Heritage et AL

Awekura is a blog and podcast series that highlights treasures within Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. In this series, library specialists provide a window into the world of these special collections.   Recently we opened Lupe I Vao Ese, a Pacific heritage exhibition at Auckland Central City Library. The phrase "Lupe I Vao Ese" is a poetic metaphor from Gagana Sāmoa, translating as "doves in different pastures." It expresses how measina - the cultural treasures of Moana Oceania - travel across time and place, carrying the voices of ancestors into the present and beyond.   Featuring in the exhibition and discussed in the interview below, Pamata Toleafoa, Curator Pasifika, highlights tapa as one of the measina displayed in the exhibition. Of interest is a contemporary [1983] unique ephemeral greeting card, made in tapa and depicting Tongan traditional dress.    Image: Front page of the ephemera. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections Eph-Item00012. T...

Image: Marilyn Portman behind the microphone, 2022. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections - Ngako: Podcast series. Photographer: Benjamin Brooking. Auckland Central City Library has been a vibrant venue for live music for decades. Among its most celebrated performances are the renowned Heritage Concerts, which have captivated both our local communities and daily visitors to the library. Now in its twentieth year, this beloved concert series owes much of its success to its steadfast curator, Marilyn Portman. Marilyn has been a librarian for close to 40 years, and for many of those years has specialised as a music librarian. She is a taonga - a treasured member of staff with incredible musical knowledge and many recitals and events under her belt. Recently, she shared a fond memory from the early days of the Heritage Concerts - a moment that marked the beginning of something special: “A seed was planted in 2002 when Kowhai Baroque presented ‘An Afternoon of Italian Music and Poetry’ in...

Image:  'Walk under ladders’ Joan Armatrading on tour music poster, 1982-1983. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, Eph-Post00485.   On Friday 26 July 2024, I gave a talk to my colleagues at the Central City Library called 'Ephemera A-Z: an introduction'. I am relatively new to the Associate Curator Ephemera role and the staff talk was a way for me to explore parts of the collection I had not looked at before. This blog post is a version of my curator talk.  There were a few things I wanted to share in my talk. One was to show staff how ephemera is arranged, described, shelved and accessed. I also wanted to show some samples of ephemera which have been digitised and are accessible on Kura Heritage Collections Online . Most of the images of ephemera in my talk (and in this blog post) were carefully scanned or photographed by me for the purpose of the talk. So, those images are not available as digitised items on Kura. The talk was a chance for me to explore parts of th...