Heritage et AL

Awekura is the name given to this blog and podcast series that showcases treasures within Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, presented by our library specialists.  Awekura is a kupu drawn from Māori weaponry, particularly the taiaha. It refers to the arero, the tongue of the taiaha, which is adorned with kura, red feathers. The term reflects both the physical beauty and their deeper spiritual and narrative significance.  The Heritage Maps collection is an essential resource for researchers, historians, and cartographic enthusiasts. Many of the 10,000 strong map collection items are available to explore on KURA under Heritage Maps . Because their formats vary widely, maps require careful storage; at Auckland Libraries, they are housed in cabinets, tubes, drawers, and specially designed folders. Over her years as Maps Librarian, Katrina helped catalogue the collection and played a key role in establishing the heritage maps presence on our digital platform, KURA .  In ...

Note: The following article discusses Auckland regional newspapers family trees (LHE-062) , a new resource available on Kura Heritage Collections Online. Have you ever wondered: what are the relationships between all these Auckland newspapers? It was an unexpected question I asked myself about a year ago when I found myself utterly baffled by the shelves full of a dozen different Courier newspaper titles in the stack at Manukau Library. In January 2024, all I knew were that there were four Courier newspapers circulating in East and South Auckland: the Manukau Courier , Eastern Courier , East & Bays Courier , and Papakura Courier . Not for a moment did I consider that a complex web of editorial decisions over fifty years had led to these four newspapers existing at this single point in time. Indeed, at one point in the past there was only one Courier —the South Auckland Courier —and at a later point there were six! Thus began my quest to make sense of the Auckland’s hundreds o...