Voyaging through Library and Archives digitisation

The Museum’s Library and Archives include published works dating back to 1469, manuscripts and drawings by naturalists and explorers to complement and support the specimen collection. Our Institutional Archive traces the life of the Museum from its opening in 1881, through to the present day. Our goal is to make these collections accessible to everyone – both physical and digitally.

Enhancing scientific discovery

In August 1768, James Cook set sail aboard HMB Endeavour on a pioneering voyage to circumnavigate the globe. Among the crew was the 25-year old naturalist and wealthy landowner, Joseph Banks who financed not only his own place, but two natural history and landscape artists, four field assistants, and the Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander to join the voyage.

The major destinations that the Endeavour docked at were Madeira, Rio de Janeiro, Tierra del Fuego, the Society Islands, New Zealand, Australia, Java, the Cape of Good Hope, and Saint Helena. Banks’s team recorded and collected numerous plant and animal specimens at each landing which led to Solander producing the first descriptions of over 1,400 species, previously unknown to western science.

At the same time, natural history artist Sydney Parkinson created detailed outline drawings and finished watercolours of almost 1,000 plants alongside zoological, ethnological and landscape drawings. Meanwhile, the assistant naturalist, Finnish scholar Herman Spöring, produced refined descriptions of plant and animal species.

Central to the recording process, and ultimately to the voyage’s success, was Tupaia, a priest and navigator from the island of Ra’iatea, who joined Banks’s party in Tahiti. Tupaia’s mastery of the sound shifts between Māori and other Polynesian languages enabled sophisticated communication between Māori and Europeans. This, in turn, led to the active incorporation of Māori knowledge into Solander’s botanical descriptions, as well as the inclusion of numerous phonetic transcriptions of Māori names for plants.

Collaborating with communities

With increased interest in Indigenous plant names and the desire to collaborate with and recognise Indigenous communities and knowledge holders’ contributions to the collections the Museum cares for, in 2025 the Museum started work on a collaboration with the University of Cambridge project ‘Naming Species in the South Pacific: Revisiting a Past Endeavour to Develop New Digital and Culture Collaborations.’ Central to this project’s aims is connecting with communities in the Pacific whose ancestors encountered and exchanged knowledge with the Endeavour party.

We received funding from AHRC’s Impact Acceleration Account fund to digitise and transcribe the New Zealand botanical drawings, Solander’s field notebooks and Spöring’s completed species descriptions relating to the New Zealand flora. The Museum project managed the digitisation element and at Cambridge, Transkribus, an online platform which uses Artificial Intelligence and optical character recognition software was used to by research assistant John Schaefer facilitate the transcription of the manuscripts.

Mostly written in Latin, the information held in Solander’s manuscripts have received less attention than the drawings from the voyage. Through their digitisation and transcription, the information they hold can now be shared and appreciated by a wider audience.

The published transcribed data and drawings are now part of the Library and Archives Digitised Collections.

Our New Zealand-based project partners intend to use this digitised resource in their outreach work. This includes the 1769 Seed Archive who actively work with local Māori iwi (tribes) and intend to use this resource in their wilderness education programme that brings local school children, teachers and parents to the 1769 Seed Archive every year.

Other collaborators include the Manuka Charitable Trust, who have produced a detailed report on the content of these manuscripts while commenting that; ‘This resource supports Māori researchers to review this work through a mātauranga Maori lens and provides valuable insights that will contribute to our study and understanding of botany and our historic associations to the land.’

Circumnavigating the data

The manuscripts and illustrations were carefully digitised using an overhead camera and lighting using cultural heritage best practice standards. Over 1400 images were captured during this process. Measurements of the drawings were are taken to further enrich metadata. This digitisation both reduces the need to handle these historical collections and enhances access for researchers and the public, allowing the beauty and valuable knowledge embedded in the works to be shared more widely.

Once the manuscripts were digitised, the next step was to make their contents searchable and readable for everyone. Using the transcription platform Transkribus, a custom model was trained to recognise different handwriting styles in the document. This was followed by a full transcription with the latest Transkribus text recognition model.

Where possible, te reo Māori and Polynesian plant names were manually identified and linked to modern plant taxa and geographical records using Wikidata identifiers. The finished transcriptions are now published alongside the high-resolution images and searchable in full text, allowing readers to explore Solander’s words in both their original and digital forms.

Forging for the future

Central to this project’s aims is connecting with communities in the Pacific whose ancestors encountered and exchanged knowledge with the Endeavour party. In July, Edwin presented the project in Auckland, Dunedin, Tūranganui (Gisborne) and Australia. ‘We spoke about the connections between Māori knowledge and European systems of classification at the point when information about the New Zealand flora was first recorded in a written form.’ Says Edwin.

Close reading and analysis of the documents now available online have revealed numerous Māori names for plants and places. This is significant because it deepens our understanding of naming dynamics. During this visit, Edwin and some of the project partners also went on a tour of New Zealand’s Eastern Cape, visiting the sites where Banks, Solander and their team collected specimens and created their illustrations and descriptions. They found that remarkably some of the species identified in 1769 are still found in these localities today despite the introduction of European style agriculture, industry and numerous invasive species.

By facilitating access to a broad range of users, and by fostering connections with interdisciplinary partners who bring diverse perspectives to the study of scientific naming practices. In the future we aim to address broader issues of translation and intellectual property. These collaborations have the potential to generate new dialogues, particularly in the more complex areas of linguistic translation and Indigenous knowledge.

Subject to further funding, the initiative would love to extend the digitisation of the collection to encompass materials from the remaining landfalls in South America, the Central Pacific and the eastern coast of Australia. This will open the collection up to its fullest potential, engaging with communities across the Pacific to better understand the major questions surrounding translation, intellectual property and naming practices.

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