Statement about Collections search from Chief Archivist

16 November 2022

Archives NZ alerted users, and is keeping them informed of progress, through its social media channels.

We sincerely apologise for the impact the Collections closure has had on work and research commitments and the frustration experienced. This frustration is also shared by Archives NZ and by our Archivists, who work with the system every day and experience the same issues.

Last evening, a core group of senior staff from the Department of Internal Affairs and Archives New Zealand met with senior officials from the supplier of Collections search, Axiell, to progress mahi underway to resolve the Collections Search outage.

We are unable to give a timeframe on when Collection search will be restored, but everyone is working with urgency.

In recent months, we have observed that some records or information associated with records, are appearing in unexpected places. This could, potentially, have security and privacy issues which is why we have needed to make Collections unavailable to the public for periods of time.

This instance is a continuation of a series of issues that we have had with the Collections records management system since it went live in February and of specific issues we have observed in recent months.

On this occasion, Archives NZ discovered that a set of records, with brief record titles containing private information, was publicly visible, despite the records themselves being Restricted and not visible.

The records are not available digitally and have never been accessible to the public. We take the privacy of the material we hold very seriously.

While the system is down, Archives NZ and its vendor, Axiell, have been investigating whether Restricted records have been publicly discoverable and whether there are system issues that need fixing to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Though we know that this, and every outage has an impact on our kaimahi and on the mahi of our users, Archives NZ remains firm that until it has full assurance that security and privacy measures are resolved in this case, the Collections system will remain down.

The Department of Internal Affairs is aware there have been performance issues with Archives NZ’s Collections Search tool since it went live in February 2022. We remain committed to improving the Collections Search. 

The contract with our provider Axiell includes maintaining and continually improving the Collections system. We meet with them regularly so we can work towards making those much-needed improvements.

We expect our provider to work with us to ensure we have an archival information management system that makes it easier for our staff and users to access collections. This, clearly, is not currently the case.

We continue to engage closely with users to hear their concerns. This has included holding workshops to identify, first-hand, issues being experienced by users so we can prioritise key issues to be fixed.

We’ve looked at whether we could return to our previous search tool, while we resolve these issues. Unfortunately, Archway had reached the end of its life, with the technology no longer maintained, supported or able to be improved. This was a major risk to the security of our data and the prompt for us to move to a new system.  

Archway also hasn't been updated since we launched Collections search in February 2022 so the data it holds is now months out of date. 

We have been keeping users updated regularly on current issues and planned fixes to improve Collections search. Go to https://www.archives.govt.nz/collections-search

Anahera Morehu

Chief Archivist

Archives New Zealand