New Zealand Maritime Museum Digi-Hub

By the Digi Team | August 2024

The NZMM Digi-Hub is made up of a small team of eager digitisers who have cut our teeth at the NZ Maritime Museum, developing a framework for small heritage institutions. We are Heidi Schlumpf, Andrew Hales, Katherine Meeten, and Laura Davies. 

Early this year we started helping, guiding and supporting small cultural and heritage organisations in Auckland with digitisation. We proposed the project last year with the goal of raising the digital capability of Museums and Archives in the Auckland region. We want to work with them, learn how they operate and what they need, in order to establish the best way to raise their capabilities. The aim is for the organisations to build their resources and knowledge to independently continue digitisation into the future.  

The Digitisation Challenge for Small Museums 

We approached several organisations who, as kaitiaki of collections, all understand the value of digitisation. They want to make their collections more accessible to their communities and rōpū, and they need to start preserving them in a digital form. But they also know they lack the core knowledge, skills, and equipment to do digitisation in a meaningful way.  

Recognising the challenges many institutions face from our own experience at the NZ Maritime Museum and at other museums, we saw an opportunity to adapt our tried-and-tested framework. We are a small, agile team in a supportive organisation that allows us to reach out to offer the tools, in-person collaboration, and guidance needed to successfully embed digitisation in fellow heritage organisations. 

First Stop: Warkworth and Districts Museum 

We launched the project in February 2024 at the Warkworth and Districts Museum. For 12 weeks the Digi-Hub team worked full-time at Warkworth Museum to integrate a sustainable digitisation workflow for their archives and objects.  

Situated in the scenic Parry Kauri Park, Warkworth Museum houses a wealth of local district history, with records dating back to the early 1800s, documenting local lives, businesses, and council activities.  

Working with them we established clear goals and a strategy to raise their capabilities. Together, we appealed to the community and recruited six new volunteers dedicated to digitisation. We then installed a tailored photography setup, with a copy stand, camera, laptop and lights. In collaboration with the museum’s digitisation volunteers, we developed a customised digitisation process that fits with existing collections activities, is suitable for their abilities and objectives, whilst ensuring that their team can continue digitising the collection independently, after the Digi-Hub moved on. 

Special Projects at Warkworth 

A highlight from Warkworth Museum was photographing a selection of the museum’s impressive textiles collection, including dresses from the mid-1800's, a WWI soldier’s uniform, and even a 1700’s damask tablecloth. We transformed the museum’s special exhibition space into a pop-up studio to digitise these precious items whilst engaging with the public. 

Results 

During our time at Warkworth Museum they produced over 1TB of digital data from over 5000 images taken of over 650 archive items and objects! 

At a follow up Digi-Hub visit in August, we found these numbers had doubled and the volunteer team had gained enough confidence with the process that we were able to share extended knowledge and skills, raising their abilities even further.  

Next Up: Charlotte Museum 

After Warkworth, we turned our attention to the Charlotte Museum Te Whare Takatāpui-Wāhine in Auckland's CBD. Charlotte Museum represents the lesbian and queer community of Aotearoa and is kaitiaki of a rich collection of personal stories, popular culture, art, and political activism. 

We started by helping them migrate 2700 records onto eHive, making them accessible online—a significant leap from the 70 records that were previously available. We also installed an appropriately sized copy stand, with camera, lights and laptop. Similar to Warkworth Museum we worked closely with the Charlotte Museum staff and volunteers to integrate a practical and sustainable digitisation process to complement their existing collection management practises. In addition, to give them a head-start, the Digi-Hub also digitised a large proportion of prioritised collections for them.   

The Charlotte Museum team cleared the way for us to commandeer their exhibition space for 8 weeks to digitise the majority of the objects, art and ephemera that were too large or technical for them to photograph. Whilst doing so, Charlotte Museum seized the opportunity to accession and catalogue previously unregistered items and review housing and storage. By working in the beautiful exhibition space, members of the public enjoyed a unique insight into the collection and the process of digitisation.  

We estimate we digitised over half of their object collection and made a significant dent into their large archival collection.  

A Fond Farewell and What’s Next for the Digi-Hub Team? 

After many weeks at each institution, getting to know them, building relationships and becoming part of their teams, saying goodbye to Warkworth and Charlotte Museums was difficult. We loved working at both organisations and enjoyed their differences. We felt welcomed and trusted, a part of both whanau.  

Warkworth and Charlotte Museums are now both taking high quality digital images of their collections and linking them to meaningful records in their collections databases, at a quality and pace they couldn’t achieve before but is comfortable to sustain. Both have well-documented processes and manuals to follow, or refer to, and both have a depth of knowledge across staff and volunteers sufficient to train new people in the future.  

The Digi-Hub work continues! From October to the end of December 2024 we will be collaborating with Howick Historical Village to support them in establishing a productive and sustainable digitisation process.