First issue of The Listener Photo: Alexander Turnbull Library
The New Zealand Listener magazine began its life back in 1939 as the Journal of the National Broadcasting Service, with the purpose of providing radio listeners with a printed weekly programme.
With the introduction of television in June 1960, the Listener started publishing weekly TV listings, along with topical articles, editorials, letters to the editor and reviews.
Now the iconic magazine has reached another milestone: It is set to be digitised on the National Library's online archive website, Papers Past.
Mark Crookston, the National Library's director of content services, said it would digitise titles from the first issue in 1939 through to 2018.
"It's run pretty much weekly since 1939, and it pretty much covers the span of all of New Zealand's history and social issues from that time," he told Nights.
It would be released in tranches over the coming years, with the first 20 years out early in the new year.
Crookson said the process of digitisation involved sending the material to India, where it would be digitised and run through a programme that delivered an optical character recognition format - a technology that changed printed documents into digital image files.
The NZ Woman's Weekly would also be digitalised, Crookston added.
"It's New Zealand's longest running magazine, it's still in circulation - first published in 1932," he said.
"The National Library of New Zealand is world leading in its digital preservation capability, and so not only can we look after and preserve our physical copies, we can also do that with our digital taonga as well, and digitisation's just one mechanism for doing that.
"But at the same time, through digitising for preservation, we can also then offer these sort of access benefits to New Zealanders as well, and they'll be able to search right from the first issue of the NZ Woman's Weekly, where prominent topics included royalty, celebrity, fashion, beauty, recipes, topics that have still sort of survived today."
