Lakes District Museum & Gallery is digitising its archives
Preservation of collections for museums is crucial. One way this can be achieved is through digitising the archives. The Lakes District Museum & Gallery is undertaking this large task currently with thanks to Impact100 Wakatipu. The archival collection includes photographs, manuscripts, heritage publications, oral history recordings, maps, plans and ephemera.
The process both increases access to the museum’s resources and protects them – if there’s a fire, flood or earthquake, there are digital copies of everything. Once complete, the museum will be able to provide documentation to schools that aren’t able to come in. It also allows everything to be easily searchable for staff and the public.
“We’ve wanted to do this for a long time – it’s expensive, you need quite specialised equipment and a lot of labour hours,” director of the museum, Jane Peasey, says. “We applied for the Impact100 grant last year and we were lucky enough to be given one, so it’s allowing us to crack on with the project.”
The grant was given in October last year and the museum started purchasing equipment soon after. It’s taken a little time to organise the workflow as they’ve been running since 1948 – there’s a lot to go through and they’ve had a number of different organisation systems over the years.
“We had to make sure that the process along the way was accurate. Do it once and do it right. We were lucky enough through Impact100, to meet a woman who lives here now who worked at Auckland museum in the digitisation department. With the impact grant we were able to hire her three days a week and use her expertise.”
Peasey says that the grant covers them for two years, which will help them get the bulk of the collection recorded, but the project will be ongoing. The team are very grateful for the grant and the recognition from the community.
