Heritage et AL

Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections gained an important collection in 2024 with the gift of 183 titles collected by the late Professor Emeritus Donal Ian Brice Smith (Don). The collection of early modern books published before 1801 comprises several hundred volumes. The collection is now housed in archival boxes, each with a label which features Don’s signature, to show the provenance from the library of Professor Smith. Image: Don’s signature on the fly leaf of ‘An account of popery and arbitrary government in England’ 1677 MARV, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. Every title brings new possibilities. To honour this significant collection Auckland Libraries has invited academics from across the country to talk about books in this collection.  Rare Book Librarians Jane Wild and Renee Orr have enjoyed looking at the collection and note that books of this age all have stories to tell in terms of their ownership (provenance) and condition. Many have annotations from for...

Image: Research Centre, Central City Library, 1998. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 669-183. Photographer: Kevin Durrant Do you want to start your family history research at home? We have a wide range of resources on the Auckland Libraries website and family history librarian Seonaid has provided information about these resources below that will help get you started.  📌Resources at Auckland Libraries  Family history research guides Our family history research guide can help you get started if you are a beginner, or assist you with questions like: What resources are available to help with finding records of births, deaths, and marriages?  What research resources are available for New Zealand specific research? When ordering an electronic printout of a birth, death and marriage, what information can I expect to receive for a birth that happened after 1875? Our guides also cover further New Zealand resources , immigration records , international resour...

Sometimes when a customer has navigated their way up two flights of escalators and come across the  Sir George Grey Special Collections exhibition room, they might decide to go through another set of glass doors to the reading room for a look around. At this point, they might scan recent acquisitions displayed in a case or walk around the edges of the room looking at the books-about-rare-books on the shelves. Next the person at the reading room desk might walk over and say 'hello' and tell them a bit about the collection. And thankfully, there is always the book  Real Gold on hand: making the task of briefly outlining the wonderful, varied and expanding Sir George Grey Special Collections much easier. Ref: Iain Sharp, Real gold: treasures of Auckland City Libraries, Auckland: AUP, 2007. When Real Gold was published in 2007 there was a physical exhibition to coincide with the book launch. In addition, there is an online version of this exhibition which gives de...

Sir George Grey Special Collections has a range of books containing cartoons and individual issues of comics. Some of the creators mentioned in Adrian Kinnaird's excellent book on New Zealand comics -  From Earth's End  -  feature in the collection. Eric Resetar was born in Auckland in 1928 and is one of New Zealand's early comic book author - illustrators. When Resetar was a child he had a great interest in science fiction and enjoyed creating his own stories with drawings. He was 13 years old when a text story he illustrated was published in the one-off production Mighty Comic .  Below is the cover of one of Resetar's self-published comics: Adventure . For the month of September there is a case displaying some of Resetar's publications in the reading room at Sir George Grey Special Collections. Ref: Eric Resetar, Adventure No. 1, 1944. Sir George Grey Special Collections. Streetwize comics  was a Christchurch Community Law Centre project and i...

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...

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...

Read all about it, military mileposts are 150 years old! In March 1863, a series of mileposts were installed at one mile intervals along a 22 mile stretch between Auckland’s CBD and the British Army Commissariat in Drury, mostly along Great South Road. They were placed to help Army contract drivers record their daily mileage and each triangular, totara post had the mile number chiseled into its two shorter faces. Automobile Association signs were added to many mileposts or their former locations in the 1960s and these have become popular features in their own right. Ref: 1-W92, Looking East from One Tree iIll with the Great South Road in the centre foreground, 1906, Sir George Grey Special Collections