Accessible, digital New Zealand Alpine Journal 1892-2012

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.