Geek’s View – Papers Plus

Written By: - Date published: 1:42 pm, July 5th, 2008 - 3 comments
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Lynn PrenticeOne of the links to The Standard this week was from Reading the Maps on the topic of Playing the history card. The very long post is a interesting commentary of the differences between the various wars of the 19th century that made up New Zealand formation and well worth a read.

The author rightly castigates all and sundry (including posts on The Standard) about their response to Key’s history card with confusing the Musket Wars and the Land Wars. In our defense, I’d point out that it was rather confusing about what Key was talking about. Obviously his Australian advice was probably of little help.

A lot of old news is available from Papers Past from the National Library. I dug up this interesting gem from the New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator, August 21st 1839. HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE COLONIZATION OF NEW ZEALAND. Perhaps John Key could read this rather long view from the settlers at the time. Amongst other things it is complaining about the ruffian element, mainly Australian, disturbing the peace and why the British government should do something about it. The Australian aspect of the complaint sounds vaguely familiar.

It is one of the curious ironies of the local net. Most current or recent news is available via the web, and natlib has a lot of the old material available. I wanted to find out the news at the time about the Auckland Harbor Bridge being built (try this Bridging the Gap). However newspapers from that era appear to be inaccessible on the net. There is a dead area from about 1920 to about 2000.

Could someone give natlib some more resources to bring more of this online at Papers Past? Just at present, virtually every newspaper referred to as an Auckland paper at the Auckland City Library is not on Papers Past. How about putting The Standard version 1.0 online as well – that’d be interesting.

Natlib needs to make the whole sluggish site a bit faster!

3 comments on “Geek’s View – Papers Plus ”

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  1. higherstandard 1
    6 July 2008 at 11:03 am

    Thanks Lynn

    Some really great reads in there – amazing that after more than 150 years some things have changed so very little.

  2. lprent 2
    6 July 2008 at 12:34 pm

    That was what I thought as well.

    Some of the leader articles in the 1890’s about Seddon bringing in the first pension bill in 1897/8 look just like the social issues debates over the last few years

  3. Matthew Oliver 3
    9 July 2008 at 11:44 am

    Thanks for the post about Papers Past. You might be interested to know that we’ve just added a further 70,000 searchable pages from the Grey River Argus, a West Coast paper. It’s available at http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&cl=CL1.GRA, and is notable for its strong connection with the Labour movement at the time.

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