This dataset consists of the METS/ALTO XML files for the New Zealand Advertiser and Bay of Islands Gazette for 1840.

Papers Past is a website run by the National Library of New Zealand (see https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/). It provides free fully-text searchable access to historic newspapers, periodicals and other material.

Some of the data that sits behind Papers Past has now been openly released. This consists of the data for 78 newspapers, all published before 1900. The data itself is METS/ALTO XML files, created by the automated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process. It does not contain images of the newspaper pages, but it does contain the metadata and full text of the newspaper issues. You can find out more about METS/ALTO at What is METS/ALTO? (https://veridiansoftware.com/knowledge-base/metsalto/)