Last week we released the latest edition of our annual research journal, Tuhinga, through our Collections Online. While we’ve had some older editions of Tuhinga available as downloadable pdf’s for a little while now, this is the first year we’ve released Tuhinga primarily in digital form, and linked to the collections themselves.

This years issue of Tuhinga is the largest published to date, with 8 research articles from a wide range of research fields including spiders, crustaceans, the flatworm, podocarp trees, an archaeological investigation of a large Māori Settlement of a volcanic cone in Auckland, exploring the material culture from Niue Island in Te Papa’s Pacific Cultures collection, and the identification and description of feathers in Te Papa’s Māori cloaks.  Check it out here.

By making Tuhinga, and the individual articles, available through Collections Online, we make more of the research our staff and associates undertake available to a much wider audience than ever before. But possibly even more importantly, we make that research available in the context of the artworks, objects, specimens, taxonomies, people and places the articles are about.  For example Safua Akeli and Shane Pasene’s research on the Niuean objects and material culture in Te Papa’s collections is now directly linked to some of the objects discussed in the article. This  also works in reverse; if you were researching throwing stones had found this maka you could see the stories and research that reference it, including the Tuhinga article.

While this year’s journal is the first  to be delivered through Collections Online, we’re working  to make all the previous Tuhinga journals and their articles available in the same way. We’re  also looking to see how we can increase access to some of our other research, which might already be published, but a bit difficult to find.