File image. Photo: Unsplash / Tim Mossholder
Community newspapers are to be digitalised as part of a new agreement with the National Library of New Zealand.
The newspapers will be uploaded on the Papers Past platform, which currently has more than eight million pages.
National Library director of content services Mark Crookston said it was "excited" to be working with The Preserving Local History and Education Trust on the initiative.
"It will elevate community and local stories to the same level of access as the major daily and metropolitan titles which are the predominant focus of our very successful Papers Past service."
One of the Trust's board members, Jane Hill, said much of Aotearoa's history was documented in local newspapers, and if they were not preserved now, they could be lost forever.
"They contain so much rich content about everyday New Zealanders: revealing the people, places, events, organisations, businesses, societies, iwi, and hapū that make up a village, small town, rohe, or region. We want this to be available to all Kiwis today, and for generations to come. If we do not act today, the first written draft of our history will be lost forever."
The Trust said the primary goal was to preserve the country's newspapers which were a "significant component of our cultural heritage and taonga".
Trustee Andy Fenton said much of New Zealand's history was documented in these newspapers.
"Often our first port of call is to hop on Google, Bing, or social media nowadays, to learn about our local history," he said.
"But it's the community newspapers that hold this."
Fenton said the first written draft of history would be lost forever if community newspapers were not preserved.
"They contain so much rich content about everyday New Zealanders: Revealing the people, places, events, organisations, businesses, societies, iwi, and hapū that make up a village, small town, rohe, or region."
"We want this to be available to all Kiwis today, and for generations to come."
Earlier this year, RNZ reported of one of the great debacles of New Zealand history-keeping - when an irreplaceable collection of more than a million photos capturing the nation's history almost ended up in a rubbish dump in America.
Not all of the Fairfax images ended up in America, but those that did eventually returned to New Zealand in digitised form.