Heritage et AL

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...

Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections recently acquired the archives of Miss Jean Wishart (1920-2016) who for over thirty years edited the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly . Wishart was a career journalist who lived and breathed the Weekly , making it the go-to read for generations of New Zealanders. Wishart began her journalism career when she joined New Zealand Newspapers in 1939. She soon worked at the Weekly itself, and in 1952 rose to the position of editor. She had wanted to write and work in publishing—her father was a printer—and had even contributed to the magazine’s children’s section, the Pixie Pages. It must have been a dream-come-true to work at that very magazine and to take readership to record levels over her thirty plus years at the helm. Image: From the Jean Wishart papers, a photograph of Jean Wishart, third from left, and colleagues with a cake to celebrate the readership of the New Zealand Woman's Weekly reaching 200,000. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, N...

For the past few months, the heritage floor, on the second floor of the Central City Library, has hosted a display titled Our Girls -- a tribute to the role of women in the First World War. The content covers the following topics: prohibition and making-do, cartoon depictions of women, the anti-militarists, the fundraising effort, working girls, nurses abroad, and the absence of men. It has been an interesting exercise to find images to cover such a variety of topics. Women were not always portrayed favourably, especially in the political cartoons of the day. Publications like Freelance and Truth condemned the ‘wowser’ prohibitionists as out to spoil a boy’s fun (men did not escape the condemnation, either) or they depicted women as vain and ignorant.  Ref: Cartoon from the New Zealand Freelance , 6 March 1915, p.11.  The caption for the cartoon above reads:  Shopman: “Yes, Miss, all face powders have gone up in price on account of the war.” Y...

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...

A library just isn’t a library without displays and with our collections, we are spoilt for choice in the display material available to us. We decided to put together a display for the Central Auckland Research Centre on the women’s magazines in the collection because they are just such a fascinating part of our 20th century heritage – the 1970’s especially.  It was tough deciding which magazines to select and also which individual issues to highlight. With all those unique seventies designs, the adverts and the products, the fashion, the makeup, the grittiness of topics and issues…. there was so much to choose from. Ref: Central Auckland Research Centre In the end, we went with 'Broadsheet' and 'Eve', two different magazines from the period. The research centre has bound collections of both these, and other magazines, on the open shelves. 'Broadsheet' (1972 to 1997) was run by a collective of the Auckland Women’s Liberation movement and...