About

UC QuakeStudies is a digital archive built to store content related to the Canterbury earthquakes. Our team aims to document the impacts of the Canterbury earthquakes, record our community's recovery, and facilitate research on earthquakes and post-disaster response and recovery in New Zealand and around the world. We're committed to making content freely and openly accessible to anyone interested in understanding the effects of the Canterbury earthquakes.

As well as storing research material from learning institutions and independent researchers, UC QuakeStudies provides communities, businesses, government, and other organisations and individuals with a secure long-term archiving service, ensuring vital knowledge about the earthquakes is not lost. UC QuakeStudies was built on Islandora, an open-source digital repository architecture supported by an international community of academic and cultural heritage users. As part of the University of Canterbury's IT infrastructure, the UC QuakeStudies archive is fully backed up and secured to ensure its long-term preservation.

Material stored in UC QuakeStudies is enhanced with high-quality metadata, such as descriptions, geolocations, and dates and times. This metadata is created by our team of staff and volunteers, who also work in the community to collect and curate earthquake-related material. UC QuakeStudies metadata is harvested into the CEISMIC federated archive, creating connections with material from other content partners to provide a single place to understand, remember and research the Canterbury earthquakes.

Material stored in UC QuakeStudies can also be accessed via the CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive, at www.ceismic.org.nz. CEISMIC’s federated search brings together material relating to the Canterbury Earthquakes from a wide range of New Zealand sources.

UC QuakeStudies and CEISMIC support a culture of sharing, reuse and innovation, by encouraging the use of Creative Commons licences. Creative Commons licences enable copyright holders to allow reuse of their works by giving users a range of permissions in advance.

To contribute earthquake-related material to the UC QuakeStudies archive, visit our contribute page, or contact our team.

How to cite

If you would like to cite a specific resource held in the QuakeStudies repository, please provide a link or URL to the landing page for the item so that users will see the item description and license information when they visit the site, e.g. https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/store/object/315434.

If you would like to cite the QuakeStudies repository generally, please reference the following paper:

Smithies, J., Millar, P. and Thomson, C. (2015) "Open Principles, Open Data: The Design Principles and Architecture of the UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive". Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities 1 http://doi.org/10.17928/jjadh.1.1_10.