCR-errors, manually and semi-automatically

2) Recognition of document structure e.g. paragraph, sentence, caption etc.

3) Export of the corpus in different formats and integration in different search tools

We are seeking funds to enable these three steps to be completed and a fully-searchable set of NZAJ be made freely available at the NZAC website.

Summary

Digitise the New Zealand Alpine Journal 1892-2012 and make it freely available for users via the NZAC website https://alpineclub.org.nz/.

Use of Funds

Funds will provide stipends for students working on the NZAJ digitisation project at Innsbruck University.

About us

Since 1891 NZAC has been the hub of NZ climbing. It has 4000 members in 11 New Zealand and one Australian Section. NZAC's core purpose is to foster and support climbing. Activities include publishing since 1892 the annual New Zealand Alpine Journal.

Use of funds

Funds will provide stipends for students working on the NZAJ digitisation project at Innsbruck University.

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Latest donations

GH
GH on 27 Feb 2018
A great opportunity to make a large part of NZer's alpine heritage readily accessible to the world.
$50
Guest Donor
Guest Donor on 27 Feb 2018
$250
Guest Donor
Guest Donor on 27 Feb 2018
It will be an excellent resource for future climbers
$20
Graham Desborough
Graham Desborough on 25 Feb 2018
Private
Guest Donor
Guest Donor on 24 Feb 2018
$150

Who's involved?

New Zealand Alpine Club Inc.'s avatar
Created by, and paying to a verified bank account of, New Zealand Alpine Club Inc. (Charity)
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This campaign started on 15 Jan 2018 and ended on 28 Feb 2018.