Ironing out the kinks to digitise paper trail
From where can one buy poisoned wheat? How many cars go over the Auckland Harbour Bridge in an hour? Who can I contact in Cape Town to get South African plant seeds?
These might not be the sorts of questions one would expect to be directed towards Wellington City Council, which is perhaps why they are causing some amusement as they are unearthed from the organisation’s vast warehouse of paper archives.
The council is about one-sixth of its way through digitising a collection of paper records that would stretch for 12 kilometres if they were laid out in a line. While doing so, it has rediscovered some of the more bizarre queries made to the council over the years.
The queries had been collated and recorded by staff working at the City of Wellington Public Relations Office, and have been uploaded to the new online archive under the title ‘‘Funny enquiries since 1959’’.
Among them are questions about distances between cities, where to buy certain goods, who starred in a Hollywood musical, and a request for a guitarist to be found to fill in for a band playing at a dance that night.
The queries were obviously deemed strange at the time, too, having been recorded by staff because of their obscurity.
According to the documents, one caller asked: ‘‘Urgent: How many cars go over the Auckland Harbour Bridge in an hour?’’
Another inquired: ‘‘Where can I write to in Cape Town for seeds of South African plants?’’
Closer to home, one member of the public asked: ‘‘Is there a bylaw against jungle music being played through a loudspeaker on Lambton Quay?’’
The wide array of questions highlights where some people went to for information before the internet age. One caller even asked for the name of the film in which Mario Lanza was conscripted into the United States Army.
A Google search reveals the film being referred to was the 1952 musical comedy Because You’re Mine.
Other notable discoveries made by council staff so far include a file containing a chunk of human hair to indicate the complainant was ‘‘tearing their hair out’’, and a 1910 request from the Wellington Amateur Athletic Society for permission to stage a race between a man and a horse. The request was declined.
But there is amore serious note to the digitisation project, a process that will cost the council more than $10 million and safeguard documents stretching back to the 1840s.
Chief digital officer James Roberts said digging through the paper archives, stored in a warehouse on Barker St near the Basin Reserve, often delayed building consent applications, and the new online archive would make that process much quicker.
For the past three years, council staff had been digitising records manually using scanners, and at the rate they were going, the project was set to take 18 years.
Recently, the council contracted the work out to digital technology company Fuji Xerox, which expects to churn through the remaining 10km of documents in just three more years.
The work will cost the council between $8m and $10m, Roberts said. That was on top of the $1.5m it had already spent on scanning equipment used to complete the work so far.
‘‘There is an element of complexity to some of the files,’’ he said.
‘‘Some of them actually have to be ironed in order to be able to scan them. So there is a percentage of that 10km that have to be handled very carefully.’’
The bulk of the collection dates from the 1860s, with theWellington Town Board established in 1863. The town board became Wellington City Council in 1870.
The earliest records are the electors list and minute book for the Wellington Borough Council, which was formed in 1842 but disbanded by the British Crown the following year.