Te hotaka whakamatihiko a Te Maeatanga
Te Maeatanga digitisation programme
Learn about the Te Maeatanga digitisation programme including how the team worked, what they worked on and the story of their name.
In June 2024, the Te Maeatanga Digitisation programme and Te whakamatihiko ā-tono Digitisation on demand service closed. The programme had been running since 2017. In that time, almost 2 million images of significance to Aotearoa New Zealand were digitised and are available online for the public to access through the Government Digital Archive.
The Te Maeatanga team delivered important mahi with dedication and expertise. Their contribution to preserving and improving accessibility to our nation's history will be felt for many years to come.
See what Te Maeatanga did
How Te Maeatanga worked
Te Maeatanga worked across all 4 Archives offices around the country. Their mahi fell into 2 streams.
Digitisation on demand
Prior to its closure, anyone could use this service to bump a record to the top of our digitisation queue. The cost depended on how complex the item was to digitise.
Proactive projects
We ran projects to digitise specific groups of archives. When identifying material for digitisation, we prioritised archives that:
were at risk of deterioration
were difficult to access physically
support all-of-government commitments to revitalising te reo Māori and teaching young people the histories of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Highlights from our work
We posted about our work on social media and in our blogs.
Our name – Te Maeatanga
Our ingoa Māori, Te Maeatanga, was given to us in 2021 by Hēmi Kelly, Lecturer in te reo Māori at Auckland University of Technology.
Hēmi talks about the meaning of our name below.
“Maea means to emerge, arise, appear, become visible, come into view, come up, surface.
I thought about the idea of these items emerging from Te Rua Mahara and becoming visible again to those who have requested them.
Te Maeatanga could be translated to mean the emergence or the coming into view.
We store, like the archives, a lot of things in our mahara (minds), not everything is visible or in the forefront of our minds, sometimes we must recollect our memories to bring them into light again, similar to these items when they're requested.“