Kōtuia ngā Kete (Kōtuia) is a collection-sharing site developed by National Services Te Paerangi, a team at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The site connects collections and taonga across Aotearoa New Zealand with people, places, and stories.
Kōtuia brings together over 1.5 million digitised taonga | treasures and toi | artworks from over 80 whare taonga, museums, and galleries.
Kōtuia includes:
- 1.5 million digital objects
- 404 directory listings
Purpose
Kōtuia celebrates taonga
We honour and celebrate the spiritual and cultural connections of taonga by connecting them to people and place.
Kōtuia invites conversation
By offering a window into Aotearoa’s national digital collection, we’ve created an online space that sparks conversation. We also hope it will be a place to examine, reframe, and remix narratives.
The name Kōtuia ngā Kete sets our kaupapa
Our name, Kōtuia ngā Kete, is based on the Māori worldview of weaving together baskets of knowledge, and interlinking a broad range of knowledge base systems.
This sets the kaupapa and direction for the site. Kōtuia ngā Kete is a place where communities can come together to share their unique knowledge and practice of care.
Ngā mihi nui to Lee Johnson, a te reo Māori expert and kaiako at Te Papa, for proposing this name.
Learn more about the logo and website design
History
Kōtuia was developed collaboratively
We collaborated with kaimahi across number of whare taonga, museums, and galleries.
Collaborators included:
- collection managers
- curator Māori
- educators
- researchers.
NZ Museums launched in 2008, relaunched as Kōtuia in 2023
NZ Museums was first launched in 2008 to give small museums and galleries an online presence for their collection. We relaunched as Kōtuia in 2023 to create a richer picture of our national collections – enabling more collections to be shared, and more stories to be linked to collections. We also wanted to create a space that reflects Aotearoa’s aspirations as a bicultural nation.