Utaina Starts digitising Audio Visual items
The Utaina team has been hard at work over the last year, and the last few months have been full of important milestones for the project.
21 December 2022
Our Archives and Library teams have been involved with the extensive work to survey, prepare, catalogue, box, and plan for items to be digitised at this scale. So in November it was exciting to see the first items from the National Library audio visual collections being digitised.
The Utaina project is a collaboration between Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, Archives New Zealand and the National Library to digitise more than 460,000 items in the Crown’s audiovisual heritage collections of which the Archives has 10,500.
Utaina milestone, first items digitised
The digitisation journey started with a very special ceremony.
The tikanga process was led by Anahera Morehu, Kaihautū Archives NZ (and current Chief Archivist) and Ruki Tobin, Kaihautū National Library. The items were transferred to Avalon Studios and Memnon Digitisation studios, escorted by staff.
We gathered to wish the first collection items (and all future items over the life of the project) safe travels as they left their whare, on their journey to Memnon’s digitisation studios in Motutawa. (This is a round trip that will be made every week for the next 2 and a half years between the Library and Archives and Memnon, and it’s important to set the process properly – for the items themselves and for all the kaimahi who will see them on that journey including our partners in Crown FIL and Memnon.)
We then travelled with the items to Motutawa, where we were welcomed into Memnon’s space with karakia to acknowledge the importance of the journey and the mahi taking place at Memnon. The items and their wairua (and ongoing journey between the two spaces) were acknowledged and welcomed. We then shared kai and felt safe and prepared for the next stage of our mahi.
With the first shipment of items delivered to Memnon, the digitisation of the National Library and Archives audio visual material is underway.
What’s in the first batch of items to be digitised?
The first batch consisted of audio cassettes - a mix of both music and oral histories from the Alexander Turnbull Library’s collections. Archives have begun with a selection of betacam items, which included Suffragette Centennial Year Trust videos, as well as sepmag items from the National Film unit.
Following digitisation by Memnon, the digital files are checked in our purpose-built quality control (QC) studios by a dedicated team of project QC technicians.
Event to celebrate this Utaina milestone
We took the opportunity to celebrate this milestone with an event at the National Library. The event was attended by Minister of Internal Affairs Hon. Jan Tinetti, Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, Hon. Kiritapu Allan, Hon. George Angene, Minister of Cultural Development, Cook Islands and our digitisation partner Memnon CEO, Heidi Shakespeare. It was a special evening, and lovely to connect and celebrate with our Ngā Taonga colleagues and our digitisation partner.
Read and view the news item TVNZ ran about the Utaina project.
We look forward to 2023 when the momentum will pick up and the volume of collections digitised will increase.
