Visible and Enduring

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Last year the Cedars of Lebanon Club approached the Library wishing to make a visible and enduring contribution to the culture and heritage of Dunedin and its citizens, the result of which is a newly-cemented partnership creating the Dunedin Lebanese Community Digitisation Centre and digital archive. 

New Zealand Micrographic Services’ software has been purchased to enable the Dunedin community to upload content such as photographs, documents, audio and visual records. The Digitisation Centre will offer scanner, laptop and Photoshop resources to facilitate the creation of digital content and permanently preserve images, documents, and selected content from the Libraries’ Heritage collections, which can be accessed from everywhere in the world by relatives, organisations, historians and other interested parties. As part of the online platform we will be offering volunteers the opportunity to digitise several hundred thousand index records identifying local and national content from the 1850’s until 1993 in local newspapers such as the Otago Witness, Evening Star, Otago Daily Times.

While the archive, to be named ‘Scattered Seeds – He Purapura Marara’ will launch shortly with limited content, over time this will become a rich repository of heritage content reflecting the life and culture of our great small city and environs. This is an exciting new initiative for Dunedin Public Libraries and we are proud to have the generous support of the Cedars of Lebanon Club.

Linda Geddes
Manager Collections and Access
Dunedin Public Libraries

Richard Joseph
Cedars of Lebanon Club