Ngā mea e kohi ai mātou – What we collect

Ngā Taonga collects audiovisual material that has cultural, social or historical value to Aotearoa New Zealand.

We collect a range of media, including independent film or sound productions, radio and television broadcasts, and non-professional records such as home movies.  This includes documentary and fictional stories made about life in New Zealand, taonga that holds mātauranga Māori, and records which document the story of local audiovisual production.

We collect a diverse range of sound and moving-image formats, including nitrate and acetate film, grooved media (such as LPs), magnetic tapes and digital files. We seek to archive and preserve the highest quality source material and prioritise media at risk of obsolescence or decay.

We also may accept Pacific Island material on behalf of countries which have no national film or sound archive, in consideration of our Southeast Asia-Pacific Audiovisual Archive Association (SEAPAVAA) responsibilities.

Ngā Taonga aims to collaborate with other local archives and avoid duplicating collections. We may advise potential depositors of other repositories that may be more suited to their material.

Ngā Taonga does not own the majority of our collections, but instead cares for material on behalf of our depositors who retain ownership rights.

We currently have a hiatus on receiving new collection material (except for Te Māngai Pāho funded content). The hiatus is partly to support our focus on Utaina, an urgent project to preserve over 300,000 Crown collection items on at-risk magnetic media before 2025. It also provides us an opportunity to reduce our archival backlogs and refine how we acquire collections, so we can ensure timely approaches to collecting decisions and processing deposits.

If you have material you hope to deposit with us in the future, we invite you to fill out a Collection offer form below. We will use this information to contact you once our collection hiatus lifts and we are ready to assess new deposits. If you are depositing Te Māngai Pāho funded content, please complete a Collection offer form and we will be in contact shortly.