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Credit: Troy Coutts, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Utaina, one of the largest audiovisual digitisation projects in the world and the largest in New Zealand to date, has concluded.

More than 400,000 items from the collections held by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa and Archives New Zealand Te Rua Mahara o te Kawanatanga have been preserved for generations to come. That’s some 277,000 hours of content digitised, that would take 90 years to watch or listen to.

The Crown-funded multi-year project was a race against time to safeguard precious analogue audiovisual materials that were at imminent risk of deterioration and obsolescence.

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Credit: Troy Coutts, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Members of the culture, heritage, broadcast and producer communities gathered to formally celebrate and close the Utaina project on Thursday evening at the National Library in Wellington. Hon Paul Goldsmith, Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, and Hon Brooke Van Velden, Minister of Internal Affairs, were in attendance to celebrate the completion of the project.

Examples of the material digitised through Utaina include the TV shows Country Calendar, Koha, Shortland Street and Asia Downunder, sound recordings made by the New Zealand Broadcasting Service, footage of The Beehive being constructed, the Polynesian Festival in 1975, and an alternative recording of Ruru Karaitiana's wartime song ‘Blue Smoke’.

The Utaina project created 50 local jobs at Ngā Taonga, National Library of New Zealand, Archives New Zealand and international vendor Memnon over five years.

The project received collaborative funding through Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage (for Ngā Taonga), and the Department of Internal Affairs Te Tari Taiwhenua (for Archives New Zealand and the National Library).

Find out more on the Ngā Taonga website.

Utaina (Ngā Taonga)