Digital encounters with Pacific Island Radio and Television Archives

Abstract

Although the Archive of Maori and Pacific Music is located within the University of Auckland and is used by staff and students, the last decade has seen a steady increase in the proportion of non-university users to the point now where more than 80% of people requesting copies of items in its holdings are members of the public or students from other educational institutions. Although this bias has created some difficulties of funding from a body receiving Government monies for purposes of teaching and research, the broad-based availability of ethnographic recordings is entirely within the aspirations for the Archive when it was formed in 1970 as a "national institution for the purposes of teaching and research, serving the cultural heritage needs of Maori and the indigenous peoples of the Pacific". One result of the Archive Director's years of fieldwork experience in Samoa, Tonga and the Cook Islands was recognition of the need for urgent action to conserve archival audio recordings held in at-risk conditions within insecure premises at the Government radio stations in these countries. A meeting with two influential businessmen in the music industry led to a direct approach by them to two Government Ministers who subsequently awarded the Archive funds to digitise the radio station holdings. The archival holdings of Samoa's Televise Samoa were included in the funding. Under the protocol signed with the New Zealand Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs, each organisation sent a specified quantity of its at-risk holdings, together with a technician who would receive three-weeks of training in digitisation and noise removal. The Archive offered to curate the original materials under separate contract, and made a second set of CDs for teaching and research purposes within the University. The Ministry grant covered all related expenses. All four Pacific Island organisations readily agreed to participate, but each brought a set of unexpected and often frustrating circumstances. Political difficulties soon surfaced, focusing on the ownership of the materials, and not all were resolvable. And, although the digitisation and denoising proceeded smoothly, the physical quality of the analogue tapes presented challenges. Such problems, however, were complemented by bonuses, and requests for an ongoing relationship with the Archive. The overall project was successful and plans are under way for extensions elsewhere in the Pacific. On both a philosophical and practical level, it is now realistic to consider framing future archiving directions within the South Pacific in terms of clusters of regional archives in liaison with one or more central repositories.