From gold rush to Great War: historic papers now online

Media release from the National Library of New Zealand

From gold rush to Great War: historic papers now online

From the gold rush frenzy of 1870’s Thames to the casualty lists of from Gallipoli, a new batch of old papers in now available on the National Library’s popular PapersPast website (http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz).

“The Thames Advertiser is a particularly exciting addition to the site,” said Emerson Vandy, the manager of PapersPast. “It’s easy to forget now that Thames was the biggest town in New Zealand in the late 19th century and the pages of the Advertiser bring out all the drama, crime and excitement of a gold rush boom-town.

“There’s also drama on a global scale from the pages of the war-time newspapers, as early war jingoism (‘Germans being beaten at all points’ is one rather optimistic headline from 1914) gives way to the reporting of horrific casualty figures.”

PapersPast contains more than 2.5 million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals from between 1839 and 1945, from 77 separate newspaper titles.

The latest additions are:
The Thames Advertiser (1874-1899)
The Dominion (1907-1920)
The Free Lance (1910-1920)
The Press (1915-1920)
The Te Puke Times (1913-1920)

Papers Past has become one of the leading historic research resources in New Zealand, with well over 100,000 pageviews every day, giving it by far the highest per-capita usage of any historic online newspaper collection worldwide.

While the National Library has now returned to its home in the newly-refurbished Molesworth St building in Wellington, more than a million individual items from its collections (photos, newspaper pages, articles, pictures etc) have now been digitised and made available via its website (www.natlib.govt.nz/)

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