To be known as the Grey Collection, the new site www.georgegrey.org.nz, is an excellent source of historical information and digitised heritage material.
The site is a showcase of the items gifted by Sir George containing beautiful digitised heritage images and a biographical timeline of the life and times of Sir George. The Grey Collection also features 10 eBbooks including titles such as the Rossdhu Book of Hours, a medieval prayer book and the Robert Park Sketchbook.
Links to two key online resources about Sir George are also on the site.
The first is Shades of Grey, a current exhibition at Central City Library (44-46 Lorne Street) focussing on Sir George, the man and his many facets as politician, philanthropist, explorer and linguist. The exhibition runs until 29 January 2011 but if you can’t get there you can view it online.
The other is Manuscripts Online, a database providing access to Auckland Libraries’ manuscript collections, including the Grey Letters database. Here you can access four manuscript collections from the Sir George Grey Special Collections: Grey letters (non-New Zealand); Grey New Zealand letters; Non-New Zealand Manuscript Collection, and, New Zealand Manuscript Collection.
The Grey New Zealand letters collection contains approximately 1800 letters from New Zealanders to Sir George Grey. Digital images of all these letters have recently been added to Manuscripts Online. Detailed summaries have also been provided, and the summaries are keyword searchable.
The digitisation of our manuscripts is an ongoing project. We plan to add more digital images of items in the database very soon, along with full transcriptions of about 1900 letters.