The Utaina project is a collaborative project between Ngā Taonga, National Library and Archives New Zealand. Through mass digitisation we are preserving our shared audiovisual collections. This project is already having an impact beyond preservation, and is improving community access to audiovisual collections and taonga. This panel will discuss some of the ways an AV digitisation project opens access to communities across Aotearoa and some of the surprising things we’ve learned along the way.

Jessica Moran (she/her) is the Acting Chief Librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa National Library of New Zealand. In this role she leads efforts to build, preserve, protect, and provide access to the Library’s collections and taonga. Her substantive role is Associate Chief Librarian, Research Collections where she is responsible for managing curatorial, digital collections, digitization projects, and archival processing for the Library. Since 2022 she has served as the project executive for the National Library and Archives New Zealand’s Utaina project.

Kate Roberts, Ngā Taonga: Kate comes from the New Zealand museum and library worlds, having trained as a conservator in Canberra in the 1980s and having worked at the Otago Museum, Te Papa, the National Library, Archives NZ, Puke Ariki, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Auckland City Libraries, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

While in Western Australia from 2014-2019, Kate volunteered at the Kimberley Language Resource Centre, writing their digitisation plan for archived audio recordings made over 40 years of linguistic fieldwork in the language-rich Kimberley.

At Ngā Taonga Kate is Project Executive for the Utaina digitisation project.

Louise McCrone is Director, Holdings and Discovery at Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga Archives New Zealand, responsible for mahi which includes description, preservation and access to archives. Louise has worked with audiovisual archives in a variety of roles for more than 20 years, including at the Film Archive and Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. Louise’s involvement with Utaina started at Ngā Taonga, and since 2020 she has been the key contact for Archives in the project.