Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision (the operating name for the New Zealand Archive of Film, Television and Sound Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua me Ngā Taonga Kōrero) is an integrated audiovisual archive formed from amalgamation of the collections and operations of the RNZ Sound Archives Ngā Taonga Kōrero and the Television New Zealand Archive with the New Zealand Film Archive. The integrated organisation was launched with its new name on 1 August 2014.
Purpose Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision identifies itself as New Zealand's audiovisual archive, with a purpose of collecting, sharing and caring for New Zealand's audiovisual taonga.
Structure Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision is an independent charitable trust (CC22250). It identifies itself as a Tier 2 public benefit entity (PBE). The predecessor organisation was The New Zealand Film Archive, incorporated under the Charitable Trusts Act 1957 on 9 March 1981. Between 2012 and 2014, an integrated audiovisual archive was formed from amalgamation of the collections and operations of the RNZ Sound Archives, Ngā Taonga Kōrero and the Television New Zealand Archive with the New Zealand Film Archive. The name of the organisation was changed to The New Zealand Archive of Film, Television and Sound Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua Me Ngā Taonga Kōrero, effective 1 July 2014. The Minister for Broadcasting Craig Foss announced Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision as the operating name of the new integrated archive organisation on 1 August 2014. Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision retained the Constitution and Kaupapa of the New Zealand Film Archive when it was founded in 2014.
Funding Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision receives core funding from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage from Vote Arts, Culture and Heritage. Over half of the $5 million annually received from the Ministry is for the management of the TVNZ Archive and RNZ Sound Archive collections. Te Māngai Pāho provides funding to Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision for the archiving of television programmes broadcast by the Māori Television Service and the archiving of iwi radio programmes, and the NZ Lottery Grants Board provides an annual fixed percentage of Lottery profits.
For the 2014/15 year, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision received $1,590,000 from the Ministry for the ongoing "management, archiving and increased accessibility" of the TVNZ Archive collection. Thereafter it received $2 million per year for the same purpose.
On 19 October 2017, the Governor-General of New Zealand Dame Patsy Reddy launched Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision's patronage programme at Government House, Wellington. The archive established the patronage programme because of uncertainty over funding.RNZ 10:00 news bulletin, 25 November 2017 At its launch, the programme raised $18,943. The public donation programme initially highlighted the need to preserve and digitise 200,000 Betacam video tapes from the 1980s which were predominantly from the TVNZ Archive collection. Chief Executive of Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision Rebecca Elvy told RNZ news that it would cost $10–15 million to digitise the Betacam tapes, which otherwise would be lost forever when the technology vanished by 2025.
Collections
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision manages three major collections: the New Zealand Film Archive collection, the Radio New Zealand Sound Archives, added in 2012, and the Television New Zealand Archive, added in 2014. In 2014, these three collections formed 65% of the total archives of Ngā Taonga. In addition, the archive holds five entries of the UNESCO Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao register. As of 2025, the archive reports holding over 800,000 items, which includes over 600,000 hours of television and over 120,000 audio items.
New Zealand Film Archive collection
Established in 1981, the New Zealand Film Archive operated as an independent organisation until the creation of Ngā Taonga. By 2012 the New Zealand Film Archive collection contained over 150,000 items including moving-images from 1895 to the present day. The collection includes predominantly New Zealand features and short films, and contains items with significant Māori content, including records of karanga, whaikorero and iwi and hapu whakapapa.
RNZ Sound Archive collection
RNZ Sound Archive collection includes early audio cylinders, acetate discs, open reel tapes, cassette tapes and digital audio tapes. Radio New Zealand's Sound Archives were established in 1956 in Timaru, and originally dates back to the late 1930s when the State broadcaster established a "special library". In 1998, Sound Archives Ngā Taonga Kōrero was established as a subsidiary of Radio New Zealand, combining the archives of Sound Archives and Ngā Taonga Kōrero, a separate collection established in the 1960s by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation to preserve Māori language content. Leo Fowler and Wiremu Kerekere travelled throughout the country recording hui, marae openings, cultural festivals, welcomes and farewells. Both raw and edited audio was kept. For many years the collection was held in Papatoetoe, before moving in 1985 with the associated programme unit, then known as Te Reo o Aotearoa, to RNZ's Cook Street facility. In the 2000s the audio preservation staff moved with Radio New Zealand to a new Hobson Street site and the collection was moved to a purpose-built archive facility at RNZ's transmission site in Henderson. The RNZ Sound Archive collection became a part of Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision in 2012. Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision moved the collection to Avalon as part of the 2016/17 restructure.
The RNZ Sound Archive staff and collection were transferred to Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision on 1 October 2012. In 2014 the collection was valued at $800,000. On 30 June 2016, Radio New Zealand transferred the full legal ownership and title of physical assets used by RNZ Sound Archives to Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision at the time of the archive's transfer in 2012. The net book value of radio assets held by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision was $423,946 on 1 July 2014, dropping to $172,029 on 30 June 2017.
In 2012, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage provided $1 million of funding for the digitisation of the sound collection. Internally the archive, was concerned that the funds were going to be used as a contingency fund for staff redundancy payments. The organisation received an additional $984,000 between 2013 and 2015 for the project.
TVNZ Archive collection
The TVNZ Archive collection holds over 600,000 hours of television spanning almost 55 years of New Zealand's public television history. In 2014 the Ministry for Culture and Heritage appointed Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision as the initial Archive Manager to manage the collection on a day-to-day basis. Since then, the archive has failed to comply with preservation and access targets set out in the Memorandum of Understanding (2014–2018) with the Crown. This has attracted national media and public criticism. In 2018, the archive announced it was starting work on a project to make the collection accessible online.
Memories of the World
Several archives held at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision have been added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao register. These include the theatrical cut and additional materials related to the 1983 documentary film Patu!, which documents the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand, oral history recordings collected by the New Zealand Broadcasting Service's Mobile Unit from conflict zones during World War II and oral history recordings in New Zealand between 1946 and 1948, the arts documentary programme Kaleidoscope spanning the years 1976 to 1989, and the documentary series Tangata Whenua: The People of the Land, originally broadcast in 1974.
Patu! was added to the register in 2012, followed by the Mobile Unit—New Zealand Oral History, 1946-48 recordings in 2014, Kaleidoscope in 2017, World War II Mobile Broadcasting Unit recordings in 2019 and Tangata Whenua: The People of the Land in 2024.
Access to the collections Onsite access and material requests
Much of the archive's content can be viewed in-person at the National Library building in Wellington. The former Taranaki Street building operated a 107-seat cinema, and until 2015, operated a gallery space.
Requests can be made to the archive to view content onsite or digitally, for content not currently available online. Material is often available after fifteen days, however some requests can take up to eight weeks in length.
In its Strategic Plan 2016-2024 published in mid-2016, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision noted that the archive had a predominantly white, middle-class, Wellington clientele. The archive had targeted "art-lovers" and film aficionados "at the expense of every other group".
Online access
In 2013, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision launched Mediasphere, a film-centric education service.
Since January 2016, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision has operated an online video catalogue. The archive's Statement of Intent 2015-2018 aimed for 20,000 items online. However the Strategic Plan 2016-2024 published in mid-2016 noted that there was still only a small amount of the collection available online.
In December 2017, 1,914 of a total estimated 800,000 items were available online. By August 2025, this had increased to 14,336 items out of a total of 804,911 catalogue records.
Outreach
Radio broadcasts of collection material have produced the biggest audiences for Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, with 924,000 listens in a year to a regular archival audio segment during Jessie Mulligan's afternoon radio programme on RNZ National.
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision previously operated Medianet kiosks across New Zealand, which allowed viewers to browse content from the archives, which in 2012 included 915 moving image titles. The number of medianet sites dropped from seventeen in 2016 to thirteen in 2018.
Acquisition and deposit
For much of the organisation's history, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision has focused on collecting film, television and radio, as well as ephemera and documentation relating to works. From February 2017, the organisation begun to broaden the scope of what the archive collected to include musical works, digital works, oral histories, software, live broadcasts, recordings of meetings and recordings of nature such as bird-life. The organisation considers the rights of three stake-holders when accepting material: the depositor, the work's copyright holder and the cultural values of iwi and Māori.
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision measures itself against the internationally agreed standards of the Image Permanence Institute (IPI) and the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA). In 2012 the archive noted how it had attracted international interest for "its innovative approach to low-cost, high-quality collection storage using technology adapted from the horticulture sector". Ngā Taonga's 2016/17 Annual Report noted that only 56% of the collection was held in best practice storage conditions, and a 2017 report from the archive to the Ministry for Culture and Heritage noted that the entire film collection was stored in conditions that it considered was below standard. The former Sound Archive's acetate disc collection was also stored in below standard conditions.
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision's Strategic Plan 2016-2024 noted significant issues with the archive's acquisition and deposit activities, including an out of date strategic plan, a significant backlog of material that had not been accessioned/catalogued, and depositors who had been promised a copy of their items but had not received them - with some waiting over ten-years.
Accommodation Current locations