Getting To Us | When You Arrive | Staff | Time | Ask for help
click here for the address and contact details of our four offices.
When you arrive at Archives New Zealand you will need to register as a user. This does not cost anything; you will be issued with a card, which will have your name and unique reader number on it.
Each time you come to Archives New Zealand you will need to sign the Reader Register.
Each office has a reading room. These areas have tables and chairs for readers to sit and research. You are only allowed to use pencils in the reading room and these are supplied. For the safety of the archives, no drinks, including water or food are permitted in the reading room.
There are secure areas to leave your belongings while you are in the reading room. You are permitted to take material necessary for your research into the reading room in a clear plastic bag.
Staff in the Reading Rooms assist researchers to register, consult the finding aids, request archives, arrange for copying of archives and provide advice on other useful sources of research. In addition, staff can provide information on how to handle archives, the reprographic services available and processes for requesting access to archives that have access restrictions and for requesting permission to publish or reproduce archives.
Researchers need to consult the finding aids to try to locate references to specific records that might be relevant to the topic of research. If references can be found then they need to request the relevant items, which will be retrieved from the stacks to be viewed in the Reading Room.
Some information about the holdings can be found in the Reference Guides, although these do not cover all the records that Archives New Zealand holds.
Archival research is usually time consuming and requires application and perseverance. There are often frustrations, such as incomplete or missing records and records which do not contain the desired information. It is therefore sensible to allocate as much time as possible to undertake research. If you are working to a deadline, such as a publication date or assignment due date, you should begin researching well before this deadline.
Archives are arranged and described by provenance, which means that they are primarily found through identifying the creator or custodian of the records when they were in use by the government and scrutinising the lists of records transferred or controlled by those government offices.
You will be working with the many and varied recordkeeping systems of government offices. The records that we hold were created primarily for administrative purposes rather than for easy research and the arrangement and description of the records may not be intuitive.
The staff in the reading rooms are there to assist and advise you in your research. Do not hesitate to ask for help but please be aware that the staff cannot conduct your research for you.
Researchers can also use the Remote Reference Service to make enquiries remotely, although the amount of research that can be done on behalf of researchers through this service is limited. Remote Reference Service