Helping Hands

UC CEISMIC is tasked with preserving the memories of the Canterbury earthquakes, a task which is largely dependent on community engagement with the archive and our federation partners. In this blog post we highlight some of the fantastic community projects that are now available in ceismic.org.nz.

Christchurch City Libraries' Kete Christchurch collects stories, photos, video and audio from the Christchurch and Banks Peninsula communities, aiming to gather the knowledge held by the community about local events, people and places.  The Canterbury Earthquake 2010 - 2011 basket within Kete collects material about the earthquakes and their aftermath, and so far contains over 5000 items.

QuakeStories was set up by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage to give people a place to tell their stories about the earthquakes.  Over 400 stories have been collected by QuakeStories so far, as well as many photographs.

Another 500 stories were collected by When My Home Shook, a website allowing primary and intermediate aged children to publish their earthquake stories. 

UC QuakeStudies is primarily devoted to research materials, but it also contains several collections contributed by members of the community.  These include videos recorded by Ben Post during aftershocks, photograph collections from Steve Taylor, Iain Dawe, Jared Cantlon, and Steve Lawrence, and audio recorded at St George's hospital during the February earthquake.  Bernard Spragg has contributed before and after photographs of the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament and Nick McIlroy contributed photographs of Kaiapoi and rural Canterbury.  The Community Collection in UC QuakeStudies also contains aerial video and photographs from GPS Boomerang, a composition based on sound recordings by Jo Burzynska and the Canterbury Time Capsule 2010. The UC QuakeStudies team are currently working on adding even more content from the community, including creative writing projects from Christchurch Boys High students, videos from community workshops, an audio documentary on the Lyttelton music scene, and many more photographs and videos. 

If you'd like to contribute your stories, photographs, video, audio or other material to the CEISMIC archive, you can do so at Christchurch Kete or at QuakeStories, or by contacting the team at UC QuakeStudies.

 
Photograph: 'Gap Filler First Night 6' by Moata Tamaira, licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 New Zealand Licence