Artefact digitisation unit - for your Anzac!

The wonderful people from the Auckland War Memorial Museum delivered an Artefact Digitisation Unit (ADU) to the Central Auckland Research Centre.

A what? I hear you say . . . .

It is an awesome piece of technology that looks kind of like an ATM machine - a kiosk with a computer, touchscreen monitor and a camera.

With its connectivity to the internet, it has direct access to the new Online Cenotaph.

People can use the ADU to search the Online Cenotaph direct from the Research Centre, and contribute information about the person they are researching - this includes the ability to photograph documents and objects to upload to a subjects record.

The Online Cenotaph itself has been completed re-designed and had been re-launched in January.

There are more than 140,000 service personnel listed, and alots of new content has been added:

• approximately 2,000 new images from Auckland Libraries' Schmidt Collection of portraits 
• direct links with servicemen’s sketches, poems and writing held in the Troopship magazines, which the Museum has now digitised 
• around 2,000 additional records of New Zealand servicemen who served in the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) – purchased for Online Cenotaph by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage 
• linking of of 437 records from the Māori Pioneer Battalion with a digital image of their signatures on the Pioneer Scroll, on display in the Scars I gallery 
• digitising of the Mickle Album, including the 60 photographs of friends from Birkenhead who volunteered and left New Zealand to fight in WWI.

3/4 portrait of Sapper Bertram Charles Robinson, Reg No 12074, of the New Zealand Engineers,
No. 2 Field Company. Killed in action in France on 15 November 1916.
(Photographer: Herman Schmidt, 1916).
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 31-R984.
No known copyright

One of the biggest improvements is that family and researchers are encouraged to add content or images to the records of service personnel, which can be done on your own computer - or on the ADU available at the Central Auckland Research Centre and other destinations around the Auckland region.

Read more about the ADU on an earlier blog post.

Happy hunting

Seonaid