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Kia ora koutou. My name's Gareth Watkins, the founder of PrideNZ.com. Pride NZ is a privately funded community website based in Wellington, New Zealand. The website was launched in 2009 and now contains over 900 audio recordings of interviews and local community events, showcasing the stories and opinions of New Zealand's LGBTI+ Rainbow communities. While the earliest recordings [00:00:30] date back to the 1990s, some of the content goes back even further, with some interviewees remembering growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. Pride NZ wouldn't exist without community support. There have been hundreds of interviewees from the community telling their own stories, as well as event organisers allowing their events to be recorded and shared. The website has three aims. [00:01:00] The Pride NZ collection is not only seen as a treasure today, but will also become a touchstone for generations to come. It's going to allow for people to hear who we were, how we spoke, what our dreams and our aspirations were. Pride NZ is about open, immediate dissemination of content. We don't [00:01:30] embargo or limit access to material. Pride NZ has never seen itself as a permanent forever, archive. We simply don't have the people or digital infrastructure or finance to do this. So as the years have gone by with more and more significant content being recorded, the responsibility of preserving these voices has weighed heavily. [00:02:00] Pride NZ's approach to archiving has been to make sure that the collection is in multiple locations both internationally and in New Zealand. Since 2011, the National Library of New Zealand has been collecting a digital snapshot of Pride NZ in its annual harvest of New Zealand websites. And around the same time, we began sending Pride NZ to the Internet Archive for snapshotting. [00:02:30] In 2019, to make sure high resolution versions of the audio were being archived, we added high quality MP3s to the website. And then a year later, to increase discoverability, we added computer generated transcriptions of the audio. In 2021, the Library of Congress took a snapshot of the website, and this then prompted a discussion with the National Library of New Zealand about depositing the master recordings. And [00:03:00] then in September 2022, the National Library acquired the Pride NZ collection, which was made up of 818 master recordings and 20 folders of related ephemera. So things like flyers, postcards, and programme notes. Accruals to the collection are continuing, with around five new recordings being deposited every month. The National Library deposit also prompted Pride NZ to develop and release a number of datasets [00:03:30] under a Creative Commons license. Now anyone can download detailed metadata about the collection, along with a dataset of geo-referenced locations relating to Rainbow communities. While it's beneficial having the audio in multiple institutions, there are real significant benefits in having the National Library of New Zealand as the primary long-term repository. The National Library has the most robust infrastructure for managing cultural digital collections in New [00:04:00] Zealand. It has a dedicated team committed to managing the files in perpetuity. Through an explicit wording in the deposit agreement and an ongoing face-to-face relationship with Pride NZ, the library understands and is committed to upholding the original intent of the website and participants, that is, open, free access to the content. The Arrangement and Description team at the National Library have professionally described the collection at item level, allowing for greater [00:04:30] discoverability and linking to other collections. They're also in the process of implementing the Homosaurus, an international thesaurus of terms relating to Rainbow communities. It was really important for Pride NZ to have the collection in an institution that cared equally for all of the diverse voices and opinions expressed in the recordings. And finally, Pride NZ believes it's important for heritage institutions, particularly heritage institutions [00:05:00] funded by the State to represent the diversity of experiences and voices in the country. Having the Pride NZ collection preserved by the National Library of New Zealand shows a tangible commitment from the State to honour the experiences of Rainbow communities in Aotearoa New Zealand.
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