Digitisation project at Bluff Maritime Museum brings greater community access to collection

Work to digitise a museum collection, which celebrates the stories of one of New Zealand’s oldest settlements, will give greater accessibility to an audience around the world.

The effort to digitise the collection at the Bluff Maritime Museum was part of the wider remit of Project Ark, a programme of work that started in 2020, with the aim to improve standards of care and accessibility for regional museum collections throughout Southland.

Since January, Invercargill City Council Museum and Collections Technician Sam Chandler and Photographer and Cataloguer Cowan Levey had been on-site in Bluff, working to help Curator Trish Birch and Museum Assistant Marama Fowler implement a consistent collections management system throughout the museum.

With the project in Bluff now complete, Birch said the amount of work that had been undertaken in a relatively short space of time was huge – but the pay-off was even greater.

“It’s absolutely the best thing that’s ever happened to us at the museum,” she said. “It’s made such a big difference, and I’m very grateful to Project Ark partners and supporters – and especially Cowan and Sam – for all of the work that has gone into it,” she said.

The museum team was proud of how many people visited from throughout the world, and the digitisation project would make it easier to locate and keep track of items, which would enable greater access to the museum’s collections for visitors, Birch said.

“It’s been a huge learning curve for Marama and I, to learn it all from the ground up. Before we did this, if somebody asked for a particular photo, we’d have to go through every single box to find it. This has just made everything so much easier, and it’s going to make such a big difference for the whole community,” she said.

Chandler said the project had involved a comprehensive stocktake of the museum collection: reformatting documents dating back to 1984, cataloguing physical items throughout the museum, scanning the museum’s collection of photographs, introducing a standard schema so objects could be located quickly and efficiently, packing fragile objects, and more.

All of that mahi had been done to in turn upload details to eHive – the web-based system used by museums around the world to catalogue, organise, and share details about their collections – which meant people could access information about items at the Bluff Maritime Museum from anywhere in the world, she said.

Project Ark was an initiative of the Southland Regional Heritage Committee. It has been delivered by Invercargill City Council since 2023. The project was funded by special grants from Manatū Taonga Ministry of Culture and Heritage and the Lottery Grants Board. Prior to heading to Bluff, other collections – such as the Wyndham Historical Museum and Te Hikoi, in Riverton – were also digitised thanks to the project.

“The broader aim of the project was to digitise the collections of our regional museums, and make them more readily available and accessible to the community, which has been really great for the museums – Te Papa borrowed artefacts from Te Hikoi awhile ago, and more recently the Heirloom exhibition at He Waka Tuia borrowed items from collections at Wyndham, Mataura, Te Hikoi, and here at Bluff,” Chandler said.

The ability to share a museum’s collection with a wide audience – here at home, or further afield – ensured its legacy continued. For a community like Bluff, which was rich in history, that was critical, she said.

“It’s more than ‘just’ a maritime museum,” she said. “It’s very much Bluff’s museum as well.”

Levey said leaving the Bluff Maritime Museum would be bitter-sweet.

“There’s been a lot of highlights. We started in the shipwreck section in the corner and went through the whole museum – every nook and cranny, really,” he said.

“I think for me one of the highlights has been solving some of the mysteries – like the bag of wingnuts, which we realised had been taken off the Awarua – and falling down the rabbit hole to put some of the stories together. We’ve had a few inquisitive Bluffies come through to see what we’re up to. It’s been a great experience.

“You get into a bit of a rhythm. And it’s been amazing to see how much we’ve been able to do in just six months,” he said.

Te Unua Museum of Southland Director Eloise Wallace said the benefits of the digitisation project would be far-reaching.

“Our regional museum collections play a critical role in preserving the stories, memories, and heritage of our collective past,” she said.

“I’m thrilled that the Project Ark team has not only been able to offer its expertise to the Bluff Maritime Museum, but forge a wonderful, collaborative relationship to guide us all in the future. We look forward to sharing stories that champion our region together.”