We aim to preserve the stories that have helped to shape our communities and to make these accessible to New Zealanders both at home and abroad.
About the Trust
Thanks to some fantastic inspiration and hard mahi from fellow Trust members and supporters The Preserving Local History and Educational Trust, Te Pupuri I Nga Hitori o Te Rohe Trust was formed.
Our primary goal is to preserve Aotearoa New Zealand’s cultural heritage and taonga. We believe our mahi can provide lasting benefits for communities and help advance education, while ultimately supporting the views and expectations of tangata whenua.
The introduction of the Aotearoa New Zealand Histories in our school curriculum means that free and easy access to heritage resources, like community newspapers, is essential. Much of Aotearoa’s history is documented in local community newspapers. They contain so much rich content about everyday New Zealanders: revealing the people, places, events, organisations, businesses, societies, iwi, and hapu that make up a village, small town, rohe, or region.
Our Kaupapa
Preserving cultural heritage
Capturing the missing portions of our cultural history, we will be looking to preserve the stories from right across New Zealand, the stories found in small newspapers from within the community.
Addressing inequity of access
By digitising and making accessible community newspapers, we are opening up access to more representative stories of our recorded, written history. This supports the varied research needs of historians, writers, genealogists and students, and enriches our national identity
Affordable preservation of community history
Storage and preservation costs are unsustainable at a local and community level. By coordinating this work, and tackling the work in stages as part of an overarching project we begin to address this. The National Library taking on this kaitiaki role in perpetuity is a significant element of this mahi.
Our Projects
The Trust has begun to digitise and upload 200,000 pages of community newspapers from Ohakune, Taupō, and Blenheim using Lottery, Environment, and Heritage funding. We are now underway with our Project, Your Stories.
This project aims to digitise a quarter of a million historical newspaper pages (published between 1840 to 2000) that are at risk of loss or decay, and make these available to the public. It will ensure the stories and histories of diverse communities across Aotearoa New Zealand are preserved for current and future generations.
Our work to date
Our project is wholly independent from, but complements, the National Library’s Digitisation Plan 2019-2022. The library’s plan focuses on digitising its own hard-copy newspaper collections and running the collaborative digitisation programme, and our project is outside the scope of the library’s digitisation plan and collections policy.
The Preserving Local History and Educational Trust was awarded Lottery Environment and Heritage funding in early 2022 for phase one of the project which is currently underway.
Using the Lottery Environment and Heritage funding, in phase one we are underway digitally preserving 200,000 pages of community newspapers including:
The Ruapehu Bulletin (1987-2000)
The Taupō Times (1958-1990)
The Marlborough Express (1921-1943)
This involves working closely with heritage colleagues at Ruapehu Media Ltd., Taupō Museum and Art Gallery, and The Marlborough Museum and Historical Society.
These titles were identified by connections of our Trustees, and researched by our expert advisor, researcher and historian Dr Ross Harvey, and also by the Alexander Turnbull Library’s Assistant Curator, Newspapers and Serials. This work is ongoing, and we are unearthing more titles to be digitised and preserved.
Make sure you get in touch with us via the button below if there is a particular newspaper title you would like to request to have digitised and uploaded to Papers Past.
The editor of the Ruapehu Bulletin, Robert Milne, delivers newspapers for digitisation.
Viewing an issue of The Marlborough Express on Papers Past.
We would like to express our gratitude and thanks to The National Library and NZMS for their valuable contribution and support.
Support the Trust
The Your Stories project requires financial support to be fulfilled. Our ‘ask’ of you, is to consider making a donation in support of the project, at a level that suits your capacity to give. Every contribution counts.
