Utaina

Utaina

The audiovisual sights and sounds of our country are unique to Aotearoa New Zealand. The audiovisual items in Archives New Zealand's holdings include broadcast news and current affairs programmes, documentaries, TV series, films, music, oral histories, live recordings of community events and more.

Audiovisual items capture the issues and experiences of people through the decades, unique cultural events and defining moments, our environment and scenery, and successes and tragedies over the last century. We can look through this window to the past to enjoy, remember and guide our future.

The Utaina project is a collaboration between Archives New Zealand, the National Library and Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision to digitise our audiovisual collections. Its aim is to preserve items in formats the public can access and use. It will deliver the digitisation of audiovisual material at a scale and quality never seen before in Aotearoa.

As well as the audiovisual material already in our holdings, we'll continue to digitise new analogue items as we acquire them.

Why Utaina is needed

We need to digitise our audiovisual collections because:

• they're stored on obsolete formats, or formats that deteriorate over time

• the equipment needed to play them is no longer being made

• fewer people with the expertise to maintain the playback equipment are available each year.

“Not only is this initiative essential for NZ to maintain its links to the past, it presents an opportunity for us to work together with our colleagues at Ngā Taonga and Archives to achieve a common goal. We are looking forward to sharing and learning from each other.”

Mark Crookston, Programme Director, National Library of New Zealand.

The project was given the name Utaina! by Ngā Taonga. The name has been interpreted as "load the precious freight on board", a catchphrase of Sir Āpirana Ngata when advocating for the recording and preservation of Māori language and heritage.

Utaina is a huge project, with a combined volume of over 400,000 audiovisual magnetic media items to digitise. The National Library holds more than 105,000 collection items and Archives NZ holds around 10,000 items.

For Archives NZ, Utaina is complimentary to the Film Lab project and will ensure our audiovisual holdings in all media are preserved for the future

Louise McCrone, Preservation and Repository Services Manager, Archives New Zealand.

Sarah Davy, Group Manager Accessible Collections at Ngā Taonga, is delighted that more than 300,000 items from the archival collections of Television New Zealand, Radio New Zealand and Māori Television held by Ngā Taonga is going to be digitally preserved.

Our collection, along with the collections held by National Library and Archives, are priceless taonga that capture our nation’s history and it is a privilege to be involved in this important project.

Sarah Davy

Thanks to Government investment of over $40 million in Budget 20, we're able to partner with international archiving specialist Memnon to digitise our holdings. Memnon will be based in Lower Hutt while the project is underway.

You'll still be able to access digitised audiovisual items as usual while we complete the project. Contact us if you want to view an audiovisual item we haven't digitised yet.

Ask an archivist to view an audiovisual item