Guest contributor: Anahera Sadler

The British Museum online photographic collection, which now includes thousands of Pacific (including Maori) images that have just been scanned as part of a long-term research project undertaken by the institution. The database is huge. From my quick search, the Pacific collection appears to be twice as large (3000+ images) than that offered on Matapihi (the NZ archived image database).

There are about 1850 Maori images (there are 11,500 on Matapihi). Many of the images are also available from NZ archives, but some of the British Museum copies are apparantly of a higher quality and there are many images that are not available here. Access to these photographs would once have been through browsing reference images over many days in a large set of ring-binders in the research library of the Museum. This is so much more user-friendly, faster and cheaper, although the larger issues of open access to indigenous images remains a tricky question!