The Open Door was a quarterly magazine published between 1922 and 1975, replacing the Australasian Missionary Review upon the dissolution of the NZ missionary partnership with Australia.

The magazine was published by the Methodist Missionary Society of New Zealand for the benefit of missionaries who were at that time concentrating their work in the Solomon Islands. The magazine initially featured articles relating specifically to missionary work in the Solomon Islands but, in time, reported on missionary activities all over the world.

The Open Door magazine ran for just over five decades. In 1975, it was decided by the Overseas Division and Methodist and Presbyterian Mission Boards that the cost of producing the magazine was becoming unsustainable and, with declining readership and lack of subscriptions to fund it, the magazine ceased publication in March 1975.

To commemorate the bicentenary of the Methodist Church in New Zealand in 2022, the Methodist Archives made the decision to digitise a complete set of The Open Door magazine so that they could be uploaded to our website and shared with people internationally.

In the archives reading room here in Christchurch we hold a bound hard copy archive set of the magazines. Using these as a guide, one of our archive volunteers, Jan Kotlowski, spent time searching for and preparing a set of The Open Door for digitisation. These duplicate copies were checked to make sure that they were intact and not ripped or damaged in any way, and then ordered chronologically in readiness to be unbound for digitising.

Scanning to archive quality resolution can be a time-consuming process and requires specialist equipment and expertise. We did not have the staffing or resources to do this in-house so we outsourced this work to a company that specialises in archive digitisation, NZ Micrographics. Another benefit of outsourcing the work is that specialist software can be applied to the scans to make the copies text searchable, a feature that is invaluable for researchers!

As with all digitisation projects, there was a significant cost involved and to proceed with the project we had to apply for funding. The process of obtaining funding can be lengthy and complex, and required careful planning. We needed to gather information to demonstrate why we wanted to do this work and the benefits that it would have for the Archives and researchers. We were delighted to secure special funding from within the Connexional budget for the project, given the importance of the bicentenary year. We were then able to engage NZ Micrographics to undertake the digitisation process for us.

The digitisation was completed in March 2022, around the same time that the new Methodist Church website was being created. This was a great opportunity to redesign the Archives pages of the website and upload all of our digital content. As part of this work, a new page was created to host the digitised copies of The Open Door magazines, in time for the bicentenary celebrations in late 2022. The magazines serve as an interesting window into the past for academic researchers, genealogists and those with a general interest in the history of missionaries in the Pacific.

The digitised magazines can be viewed on our website here.