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🔍 What is this?

An alternative search system for Archives NZ, inspired by the beautiful simplicity of the beloved Archway system.

🔍 How does it work?

The search results displayed here are sourced directly from the backend of Archives NZ's publicly available Collections Search system, in almost exactly the same way that the official website works, but organised and displayed differently.

To start with, you can do a straight-forward search with a few keywords and an optional date range and whether to focus on digitised items. You then have the option to filter the results futher (such as by Series and Format - photos, documents, etc).

You can highlight search keywords in the results by clicking the orange text in 'X results matching {keywords}'

The Advanced Search allows you to search with criteria such as showing only Series or Agency results, records held in a specific location, plus sorting and grouping options.

You can also browse within a Series or Accession by clicking the Series name. Search for records within that Series by using the search box on that page.

Digitised records can be viewed by clicking on the thumbnail or the 'Show Scan' links. This embeds a simple viewer directly in the page. You can switch to the official Archives NZ viewer by clicking the 🌀 Archives NZ Source link under the viewer.

🔍 Why is this necessary?

Since it launched in February 2022, Collections Search has been plagued with issues, crashes and downtime, and described by users as "awful", "markedly inferior", a "dog’s breakfast" and "dreadful".

Public complaints about Collections Search have been made by Crown Law, Te Arawhiti, the Archives & Records Association of NZ (ARANZ), the Professional Historians' Association of NZ (PHANZA) and the Treaty Research Officials' Committee (TROC).

Reporting by RNZ's Phil Pennington produced an internal Archives NZ report on Collections Search, describing: "Several significant issues ... slowness, a lack of booking functionality and an external user design that makes accessing archival records difficult. The level of user experience in place now is well below what was in place before the roll out". The report goes on to detail a number of privacy breaches, "continued delays by the vendor" on software improvements, and outages of 29 days in total, out of the ten months since launch.

This alternative search system aims to address some of the shortcomings of Collections Search, such as:

Only 12 search results are displayed at a time
Pages load very slowly
Full name of search result is cut off after a few words
No direct link to scanned documents
Type of record (military records, divorce files, land records, etc) and access status is not shown
No sorting records by date
Advanced Search has very limited functionality
It is almost impossible to browse records within a Series or Accession

🔍 Are my searches private?

Great question! In a nutshell, your searches are visible to me, but anonymous.

Your search queries on this system are recorded in logs for a period of time, without any user-identifiable information associated with them, for debugging purposes.

I have no way of identifying you as a person, or associating your search queries with you.

This website does not use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or any other analytics/tracking software.

🔍 Who made this?

I'm Luke Howison, a freelance web developer with an interest in genealogy. I have written a few homebrew tools to assist with this research, such as NZ Ancestor Search Helper.