Bowers, Cynthia and Bainbridge, Linda – Hawke’s Bay Knowledge Bank

The following is a talk on the Hawke’s Bay Knowledge Bank given by Chairperson, Cynthia Bowers and Knowledge Bank Manager, Linda Bainbridge.

There is no introduction, and the recording starts after the first speaker has already commenced:

Cynthia Bowers: … we can digitise those histories. We have a team of people who do oral interviews; we digitise Hawke’s Bay books, maps, diaries, commercial records – all sorts of things, and one of the important points is that the records are freely available other than for commercial purposes, on our website, and Linda’s going to give you all a little preview and show you some of the special things on the website shortly.

So how did it all begin? I think many of you probably knew the late James Morgan. James always had a vision of seeing an archive for Hawke’s Bay, and that vision came to fruition in 2011 when the Digital Archives Trust was formed. And around about that time Hastings District Council had purchased Stoneycroft, which as you all know is a heritage building built in 1875, and it’s providing a very fitting home for the Knowledge Bank. They lease it to the Knowledge Bank for a peppercorn rental, and we’re really fortunate to be there.

The Knowledge Bank is governed at the moment by four trustees, so myself as Chair, Kevin Atkinson is our Treasurer, Barry Cole is our Secretary, and Helen Walker is our other trustee, and currently we’re just in the process of recruiting several more trustees to join us. We only have one paid staff member, and that is our manager, Linda [Bainbridge]; and then we have a paid contractor, John [Newson] who provides us with IT [information technology] support, which as you can imagine, for something like a digital archive is absolutely critical to our operations.

We have a large team of volunteers – I think at the moment we have around about eighty, eighty-five active volunteers working for us. Grant Nicholson is the Chair of our Advisory Committee, and he is largely responsible for managing and working with the volunteers. And then the [a] group of people is our Advisory Committee, many of whom are here this evening, and they’re responsible for providing operational advice to Linda and to the Board. So these are the people who are absolutely critical to our operations at the Knowledge Bank. Without the volunteers we wouldn’t be here; they are absolutely amazing, and their loyalty and commitment to the cause … it is just amazing, as I’ve said.

We’re very reliant on IT equipment; so this is Grant Ancell, one of our volunteers, with one of our cameras which we use now. The cameras are more effective and provide better quality than scanning and so we have several of those now. So Grant is not part of the IT equipment, but he’s [chuckles] essential to the operation of a lot of it.

In terms of equipment, I think … we’ve got a heap of it … about twenty-eight computers; we’ve got three servers, one located in Palmerston North, one in Hastings and one in Auckland – that’s for security reasons; we’ve got a pile of scanners, and I think we’ve got … how many of these cameras?

Linda Bainbridge: Two.

Two of these cameras. The life cycle of our technology equipment is around about five years, so as you can imagine, for a not-for-profit charitable trust, which we are, it is a big ask to keep our equipment renewed and up to date, and currently we’re not renewing everything every five years; it’s a goal that we’ve got, but when I look at the equipment register, I think I see one or two items there that were purchased in about 2011. So they’re way – way, way out of date, but still managing to be of service to us.

We have some really, really good supporters – so Hastings District Council is a very long term, ongoing supporter. Currently we’re in Year 1 of a three year contract with them and they provide us with $30,000 of operational funding every year. We need about $100,000 for our operational funding and then equipment replacement on top of that. And so all of that either comes from the likes of the council, the Lotteries Grants Board, from private donations, community trusts; we get some project funding from Napier City Council but it’s not secure – we don’t know from one year to the next what they’re going to commit to. The Friends of the Knowledge Bank pay us a donation every year which makes a huge difference, and we do fund raising. And when I move to ’Looking Forward’, we have plans of doing more of that.

This just gives you a little snapshot of our collection: at the moment we’ve got about forty-four thousand items online on our website, and you can see all the various figures there. Importantly, we’ve got about five hundred and thirty oral histories that have been recorded and saved, so this is a fair chunk of history that is now safe. It’s accessible to all of us, and if we didn’t have the Knowledge Bank doing what they’re doing … who knows where all of this history might be. I don’t know about your children, but mine are showing very little interest in my two drawers of family history, and I kind of worry when I’m no longer there, what will happen; whether there’ll be a great big bonfire or quite what will happen to it. And I think for baby boomers that that’s a very, very real issue, and that’s where the Knowledge Bank can help.

I just want to touch on this, because this is the elephant in the room really, or it is for me anyway. In 2019 we had this top headline that [the] preservation of history was at risk as the Knowledge Bank admitted that closure was threatened. And then in February this year we all woke up to the headlines in Hawke’s Bay Today that said that the Knowledge Bank was facing a precarious future. Now headlines like that, or like both of those, are really, really unfortunate, because a lot of people have read the February one anyway – possibly most of us have forgotten about the 2019 one – but we’ve read the February one and that’s the last thing that people have heard about the future of the Knowledge Bank, which is why it’s really important for you to be here this evening, listening to us. Because we’re not facing a precarious future; we’ve got a really solid future, and I just think it’s really, really unfortunate that we’ve had headlines like this which detract from the absolutely amazing work that our volunteers are doing.

So when I came in as Chairman, one of the things that I recognised right away was that there was no shared vision, and there had been not the best of communications between the Board and Linda, and the volunteers. And Linda and the volunteers were largely, for most of this year, battling on, not well supported. But through their loyalty and their commitment they were continuing to do what we are there to do. And that is absolutely amazing, because they didn’t need to do that, you know? And so what I’ve been trying to do since July is to build us together as a cohesive team – so it’s not the Board up here, and then Linda, and then the Advisory Committee and the volunteers; it’s all of us there together with a shared vision; all knowing what that vision is, and working for a common purpose.

And so our transformational purpose is that we want to be nationally recognised as the go-to place for digital history. Now that’s quite a lofty ambition, but we think that if we don’t set out goals way up here we’d never have a chance of getting there. And so we’ve had a strategic planning session and we now have a strategic plan; and we’ve got five key themes that we’re going to be working on for the next three years. And hopefully we all know exactly what the role is that we have to play, and we know where we’re heading. So looking to the future, these are the key things that we are needing to focus on.

So the first one, as I’ve said, is financial sustainability. If we haven’t got that then we run the risk of seeing more of those unfortunate headlines that we’ve seen in the past … but we’re not going to be seeing those under my watch, I hope. At the moment we’ve got enough money in the bank to cover our operations for around about twelve months, and we’ve got a very purposeful programme of lodging funding applications, building relationships with the councils, and making sure that we keep the money coming in. Really, really pleased to announce that, just today we’ve received a funding agreement from Hastings District Council which is over and above the funding that we already get from them, for us to do some project-based work for them. I won’t talk about the amount of money yet until we’ve all signed the agreement, but it’s a really good chunk of money, and that for us for where we’re at at the moment is sort of the icing on the cake, really.

That doesn’t mean to say that we’re not going to need you all to support us through the Friends of the Knowledge Bank, and to attend our fund raising events and that sort of thing when we have them, but personally as Chair, I’m feeling much more secure about the financial situation now that I was a few months ago.

What we need to do is increase the paid resources that we have, so as from 1st October Linda has become a full time employee. Prior to that she was working thirty hours a week which wasn’t enough for the huge workload that she has. And so that is a start for us; it’s going to enable her to do a whole lot more, we hope. But I think we’re going to need to get ourselves into a financial situation where we can probably get one or two more people on board, just to lessen the pressure and some of the responsibilities on our volunteers.

We are always looking to maintain and grow our pool of volunteers. I’ve mentioned how important they are to us, and I think Linda will probably talk to that a little bit more later.

We’re working really hard to gain support from all five of the Hawke’s Bay councils, so at the moment Hastings District Council are great supporters; Napier also, but to a lesser extent. And one of my roles because of my background is going to be to sit down with all of them and get them on board, and get a commitment from them.

We’re looking to partner and co-operate with other groups and businesses. Those of you who were here last month and heard that fantastic presentation by Jeanette Kelly from the MTG [Museum Theatre Gallery] Foundation – one of the comments she made was about all the photographs that they’ve got at the museum that haven’t been digitised yet. And so when you hear comments like that … there’s a little light bulb that goes off in Linda’s mind … and she’s like a little fox terrier really. She doesn’t let opportunities like that go unnoticed. We’ve got a whole lot of ability and resource, and we could be helping the likes of the MTG to secure their part of our history as well. We’ve just got to all get ourselves into a situation where we can work together comfortably for the benefit of our history. The other thing that we’ve got to do is partner up with technology businesses and that sort of thing, and see how they can help us.

I’ve already mentioned the challenge that we’ve got to maintain and replace our equipment; we don’t need to have leading edge equipment, but we have to have equipment that is probably best practice for businesses like us because it’s important that we digitise things to a high quality level. And then the other area that we’ve just started work on is building a new database.

So before I hand over to Linda, just a quick slide on how you can help. The first thing that I need from you as Chairman of the Board, is for you to be positive advocates for us, and if you’re out and about socially and someone mentions the Knowledge Bank, and someone else says, “Oh, well they’re going broke – I read about it in the paper”, please put them right, because we can’t afford to advertise, and when we do positive press releases we get very little traction; good news apparently doesn’t sell, and so we need all of you to just communicate that positive story as much as you can.

If you’re not already doing so, please consider becoming a volunteer; Linda will run through that shortly. When we have our fund raising events please come along and support us. One of our projects that we’re going to be working on is revamping the Friends of the Knowledge Bank, and hopefully we’ll be in touch with all of you and you might sign up for that. And most importantly, if you’ve got those drawers of history like I’ve got at home, before your kids get the opportunity to have a big bonfire, please, please bring them in to us so that we can capture that history for you so that it doesn’t get lost.

That’s it from me, so what’s going to happen now is that Linda is going to take you through some of the really exciting stuff, and then we’ll answer questions at the end.

Linda: Thank you, Cynthia. Well, I’m quite impressed about how much she knows about our business already, [chuckles] considering; she says she’s been in since July but really it’s only been two months, so sort of August, September, and she’s made some really amazing changes. So yeah, thank you, Cynthia … one of the best things that’s happened to the Knowledge Bank in a long time.

So, I get the job of showing you round the website, and some of the stuff that we’ve been doing lately. [Shows slides] I thought I’d start with a different photo of Stoneycroft – this is in the early 1900s with Nathaniel Beamish outside.

This collection here is the Townsend [Townshend] Collection which is actually Alexander Lavery, and he was lucky enough to own a camera. So if you can imagine, this is the ruined photo of what this looked like when we first received it; it had blue marks all the way through it. So someone has gone along and tidied all of that up so that is now ready to go on our website. Likewise, this is a little girl, and she was actually white, so the whole film sort of had this white haze all over it. The volunteers have tidied that up as well.

This here is the 1924 flood of the Esk Valley, and you can just see down the bottom there where it’s all kind of fuzzy – again, that was really quite white. You know how it doesn’t flood in the Esk Valley [chuckles] – this is the 1924 flood. We’ve also got pictures of the 1938, 1860 and there was another flood as well – think it was in the seventies.

Another project that we’ve been working on as well, which is a Hastings District Council project, was the Daily Mail. This paper ran from 1938 through to 1945, and it was a daily paper, or six days a week. This is just the raw form; basically these are all going online currently but they haven’t been transcribed. All that’s happened to them is they’ve been made black and white and they’ve been put up online.

The next one was the Perrin Collection, and these are really significant photos; these were actually glass plate negatives, and they actually came from Wellington. The person had actually wanted to put them into National Archive, but National Archive didn’t really want them ‘cause they had to store them, and glass plate negatives have to be stored in certain conditions otherwise all the emulsion comes off the back. So we actually had a volunteer drive down – well they were going anyway, but go down to Wellington, pick up the slides, bring them back; we digitised them and then returned them. I don’t know whether he actually ever got them into National Archive, but hey – very safe at the Knowledge Bank.

This is another one – most of this is from Dannevirke way, Ormondville way – something that the Knowledge Bank doesn’t hold a lot of because everyone thinks we’re a Hastings archive. But we’re a Hawke’s Bay archive, so we go from Woodville up to Mahia. And this one was added because all of these mouldings … I assumed that they would’ve been handmade, but they weren’t; they were actually machined. Back in that time when they were clearing 70 Mile Bush, which would’ve been the late 1800s, I thought that was actually quite exceptional.

This is a letter to the editor [of the Hawke’s Bay Herald Tribune from Alice M Deans]. I’ve put this in because everyone thinks that their history is insignificant. It says here that two photos published in the centenary issue were [of] particular interest because they were taken by her father, A A George, and he was a very prominent photographer.

“We lived near the pharmacy in the two-storey house where the window [photo] was taken from. The man with the umbrella was James McKittrick, who lived [nearby] and worked near [in] the Post Office. He married my eldest sister, [and] their son, Terry, had a [the] car business in St Aubyn Street. The gentleman with the bicycle was Mr Beharrell, who travelled for Newbigins, [and] his sister had a private school which is now [near where] the Seventh Day Adventist [Church now is].”

So in that short, short letter we found out that her father took the picture, where they lived, that it was across the road from Newbigins, the name of the man with the umbrella, the man on the bicycle; and there is a picture of Newbigin’s Brewery. The reason we transcribed this is – how many of you could’ve read the original letter? One of the things that is not getting taught today is a) how to write cursive, or b) how to read it. And that’s why we have volunteers of this generation to help us transcribe all of this. So when you think that what you’ve collected in the way of your history is insignificant, it’s not; because that one little letter to the editor gave us so much information.

One of the things I like to talk to people about is, you think about how your grandmother did the washing, okay? To how you do it today. You think about telling your grandchildren about how your great grandmother used to do it … they wouldn’t believe you, you know, especially with the washboard. So everything is relevant.

So this is the [an] ad [advertisement] from July 1969 for Woolworths Supermarket. I threw that in there just as a matter of interest, so who would like to go and buy some butter for 25c a pound? Chicken, down 8c to $1.35, and you can buy two tins of peas for 33c. So that’s just over fifty-five years ago – how much the prices have changed, but it’s all relevant.

Another collection that we got [of] great significance to the Knowledge Bank is the Guy Natusch Collection … most of you would know who Guy Natusch was? He was a prominent architect from a family of architects from Napier. In this information we’ve got stuff going back to C T Natusch, which is the late 1800s, right up to the stuff that Guy was working on before he passed away. We’re preserving this history, otherwise we don’t know what would happen to it, so we’re storing it while we’re digitising it for him. But once it’s digitised we’re hoping it’s going to go into the Regional Archive, but if it doesn’t then we still have the digital record, so it’s really cool.

This is our Wairoa Star Collection, so over a hundred years of newspapers. We don’t have every item in physical form; we do have a few copies on microfiche, so it’s a matter of getting the equipment to read the microfiche to be able to digitise it. If anyone would ever like to read a newspaper while you’re scanning it, you’re welcome to come and have a go and we can teach you to use the camera, ‘cause we’re after quality, not speed, at the Knowledge Bank.

So, my next question is, can you help us? We’ve got all this work to do; we don’t have enough volunteers and enough hours in the day, so we’d really like some help. Can you scan? Can you push a button on a computer? Yes, you can. Can you turn a page? Yes, you can. Anyone can scan. Grant makes great cups of tea … that’s what we keep him around for really. [Chuckles] Can you type? Can you use a computer? We have to transcribe everything to make it searchable, otherwise we’re just putting images up online. And of course with the photos we need to edit them all to make them look great ‘cause people want to see the detail – they don’t want to see the scratches and so forth. And then the final stage is that we proof everything, so we need to check to make sure that all the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted, otherwise we get in trouble with Linda Ward. But that’s that.

Would anyone like to have a look round the website?

[Audience agreement]

So what I’m looking for now is the Hastings District Council Collection. I’ve gone [to] Browse, into Collections, and then typed in ‘Hastings’, which has brought up several collections, so [a person with the surname Hastings], Hastings Croquet Club, Hastings District Council and Hastings Foodbank Trust, which is now Nourish for Nil … so [an] organisation that’s folded here in Hastings, or rebranded; but we’ve got the history of the Foodbank on the Knowledge Bank website.

So in here [the HDC Collection] we have lots of things actually, quite a number of items … thirty-seven photos of the 1931 earthquake; thirteen maps; a hundred and thirty-one Blossom Parade pictures; eighty-two sports and recreational items; thirteen various items; a hundred and eighty-two district photos, and eight items from the Hawke’s Bay County Council – which people of this [current] generation wouldn’t really know that that council ever existed. And of course we’ve got The Daily Mail … all of these newspapers which is [are] the Hawke’s Bay Daily Mail, waiting to be transcribed. And the most interesting part about this is because it was during war-time there’s lots and lots of information in there. So I’d just like to thank Grant Ancell for actually putting all these online for us. So not very many pictures in the newspaper, but lots and lots of information.

Another really interesting collection that’s gone online this year is Poppelwells. Most of you would know Poppelwells, on Russell Street, and then Havelock North? Harry Poppelwell was really quite committed to Greater Hastings and promoting Hastings, and he brought the Blossom Parade and so forth to Hastings as well as Fantasyland. And he also was involved with the Orphans [Club] so there’s lots of information about Hastings; lots of letters and proposals, theatre programmes and things that he participated in … really, really worth having a look.

The other one [collection] which I find exceptionally interesting – this is a collection about Rona McCarthy [née Tong]. We’ve already got Rona’s collection online, and when she passed away her daughter brought in some more to add to that. For those of you that don’t know Rona Tong, she represented New Zealand at the British Empire Games in 1938, in hurdling. [Hurdles] She also played netball, or basketball as it was known, and she received a [an] MBE [Member of the British Empire] for her services to sport. These figurines are amazing – so this is her hurdling. With physical items, we’re quite fortunate that we can actually take pictures all the way around, so that’s exactly what we’ve done, which means that if it ever needed to be recreated we’ve got quite a good idea of what it actually looked like.

The most exciting thing that’s happening in the next week or so is we’re kicking off a cyclone [Gabrielle] project with the courtesy of the Hastings District Council. So we are going out into the community and doing fifty interviews on people that [who] were impacted by the cyclone. When I say impacted, there’s been so much talk about the Esk Valley and about Puketapu and about Pakowhai Road; we want to make sure we get a broad section of everybody, because – not downplaying the impact on their lives – but there were other people affected by the cyclone as well. We need people to go out into the community and complete these interviews; we need to find out who would be interested in being interviewed, and we also need people to do the transcribing of these interviews – again, another dying art because of all the AI [artificial intelligence] etcetera out there; no one can actually pull on a set of headphones and actually type any more, so it’s people again that we’re looking for. This is kicking off by November and will carry on until the end of March, so if there’s anyone that [who] would be interested in going out and having a conversation about the cyclone and how it’s impacted on their lives, or if you know of someone who we could interview, could you please let me know. There’s [There’re] brochures down the back with my email address if you’d like to gather one of those; that would be great.

Well thank you very much for coming tonight and listening to us again. Any questions that anyone would like to ask … more than happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

[Applause]

Closing: Well I would like to thank Linda, and Cynthia of course. And I was thinking before … who are we without our own personal history? If I could not remember my own history, who the hell is John? And likewise, what is a community has forgotten it’s history and doesn’t have it’s history? And this is the wonderful value that the Knowledge Bank gives us, so thank you very much again. And just to say that the donations that you’ve given tonight, which would normally go to the Landmarks Trust, we’re going to donate to the Knowledge Bank.

[Applause]