Heritage et AL

Image: Penny Vernon with her twin lens camera, 17 July 2025, photographer Jane Wild Robin Hyde’s distributed archive continues to grow. Sometimes the photograph, the book or the letter takes its own time. In this case a photograph which features Robin’s son Derek Challis took over forty years to be developed. The story behind the photograph demonstrates the way documentary heritage can surface beyond the formed collections. This is particularly apparent when an archive is collected after the subject’s death. In this case Iris Guiver Wilkinson (1906 – 1939) now better known as Robin Hyde has left a trail of letters and photographs across the country and beyond reflecting her vivid and tumultuous life. More letters continue to be found and through digitisation and transcription they add to the distributed archive in collections, both public and private.  Image: Derek and Ellynne (Lynne) Challis with Jean Sweetman, Grey Lynn, 1980s, photographer: Penny Vernon The photo had been waitin...

Image: School children on Apirana Ave, Glen Innnes, 1989. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 273-PAG002-10. Photographer: Stuart Page In 1990, Auckland Libraries launched a large-scale oral history project to commemorate Aotearoa New Zealand’s sesquicentennial anniversary. The aim was to preserve the voices of Aucklanders and capture the city's history through their lived experiences. This particular series focuses on Glen Innes, highlighting its unique social, cultural, and historical narratives. The oral history excerpts below highlight key themes such as the everyday social and cultural life of Glen Innes and its surrounding market gardens, mana whenua, and the communities that later moved into the area. These excerpts have been curated for the exhibition 'Glen Innes: A Century of Community and Change,' held at Te Oro Music and Arts Centre from 6 September 2025. More details of the exhibition can be found here . 1. Elizabeth Smith  Elizabeth was interviewed by Je...

Blame it on the rain by Hana Pera Aoake Carin Smeaton : Kia ora Hana, You’ve been a busy mama! I’ve just finished reading your gorgeous little pocket-sized pukapuka 'Blame It On the Rain' and now I’m reading your third (and latest) 'Some Helpful Models of Grief.' I love the philosophies that you weave through your writings with the humour and socio historical threads that we writers from this part of the world tend to shy away from. I love that you don’t sanitise things and I love reading books that embrace that edge. Could you please let us Aucklanders know where you’re from and your connections to Tāmaki Makaurau?  Some helpful models of grief by Hana Pera Aoake Hana Pera Aoake : He uri tenei nō Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Hinerangi, Waikato/Tainui, Te Arawa, me Poutini Ngāi Tahu. Kei te noho au ki Kawerau. I tipu ake au Ōtepoti me Te whenua Moemoea. Ko Aoake tōku whanau. Ko Miriama Jean taku Tamāhine. Ko Hana Pera Aoake toku ingoa.  Kia ora, my name is Hana. I'm from a...

In late 2022, Auckland Libraries received a significant donation of fashion photography negatives by Noel Brotherston (1932–1997). Most of the images date from 1968 to 1969. For me, it marked the beginning of a piece of work to make this substantial archive discoverable. Of the nearly 19,000 frames in the collection, over 7,000 now include metadata and are available to view on Kura Heritage Collection Online . Creating metadata for this collection turned out to be more revealing and more rewarding than I had expected. Metadata is generally defined as data about data. It records information such as format, dimensions, media type, and other technical or descriptive details. As dry as that may sound, effective metadata is essential – it helps users locate, search, and make sense of content.  At Auckland Libraries, those of us creating metadata for photography collections work in spreadsheets adding descriptions, keywords, subject headings, and relevant notes for each image. Thankfully...

What has many editions and only one? Tāmaki Makaurau’s long-running newspaper, The Auckland Star. A researcher’s worst nightmare is knowing of a source that no longer exists, and the Star is a source like no other in that it was once published as several editions every day, yet nobody bothered to collect them all. Auckland Council Libraries holds a near-continuous run of the daily periodical from its origin as the Evening Star in the 1870s to its present incarnation as the Sunday Star–Times . However, a decision was made over a century ago to only retain a single daily copy, a mere sampling of the Star’s copious output. This decision still impacts historians and researchers today and raises important questions: why did the Star print so many daily editions and what are we missing by their absence? Image: The Auckland Star masthead with various edition stamps underneath dating from 1926 through 1975. Despite covering the same geographic area—urban Auckland—the long-running newspa...