New look for Hawke’s Bay’s Knowledge Bank
Hawke’s Bay history has been captured for posterity with the launch of Knowledge Bank’s new website.
Visitors to the website, launched by Hawke’s Bay Digital Archives Trust on February 15, can get their hands on one of the oldest records of newspaper clippings dated April 1872 as well as 18,000 other records procured and digitised.
Hawke’s Bay Digital Archives Trust chairman Peter Dunkerley said the new website was about preserving a slice of history which would otherwise be lost.
“While our old website was adequate, it was very much of its time and in desperate need of a fresher, cleaner look and upgraded functionality.
“It (the new website) is about preserving the pieces of history that make up the culture and landscape of the Bay we have today.
“These records would probably not feature in a traditional museum but they are very important — the photos people took at all sorts of events, from family shots at Marineland and the A&P Show to those taken by locals during major disasters such as the 1931 earthquake.”
The material has been donated by the public and uploaded to the website by a team of 90 volunteers, he said.
“We had more than 1400 visitors to our website last week. That shows there is a great deal of interest in the information we have on there. To make it easier for users and do justice to the
collections and the wonderful people who have donated the material, we have prevailed on some brilliant volunteers to build us this new model.”
He said the collection on the website was an ever-expanding one.
“We are working on some very exciting collections, including the Spiller collection — the scanning of 22,000 reels of film taken in Hawke’s Bay in the 1940s. There are an estimated one million images in this collection and we are due to have a lot more of them up on-line in the not too distant future.
“And as we make new memories over the next generations they can be added, so really it’s a project with no end.”
The records are open for the public to see and use under a Creative Commons License allowing them to be reproduced at no cost for non-commercial use.
“There are images of the 1962 Watties’ fire that many will still remember and a fire in Ahuriri started by the 1931 earthquake, a grainy image of a fire from way back in 1893 about which there is little detail, beautiful pictures of olden-day fire engines and the story of the loss of Hastings’ Sacred Heart Church to fire in 1992.
“We would love to see school children access these photos for school projects. It would help keep these memories alive and instil in the next generation an understanding of how our region was shaped and what life was like in times past.”
Other collections being worked on include the Balfour diaries, a written record of dayto-day life of a Hawke’s Bay farmer with a young family to feed. The project is being undertaken in a partnership with MTG Hawke’s Bay and should be completed by the end of 2019.
It will take about four years for the whole collection to be digitised and uploaded by Knowledge Bank’s volunteers.