New Zealand’s largest ever audiovisual digitisation project a success

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

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. Members of the culture, heritage, broadcast & 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.

“Utaina has guaranteed that precious audiovisual taonga will be here for future generations to enjoy. I’m incredibly proud of the mahi our staff contributed to Utaina as well as that of our partners on the project. It would take over 90 years to watch or listen to the 277,000 hours of content digitised by Ngā Taonga alone,” said Honiana Love, Tumu Whakarae Chief Executive of Ngā Taonga.

“Key to the success of Utaina has been the collaboration and knowledge sharing between partners. The archivists across the organisations have come away with invaluable experience that can be applied to the continuing mission to preserve our nation’s audiovisual heritage.”

Without digital preservation, it was estimated that more than 95% of magnetic media could be lost within the decade due to physical deterioration. In addition, the playback technology required to digitise these formats is increasingly hard to come by, and even harder to repair.

Due to the innovative work on this project, countless hours of New Zealand’s favourite television, radio programmes and music will survive to tell our country’s history and culture for current and future generations.

Some examples of the material digitised through Utaina include the TV shows Country Calendar, Koha, Shortland Street and Asia Downunder, sound recordings made by the NZ 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”.

"One of the real benefits of Utaina is the sheer diversity and richness of the audiovisual material digitised and preserved through the project. The investment in this project has not just preserved thousands of hours of television, radio, government records, New Zealand music and oral histories, it was the first step in unlocking these treasured taonga for generations of future researchers,” said Jess Moran, Chief Librarian and Director Library Collections, National Library of New Zealand.

International archiving specialists, Memnon, were selected to carry out the digitisation mahi on the project and worked from a temporary studio in Avalon Studios, Lower Hutt.

The three heritage organisations will now work with the respective rights holders of the newly digitised material to enable it to be shared with New Zealanders.

The Utaina project created 50 local jobs at Ngā Taonga, National Library of New Zealand, Archives New Zealand and Memnon over five years, after receiving funding in Budget 2020.

More information

• Utaina was a response to Deadline 2025, an international initiative which sounded the alarm over the urgent need to preserve at-risk magnetic media in advance of an obsolescence deadline of 2025. Magnetic media refers to storage devices that use magnetised layers to store data, such as video and audio tapes.
• The project received funding after a collaborative budget bid between the 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.
• The name Utaina was drawn from the call Sir Āpirana Ngata made for the recording and preservation of mātauranga to support the revitalisation of Māori language and culture. In taking this stance, Ngata adopted the catch cry ‘Utaina’. Utaina was adopted as the Archive’s clarion call to archivally ‘load on board’ half a century of irreplaceable audiovisual taonga so that it is preserved for present and future generations.

Photographs from the Utaina celebration are available upon request

Media Contacts

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Julie Warmington – Manager Marketing & Communications, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Email: communications@ngataonga.org.nz

Mobile: 021 879 886

DIA

DIA Media Desk

Department of Internal Affairs Te Tari Taiwhenua

Mobile: 027 535 8639

Email: media@dia.govt.nz