Long known as the National Register of Archives and Manuscripts, NRAM relaunched in June 2009 as The Community Archive ( – a hub for small organisations to use as an electronic archive management system.

Archives New Zealand is primarily tasked with government recordkeeping, but the team in charge of the Community Archive are working hard to help non-governmental organisations to get help and training in managing their archives.

I got involved, and loaded some information to the site, but got bogged down with my lack of knowledge and experience at how archives should even be managed.

Recently I had the chance to attend the first of several training sessions – this was a two day course called Introduction to Archives, held on Saturday and Sunday at National Archives in Wellington.

It proved to be an excellent and invaluable course, and I look forward to further training on more aspects of managing archives.

As I have started to receive donations of scooter related ‘stuff’, I eventually hope to have an accessible archive for some of our New Zealand scooter history – or at the least a web based version with digital images.

There is also a great deal of interesting material held in National Archives, Auckland Museum, and other major archives around New Zealand. However most of this can only be found with hours of searching, and like most material it is not described in great detail. I will be looking for a way to make more of this detail available to others.