Ā mātou pūranga – What we hold

The Film and Video Collection includes:

• Feature films
• Short films
• Newsreels
• Home movies
• Documentaries
• Experimental films
• Animated films
• Cine club productions
• Promotional films
• Advertising films.

The Film and Video Collection encompasses a range of amateur productions, government-produced material, and commercially released films. It reflects a variety of perspectives on what it has meant to be a New Zealander, or be connected with this country, over the decades.

Films are on a wide array of formats that reflect the history of the medium – 70mm, 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, several generations of video tape, contemporary digital projection files, and a plethora of less common formats.

The Television Collection spans the history of television broadcasting in Aotearoa New Zealand and includes several major sub-collections.

The Television New Zealand Collection 

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision manages the Television New Zealand Collection (TVNZ) on behalf of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. The collection contains over 600,000 hours of original New Zealand television, including news bulletins, current affairs shows, documentaries, sports, entertainment and drama.

Māori Television Collection

Māori broadcasting is archived by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision on behalf of Te Māngai Pāho, the Māori broadcasting funding agency. This collection consists of Māori television programmes across the history of New Zealand broadcasting. All contemporary and legacy genres and channels are represented, including all programmes in te reo Māori.

The Chapman Collection 

Deposited by Professor Robert and Noeline Chapman of the Political Studies Department at Auckland University, this collection starts with impressively consistent audio recordings of television news from the 1960s and continues through to VHS recordings which date from the 1984 snap election.

National Television Collection 

Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision maintains the National Television Collection on behalf of NZ on Air and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. The Archive collects broadcast content including television news, dramas, documentaries, game shows, music videos, infomercials, youth programming and sport.

Ngā Taonga cares for over 120,000 audio items, many of which were originally part of the Radio New Zealand (RNZ) sound archive.

Radio Collection 

The Radio Collection totals thousands of hours of audio, including broadcast radio recordings by Radio New Zealand and its predecessors, dating from the 1930s to today. Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision also regularly records programmes from a variety of contemporary radio stations, constructing a picture of the New Zealand broadcast radio market as it exists today.

Irirangi Māori Archiving Project

Te Māngai Pāho has contracted Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision's expert services to ensure iwi radio collections are adequately archived, housed and made accessible to the public. The Irirangi Māori Archiving Project provides archiving services for 21 iwi radio stations across the country. Legacy material is collected from the stations, which Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision then digitises, catalogues and returns to the stations in digital form.

Ngā Taonga Kōrero Collection 

The Ngā Taonga Kōrero (Treasures of Speech) Collection holds over 12,000 audio taonga. The collection dates from the early 1960s, when the Māori section of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation was set up by Leo Fowler and Wiremu Kerekere.

New Zealand Broadcasting Service Mobile Unit Collection 

A preeminent assemblage of broadcast oral histories recorded around regional New Zealand during and after World War II. The recordings, in both English and te reo Māori, contain eye-witness accounts reaching back as far as the 1850s.

The D Series 

The D Series is a collection of over 10,000 analogue discs dating from about 1935 through to the late 1950s. They are mainly broadcast discs recorded by the New Zealand Broadcasting Service (and predecessor, the Broadcasting Board). The collection contains some of the oldest material in our sound archive. They include many wartime radio newsreels, election addresses, current events programmes such as Radio Digest, Australian serial dramas and brass band contests. Approximately 400 discs relate to Māori subjects, ranging from recordings of traditional waiata, oratory and tributes to famous people.

General Tape Collection

This collection includes audio on 5", 7" and 10.5" reel-to-reel tapes, audio cassettes and digital audio tapes. It encompasses cuts edited from longer programmes, often taken out of context, as well as entire programmes, and – in some cases – actual series in their entirety.

Māori Acetate Collections

We hold approximately 1,000 discs on Māori subjects and in te reo Māori, recorded c. 1937 - 1960, which do not fit into other series. Of these nearly half belong to a series broadcast from 1949 - 1958, entitled Ngā Pao me ngā Pakiwaitara a te Māori / Song and Story of the Māori. These programmes featured recordings of Māori events made by the NZBS in the 1940s.