As part of a series of blogs celebrating the one-millionth collection item to be released on Te Papa’s Collections Online, Head of Digital Channels Adrian Kingston, looks back at the history of the website.

In the early 2000s, when the internet was still pretty new for a lot of people, museums were starting to think about new ways of providing access to the collections we hold that weren’t on display.

For many museums, particularly interdisciplinary museums such as Te Papa, we can only ever have a small percentage of the collections on exhibition at any particular time. Many collection items are not suitable for exhibition, but are of interest to researchers; or other items that may be interesting to someone, but don’t fit in upcoming exhibition programming. People started talking about whether making our collections available online might be an option.

You want to do what now?

While it seems a no-brainer now, there was some concern around this new approach. There were worries that by making the collections accessible online, people might not visit the museum. There were also concerns about making images available and that people might copy them and use them for purposes that were out of our control.

Remember, this was twenty years ago, and there was a lot of uncertainty around the internet, and it was also a very different world regarding how museums saw themselves. Museums were about protection and careful, moderated access to information. The internet appeared to be the antithesis of that.

After much internal discussion, and following the examples of many other museums and galleries ahead of us during that period, it was agreed we would begin to release records for visitors beyond the museum walls.

However, at that time, Te Papa only knew how to do things a very particular way. Every record we released had to have a copy-edited, at least 500-word description, be a copyright cleared, publication-quality image, and have been reviewed by multiple people before it could be released. That’s how we made such high quality exhibitions and publications, so why wouldn’t that apply to how we made them available online?

We launched in the first version of Kohinga Ipurangi Collections Online in September 2005 with 1,500 collection items.

Keep building

The problem with that approach, however, was when you’re dealing with two million+ collection items, and the scale of the internet, it was not sustainable.

Once we’d had some records available online for a while, and everybody was a bit more comfortable, we were able to adapt our processes, and continuously release more records.

As well as understanding what publishing at internet scale meant, another major shift was in how we catalogued the collections. For humanities in particular, it meant cataloguing for public access, not just for our internal purposes. This may sound obvious that it shouldn’t be any other way, but it was a significant technical and process change for the museum.

We updated our Collection Information System to more closely align with the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, a framework to define the relationships between objects, people, places, categories, and classifications, and narrative topics. This made it easier to browse the collections, and find related objects and stories.

Te Papa has put a lot of effort into creating documentation and digitisation workflows that work at scale, within the resources we have available. Over time, as record quality improved, collections have continued to be digitised, and more permissions to reproduce images were received, the number of records has grown, hitting one million records on the 10 April 2024.

Accessibility and availability

We, along with other museums around the world, also started looking at how we made our images available. Much of our collections are historical, and are out of copyright. Other parts have no copyright coverage, like collected specimens, but we own the copyright of the image of the specimen (copyright is complicated).

We looked at how we could make collection images as accessible as possible, while still ensuring cultural and legal protection. With a lot of work by our Rights team, and others, we were able to launch our open access initiative in 2014, making – at the time – 30,000 high-resolution collection images freely downloadable for reuse. Ten years on, that number has grown to over 150,000 images.

In 2018 we made a significant step forward in making the collections as accessible as possible – and not just through our own websites – by releasing our first public collections Application Programming Interface (API).

An API allows others to access structured collection data to build their own cool things, or to add to their own collections. This has helped get the collections into places where people are already, and alongside other museums, joining up collections across the globe. Examples include Google Cultural Institute, DigitalNZ, and DigitalPasifik, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

Of course there’s still lots left to do. The museum was originally founded as the Colonial Museum in 1865; we didn’t have computers then. So of course many of the original documentation is hand-written in registers, ledgers, and on cards.

While the process of digitally cataloguing those has been underway since the mid 1990s, there is still a large backlog. These notes were also often very brief, and used terminology that sometimes stripped the taonga of their connection to their original language and culture, like calling a mere, a club.

We’ve been working through addressing those inaccuracies, but there is still plenty more to do. With digital imaging – again we’ve been doing this since the late 1990s – incredible work has been done in the last 10 years in particular, but it is, necessarily, not a fast process. A collection of over 2 million items, ranging from the size of a louse, to 22m-long artworks and everything in between, takes a while to digitise. I’m always in awe of the quality and care of the work the Imaging Team do.

So what’s out there now?

As of 10 April 2024, Collections Online includes:

• 432,000+ humanities collection records
• 568,000+ botanical and zoological specimens
• 425,000+ images on nearly 300,000 objects
• 150,000+ high resolution images available for download and reuse
• 4,200+ topics

Linked by

• 17,700+ taxonomic records
• 34,000+ people, and 8,660+ organisations
• 6,200+ places
• 17,000+ categories

How people are using Collections Online

There have been over 10 million visits to Collections Online since it launched. We’ve had a few surveys and other tools running for a number of years that help us understand how people are using the website, and what access to the collections means for them. People have shared personal stories very generously, and it helps us understand where we’re doing well, and where we can improve. Below are just a few examples.

The future

As mentioned earlier, one million collection records is a major milestone for us, but there is plenty more to do. As well as continuing to work through material that isn’t yet published, or imaged, we’ll also work on new ways of making the collections available in places where people are, or where more advanced analysis tools exist, than we can offer.

The point of making the collections available is so that people can connect with them – on a personal level– or to enable new creativity, research, and knowledge, and that can’t always happen on Te Papa’s own platforms.

We also have more plans to better represent Indigenous and traditional knowledge and taonga, in ways that are more appropriate to those communities. We’d also like to better understand the impact the collections access is having, particularly in the long term, so we’ll continue to invest in that research.

One area we are both excited and cautious about is where emerging AI models can help find connections across this large collection, but also where we might be able to help reduce some of the cultural bias in existing tools.

So, we’ll keep working on making the collections available in meaningful and relevant ways, and maybe you might like to spend some time perusing the one million collection records. I don’t know what sorts of subjects you’re into, so I’ll just share a few of my favourites as a starting point.