Researching the histories
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Transcript
- Greymouth High School student
- When you are researching a topic what avenues do you turn to? Where do you go for your research?
- David Filer
-
There are a lot of publicly available libraries and archives that you can go to for historical research; some of these are online and you probably use some of the websites, like the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography is a fantastic collection of all of the biographies of important and not so important New Zealanders. The best archive for pictures in New Zealand is the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. But you can all see a lot of their material online now on a website called Timeframes, and there are 20,000 plus images you could access on Timeframes. We use these sorts of resources; we also went to a lot of books, and we went to a lot of film and television archives. The New Zealand Film Archive in Wellington has got film going right back to 1900. It’s got some wonderful film from the 1920s and 1930s, even some in colour from the 1930s. The television archive has film from 1960 onwards.
So what we were doing was we were adding all these different sources together to create, as you’ve seen, a close-cut series of pictures.
- Vincent Burke
-
We also went to first hand experience obviously; we went to personal archives; we advertised on television for people to come forward with their own stories, their personal or family stories. So that gave us access to family records that we wouldn’t otherwise have had. There are also newspapers – we’ve trolled extensively through different newspaper archives and local museums. We tried every avenue basically.
What we did: every programme had its own researcher – David oversaw the research and the archive research, but every programme of the 13 had its own dedicated researcher or researchers – and they just spent months working on that essay. First of all, we received an essay from the historians; we then moved that essay and made it tighter, and made into like an extended tele-script. Then the researchers went out there and, under the guidance of Ray and David, they looked – basically with the help of historians – for ways of telling the story; they looked for resources.