All unambiguous end-of-line hyphens have been removed and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line, except in the case of those words that break over a page. Every effort has been made to preserve the Māori macron using unicode.
Some keywords in the header are a local Electronic Text Centre scheme to aid in establishing analytical groupings.
Contents
To those who see us from abroad the bibliographic infrastructure necessary to support New Zealand studies may appear close to perfection. A retrospective national bibliography has been published in five physical volumes covering monographs (including pamphlets) from 1663 (Thevenot's Relations de Divers Voyages Curieux, just 21 years after Tasman) up to 1960; from then on a current national bibliography lists the national printed output plus publications relating to New Zealand published elsewhere. Bibliographical control of the mainstream of monographs has been achieved, and with a central national union catalogue of monographs dating back to the late 1930s; a national interloan system based on the National Library as a first resort; a liberal compulsory deposit law which is firmly enforced; a division of the National Library, the Alexander Turnbull Library, designated as the national collection of last resort for New Zealand monographs; and with the National Library holding in its collections over 90 per cent of the monographic items listed, universal availability appears within our grasp.
To the New Zealander the perspective, and thus the view, is different. It is acknowledged that there are some excellent broad public highways — that is the published bibliographical literature like the National Bibliography, Index to New Zealand Periodicals, Union List of New Zealand Newspapers, Union Catalogue of Higher Degree Theses — but they traverse a landscape with a precariously thin covering of books. The assumption that one can readily make in an older country, that most things worth knowing can be found inside the covers of a book or periodical, cannot yet be made in New Zealand studies.
To get to the real heart of the country one must still travel the private roads — the unpublished catalogues and card indexes in the major research collections — and make substantial use of the byways, the cart tracks, bush roads and walking tracks of bibliography.
Some comparisons will help. The
It is necessary (even though one will appear to be statistically naive) to pursue some further comparisons to assist those whose experience is with a research culture that is almost entirely book based, to make the imaginative leap to a research culture that is substantially not yet book based. New Zealand's land area is 103,736 square miles, an area of the same order as the British Isles. The density of the national literature for New Zealand was, therefore, at 1960, one book to every 2.8 square miles. Or, on a population basis, in 1960 there was one item of the national literature to every 64.8 persons. Or, in the 297 years from 1663 to 1960, there was an average of 124.5 items per annum. When reflecting on the implications for scholarship of this low bibliodensity, one has in addition to bear in mind The Historiography of the British Empire-Commonwealth.. . edited by
To the casual observer in a New Zealand bookshop the current volume of publication of New Zealand books is impressive. Recent figures indicate that New Zealand titles now account for some 30 per cent of retail sales through bookshops in New Zealand. In the past ten years the national monograph imprint, as measured by the National Bibliography, has varied between
In New Zealand enumerative bibliography begins with B, for Bagnall. New Zealand National Bibliography to the year 1960, will be completed in 1985 with the publication of Volume V, the indexes to the 1890-1960 period, plus addenda and corrigenda to the full sequence, 1663 to 1960.
Volumes II to IV, 1890-1900, were published between 1969 and 1975. The bibliography is primarily a catalogue of printed books and pamphlets, with some significant omissions. Normally outside scope' are price lists, sales catalogues, advertising brochures; minor publicity material; primary and secondary school texts unless by authors of note; minor juvenile material and picture books; and a range of ephemeral materials. The compiler was well aware of the importance of the advertising, fugitive and ephemeral materials excluded and notes in his
A major 'outside scope' field, that of school texts, has already attracted its bibliographers. Whitcombe's Story Books: a Trans-Tasman Survey, and
Before leaving Bagnall's broad highway it is instructive to glance at the predecessors. The first listing of the literature relating to New Zealand was produced by Contributions Towards a Bibliography of New Zealand, at comprehensiveness. Can any other country match this? Some four attempts at a comprehensive national bibliography within 100 years? One might hypothesise, bearing in mind New Zealand's other not insignificant contributions to the art, some bibliographic virus, long dormant in the non-literate Maori period, infecting the unsuspecting European settlers: my mundane conclusion is that the most likely explanation can be found in the size of the corpus and its convenient concentration in a few institutions. The literature relating to New Zealand was perceived as manageable, and this was the lure to which the bibliographers rose.
For a comprehensive coverage of Maori language materials one looks beyond Bagnall to A Bibliography of Printed Maori to 1900 (1924) with its
For currently published materials, both the national imprint and items about New Zealand or by authors normally resident in New Zealand and published overseas, one looks to the New Zealand National Bibliography published by the National Library of New Zealand. To May 1983 it was issued on paper; monthly lists and an annual cumulation in dictionary catalogue form. From June 1983 an awkward transistional publication on microfiche, part computer output, part manual, intervened. The printed bibliography was divided into three sections: I. Books, pamphlets, art prints, music, sound recordings, audio-visual material; II. Atlases, maps and charts; III. Serials (new and discontinued titles, including newspapers) together with a list of publishers and addresses. The microfiche bibliography is currently (until appropriate software is available) issued in two parts; a monthly cumulative computer-produced fiche containing books, pamphlets and serials, and issued in three sequences, a register, subject index and author/title index; and a monthly non-cumulating manually produced fiche, with an annual cumulation, divided into three parts; Art prints, music and sound recordings; Atlases, maps and charts; New Zealand publishers' addresses. Present thinking is to convert the manual records from 1981 into machine readable form and to publish a five year cumulation, 1981-85, on fiche. In due course it is proposed to work backwards from 1980 to 1961 to convert the post-Bagnall records into machine readable form and to make them available nationally on-line through the New Zealand Bibliographic Network (NZBN).
The Bagnall volumes (up to 1960) have assigned a unique number, commonly known as the Bagnall number, to each item; the machine readable records also have a unique number prefixed ZBN. In the foreseeable future, then, the published monograph literature relating to New Zealand' (or at least the mainstream of it) will be under near complete bibliographic control and with each item assigned a numerical unique identifier.
The last stop on the monograph trail is New Zealand Books in Print, published by three agencies in its brief and irregular history since 1957. From 1979 it has been issued annually by the Melbourne publisher
If New Zealand's cultural topsoil was deficient in monographs, it was enriched by the newspaper printing press from the very beginnings of European settlement. Dr Newspapers in New Zealand (1958) notes that our first locally printed newspaper appeared in Wellington on 18 April 1840, some three months after New Zealand became a British colony, and comments on the rapid spread of newspapers. By 1851, according to his count, sixteen newspapers had been established; by 1858 twenty-eight. Between 1860 and 1879, the gold rush period, 181 newspapers were founded. The latest count, in
Conditions in New Zealand in 1840 suited the growth of the cheap, small edition, community newspaper, and in the first 60 or so years of settlement most communities of 1,000 could support a newspaper and jobbing establishment. Editions were small, and an edition of 100 to 200 copies was not uncommon, and it is clear from the high failure rate that these were only marginally economic enterprises. Such newspapers, because they were present in every large town—and 1,000 was a large town— from the very beginning of New Zealand's settlement, attracted to themselves a disproportionate share of community information. In the early period the periodical press was weak and locally printed monographs few and far between. In more established societies a different balance was struck between books, periodicals and newspapers. In the old world books had a strong hold before the appearance of periodicals and newspapers: in New Zealand the newspaper established itself first (that is among the European community: the very reverse is true of printing in the Maori language). The result is that for the early period the
The first bibliography and finding list of New Zealand newspapers was compiled by Dr Union Catalogue of New Zealand Newspapers appeared in 1961, and this will soon be superseded by a publication based on
For more recent newspapers one should consult the General Assembly Library's Newspapers Currently Received (1947-1976) and for current listings the New Zealand National Bibliography, the Post Office's List of Newspapers and Magazines Placed on the Register at the General Post Office, and various media guides issued by advertising agencies.
Only one newspaper has published an index; between 1946 and 1958 a minor provincial newspaper, the Northern Advocate from Whangarei, issued 31 volumes of an index to its contents. The great value of newspapers as sources of information has stimulated hundreds of indexing ventures by individuals and organisations. Some have been issued in typescript but most are still in card files. The importance of these scattered indexes has long been recognized: an inventory of them compiled by
The periodical press in New Zealand has not yet found its bibliographer. It is a moot point whether the lack of a retrospective listing of New Zealand periodicals (compounded by the paucity of indexes), or their overall weakness both in persistence and content, has contributed most to their lack of use by researchers. Social historians are beginning to explore the byways of the New Zealand periodical literature but most scholars have kept to the handful of quality journals that have managed to survive at the margins of commercial publication. The smallness of our population and the ready availability of quality weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies from Britain, Australia and the United States has stunted the development of a quality national periodical literature.
The Union List of Serials in New Zealand Libraries and its successor the
Literary periodicals are relatively well treated, with Commonwealth Literary Periodicals: a Bibliography issued by the Working Party on the Library Holdings of Commonwealth Literature in 1979, and New Zealand Periodicals of Literary Interest (1962) covering the period from 1850 to 1959.
A national index to the periodical literature began in 1940 with the Index to New Zealand Periodicals, now published by the National Library, which 'scans' some 200 titles for 'articles considered to be of lasting value'. In 1979
Parliamentary papers are well documented. As well as regular indexes issued by the Legislative Department there is Robertson and Hughes's New Zealand Royal Commissions, Commissions and Committees of Inquiry 1864-1981 (1982), J. O. Wilson's A Finding List of British Parliamentary Papers Relating to New Zealand 1817-1900 (1960), and the Irish University Press's
The thesis literature, given such an important place in historical research by Union List of Higher Degree Theses first issued in 1956 and with six supplements up to 1982. Minor research papers in history are listed in Cookson's
The analysis above has divided the field into monographs, serials (subdivided into newspapers, periodicals, and parliamentary papers) and theses. This section of the paper concludes with some general guides to all formats.
The father of the general guides is Guide to New Zealand Reference Material and Other Sources of Information, 2nd edition 1950, with supplements in 1951 and 1957. Its child is
The literature of science has not been mentioned before. Suffice to say that it is more dense, and better organized, indexed and documented than that of the humanities. In 1980 the of New Zealand Science Abstracts, produced from the Department's SIRIS database which aims to control all current New Zealand scientific literature. Modelled on the AGRIS and INIS systems, the
The current legal literature is covered by Index to New Zealand Legal Writing. The second edition, 1982, covers books, theses, dissertations and articles 1954-1981.
For the beginning historical researcher A Guide for Students of New Zealand History (1973) is useful.
Literature is relatively well provided for with New Zealand Literature to 1977: a Guide to Information Sources from Gale Research in 1980; the 'Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature' in the
Among the many other specialist bibliographies worthy of note are A Bibliography of Publications on the New Zealand Maori and the Moriori of the Chatham Islands (1972), an updated version of a section of his earlier
The bibliographical arts are alive and well in New Zealand, and enumerative bibliography, fuelled by the enthusiasm of some two generations of library school students, is flourishing. The national bibliographical pulse can be felt with accuracy since 1962 when the first annual survey 'Bibliographical Work in Progress' was published in New Zealand Libraries. In 1977 the last survey appeared in
The very considerable importance of primary materials in New Zealand studies led in the 1950s, when studies in New Zealand history and literature first began to acquire legitimacy in the universities, to a sense of urgency for the creation of appropriate bibliographic approaches to manuscripts and archives both in overseas and New Zealand repositories.
For the records outside New Zealand the major guide is a project conceived at that time, Manuscripts in the British Isles Relating to Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific (1972). This guide book includes both archives and manuscripts but is acknowledged by its compiler to be less than comprehensive in three areas. She notes, first, that 'Hand drawn maps, drawings and paintings here received a brief reference only when found associated with handwritten or typewritten documents'. Second, for private papers and business records it was 'decided not to follow up every lead but to leave this field to future research'. Some further research has already produced
Another source, closely related to Mander-Jones, is the Australian Joint Copying Project Handbook, an index and guide to the many thousands of feet of microfilm created by the project's staff as it followed in Mander-Jones's footsteps. Since 1972 the Project has issued seven volumes of the
The archive resources outside the United Kingdom are being documented by the International Council on Archives's series of 'Guides to the Sources for the History of the Nations'. In series 3, covering North Africa, Asia and Oceania, volumes have been published on France (which includes the manuscripts in the Bibliotheque Nationale) in 1981, and Scandinavia 1980-81. French records relating to New Zealand were listed by Marchant in 1962 and 1963, and more recently and in greater detail by Isabel Ollivier in a two part article in the Turnbull Library Record in 1983.
That concern in the 1950s for the documentation of primary sources, alluded to earlier, was manifested in New Zealand by the creation of an Archives Committee of the New Zealand Library Association (NZLA) in 1951. By 1955, the Committee had persuaded the NZLA to commit itself to a union catalogue of manuscripts in New Zealand libraries and the Alexander Turnbull Library agreed to take responsibility for maintaining a central card catalogue and in due course to publish the catalogue. The first interim list of libraries' reports was issued in 1958. In 1968 and 1969 the two volume Union Catalogue of New Zealand and Pacific Manuscripts in New Zealand Libraries was published by the Turnbull. Part I (1968) consisted of some 1,500 notifications from 18 institutions, Part II (1969) of 2,000 entries from the Turnbull Library. Public archives were 'at the moment' excluded, as were manuscripts unrelated to New Zealand or Pacific subjects, but the introduction looked forward to a wider scope for future editions. In the mid 1970s the project was reviewed and a decision made to abandon the standard library catalogue card format and to adopt a format similar to the
Coverage, at this early stage, is uneven. Some institutions have reported all their holdings; some have reported only a selection of acquisitions since 1979. The National Register still needs to be used as a supplement to the Union Catalogue of 1968-69. Reporting from the big four institutions (National Archives, Turnbull, Hocken, and Auckland Institute) still represents only a small percentage of their holdings. The Turnbull Library has, since 1967, reported new acquisitions of manuscripts very fully in the Turnbull Library Record; other institutions have in recent years recorded new acquisitions selectively in
The major gap is in the reporting of public archives. A new administration at the National Archives has now concluded that the format of NRAM is unsuitable for reporting public archives in its possession and decided in 1983 to submit records only for their holdings of non-public archives and manuscripts.
Archives New Zealand: A Directory of Archives and Manuscript Repositories in New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Niue, Tokelau, Tonga and Western Samoa, listing some 155 institutions, was compiled by Frank Rogers and issued early in 1985.
Bibliographic work on New Zealand music has grown rapidly in the past 15 years but, overall, bibliographic control is fragmented.
Philip Norman's Bibliography of New Zealand Compositions 1940-1982, published in a second edition in 1982, provides good coverage of published and unpublished compositions (and recordings) by members of the
The demand for New Zealand serious compositions is small, but strong. Because of the size of the market very little reaches the printed page, so one of the objectives of recent bibliographical work has been to identify and locate manuscript scores which can be borrowed or copied. With the aid of the xerox machine a trade in manuscript copies has developed and is likely to continue to flourish in the foreseeable future.
The National Library maintains as a card file the Recorded Compositions by New Zealand Composers (1965), by
The papers of musicians and the archives of musical organisations, few in number to date, are listed in the National Register of Archives and Manuscripts. Research materials being added to the Archive of New Zealand Music at the Alexander Turnbull Library are notified regularly to scholars by a selective list of acquisitions published in
A Bibliography of Writings about New Zealand Music and Musicians, compiled by
Music collections in New Zealand are listed in volume 4 of Rita
Directory of Music Research Libraries (1979), and
The standard bibliographic source for Maori music is An Annotated Bibliography of Oceanic Music and Dance (Polynesian Society, 1977. Memoir no. 14;
Oral history is a new discipline in New Zealand. What little has been taped or recorded on discs is widely dispersed in a range of institutions and is substantially undocumented. Historically the field has been dominated by Sounds Historical: a Catalogue of the Sound History Recordings in the Sound Archives of Radio New Zealand, in two large volumes.
The obvious first step, the compilation of a general directory of organizations with sound archives, has been taken. With a grant from the Department of Internal Affairs, the New Zealand Oral History Archive (a private organization) has compiled a list of oral history collections ( Report on Oral History Catalogue Research Project) which was published early in 1984.
The state of oral history in New Zealand is evidenced by the creation of the New Zealand Oral History Archive as a charitable trust. Despairing of a lead from the universities or any government agency, two committed individuals,
There is no comprehensive published listing of films made in New Zealand, or films about New Zealand made elsewhere, either current or retrospective. Film features as a 'library material' to be included in the 'national collection' developed and maintained by the National Library of New Zealand (National Library Act, 1965), but the National Library has not collected film nor become involved in the bibliographical control of the national film output. The compulsory deposit legislation (Copyright Act, S.64) does not require the deposit of films or sound recordings. The current National Bibliography includes sound recordings but not films. The copyright laws do not require registration of films and it seems that the only official requirement is that of registration, for censorship purposes, under the Cinematograph Films Act of 1928. A register, under this Act and its predecessor of 1916, is available to the public, and in recent years lists of films registered have been published in the New Zealand Gazette.
The major producer of documentary films in New Zealand, the Film Making in New Zealand: a Brief Historical Survey (Wellington, 1984). The Archive drew heavily on the only comprehensive listing of films in New Zealand, the registers and indexes compiled by the Censor of Films from 1916. The Archive is compiling, from the same source, a complete list of all New Zealand made films which it plans to publish. The National Film Unit has a card file listing its weekly newsreels, 'Weekly Review', from 1941 to 1950, and 'Pictorial Parade' from 1952 to 1971, together with other National Film Unit productions.
New Zealand's pictorial landscape shows few signs of the bibliographer's art. The strictly bibliographic approaches to our pictorial resources are few and far between and the researcher must approach the images by other, less direct pathways; through catalogues of the works of individual artists, the catalogues of institutions and exhibitions, general histories, and directories. One work that gives an overview of the pictorial images available for New Zealand studies, and their locations, is the New Zealand's Heritage: the Making of a Nation, issued in 105 weekly parts between 1971 and 1973. It is still the best and most widely available catalogue of pictorial representations of New Zealand.
Early prints relating to New Zealand have found their bibliographers in Enid and Don Ellis's Early Prints of New Zealand 1642-1875, published in 1978 by Avon Fine Prints. It covers commercially produced pictorial plates issued as separates or included in bound volumes and is an essential guide to the pictorial riches of the early exploring expeditions. For the important pictorial records in London,
Because of the lack of readily available published catalogues of the major collections in New Zealand, the catalogues of Portraits of the Famous and Infamous ... 1492-1970 based substantially on portraits in his collection.
In bibliographic terms the next most significant group of publications is the catalogues raisonnes of individual artists. An early example is Works of Frances Hodgkins in New Zealand (1954), a recent one,
Several New Zealand galleries have issued catalogues of their holdings, of varying standards of description. In 1979 the Inventory covering the years 1883-1978; the Catalogue of the Permanent Collection in 1980 (first issued 1964); the A Guide to the Collection in 1973; and the Catalogue of the Picture Collection 'for use by the Library
Catalogue of Pictures in 1948. These catalogues and inventories are supplemented by hundreds of exhibition catalogues, again of varying standards of description.
The major gap is a published catalogue of the Alexander Turnbull's collection of some 40,000 paintings, drawings and prints relating to New Zealand and the Pacific. Such a catalogue, either on paper or colour microfiche, has been discussed in recent years. The Library has made minor amends by publishing lists of major acquisitions in the Turnbull Library Record since 1969.
The major research libraries (Turnbull, Hocken, Auckland Institute) have had for some time good internal bibliographic control over their collections and the public galleries have improved their control markedly in recent years. The best bibliographic records are still the card catalogues of the research libraries. The Turnbull Library's embryo 'union catalogue' of eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings, drawings and prints relating to New Zealand, has been described in the June 1983 issue of ARLIS/ANZ News. The 'catalogue' consists of some 20,000 black and white 6 x 8 inch photographs, supplemented by colour transparencies of some, of originals held by the Turnbull (some 10,0000 to date), other New Zealand institutions, private collectors, and overseas institutions such as the British Library, Australian National Library, Bibliotheque Nationale, Archives Nationales, Paris, Mitchell Library, and others in the U.S.A. and Canada.
General histories of New Zealand painting are, in this bare bibliographic landscape, of value. Brown and Keith's An Introduction to New Zealand Paintings 1838-1980 (rev. ed., 1982) and Docking's
Other reference works of value are Nineteenth Century Artists: a Guide and Handbook (1980), a biographical compendium;
Periodicals used by researchers include Art in New Zealand (1928-1944),
If the artistic landscape is bibliographically underpopulated, then the photographic record is grossly underexposed. A beginning has been made by Hardwicke Knight, Main, and others, on the history of photography in New Zealand. Knight, in his New Zealand Photographs: a Selection (1981) includes 23 selected biographies and a list of some 1,100 photographers working in New Zealand up to 1900. The very substantial collections of photographs in institutions are, with some notable exceptions, under poor internal bibliographic control. The first step, a directory of photograph collections, is under consideration by interested parties. To date the only directories are those in Witkin and London's
The bibliographic control of maps relating to New Zealand is unsatisfactory. There is no comprehensive retrospective bibliography of maps relating to New Zealand. Barton in a 1980 paper on the need for a national union catalogue of maps on the Canadian model, estimates that less than 10 per cent of the maps in New Zealand collections are covered by published lists and library catalogues.
The published cartobibliographies divide neatly into three groups: first those of the imperial mapping agencies, second the national imprint, and third the locally produced specialised listings. Catalogues were issued by the Hydrographer of the Navy {Catalogue of Admiralty Charts and Hydrographic Publications... 1829-) the Colonial Office ( Catalogue of the Maps, Plans and Charts in the Library of the Colonial Office (1910)) and the Hydrographic Office (
The national imprint of official maps is listed in the New Zealand Hydrographic Office's New Zealand Chart Catalogue (1959-) now in its 12th edition in 1983, and in the New Zealand Department of Lands and Survey's
A number of very useful specialised bibliographies have been produced by Maps in New Zealand Provincial Council Papers (1964);
The best bibliographic sources are the card catalogues of major research libraries with New Zealand collections: the Alexander Turnbull and Hocken libraries in New Zealand; the Mitchell, National Library and
Very little has been published on printing and the book in New Zealand. A count of the footnotes in The Spread of Printing yields over a dozen separate references mostly to monographs, for the period up to the 1890s, but all of these are worked hard throughout her paper.
A survey of the wider subject of libraries and the book has yielded more references, but the core literature is still very small, and most of it is scissors and paste work. In the last ten years or so libraries and scholars have begun to gather the documentary sources necessary to support research, and the archives of printers, publishers, booksellers, and others involved in the book trades from the 1920s, are being collected actively by libraries.
Unfortunately the records for nineteenth and early twentieth century printing are very sparse.
The proportions of the published literature as between types of libraries and newspaper/book/periodical publication and their emphases lend further weight to conclusions reached in the earlier survey of the bibliographic literature: that this antipode is indeed a back to front world.
The national English language imprint begins with newspapers and only slowly develops into books; Maori language publishing begins with books and slowly develops into periodicals and newspapers; libraries begin with public lending libraries. Research libraries, a much later development, are as a consequence seen by most as mutations from a parent lending library stock. While research on libraries and the book in Pakeha New Zealand is substantially a provincial sub-field of the history of public libraries and popular reading, the field of Maori language publishing provides rich and instructive parallels with the spread of literacy and printing in the old world. Some ways forward in this grossly neglected field have been suggested by The Library).
In 1950 in