The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC) is a digital library project at Victoria University of Wellington. The Centre has been digitising New Zealand books since early 2002, and publishing them on its website. Since April 2005, the structure of the website has been based on Topic Maps.

Many digital library websites use a resource-centric organisation, in which individual documents are the primary or exclusive objects of interest. By contrast the NZETC’s Topic Maps-based website has a more subject-centric architecture which accommodates not only the digitised texts and images, but equally their subjects and themes, their authors and publishers, as well as the people and places mentioned or depicted in those texts and images. Because of the generality of the Topic Maps paradigm, the conceptual structure can be extended as needed, e.g. to include extra classification schemes such as Linnaean classification for biological texts, or to provide more specific types of relationships between texts, such as a new law repealing a section of an old law.