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Help searching the New Zealand Electronic Text Collection

Search for a specific work

If you know the title of the work you are interested in enter it into the search box and click “Submit”.

Search for works by a specific author

Enter the author’s name in the search box. If you know both their first and last names enter these in the form “firstname lastname”. Click “Submit”.

To see all the works by a particular author in this collection enter the author’s name in the search box and click “Submit”. Now use the left hand toolbar to discover if there is a dedicated topic page for this author. Under “Entities” click on “Person”. If the author you are interested in is listed there click on the (insert arrow symbol) which will take you to page listing all works by that author in our collection with links to the full text of all the works. Here is an example of a topic page for the author Te Rangi Hiroa, also know as Sir Peter Buck

An alternative route to these author pages is via the list of authors

Search for images only

Method 1: Enter your search terms in the usual box and click “Submit”. Choose to see image results by clicking on “Images” at the top of the page of results. To see all Image results click “Show All”.

Method 2: Enter your search terms in the usual box and click “Submit”. Now use the options in the left hand tool bar to refine your search. Under “Type of Result” select “Image in Work”. If this option is not visible it means that your search returned no images.

Refine your search

The ability to “Refine your search” is provided by the left hand tool bar. Browse the various options and select those most relevant to your search. If you wish to undo a selection click on “remove filter” at the top of the tool bar

The search is a phrase search. This can be confirmed by searching for “New Zealand” which returns many hits and “Zealand New” which returns substantially fewer. Searching for unicode is supported and macrons are not normalised, thus “Kōtare” and “Kotare” are different searches.

Note that the search does not support Boolean operators. If you would like to run Boolean searches across the NZETC collection we suggest using the Google advanced search which is found here and choose the “search within a site or domain” option to limit the search to nzetc.victoria.ac.nz.

Note also that while you can refine your search using selections from two different types of facet (eg a person and a date) it is not possible to refine your search by making two selections within the same type of facet (eg search results which refer to both Sir George Grey and Sir Apirana Ngata). If you wish to execute this type of search we suggest using Boolean operators through the Google advanced search

Search for works in Māori and other languages

Enter your search terms in the usual box and click “Submit”. Now use the options in the left hand toolbar to refine your search. Under “Language” click “Language of Material” and you will see a list of all the languages of documents in your search results. Clicking on one of the languages listed will refine the results of your search to those Works, and Pages and Images in Works, where the main language of the Work is that which you chose.

The NZETC collection contains works in English, Māori, Rarotongan, French and Latin. Further works contain fragments in Malay, Samoan, Rapanui, Niuean, and Polish.

Search using words in a specified language

Enter your search terms in the usual box and indicate the language of your search terms using the options in the box immediately below. Click “Submit”.

Note also that executing a search using terms in a specified language is a different process to searching for material in a particular language. It is intended to support researchers who are interested in finding particular instances of language usage, usually for a language other than English. Searching using words in a specified language looks only at the full text of a work not the metadata. Therefore results are automatically limited to “Pages in a Work” rather than “Works”.

Note that the results returned by this search are only as good as the language tagging which has been applied to the texts in the collection. This tagging is not perfect and we would be glad to hear from readers who have uncovered errors.

Search for Māori-English parallel texts

A parallel text is one which contains the text in both English and Māori. It may be an English document which contains a Māori translations, a Māori document which contains an English translation or a English translation of a Māori document with a Māori re-translation. The NZETC collection contains over 150 such texts, but all of the translations are historical, the NZETC has not translated any documents.

Method 1: In the right hand toolbar select “Māori-English / English-Māori parallel texts only” in the Structure box. Enter your search terms in the usual box and click “Submit”

Method 2: Enter your search terms in the usual box and click “Submit”. Now use the options on the left hand toolbar to refine your search. Under “Language” click on “Parallel English-Māori Text” and then on “Yes”. Your search results will be filtered to show only those results which match you search terms AND are parallel English-Māori texts. Note that if the “Parallel English-Māori Text” option does not appear in the left hand toolbar it means that your search results do not include any parallel texts.

Search for a phrase

The search does not support searching for a specific phrase. We suggest using the Google advance search which is found here and using the “search within a site or domain” option to limit the search to nzetc.victoria.ac.nz.

Find other relevant digital resources

Using the NZETC search automatically includes a search of many other sources of digital New Zealand content through DigitalNZ. The results appear in the right hand tool bar.

Note that when you refine your NZETC search using the left or right hand tool bars this does not affect the Digital NZ results.