Celebrating our Digital Transformation
It’s lovely to be able to take a moment to pause and celebrate the milestones of the Methodist Archives’ rapid digital transformation over the past year.
After an intensive six months working through the website’s design, build, and UAT (user acceptance testing) phase, alongside site vendors New Zealand Micrographics Services, we took over formal ownership of the website from them in late February this year. From that point, our focus switched to securing the resources we need to make the most of this incredible new tool.
In April we advertised for the appointment of a Digital Archivist to assist with the Recollect project, and after working our way through an overwhelming number of applications from NZ and abroad, we were delighted to appoint Emanuella de Ruiter to the new role, who commenced work here in late June.
Emanuella brings with her extensive experience in handling and digitising cultural heritage collections, having spent the past five years working on a variety of projects with New Zealand Micrographics Services. Her expertise includes the careful digitisation of diverse materials, from large format historical maps to delicate glass plate negatives, ensuring even the most fragile items are digitally preserved to the highest standards. She is excited to engage with the rich collections at Kei Muri Māpara and help increase public access to this important taonga by sharing them online with Recollect. Through this work, Emanuella looks forward to building on her skills and gaining a deeper understanding of the tasks involved in caring for an archive.
In the three months since her arrival, Emanuella has provided invaluable assistance in transforming our once poky storeroom into a state-of-the-art archival digitisation suite, equipped with cutting-edge photographic and scanning technology that is enabling us to safely (and economically) digitise most of the record formats that we hold, in-house, to a very high standard. While cameras, lenses, scanners, and lighting set-ups don’t come cheaply, we’ve tried our best to borrow, economise, and improvise wherever we can – including Emanuella crafting our professional studio-worthy photographic backdrop out of a cheap set of black queen bed sheets purchased from the Warehouse!
As a result, we have been able to commence our enhanced digitisation programme, starting with the digitisation of some of our most heavily used, historically significant, and fragile items – including our photographic collections, our Church Histories collection, and our typescripts of early Wesleyan missionary reports and correspondence from missionaries stationed in New Zealand to the Wesleyan Missionary Society in England (1817-1859) [MCNZ Archives Reference: MS-39].
The digitisation and upload of this latter series of records to Recollect is a particularly good example of what having the new website and digitisation capability can enable us to do for our researchers. Many readers will already know the interesting journey of these fascinating and important manuscripts. In 1937, the original material was borrowed from England by Rev. M. A. Rugby Pratt, and a small, dedicated team of typists at the Connexional Office in Christchurch made transcripts of the almost 1300 handwritten documents. At the conclusion of WWII, the originals were returned to England, and the typescript copies archived here.
While the original records were later microfilmed, and more recently, in turn, the microfilm copies digitised and made available online via the National Library of Australia’s TROVE website, the patchy quality of the microfilms and the need to decipher nineteenth-century handwriting has rendered research into this material quite cumbersome to date. Happily though, as the copies that we hold are in typescript form, once they are digitised and uploaded to Recollect, they are able to be ‘read’ by the website’s inbuilt OCR (optical character recognition) technology - rendering them fully text-searchable to researchers for the first time.
With just over a month left until its launch, the website already hosts almost 3000 digitised records of significance from our holdings, with a wide variety of items recording over 200 years of NZ Methodist history. We are very excited at what has been achieved in such a short period - an attractive and user-friendly website, optimised to meet the diverse needs of our researchers, and to showcase and celebrate the precious taonga that we hold in our collections. We can’t wait to share it with you!
