Back in 2022, when Archives New Zealand released its disastrous Collections search tool, many researchers despaired (or called for an inquiry). Collections was so bad that finding relevant files in the millions of documents held by Archives had become extremely challenging. Following a damning inquiry, Archives management apologised for the debacle in 2023. 

But help was at hand. Somewhat incredibly, a private member of the public managed to produce a much better search tool, drawing on the infinitely better Archway system that Collections had replaced, in short order and with zero funding. Even more remarkably, he did so using the very same data that Collections relied upon. And so Luke Howison’s Archway-style Collections search tool was born. 

In the past six months or so some belated improvements have been made to Collections. You no longer have to load potentially hundreds of search results twelve at a time, for example. But you still can’t order files through it. Four years down the track, everything still has to be requested manually. And Luke’s search tool is still preferable in various ways, including how it displays search results. 

And it is not the only online resource he has developed to assist historical researchers in Aotearoa. There is also the NZ Ancestor Search Helper, a really neat one-stop shop for those doing family history. 

So I was delighted last week to discover Luke’s latest search tool, the New Zealand Gazette Index. Published continuously since 1841, the Gazette is an official publication, often referred to as the Government Gazette, and as such an incredibly valuable resource for historians and researchers. It includes all manner of notices, from government proclamations taking land under the Public Works Act (or invading Waikato) through to public service appointments, school exam results or conscriptions lists.

But until now there has been no freely-available online search tool for the Gazette. And because of the huge number of pages published each year, manual searches of published volumes were often daunting and time-consuming exercises, even when viable. 

The New Zealand Gazette Index is therefore a real gamechanger that is going to open up this important resource for a whole range of people doing research on anything from genealogy through to Treaty claims, theses, or whatever. A bit like Papers Past has done for historical newspapers. It is another really valuable resource from Luke Howison.