NZETC is engaged in an ongoing programme of digitisation and hosts an expanding online library. The standards-based collection is delivered through an Open Source framework and offers full and free access to a range of materials in multiple formats for download or online browsing.

XML and TEI are the document mark-up standards which underpin the work of the NZETC. Information on TEI can be found through the Text Encoding Initiative. Other key technologies used at the NZETC include topic maps and XTM, XSLT, Apache Cocoon and Lucene.

To construct the NZETC topic map, a XSLT stylesheets are used to extract metadata from each of the XML text files, and express it in the XTM format. In this way hundreds of topic maps are automatically created, each of which describes one of the texts. Also information about people, places and organisations are harvested from an entity authority file. Finally the harvested topic maps are merged together to create a unified topic map which describes the entire website.