Te Papa collection manager and kaitiaki taonga Moana Parata shares a story of her recent journey to Los Angeles to bring home a precious taonga, a raranga vest collected by Carl Freeze, an American Mormon missionary in the early 1900s.Read more
Nancy Adams (1926–2007) was one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most prolific botanists and a talented artist. She produced many botanical illustrations, which were included in widely distributed and well-regarded books about the New Zealand flora. During her botanical career at the Dominion Museum (predecessor to Te Papa Tongarewa), she wentRead more
Last year a Te Papa curator approached the library team with an intriguing question. Could we help them find more information about the story that in the 19th century whales in the Wellington Harbour were so noisy that they kept people awake at night? The curator couldn’t find any first-hand contemporary accounts, known as primary sources, from the 1800s to confirm the tale and hoped the library team might be able to help. Cataloguing and Acquisitions Librarian Kim McClintock talks about her discoveries.Read more
Nancy Adams was a key player in the early decades of the Dominion Museum (predecessor to Te Papa), making substantial curatorial contributions to collections spanning from colonial history to botany and producing illustrations, now a valuable part of the Te Papa Art collection. As Lucia Adams and Margo Montes de Oca discovered during their summer research this year, traces of her influence and curatorial eye can be found not only in Te Papa’s archives but also in the outside world, specifically in the gardens by the old Dominion Museum building in Buckle Street.Read more
The warmer months are, in many respects, the ideal time for enjoying nature, including connecting with the amazing diversity of plants around us. This time last year, Curator Botany Leon Perrie was traversing the country to get the final photos for the fern guidebook he co-authored with Patrick Brownsey.Read more
In their first Gen AI blog, Gareth and Katie left you hanging as to how the descriptions created using Generative Artificial Intelligence turned out. Before they show an example and talk about how they assessed the content, there were a couple of discoveries they made about supplying images to the AI model.Read more
Te Aka Matua Research Library at Te Papa currently has a collection of over 60,000 books and supports the work of Te Papa kaimahi with its wide-ranging books and resources about Aotearoa New Zealand history, Pacific cultures, mātauranga Māori, art, natural history, and museum studies. The library was first mentionedRead more
“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” E.O. Wilson, father of the modern naturalist movement. In this series of blogs, Te Papa entomology curatorRead more
We are dedicating this blog post to acknowledge two honours recently bestowed on one of our own, Curator Vertebrates Dr Colin Miskelly. He has been made a Fellow of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand and received the New Zealand Association of Scientists Cranwell Medal. A huge congratulations on these achievements, Colin!Read more
The possibilities of using Generative AI in a positive way to enhance collection accessibility and findability has sparked a pilot project by history curator Katie Cooper and Collections Data Manager Gareth Watkins. In the first of a series of blogs, Katie and Gareth take you on their AI journey.Read more
The 40th anniversary of Te Maori inspired events to improve its Wikipedia article. Te Herenga Waka Museum Studies intern Elise Goodge explores what made these events so unique.Read more
It would be hard to miss that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen an exponential rise in programming, availability, use, and debate in the last few years. Here at Te Papa, we’ve been looking at possible use cases for the Digital Museum, and investigating safe ways to connect the collections to visitors. In this blog, Collections Data Manager Gareth Watkins describes his experiments with ways Generative AI can tell richer stories and enable deeper connections to our collection database.Read more
In 1997 Te Papa purchased approximately 1000 nineteenth- and twentieth-century silversmiths and jewellers’ tools. The collection was started by jeweller Norris Blaxall in the early 1920s and his son Kevan continued to assemble and document the collection. Jessa Roylands, a Museum Studies student at Victoria University of Wellington, has been researching the tools, and shares some insights into the process of creating beautiful, glossy enamelled jewellery.Read more
As Wikipedian in Residence at Te Papa, Siobhan Leachman researched the research expeditions the museum has undertaken since the Colonial Museum was founded in 1865. Siobhan and Digital Channels Outreach Manager Lucy Schrader show how sharing this information through the open linked data platform Wikidata has made it easier to learn about the expeditions and what they discovered.Read more
In March, Te Papa’s Leon Perrie, Bridget Hatton, Julia Wilson-Davey, and Lara Shepherd travelled to inland Hawke’s Bay to collect plant specimens from Puahanui Bush, a rare lowland forest remnant.Read more
