When its reading room hours changed, in 2021, ANZ cited greater accessibility for a larger number of people, and linked that to their core purpose: ‘To be a vibrant, trusted, national archive we need to provide a modern service that meets our customers’ needs. Reducing reading room hours has allowed us to put our energy into listing and digitising records and making them available online. This provides better access to New Zealand’s public archives for more users.’

What, then, are the consequences of the end of this project? Millions of Archives NZ records remain undigitized, and therefore less accessible, especially for those who live outside the centres of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. Their physical storage facilities are also close to capacity, and therefore not future-proofed for incoming archival content. Of course, digitisation was not a panacea for storage issues, as digitising records did not mean destroying the originals, and digital content requires storage of its own. However, storage issues remain a factor to negotiate in the ongoing mahi of Archives NZ.

The end of the digitisation project at Archives NZ gives us greater resolve to offer our own, accessible, history work online, as we are unbeholden to external funding.

The work that Archives NZ staff—a number of whom are about to be made redundant—have done is valuable and is valued by many people. We extend our aroha to those whose livelihoods will be affected.

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The Northern Michigan Diocese of the Episcopal Church has launched a travelling exhibit, intended as a step towards reconciliation with indigenous people in the area, which engages with the impact of the residential schools system on First Nations people in the United States. These schools were intended to assimilate native children into the dominant culture of the United States, and to erase indigenous languages and cultural practices. The exhibit designers have sought to document ‘how Indigenous boarding schools’ legacy continues to impact Native American people today’, through survivors’ personal narratives, and also to tell histories and cultural practices of Anishinaabe people (one of several tribes in the region) through to the present day.

After reading this article, I had two responses to it that may inform our ongoing mahi at He Taonga Tuku Iho. Though there are many elements of digital material in this exhibition (QR codes to connect to survivors telling their stories, for instance), it is a physical, touring exhibition. The rationale for the physicality of the exhibition is not explored in this article, but those who created it clearly expect there to be benefits from people interacting with it in a physical space. How will we balance physical accessibility with technological accessibility?

Second: when telling stories about historical violence and injustice, particularly stories which continue to resonate with or circumscribe the lives of descendants of those targeted by that violence and injustice, should reconciliation be the expected outcome? Reconciliation is a two-way process, a moving towards one another. Is creating an exhibition in hopes that it will lead to reconciliation impelling victims to behave in a proscribed way in the present?

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