Seven early newspaper titles covering Central Otago and the Queenstown area from the gold rush days through to the 1940s are being digitised and added to the Papers Past digital archive.
The Central Lakes Trust had given $100,000 for microfilming and digitising, to preserve the region's old newspapers, chief executive Paul Allison said yesterday.
The newspapers are the Alexandra Herald, Arrow Observer, Lake County Press, Dunstan Times, Lake County Mail, Lake Wakatipu Mail and Mt Benger Mail.
Mr Allison said staff at the National Library of New Zealand, the University of Otago's Hocken Library, the Lakes District Museum and Friends of the Hocken Collections had been working together to identify the newspapers which were key to the region, to clarify which institution held which papers and which titles had yet to be microfilmed and digitised.
The project would take at least three years and cost more than $180,000.
The National Library was funding up to half the cost of digitising the newspapers and would be responsible for the ongoing costs of preserving the content in the national digital heritage archive and making the content available on the National Library's Papers Past website.
Department of Internal Affairs spokesman Allen Walley
said it was extremely important to digitise old newspapers and collaborating with community groups was an important part of the process of preserving heritage.
''The Papers Past website is well utilised. It's far and away the most popular of the National Library and Internal Affairs websites and seen as an extremely valuable research tool ... '' Mr Walley said.
The website now had 89 titles and it received more than 100,000 page views a day.
Mr Allison said the trust was delighted to collaborate on such an important heritage project.
Most of the seven titles were merged into the Central Otago News in the 1940s and that publication became the Lakes District and Central Otago News, a sister paper to the Otago Daily Times.