The New Zealand Digital Library project is a research programme in the Computer Science Department at Waikato University, whose aim is not to set up new libraries but to develop the underlying technology for digital libraries and make it available publicly so that others can use it to create their own collections. We are concerned with large collections of electronic, predominantly textual, documents, physically dispersed on computers the world over, and aim to make them accessible through a uniform interface that allows information to be located and accessed. This article describes the NZDL project, illustrated by a large example collection of Computer Science Technical Reports. The system is freely available on the World-Wide Web. The migration of information from paper to computers promises to change the whole nature of research, and in particular the methods by which people locate information. The goal of the New Zealand Digital Library project is to explore the potential of Internet-based digital libraries, by which we mean large collections of electronic, predominantly textual, documents, physically dispersed on computers the world over, which are accessible through a uniform interface that allows information to be located and accessed. Our vision is to develop systems that automatically impose structure on fundamentally anarchic, uncatalogued, distributed repositories of information, thereby providing users with effective tools to locate the information they need and peruse it conveniently and comfortably. As a geographically isolated but technologically advanced nation, New Zealand stands to gain markedly from effective deployment of information resources that are freely available on international computer networks. The New Zealand Digital Library project is a research programme in the Computer Science Department at Waikato University, funded in part by the NZ Foundation for Research, Science and Technology and the NZ Lotteries Grants Board. Our aim is not to set up new libraries, but to develop the underlying technology for digital libraries and make it available publicly so that others can use it to create their own collections. Not surprisingly, the technology required varies greatly depending on the kind of collection and the source of the information. Consequently, we are making several different large collections of public-domain text available on an experimental basis as test cases. These allow us to investigate the technical problems of gathering and indexing the material, to assess the useability of our interfaces, and to collect information on external usage so that we can improve the facilities offered. We call this testbed the “NZDL” to distinguish it from our research programme. This article begins by presenting the facilities offered by the NZDL. We then discuss the indexing and retrieval strategies that it supports, and go on to explain how the collection is built and maintained. Finally we indicate likely directions that our project will be taking in the future.