Upper Hutt City Library is the city’s primary community centre for living, learning, and leisure. It seeks to engage, inspire, and inform people, and plays a key role in the development of a strong local community.
The Library’s Community Archive makes a significant contribution to this mission through the capture, preservation and sharing of Upper Hutt’s history.
UHCL AND RECOLLECT
Upper Hutt Public Library selected Recollect as the platform for transforming the archive into a resource with wide reach and appeal. Current & past residents of Upper Hutt can now access the unique collections and contribute their own knowledge and memories. This includes the huge photographic archive of society photographer Wilfred Revelle Jackson who documented many weddings, 21st birthday parties and other community gatherings in the 1970s & 1980s.
The Library’s Recollect site now holds over 20,000 photographs as well videos, sound recordings, publications and manuscripts, and while the Upper Hutt Community Archive is a very open site, there are layers of securely stored information that is not visible to or discoverable by members of the public. This includes their archival records around the transfer and legal status of material and the management of access conditions and copyright.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Upper Hutt’s programme of community involvement includes a growing team of enthusiastic volunteers who provide geotags, image tags and broader information about the material that was often sparsely described. The content is formatted to encourage easy sharing via social media and Upper Hutt City Library has seen the usage of its collections soar.
“Recollect for us is an absolutely critical platform for future community engagement”
Visit UHCL’s Recollect Website
So we use technology as a platform to connect with people in different ways and help them connect with information.
Debbie Duncan – Upper Hutt City Library
NZMS have been a fabulous company to work with we’ve had a professional relationship with the company for a number of years.
Recollect is really the solution to our conversations. One of the things I love the most about Recollect is the fact that it is continually evolving and embracing new technologies as they’re developed. That heritage is not just about old stuff, today’s stories is tomorrows heritage or history and I think one of things I really love about Recollect is that it has the capability for us to be able to capture some of today’s stories and harness them. Recollect for us is an absolutely critical platform for future community engagement.