(17 Oct 2025) Utaina, one of the largest audiovisual digitization projects in the world and the largest in New Zealand to date, has concluded. Over 400,000 items from the collections held by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa and Archives New Zealand Te Rua Mahara o…
(9 Oct 2024) Two of Alexander Turnbull Library’s important historic collections have gained inscriptions on the UNESCO Memory of the World register for Aotearoa. The register, established in 2010, allows for significant pieces of Aotearoa’s documentary heritage to be preserved and protected. They are the Frank Sargeson Collection showcases the life of notable Aotearoa author…
Martin Gengenbach, Digital Preservation Policy and Outreach Specialist, shares the work and aspirations of the library mahi to preserve digital cultural heritage. (17 Jul 2024) Preserving the digital cultural heritage of Aotearoa New Zealand means taking the long view: thinking about how old, current, and new generations of technology are used to create, and…
(27 Feb 2024) Outdated and offensive language haunts archival and library catalogues, potentially causing harm to those searching for and accessing the material these institutions hold. In other cases, there are silences — people can’t find material because the search terms they employ have not been used by the Library in the item’s descriptive record. These…
(6 Dec 2023) From the National Library of New Zealand blog: “The National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa is charged with ‘enriching the cultural and economic life of New Zealand and its interchanges with other nations’ (National Library of New Zealand Act 2003). We have a growing commitment to…
(19 Oct 2023) To celebrate the upcoming World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2023 read about the audiovisual digitization project Utaina and watch the video of the Utaina digitization process. Read more here.
(1 Feb 2023) Due to the recent devastating flooding that has hit several areas of New Zealand, the National Library of New Zealand has made available its ‘Disaster Recovery Guidelines’ to help in the recovery of damaged belongings such as photographs, books, artworks, and music collections. The guideline can be found here. …
(8 Mar 2022) National Library of New Zealand is archiving the diversity of voices and reactions to the 2022 Wellington protests, from ephemeral placards and signs to born-digital tweets and live video streams. See how they collect and archive the events while the library building was in the center of the happening. The full…
(30 Nov 2021) The New Zealand National Library decided to cease its donation of 600,000 books from its overseas published collection to Internet Archive for digitization, following a wave of criticism due to copyright issues. The US-based Internet Archive is a digital repository of books, movies, games and music free of use. Following digitization, the…
(11 Aug 2021) The Papers Past website is a goldmine of information, with millions of pages of digitised historical content from all over New Zealand. Papers Past first saw the light of day in August 2001. Over its 20 year life-span there are have been a number of iterations. Tracy Powell, Digitisation Advisor, gives a brief history…