An update from Archives NZ No images? Click here He Kohinga Maharahe mauhanga kitea, ka hoki ngā mahara Tēnā koutouWelcome to the lockdown edition of our newsletter. We’ve been adjusting to life working from home over the past couple of months. This has meant that some of our business-as-usual work has slowed or stopped, but it’s also meant that other areas have had the rare chance to flourish. Personally, I’ve found working from home a little tough at times, despite being a self-declared tech geek. We’re fortunate to be locked down in the digital age, where communication is everything, but technology doesn’t always behave and this causes frustrations. Amidst the sometime tedium of endless zoom meetings, there have been surprising joys, like seeing my colleagues in their natural habitats and meeting their children, pets and plant babies. I’ve enjoyed keeping some of our office traditions alive, such as our daily Dom Post ‘five-minute quiz’ via zoom, which has helped to balance out the ‘zoom fatigue’. Budget 2020 has also been a highlight of the lockdown period for me. You can read more about what Budget 2020 means for Archives and our colleagues at National Library below. Through the lockdown I’ve been trying to take the long view. You may have seen the Canvas article on 9 May in which myself, Honiana Love from Ngā Taonga and Chris Szekely of the Alexander Turnbull Library discuss our different institutions’ collecting areas, and the importance of documenting this once-in-a-lifetime (hopefully) event. My team across the country are working hard to prepare our four offices for re-opening to the public. We look forward to welcoming you back soon. Noho ora mai rā Budget newsThis week the Minister for Internal Affairs Hon. Tracey Martin announced funding secured through Budget 2020 for a number of Archives related ventures. That announcement signalled a clear commitment from the Government to our documentary heritage sector, giving a significant boost to the Preserving the Nation’s Memory Programme (PtNM) and to Archives New Zealand and the National Library of New Zealand. Budget 2020 will support a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a national documentary heritage campus in the Thorndon area, with Parliament and many government departments nearby. This heritage campus will enable closer collaboration across New Zealand’s three heritage organisations; Archives, the National Library and Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision, who are currently co-located with the National Library. Funding secured for PtNM through Budget 2020 provides $46.6 million in operating spending over four years and $146m million in capital and will fund: • The Archives Wellington lease facility and air-bridge construction and ongoing lease commitment; • The design and procurement phase for the National Library alterations associated with the development of the documentary heritage campus; and • The Regional Shared Repository land purchase and design. Archives New Zealand Aitken Street concept Budget 2020 also includes increased funding for the second successive year for the National Library and Archives New Zealand for ‘Meeting Core Statutory Responsibilities’ and to digitise high-risk audio-visual collections. These initiatives will support improved public access to legal deposit publications and public records, audit and monitoring of public agencies and preservation of digital records and items. NALI updateI appreciate that a number of our stakeholders and supporters have been eager for an update on the National Archival and Library Institutions (NALI) work. Ministers have now agreed that no structural changes will be made in the current term of this Government. The Department of Internal Affairs will continue its commitment to improving the impact of the National Library of New Zealand and Archives New Zealand together with Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision. While the consensus is that current settings cannot continue, Ministers have agreed that with this level of investment and commitment no structural changes will be made in the current term of this Government to allow the department time to implement the new measures in the context of the significant investments announced. The Department’s Chief Executive has decided on several measures to give the National Library and Archives more operational flexibility and transparency, so we are best able to deliver on our 2030 and 2057 Strategies. You can read more about what these measures are on the National Archival and Library Institutions webpage. Our response to COVID-19Archives pre-empted the government’s stay-at-home advice and closed to the public from the evening of 20 March. This was also the first day of working from home for most staff, who’ve been continuing to work from home throughout the lockdown. A small number of staff have returned to the buildings under alert level 2, with appropriate health & safety measures in place. We’re working on how to re-open our reading rooms without compromising the gains Aotearoa has made to eliminate the spread of COVID-19. Our primary focus is the wellbeing of our staff and users. When we know more we'll let you know on our website, twitter account and Facebook page. While it has been difficult for many of our archivists to be so far from their beloved archives, it’s been encouraging to see the 10% of our holdings that we have digitised getting good use, with notable spikes around ANZAC day, and following an article in which we were reminded that New Zealand has been through, and survived, something very similar to the COVID-19 pandemic before. With no physical access to archival material, we’ve seen roughly double the usual traffic to our digitised holdings. It’s exciting to see that our strategy to digitise for increased access, no matter where our users are, is already paying dividends. It’s also encouraging to see that the majority of our staff have been able to continue at least some of their core work from home, as well as take the opportunity of a break from the everyday routine to complete some archival projects. Read onto find out more about just a few of these projects. Some Department of Health posters from the 1950s and 60s on Archives' Wiki Commons page · WikimediaThe COVID-19 lockdown has allowed archives staff from across the country to support our online outreach activities. As part of our Archives 2057 strategy to “take archives to the people”, we’ve been using Wikimedia to highlight some of the digitised records in our online archive. Wiki Commons is a site that hosts millions of images from around the world, many of which are used in Wikipedia articles, the online encyclopaedia which is the 12th most popular website in the world according to the latest Alexa rankings. Having our images used on such a popular platform is a great way to generate interest in Archives NZ, primary sources and New Zealand’s documentary heritage. Prior to lockdown, we had 1,400 images in the category Images from Archives New Zealand. During lockdown we’ve uploaded over 2,000 images. Add to this the more than 1,200 images which were already in Wiki Commons, but not attributed to Archives. We fixed these up too, resulting in a new total of over 4,750 images in this Wiki Commons category. Uploads covered a range of topics, such as Great War Medal recipients; Chinese Poll Tax; and Walter Nash. Where applicable, these images were added to Wikipedia articles, such as in the case of Mildred Amelia Woodbine Pomare. Our records appear in Wikipedia in multiples languages, with English, Spanish, Italian, German and French being the top 5 Wikipedia sites by views of our material. An image of instructions issued by the Coromandel Hospital Board during the 1918 influenza pandemic sits on the Wikipedia page for that event. In April the image had 4,593,145 views. Images of the Royal Family are popular as well, such as a young Duke of York, fishing on the Tongariro River, which had 783,684 views in April. The biggest success story of all is seeing how many staff from across the country were willing to learn how to edit and get on board in assisting the small number of staff who previously worked on WikiMedia editing. Even when we return to business as usual, we hope this new team of editors will keep supporting this successful outreach initiative. · Tutorial VideosDuring lockdown, members of the digitisation team have been unable to do their core work of digitising our holdings. Luckily, there’s plenty of other cool stuff on our to-do list, and one of these jobs is to make handy video tutorials. These short videos provide easy step-by-step introductions to some of the things users can do online. Examples of these include how to open a digitised record, how to find community-held collections, and explore Archives NZ online. Other videos, such as the popular introduction to the conservation laboratory give the public a look behind the scenes at Archives. So much of the work we do is about preserving our holdings for future generations, so it’s been great to see such an enthusiastic response to this video. Updates to our websitesWe’ve launched a new directory of community archives in New Zealand, and a refreshed page for our National Collection of War Art on our website. As part of our work to build a new Archives website in 2019, we agreed to retire some of our legacy websites which posed business risks as they were on beyond-end-of-life platforms and servers. This gave us an opportunity to reconsider those sites. Where appropriate, these have been refreshed and their content relaunched on the new website. On 4 May 2020, our legacy websites were removed from public view ahead of a full decommission process, which will be completed by 30 June. Appropriate tikanga for the decommissioning will be conducted either virtually, or at a time when the COVID-19 alert level is lowered sufficiently to permit gatherings. You can read more about how we developed our new website on digital.govt.nz If you notice a bug or would like to share your experience with our website, please email archives.online@dia.govt.nz Ngāti Porou internshipsWe’ve been privileged to have Maria Wynyard (Te Aitanga a Materoa, Te Whanau a Rakairoa, Te Aowera) interning for ten weeks at Archives Wellington as part of an initiative run by Radio Ngāti Porou and funded by Te Mātāwai. Three interns were placed at Archives New Zealand, Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision, and the Alexander Turnbull Library from 13 January to 20 March 2020. Maria (4th from left) with (L-R) Richard, Honiana, Bill, Mahinaarangi Manual, Lady Pokai At Archives, Maria focused on identifying and accessing materials with a high level of Ngāti Porou reo content, such as tīpuna letters, Crown Purchase Deeds, Māori Land Purchasing files, and files created by Sir Apirana Ngata. She also listed several folders of te reo letters relating to the Tūranganui-a-Kiwa campaigns of the 1860s that were previously unlisted. Alongside her description and discovery work, Maria spent time with every team at Archives. The internship was a great success, strengthening our relationship with Ngāti Porou as set down in the Letter of Commitment. Maria used her knowledge and experience as a researcher to successfully locate many items of interest. She also worked in a way that anyone following in her footsteps could continue the mahi. The internships also fostered a closer working relationship with Ngā Taonga and the Turnbull Library, and included well-attended mihi whakatau and poroporoaki at the National Library. All three institutions have learned a lot from the internship and anticipate more in the future. Maria in the Conservation Lab with Anna Whitehead Government recordkeepingWe’ve continued work on the new recordkeeping audit programme during lock-down. There are some delays but we still intend to recommence audits of those public offices that are due for re-audit during 2020/21. We have also been preparing our annual survey of public sector recordkeeping for launch. This was scheduled to go out to public offices and local authorities in June, but we are assessing whether it would be too onerous to require the full survey to be completed in light of the heavy demands on the public sector during the COVID-19 response. We’re looking at undertaking a shorter survey restricted to just key indicator questions. We’ve also also developed and published advice to the regulated sector on recordkeeping issues arising from and during the COVID-19 response, and will continue to do so as the response evolves. |