Belgian team helps preserve AV taonga
‘‘We’re over the moon. It’s an awful conundrum that keeps us awake at night . . . [This is] the first step in a very long process.’’
A team of Belgian experts will live in Aotearoa for three years to help digitise hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Crown-owned audiovisual heritage items as part of a $47 million project.
The project will put New Zealand among the foremost countries in the world when it comes to proactively digitising rapidly degrading heritage material.
Despite being stored in climatecontrolled vaults, playback equipment for digital preservation is becoming obsolete and age-related decay makes it progressively difficult and expensive to maintain.
Countries leaving their digitisation efforts late may find themselves left behind altogether, competing for contracts to protect degrading taonga as equipment capable of playing back the vast collections is in short supply.
‘‘The race is on ... some institutions in some countries may miss out,’’ National Library documentary heritage programme director Mark Crookston said.
International archiving specialist Memnon, based in Belgium, was contracted by the National Library, Archives NZ and Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision to help preserve the material.
Memnon has worked with libraries, broadcasters, museums and governments worldwide and will be based out of Lower Hutt’s Avalon Studios, adjacent to Kiwi archivists for ease of access while digitisation is under way.
It is thought the project will create up to 20 jobs for Kiwis when work begins this year.
Theproject was funded by the Government in Budget 2020, but was delayed by Covid-19. More than 10 tonnes of cutting-edge, hitech digitisation equipment was shipped from overseas.
Ngā Taonga will be preserving about 348,000 items in various formats, with the National
Library and Archives digitising 106,000 and 10,500 items respectively. Without the Memnon equipment, it would take Kiwi archivists about 2000 years to digitise the material from Ngā Taonga alone.
The physical items will go into what is known as deep storage, with archivists then tasked with making the digitised items publicly accessible – a ‘‘challenge for down the track’’, Crookston said.
Examples of the material being digitised include TVNZ news programmes on magnetic tape recorded between 1984 and 2016, Māori Television content from 2004 and 2019, Te Kaea, Go Ask Auntie, Tangata Whenua, Marae, Waka Huia, archives of radio stations and interviews, published Kiwi music released on vinyl, cassettes and CDs, oral histories, and news coverage of interest to
Māori audiences from the 1940s to the 1990s.
‘‘It’s about the stories. We have a combination of art and science [at work],’’ Ngā Taonga accessible collections group manager Sarah Davy said.
A small team of technical staff from Memnon will live in Aotearoa, helping operate the machinery, until the project is finished. An end date has been set for 2025, but there is scope, funding permitting, for the contract to be extended to more material, including non-Crown-owned material. This would also depend on Memnon wanting to stay on.
Davy said it was a relief to be able to safeguard the material. ‘‘We’re over the moon. It’s an awful conundrum that keeps us awake at night ... [This is] the first step in a very long process.’’
The project has been given the namēUtainaSirAafterthe pirana Ngata catchphrase, when he advocated for the recording and preservation of Māori language and heritage.