Whether it's the news of the day, or the pop culture of yester-year, so much of New Zealand's history has been captured on tape and film.
But what happens when those file types grow old, and the technology to play them is obsolete?
Kate Roberts is the group manager of collection growth at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, which looks after a collection of close to a million audio and video files at their temperature controlled vault in Lower Hutt.
"This is a race between getting the content into a safe digital format, and the age of the media, which are breaking down over time," she said.
But many of the files they have are becoming outdated, risking the content they contain, often crucial chapters of Aotearoa's cultural history.
That's why Ngā Taonga have partnered with the National Library and Archives NZ to embark on one of the largest digitisation projects of its kind in the world.
A $40 million venture that will see close to half-a-million video and audio files preserved in digital form.
"The scale and scope of it is so massive. It's the biggest project I've ever been involved in," Jessica Moran, associate chief librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library, said.
"Our history anchors us, it allows us to know where we've been, where we're going. The stories, the good the bad the ugly, everything in between. If we don't do this now, we run the risk of losing the content forever," Roberts said.
Almost a third of the assets (115,000) will come from the National Library and Archives collections.
Prior to this project, digitising that many files would be a 100-year task.
But with a crucial partnership with Belgian company Memnon, one of the world's leading digital media migration services, it's a process that will take around three years.
Heidi Shakespeare is Memnon's chief executive, and was in New Zealand visiting the Avalon Studios for the first time this week, overseeing the process.
When asked what the best part of the process is, she said: "It's the hidden treasures. It's the story-telling. That's the beauty of media, it allows people to tell stories. And if we don't do these projects now, then those stories will just disappear."
It's fitting this process is happening on the site of so much broadcasting history, at the Avalon Studios in Lower Hutt.
In fact, many of the staff working on this project are former TVNZ employees, a reflection of the fact there just aren't that many engineers and technicians around who have the understanding or knowledge of decades' old playback equipment.
"It's brilliant to see them running some of the content and recognising some of their own handwriting or some of the work they did," Shakespeare added.
Tape by tape, reel by reel, New Zealand's broadcasting history is being preserved for future generations, under a digital lock and key, with an eye to making it all accessible to the public.
SHARE ME