25 June 2015
Valuable Hawke’s Bay Archives Centralised and Online

Hawke’s Bay Regional Council archives are now searchable online, and include such treasures as a 1931 minute book recording that a board meeting was disbanded due to a severe earthquake.

HBRC has used Archives Central in Fielding, a unit of Manawatu Wanganui Local Authority Shared Services Ltd (MW LASS), to manage the records that the council was holding.

“Archiving is a specialist field and has to be done properly to preserve delicate paper and film records,” says HBRC Interim Chief Executive, Liz Lambert.

“We had concerns about the legacy of material that we could not store properly, or even search on reliably to make available to interested people. Now anyone researching regional or family history can take a look at the catalogued material on line.”

HBRC staff delivered 210 boxes of documents to Archives Central – approximately 70 metres of shelf space. The archivists have appraised them and catalogued the material that needs to be kept.

The Hawke’s Bay records cover the numerous organisations that came before the Regional Council was established in 1989 – such as catchment boards, pest destruction boards, rabbit boards, rivers boards and drainage boards. Key Regional Council material up to 2002 has also been archived.

The archive includes minute books and other meeting papers, correspondence, accounts and financial records, maps and scheme plans, photographs and film which are now kept in secure, temperature and humidity controlled storage.

The oldest records are the ‘Minutes of the Taradale District Board of River Conservators’ from 1877. However a number of Hawke’s Bay minute books start in 1931 with entries like “Previous records were destroyed”.

People can search for these items on http://archivescentral.org.nz/ and a sample of items have been scanned for viewing online. Researchers can make requests through the website or visit Archives Central in person. Archived records of 8 other councils in the lower North Island are also searchable.

Other councils in Hawke’s Bay are also considering their archiving options.

Craig Grant, Executive Officer of MW LASS says “Archives Central was established to make council archives more accessible and easier for the community to use. This combined approach has saved the councils together well over $1 million in archiving costs.”

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