Heritage et AL

The photography material in  Sir George Grey Special Collections  is made up of 500,000 images from the 1840s to the present day. Items in the collection include glass plate and film negatives, cartes de visite ,  daguerreotypes , postcards, watercolour paintings, drawings and original prints. The 250 individual photograph albums the library holds are a lovely but sometimes trickier-to-stumble-upon part of the collection. The photograph albums date from 1859 to the present day. Predictably, the subjects covered in the albums vary widely and include: tourist snaps, war time scenes, images of family, friends, animals, buildings, cities, landscapes, vehicles, forests, beaches, vessels, tangi/funerals, celebrations, parades, expeditions, council activities and royal visits. Some of the photograph albums have an entry on the Heritage Images database and only a selection of the images in the albums have been digitised. Ref: The inside cover and first page, with a dr...

The heritage music collections at Auckland Libraries include a range of material, including cassettes, LPs, CDs, music scores and manuscript sheet music. The music collections cover a large range of genres and are continually expanding. Ref: Items from Sir George Grey Special Collections music collections, clockwise from top left:  Shocking Pinks (self-titled) CD, Ardijah 'Take a chance' CD, New Zealand poets read their work LP, Freebase 'Raw: live at Cause Celebre' cassette Auckland Libraries' music collections are of historic interest and relate to the development of New Zealand music. In November last year, the original manuscripts of  God Defend New Zealand ,  held at Sir George Grey Special Collections, received national recognition with inscription on the UNESCO Memory of the World New Zealand register of documentary heritage . Older forms of media, sometimes out-dated, hard to track down, unpopular or difficult to purchase, are also part of the ...

Chris Bourke has written a great  profile on the  AudioCulture  website about Auckland entertainment industry entrepreneur and local government politician Phil Warren. Many of the images included in the article are from the Phil Warren manuscript (Click here and type "NZMS 1214" into the search field), donated to  Sir George Grey Special Collections  after Warren's death in 2002. Ref: NZMS 1214, Phil and an unknown friend dining in the early 1960s, Sir George Grey Special Collections. Born in 1938, Warren came from a family in which music and politics were important - his parents were performers and his grandfather's wife's family were political figures in Auckland. As a teenager, Warren worked for the music retailer Beggs and through a contact at this job he was hired as a travelling salesman. When he was 18 years old, Warren met with an Australian agent of Clef Records in an attempt to establish a New Zealand branch of the company. The agent was surp...

Ephemera is the term for printed material originally intended to have a limited life-span, such as pamphlets, posters, tickets and flyers. Libraries collect ephemera because it enhances information found in longer-lasting documents, giving us a more complete picture of life at a given point in time. Some of this 'throwaway' material has considerable visual appeal because it often combines text with images. The performing arts is a major subject area of the  ephemera collection  in the Heritage Collections at Auckland Libraries. Material in this collection dates from the 1850s to the present, with active collection by librarians beginning in the 1970s. The ephemera collection has a wide geographic scope which is nationwide. Usage of the collection for research purposes is broad and varied; with researchers ranging from social historians and popular non-fiction authors, to graphic design students and academics. Ephemera reflects both changing attitudes in society...

Cataloguing and preservation tasks can lead librarians working in heritage collections to come across items which may not have been accessed for some time. These encounters provide an opportunity to explore the lives of historical figures, both locally and internationally, who are connected to the objects. Ref: AWNS-19381005-50-2, portrait of Signor Mussolini, dictator of Italy, 1938, Sir George Grey Special Collections A recent 'rediscovery', which sparked a conversation in the  Sir George Grey Special Collections  workroom, was a telegram sent in 1933 under instructions from the Italian leader, Mussolini. Ref: AWNS-19350925-41-2, king of Italy with Signor Mussolini during the Bolzano maneuvers, 1935, Sir George Grey Special Collections

In one part of the printed book collection of Sir George Grey Special Collections there is a section of books grouped by Private Press publisher name. Private Press books can be defined as books printed by hand, in limited editions, with as much emphasis on making an object of beauty as on reproducing a text. Private Press books are excellent sources of inspiration for artists and can be appreciated by anyone who admires carefully crafted things. Examples of books from some of the many Private Press publishers featured in the collection include exquisite first editions from Arts and Crafts era printers the Doves Press and Kelmscott Press, intricate book art from Flying Fish Press  and The Whittington Press , and a wide range of lovely books from New Zealand printers like The Holloway Press , Otakou Press ,  Puriri Press  and The Pear Tree Press. Alongside these fine books are journals that promote, review and critique the work of Private Presses and related in...