Retrolens
is made up of a treasure trove of aerial photographs that have been taken since
the 1936 through to 2005. It is a New Zealand Crown archive and contains 500,000 images.
This
Historical Image Resource came about as the result of a scanning project that was
started in 2015 by partnerships between the Local Government Geospatial
Alliance (LGGA) and Land Information New Zealand (LINZ). The two organisations
were concerned that the treasure was deteriorating and with fewer and fewer
scanners worldwide able to read the images, something had to be done quickly
before this significant slice of our cultural and geospatial history was lost
forever. An initial pilot was undertaken to test out the viability of a full
scanning project for the whole archive, then the project itself, led by LINZ
began.
The
Local Government Geospatial Alliance (LGGA) representing the geospatial section
of New Zealand’s local authorities created area co-funding partnerships with
LINZ to enable the funding for the scanning. The project began with three
partner regions (Canterbury, Waikato and Bay of Plenty). Council partners
continue to join the project progressively from across NZ as different areas
became aware of the project and have funding to be able to join the initiative.
It is estimated that the scanning of the Crown archive will be completed by
2021.
The
photos were taken for a range of reasons such as land management and mapping.
The value of these images is in showing change across New Zealand. Key drivers
for having the images scanned broadly speaking are better decision making,
complying with regulatory requirements and cultural heritage with specifics
including using the images to support potential identification of “HAIL”
contaminated land sites, accretion and recession of coastlines, changes in
areas of significant vegetation and changes in river pathways.
The
footprints of the scanned images have been made available on the LINZ Data
Service. Some of the digitised surveys are available for download (1936 –
2005), released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 NZ. In time it is
expected that more surveys will become available.
Note that the photographs have
been mapped to varying degrees of accuracy and the markers may therefore not
represent the exact field of view or location of the image.
The
following LGGA regional council members are involved in this Retrolens -
Historical Image Resource project:Bay of Plenty Regional CouncilEnvironment CanterburyEnvironment SouthlandHawkes Bay Regional CouncilMarlborough District CouncilTasman District CouncilWaikato Regional Council
