A Southern heritage project is moving into a new, community-led phase.
In April last year Clutha District Libraries hired a new community heritage co-ordinator to record, curate and digitally archive the district’s popular history.
At present, heritage co-ordinator Tiffany Jenks had been embedding herself community by community around the district, to record items and oral history brought to her by members of the public.
However, the new digihubs would allow those wishing to record and archive local heritage materials to do it themselves, at any time, Ms Duncan said.
"During the next few months, Tiffany will be training each of our branch staff to use the A4 scanners and digital archive interface, so they can pass that on to those wishing to use the facility.
"We’re now thinking about the longer term, and how we can continue to do some of these amazing things that we began under generous New Zealand Libraries Partnership Programme funding that has now concluded. We want to put services where the people need them, and this is part of that ongoing initiative.
"Every town has its residents who act as repositories of local history, and we don’t want to lose that."
Larger items could still be recorded at the Balclutha digihub, which would house larger-scale equipment.
Ms Duncan said the library team was proud of what it had achieved to date.
"There are now more than 1500 individual heritage items recorded, archived and available for public access online.
"We’re really proud that we set ourselves a high bar when we set out on this path, and continue to attain those aspirations."
The digihubs would be one element of a range of "significant" material upgrades to the district’s libraries during the coming year, she said.
