15 Hūrae 2024
Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga Archives New Zealand,
10 Mulgrave Street, Wellington
Phone +64 499 5595
Craig Innes
Website
s www.archives.govt.nz
fyi-request-27277-
www.dia.govt.nz
[email address]
E te rangatira e Craig, tēnā koe
Copy of Col ections Search Database
Thank you for your email, received on 17 June 2024, requesting a copy of the Collections
Search database under the Official Information Act 1982 (the Act).
You have requested:
“Please supply a copy of the Collections Search database in comma separated format,
including the following fields:
‘R’ Number
Title,
Years,
Item ID,
Agency,
Series,
Accession,
Record group,
Box / Item,
Sep Record no.,
Part Alternative no.,
Record type and
Former archives ref” The information you have requested is publicly available at
https://col ections.archives.govt.nz/en/web/arena#/, though not in the format you have
requested.
Kia pono ai te rua Mahara – Enabling trusted government information
Auckland Regional Office, 95 Richard Pearse Drive, Mangere, Auckland
Christchurch Regional Office, 15 Harvard Avenue, Wigram, Christchurch
Dunedin Regional Office, 556 George Street, Dunedin
We sent an email to you on 21 June 2024 asking you to clarify and narrow the scope of your
request to a specific group of records, as initial scoping suggests that the information could
not be made available in the requested format without substantial col ation and research.
We advised that charging you would be unlikely to enable us to fulfil the request, that the
cost of the resources required would not be reasonable to pass on to you, and that an
extension would not reduce the cost or enable reasonably timely delivery of the request.
In this email, we also informed you that we were unable to easily produce the information
in the format specified directly from the Col ections Search database. Col ections Search
harvests information from the Col ections Staff database. We let you know that if you
narrowed your request to a specific group or groups of records, we could provide an extract
of the information in the requested format from Col ections Staff.
To date, we have not received a response from you.
The fields you have requested relate to the ‘Archives - items’ data set on Collections Staff.
We have interpreted your request to only refer to the ‘Archives – items’ dataset, and not
any other such as agency, series, disposal authority etcetera.
As required under section 18A (1)(a) and (b) of the Act, we have considered whether fixing a
charge or extending the time limit of this request would enable us to provide you with the
requested information. We estimate that it would take two staff working on this request full
time for three weeks to export, verify, and send the data to you. The cost would not be
reasonable to pass on as it would cost upwards of $12,000 in staff resource. Extending the
timeframe to respond to your request in order to spread the work over a longer period of
time would be administratively burdensome and would stil interfere with high priority
work.
Additionally, charging you for this request would not address the impact on the ability of Te
Rua Mahara to carry out our other operations. Completing this request would mean other
high priority work would be paused, which would have a severe impact on our business
functions, and would interfere with our ability to carry out our statutory obligations under
the Public Records Act 2005.
This request is therefore refused under section 18(f) of the Act, as the information
requested cannot be made available without substantial col ation or research.
If you are able to specify the group or groups of records you would like to have more
information on, we are able to extract that from Col ections Staff and provide this to you as
a business request. For example:
-
A particular series of records
-
A specific keyword search, which could also include the relevant time periods
-
Records from a particular agency/agencies
If you would like to request this, please contac
t [email address].
Page 3 of 3
Please contac
t [email address] if you have any questions about this response.
Please note that in cases where the Department’s response provides information that is
identified to be of public interest, the response may also be published on the Department of
Internal Affairs website. If the Department publishes its response to your OIA request, all
personal information, including your name and contact details, will be removed.
You have the right under section 28 of the OIA to seek an investigation and review by the
Ombudsman of this decision. Information about how to make a complaint can be found at
https://www.ombudsman.parliament.nz/or freephone 0800 802 602
Ngā mihi, nā
Anahera Morehu
Poumanaaki Chief Archivist
Page 3 of 3
