Her office is filled with audio recording and digitisation equipment and she is working on a project to digitise these discs, to make them available now and for future generations. Now, nearly 80 years later, several boxes full of them are in the office of Sandy Ditchburn, a Senior Sound Archivist at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. The recordings are cut to a disc on a recorder in the truck, to be sent back to New Zealand for broadcast. They’re waiting to record simple messages for the National Broadcasting Service Mobile Unit to send back to loved ones and the rest of the country. Microphones with long leads stream out of the truck and over to a line of New Zealand troops serving in World War Two. Imagine it’s the early 1940s and an Army truck crosses the sands of Northern Africa, comes to a halt and is set up on jacks. This story covers the digitisation work for parts of this collection. The inscription is also a recognition of the invaluable work done by Ngā Taonga.
The collection has been recognised as being of significant international documentary heritage. Ngā Taonga is delighted that the World War Two New Zealand Mobile Broadcasting Unit Recordings have been inscribed to the UNESCO Memory of the World.