Dear Ministry for Culture and Heritage,

Given that Nga Taonga Sound & Vision failed badly to meet requirements for digitising the TVNZ Archive Collection I would like to learn more about earlier digitisation projects that the tax-payer has funded - specifically the audio digitisation project worth $1 million dollars of tax-payers money.

My request is:
Please supply all official information held by the Ministry that relates to the $1 million dollar audio digitisation project undertaken by Sound Archives/Film Archive/Nga Taonga. This request includes (but is not limited to) the use/or proposed use of project funding for other purposes.

To assist you in this request I've supplied the information available on Wikipedia that relates to this project
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngā_Taonga...)

As part of the transfer of RNZ Sound Archives to the New Zealand Film Archive (now Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision), the Archive received one-off project funding of $1 million from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage for the digitisation of the sound collection. Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Chris Finlayson said "This is an important project that not only ensures the secure storage and preservation of these important records, but through digitisation will help make the living history contained in the archives more readily accessible."

However in private, the money was also seen as a contingency fund. The Archive had been concerned about taking on the cost of redundancy provisions that the former RNZ Sound Archives staff had under their RNZ employment agreements. Employment contracts at the New Zealand Film Archive did not have redundancy provisions.

In January 2013 the Chief Executive of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage Lewis Holden wrote to the Chair of the New Zealand Film Archive Jane Kominik noting that some of the digitisation funding could, if required, be retained for a few years and used to cover RNZ Sound Archive staff redundancy payments. Mr Holden stated "provided that the [Archive] delivers the services that have been agreed with the Minister, it is free to decide when to spend allocated monies". Mr Holden went on to state "With respect to one-off transition costs [...] we remain prepared to consider any request for additional relief as a charge against funds from the one-off project."

The digitisation project was due to begin in July 2013 with the aim of digitising an estimated 20,000 audio items by mid-2015. However technical and methodological issues delayed the project until the start of 2014.

The New Zealand Film Archive/Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision received from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage $150,000 in 2013, $610,000 in 2014 and $224,000 in 2015 for the radio digitisation project. The Archive's Annual Report 2013/14 noted project expenditure of $0 in 2013 and $144,235 in 2014.

Yours faithfully,

K.I. Davis

Dear Ministerial and OIA Enquiries,

The information you've supplied gives a good backgrounder to the multi-year digitisation project, but seems to stop around 2012, so I am still in the dark as to how the project actually went and whether the $1 million dollars of tax-payers money actually got spent on the digitisation project (I can only see $144,235 specifically committed to the project in the archive's annual report (2013/14).

You haven't supplied the January 2013 letter from Chief Executive of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage Lewis Holden to Film Archive Chair Jane Kominik (noted on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngā_Taonga...) or any official information relating to the funding being set aside or used for other purposes. You haven't supplied any progress or completion reports.

Is there a reason why these things have been excluded from your response?

Yours sincerely,

K.I. Davis