Scholarly research now available online

12 July 2011

On 30 June 2011, Te Papa released its annual scholarly journal Tuhinga online for the first time. The complete contents of this year’s issue and the previous four issues have been published online by Te Papa Press through Te Papa’s Collections Online.

This years’ issue of Tuhinga is the largest published to date, with eight research articles from a wide range of research fields including spiders, crustaceans, the flatworm, podocarp trees, an archaeological investigation of a large Māori Settlement of a volcanic cone in Auckland, exploring the material culture from Niue in Te Papa’s Pacific Cultures collection, and the identification and description of feathers in Te Papa’s Māori cloaks.

“Research is an integral part of Te Papa and underpins all our work, including exhibitions. By publishing these research articles online through Collections Online, the range and depth of Te Papa’s scholarly work is made more accessible to the wider public,” says Claudia Orange, Collections & Research Group Director, Te Papa.

Tuhinga is published by Te Papa Press and online through Collections Online, Te Papa's searchable collection database. This enables the rich content of each article to be linked to multiple objects, specimens, people and stories connected to the museum and its collections.

In addition to this year’s articles, 27 further articles published since 2007 are now online, with earlier articles being added all the time. Readers are able to view content as individual articles or entire issues of Tuhinga and will be available to be downloaded as PDFs.

Tuhinga: Records of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa is the successor to the Museum of New Zealand Records, the National Museum of New Zealand Records, and the Dominion Museum Records in Ethnology. It is peer reviewed, published annually in June, and collects together papers by Te Papa’s curators, collection managers, and research associates on a range of topics, from archaeology to zoology.

Te Papa’s publishing has its origins in the 19th century. Since the 1860s, the scientists of its predecessor institutions, the Colonial Museum, the Dominion Museum, and subsequently the National Museum of New Zealand, published papers on a range of topics, particularly in the natural sciences and ethnology.

Media contact

Roxan Mathys, Manager Communications (Acting)
029 645 6370 or 04 381 7083