1925-1945 New Zealand goes live on newspaper site
The final stage of a collaborative project to fully digitise 82 years of the New Zealand Herald from 1863-1945 is
complete and online at Papers Past, a newspaper website run by the National Library.
All issues of the New Zealand Herald from 1925-1945 were recently added to the website, completing the project that
started in 2012 with the digitisation of the newspaper from 1863-1885.
“Access to the New Zealand Herald up to 1945 is a landmark event for researchers in Auckland and in terms of content
coverage for the Auckland region,” says Jane Wild, Research Centres Manager for Auckland Libraries.
“We owe the success of this project to the National Library’s Papers Past website, which hosts the content, as well as
APN and Auckland Libraries, who preserved the fragile newspaper volumes that were first microfilmed before being
digitised.”
Papers Past now contains more than three million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals from between
1839 and 1945, including 83 separate newspaper titles.
“1925-1945 was a period of worldwide economic depression, the creation of the welfare state in New Zealand and the
Second World War," says David Verran, Auckland Libraries Central Auckland Research Team Leader.
"Issues of the newspaper for 1945 identify a world that had just come through a devastating World War and its hope for
the future.”
The project is a collaboration between Auckland Council, the National Library of New Zealand and APN (publishers of the
New Zealand Herald).
For the Auckland region, Papers Past now contains the archived issues of eight newspaper titles. The essential morning
and evening papers are digitised up to 1945, with the New Zealand Herald starting in 1863 and the Auckland Star in 1870.
The oldest title is the Daily Southern Cross, with coverage from 1843-1876.
Explore NZ Herald on Papers Past www.paperspast.natlib.govt.nz
ENDS