A statistics-based contemplation of collection sharing efforts from the Kōtuia ngā Kete project.

Collection-sharing website Kōtuia ngā Kete was launched by Te Papa’s National Services Te Paerangi in 2023, with the ambition to provide greater visibility of taonga held by collecting communities in Aotearoa. Two years in, this lightning talk will use some rudimentary data from the site to consider the fluidity of collections access and how we might now define a distributed national collection.

We will touch on some of the barriers to sharing collections, including attracting whare taonga and marae-based collections to participate. We will also consider some of the models which might support digitisation and collection sharing efforts.

All of this might just change our perspective of success.

The paorangi | impact of sharing collections collectively has benefits to communities that care for collections and those communities that they serve. By evaluating our goal of access to communities against the reality of delivering this service, this talk hopes to inspire the NDF community to consider how they can help support access to collections outside their own organisations.

Emma Philpott, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa: Emma is the programme lead for collection-sharing site Kōtuia ngā Kete and was the Product Owner for development of the website. She has spent the last decade at Te Papa working across sector support, content development and policy roles. She has previously worked for non-profit, charity and cultural sectors both in NZ and the UK. She is particularly interested in championing good practice and innovative solutions in the museum and gallery sector.