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This article focuses on the conversion of Niupepa, a collection of 42 newspaper titles published in New Zealand from 1842-1933, comprising a total of 21,000 pages in 1,750 issues, to soft form which is available full-text with search capability on the Internet. This collection forms a unique historical record of the language of the indigenous Maori people, the evolution of the written form of this language, and of events and developments during the formative colonial history of the country. This has been done using Greenstone software in New Zealand Digital Library. To facilitate full-text search, the newspaper content was first converted into electronic text using optical character recognition. To maintain the form and integrity of the original newspapers, a digital facsimile of the original page was preferred for viewing. The Niupepa collection incorporates a page-level index, with text for each page held in a separate file. Capturing this invaluable resource on microfiche, on which the original matter is gathered from libraries, secured its preservation.