Celebrating Te Oha – Whakaputunga Taonga, the new Te Rarawa Iwi Archive 

NZMS first heard about a move to create a digital archive for Te Rūnanga o Te Rarawa in 2022 when Whina Te Whiu emailed Alison Barnett, NZMS Northern Regional Manager: “The time has come for the iwi to digitise their post settlement iwi collections.”   Te Iwi o Te...

Forgotten Formats: The Lucky Cassette Projector

As a digitisation company, NZMS primarily deals with documents, photos, slides, ephemera, and the microfilming of newspapers. We also have a small audio-visual division helping to digitise obsolete audio-visual materials mainly of the magnetic tape format – cassettes,...

A Journey in Watercolour: The Illustrated Diaries of Brian Pleasants

Our NZMS team in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington recently had the privilege of digitising 9 illustrated diaries for the family of artist Brian Pleasants.

These diaries paint a vivid picture of the adventures Brian and his wife, Antionette, embarked on together. Beautifully illustrated, they are filled with fascinating tales and experiences from across the globe. We recently spoke with Brian’s son, Simon, about his father’s diaries and the significance of their digitisation.

Preserving Hamilton’s Photographic Heritage

In 2007, Hamilton City Libraries launched a digitisation project, focusing on its holdings of aerials, maps, and a significant photographic collection, which included images transferred from the Waikato Museum during the redistribution of its exhibition spaces. NZMS captured 32,000 heritage photographic negatives as part of this initiative, a project spanning 15-years!

Revealing Untold Stories: The Value of School Archives

Archives are more than just a collection of official records, they also serve to safeguard and celebrate the memories and achievements of their communities. In the case of schools, archives are increasingly seen as a vital component of alumni engagement programmes.

Sketchbooks Provide Fascinating Insights into 19th Century Naturalism

John Buchanan was the first locally based scientific illustrator in Aotearoa New Zealand, and joined many explorations across the country from 1862-1885, collecting and illustrating distinctive examples of our local flora and fauna.

Fantastical Digitising

Fantastical Digitising

For a number of years, artist Sacha Lees has been trusting NZMS to digitise her Fantastical artworks. For her current exhibition ‘Vagrant Mind’ at the Exhibitions Gallery in Wellington we had the pleasure of viewing and carefully digitising her beautiful and unique...

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13,000 Surveyors Field Books

13,000 Surveyors Field Books

NZMS are currently digitising 13,000 field books for Land Information New Zealand (LINZ).
As part of a much larger project for LINZ which includes large format maps, we are currently digitising approximately 630,000 pages of field books for the North Island, with some of them dating back to 1872.

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Bulford Kiwi

Bulford Kiwi

Earlier this year we received a unique digitisation request. The grid layout of a chalk Kiwi commonly known as the Bulford Kiwi carved by New Zealand troops on Bulford Hill near Stonehenge. The carving has recently become a “scheduled monument” on the advice of Historic England as part of the centenary of World War I.  The 130 metre tall Kiwi was carved by New Zealand troops stationed at Sling Camp in Bulford following the 1917 Battle of Messines in Belgium.

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