Radical Archiving Project Announced
The Radical Aotearoa Digital Archive, or RADAR Project, has been announced in Dunedin with a launch date set for next
month.
RADAR is a project aimed at preserving and promulgating the publishing culture of the radical left in New Zealand,
primarily by maintaining a collection of digitized materials online.
“This has been a project over a year in the making,” states project coordinator Tyler West.
“It is the culmination of many months spent tracking down these old leaflets, papers, pamphlets; and many more slowly
digitising, cataloguing, and uploading them.”
The archive will initially maintain a collection primarily dating from the last thirty years, but with aims to continue
expanding the available collection as far back as possible.
“Even material produced as recently as the beginning of this decade are difficult to track down or seemingly lost
entirely, and the picture gets grimmer the further back one goes.”
“Papers Past already has a number of important socialist and union papers dating up to 1950, but it is not a total
collection and even then there is nothing for material published after.”
“That leaves nearly seventy years of publications slowly being forgotten, the core aim of this project is to ensure that
as little material as possible is lost to obscurity,” concludes West.
ENDS