Welcome to the Waikerepuru Whānau Archives. The Archives were established in 2017 and is an acknowledgment to the life's work of Te Reo Māori Activist and Trade Unionist Te Huirangi Eruera Waikerepuru (THEW). The archive content is administered within the Mukurtu CMS programme and hosted by Reclaim Hosting.
The Mukurtu CMS programme operates out of the Centre for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University, a free and open source platform. This system was adopted by Te Pute Rau Tiriata, the Archiving Arm of Te Reo O Taranaki over 15+ years ago and has the capacity to meet the cultural needs of our whānau. The programme has proven experience within Indigenous Communities around the world (Mukurtu CMS).
Stage I. 2017
The Mukurtu CMS was used to create a Whānau Led Digital Archive when pursuing a Masters in Museum Studies Advanced Research Practicum. A whānau project proposal was accepted, a Specialist Practitioner/Supervisor appointed and through this process we created criteria, values, descriptors and templates to identify, describe and assess heritage items, including items in need of urgent interventions. Principles of Data Sovereignty (mana_raraunga), Traditional Knowledge Labels (TKL) and Museum Standards of Indigenous Heritage Items (Sig2.0) were thredded through each step of our process to ensure tikanga, museum studies and archival standards were met.
Stage II. June 2023
Reviewal of the Whānau Digital Archive site has commenced following participation in a Iwi Archiving Symposium in Wellington run by a collaboration of agencies ie.National Library, Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision and Alexander Turnbull Library amongst others. Discussions with Archive and Museum Specialists Vicki-Anne Heikel, Paul Meredith, Claire Hall and participating whānau have resulted in the following:
collate all existing and store on a separate external hard-drive
repopulate the Mukurtu CMS programme with previous material
reconcile the master metadata register with the images in the scald library
source "items" data from the ARP project and prepare for download
Provenance of items and images have been added where this is known and information is added as we continue to build the Archives site. There is still gaps in content due to the length and breadth of time the Collection covers.
We therefore invite you to awhi mai (help us) to contribute information to any of the items in the collection that gives context such as to identify people, places, dates and events within the Collection.
You may register for an account by clicking the 'Log In' button at the top right corner of this page. Then, click 'Create an Account' located under 'User accounts' to the left. This will allow you to comment on each photo.