Parliamentary Counsel Office

With more than 150 years of New Zealand Acts to digitise, the Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO) called in Desktop Imaging to produce the Acts in PDF format that could offer searchable content and metadata.

The result is the New Zealand Acts 1841-2007 As-Enacted Collection, a free online database containing more than 16,000 documents that reveal an important part of New Zealand’s social history.

The digitisation project has preserved the Acts in their original form, whether or not they have been repealed or amended. This means historians, researchers, and members of the legal profession, as well as the general public, can easily find what New Zealand’s laws were in the past.

While commercial publishers provide access to repealed legislation for a fee, the digitisation project has proven to be a cost-effective way of giving New Zealanders searchable and free access to the records of their heritage.

Because many libraries’ collections of the original Acts are incomplete or have been damaged and become fragile over the last 150 years, the PCO collated the best available copies from different sources around the country. Desktop Imaging then dismantled and scanned the Acts using its Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to produce PDF formatted files that could offer searchable content.

Work on the project started in March 2010 and was completed in September 2010, more than two years ahead of schedule. The collection is now available on the New Zealand Legal Information Institute website. More information about the project is available on the Parliamentary Counsel Office website.