Te Awamutu Museum’s digital collection is set to go live next week giving the Waipā community access to more than 18,000 precious museum items.
Museum staff have been working hard to digitise the museum’s extensive collection ranging from the beautiful to the plain bizarre. From Wednesday next week items such as taonga Māori and Social History artefacts from the collection will be available online, complete with supporting information.
Museum collections manager Haylee Alderson, said getting the collection live was a huge achievement and something that had been a long time in the making.
“We have worked really hard on this project and are excited to see it finally go live for the world to enjoy. We aren’t able to physically showcase the entirety of our amazing collection to the public at once so this is the next best thing.”
“We are still working our way through digitising the whole collection but when it’s finalised it will bring the museum into the digital era for everyone to appreciate. The new site is also much more user friendly which is great.”
Alderson said digitisation would also go a long way to helping research efforts by people wanting to find out more about their family history or information on historical events.
The project, which has taken 14 months to complete, involved each item being painstakingly photographed, captioned and uploaded to the museum’s website. Items will continue to be uploaded over the next few years.
Alderson said while the museum may have accomplished one major step, its digital collection would be continually updated and added to. The collection will be available online from Wednesday 28 August at collection.tamuseum.org.nz/explore.
Haylee Alderson, Collections Manager
27 AUGUST 2019
