Having spent the last year and a bit intensively seeking and researching hard-to-find sources, I’ve become a strong advocate for digitising collections. Although particularly urgent for hard-to-find, old sources, digitising collections is real helpful across all manner of items. Not only does it help preserve old sources from over-handling, digitising collections increases peoples ability to access information, and not have to spend heaps of time and money to visit institutions – it means that information is not just the domain of academics, public servants, and retirees.
So I was pretty gutted to hear that the Archives NZ digitisation project was going to end prematurely this year – another casualty of our current neoliberal overlords. In my very privileged line of work, where I get to look at archives and library collections for a living, I’ve seen first hand the absolute gems and often hilarious sources contained in archival collections (see here for examples of the quirky shit Archives NZ holds).
Speaking of rad digitised collections, Up The Punks has an awesome digitised zine collection, featured in Radical Repositories this week. Check it out.
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