A historic imagery scanning project has been beavering away digitising the Crown aerial imagery archive in the interest of long term preservation, easier access, and better use of this valuable national resource. This current project underway involves digitising more than 600,000 images which date from the 1930s to present day. The project is managed by LINZ, but is a jointly funded project by the following local authorities/ shared services:
Auckland Council
Bay of Plenty Regional Council
Environment Canterbury
Gisborne Regional Council
Hawkes Bay Regional Council
Environment Southland
Tasman District Council
Waikato LASS
Overall, the total project cost is estimated to be $5 million, with local govt partners spending half of this value on digitising the images in their regions.
As at June 2016, 150,000 images have been scanned and delivered to the partners. It is estimated, Bay of Plenty and Gisborne to be completed in June 2018, Waikato in December 2018 and the others in 2020. The whole project is expected to be finished by 2021.
The Local Government Geospatial Alliance identified the need of its councils’ customers to access the rich resource of historical images in an open and freely accessible application. It needed to be simple and easy to use. Instead of creating several separate resources to access this resource the following local authorities / LASSes jointly funded a national website called RetroLens: