Of Danish settler parentage, Tom Wilsted was born in Detroit, 16 April 1943, and grew up in Greenville, small town Michigan, where his parents had a furniture store. From 1962 he attended Kalamazoo College, where he met Mary, his future wife of 57 years, before going on to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Here in 1968, he graduated MA in history with his American Civil War thesis: Roger A. Pryor: Secessionist and Soldier, 1849-1865. So, a lifelong fascination with history and its sources was confirmed.
This is my final year as the Reviews Editor before I hand over the baton to someone else for 2025. This experience has been immensely enriching as has been working with the editorial committee.
Dance, like all performing arts, is ephemeral. And by ephemeral, I mean that once a dance reaches its conclusion it is gone. This is unlike fine arts, which often ends as a finished artwork such as a drawing, painting or sculpture. In performance, be it music, drama ordance, completion and conclusion are one and the same, with nothing but memories and representational elements remaining. Because of this, intangible heritage is another expression used in association with dance and the performing arts. This expression acknowledges that it is the act itself that is our heritage and not just the tangible recordings and mementos of it.
Massey University Archives is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2024. The university itself traces its origin back to 1927 when the Massey Agricultural College was established in Palmerston North. Establishing a university archive was not a fast process at MasseyUniversity. The movement to establish an archive began in 1964, the year Massey gained full university status. In that year, the library first raised its concern at the lack of an archive repository for the university and the disparate state of storage of historical records andmaterials of the university. A university archive was eventually established in 1984 to put the management of the university’s archival and historical records on a sound footing. This overview will look at the history of the Archives, its spaces and facilities, the collections in its care and the systems used for intellectual control and access.
Oral histories are an often overlooked but very valuable record for archives, and an equally valuable resource for researchers. In many cases, the recordings are the only record that exists on certain topics, or the individuals involved. Oral histories have been recordedfor several decades in New Zealand and vary in terms of quality and content. For this article, the oral history collection held in the Wairarapa Archive will be analysed as a case study about the quality of the recordings and their value for historical research as demonstrated by their use in the publication, Our New Zealand Home: The USMC in Wairarapa.
The UNESCO Memory of the World Register recognises items and collections of unique national significance, with accepted nominations recognised by their inscription into the Register. The Memory of the World programme was established by UNESCO in 1992, with the objectives to raise awareness of the significance of unique documentary heritage and support preservation and access to these collections. The Aotearoa New Zealand register was initiated in 2010 by the New Zealand NationalCommission for UNESCO. The four 2024 Aotearoa New Zealand inscriptions on the Memory of the World register come from six archival institutions, reflecting the distributed nature of documentaryheritage. They also represent unique documentary heritage taonga, with many firsts. Each of the fourinscriptions is described below, along with their related page work as it will appear on the Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Nga Māhara o te Ao website. You will be able to view these page works online at: https://unescomow.nz.
Kei ngā iwi o te ao nei, ehara taku toa te toa takitahi, engari he toa takitini. Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.To the many people of the world, it is not through my strength alone but the strength of the many that we will succeed. Greetings thrice over to all.Between February and July 2022, Archives New Zealand Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga (Archives) led a proof of concept (PoC) to see how best it could transfer and identify high value agency data, including information that is of interest to Māori. This proof of concept involved analysing hyperscale cloud capabilities and machine learning tools to see how a cloud service provider can support our need to deliver. This article summarises the process and findings of the draft report. While the PoC is only a first exploratory step, findings will be used as a base for future learnings. Any policy decisions or redesigns of our archival management systems would be a separate process.
Rata Holtslag in the Assistant Curator, Acquisitions Services, at the Alexander Turnbull Library.
In Aotearoa we have an incredibly vibrant comics community, rich with diversity. The Alexander Turnbull Library’s Cartoon and Comic Archive is one of the few archives in the world specialising in collecting cartoons and comics, playing a vital role in acknowledging theimportance of this medium both as an important historical record that has unique reflections of the worlds in which we live, and as a way of demonstrating a diverse range of voices and stories.
Over the past few years, I have been involved in writing a number of grant applications to funding agencies on behalf of associations and organisations who hold important local archives and collections. In doing so, I have faced the same frustrations experienced by many when looking for funding for the cultural heritage sector, and indeed for all not-for-profit organisations. There is the economic reality of limited (and diminishing) pots of funds, competition between many worthwhile organisations, and in New Zealand, a small economy with limited tax revenue.
There is little analysis of press articles that report on archives, especially those from New Zealand, and archives are underrepresented in news media analysis in comparison to libraries and museums. The research outlined in this article describes the themes and topicspresent in written news articles, and the general sentiment of press coverage of archives. Research was undertaken in the form of aqualitative content analysis of press articles published by major New Zealand news organisations over a ten-year period. It found thatportrayal of archives by the New Zealand press is generally positive, any negative sentiment tending to align with constructive critiquerather than cynicism or promotion of stereotypes. Themes including digitisation, funding concerns, and access to collections are commonly presented by the press, which in turn may influence the perception of archives by the public.
Within the heritage sector, the opportunity to incorporate a significant, standalone collection in its entirety with an existing collection rarely presents itself. The sheer size of, and topics covered by, the Peter Bush collection qualifies it as a truly unique taonga of national significance. This article details a short history of Peter Bush’s life and travels, the items he collected as a prolific photographer,and the project to rehouse and begin cataloguing his life’s work.
The preface of this book indicates that this collection of essays originated from a project looking at creating a better record of the histories of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, particularly their practices around music and dance. Funded by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project Scheme, the project was titled Reclaiming Performance Under Assimilation in Southeastern Australia, 1935–1975. The book’s nine chapters stretch much further than this, however. As well as covering First Nationspeople in Northern Territory and Western Australia, it also includes two chapters relating to Aotearoa/New Zealand, and further chapters on the Indigenous practices of Taiwan, and the Haudenosaunee in North America.
FLAME (Future Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Excavation) is a podcast series that ran from December 2021 to September 2023.1 It was created by Laura Wilson, Ece Turnator, Petrouchka Moise, Jennifer Grayburn and Keith Smith as part of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Curated Futures Project within the CLIP Post-Doctoral Fellowship programme. The Podcast series has eight episodes consisting of interviews with experts, researchers, and gallery, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) sector workers who focus on the decolonisation of GLAM institutions. Interview segments are interspersed with commentary from the hosts, in which they connect themes from across the episodes and include data and other citations that reinforce or provide context to theinterviewees’ statements.
Since its inception in 2013, the Ian McLean Wards Memorial Trust Scholarship has been one of the more generous scholarships available in Aotearoa New Zealand for archives, records and information professionals. It provides $10,000 towards research that supports the management of heritage materials in particular, archives, records and manuscripts.1 The research generated by scholarship holders has made a notable contribution to professional knowledge but it has been awarded only three times. The Trust is keen to see more use made of this funding and a diversity of research generated. The Scholarship is open to those working in archives, libraries, museums, information and records, and galleries. This article provides some background to both the Trust and the Scholarship and highlights the research of past holders.
Fortune by Tāmaki Makaurau artist Bev Moon is on display at the Hocken Gallery in Ōtepoti, Dunedin from 12 August to 21 October 2023. Fortune is a touring exhibition, which was previously shown at Upper Hutt’s Whirinaki Whare Taonga gallery and Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato in Hamilton.
Presents research on the issues facing school archives and archivists in New Zealand schools, as well as on the topic of community archives. Aims to promote he role and function of the archives in schools, noting that archivists appear to be relatively unrecognized and unsupported.
Chat in public sector workplaces has substantially shifted from deskside conversation to something written down. An activity that did not create records now does, almost completely unintentionally. Of course, people still talk to their workmates, but in many public offices there is now a large amount of typing back and forth every day, peppered with links, jokes, emojis, animated GIFs, and references.
Farewells the first woman national librarian in the world, and includes many personal anecdotes and reflections from colleagues. Describes her far-reaching legacy in the library world and her capable and warm leadership.Metadata reused from the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa under a CC BY 4.0 license.
