Background

There are approximately 2.5 million items in Te Papa's collections, built up since 1865, when the Colonial Museum opening in Museum Street, Wellington, close to where the Beehive is now. The core areas of collecting cover:

Natural Science

• Archaeozoology
• Birds
• Fish
• Fossil Vertebrates
• Geology
• Crustacea
• Molluscs
• Marine Invertebrates
• Marine Mammals
• Land Mammals
• Plants
• Reptiles and Amphibians
• Insects

Humanities

• Collected Archives (archives collected from significant New Zealander's as part of Te Papa's collecting policies)
• Museum Archives (institutional archives, created by the Colonial Museum, Dominion Museum, National Museum, National Art Gallery, and Te Papa)
• Art
• History
• Pacific Cultures
• Philatelic
• Photography
• Taonga Maori
• Rare Books

With over 150 years worth of collecting, and evr evolving cataloguing and research practices, like most museums, Te Papa's documentation around the collections varies from non-existent, paper only, skeletal digital records all the way through to highly researched and described, digitised exemplar records.