"I find out the context, date ranges, when they might have been painted.
"Understanding when the events took place gives a rough indication of when the watercolour was painted.
"I research the colonial schooner ships that are painted in these drawings. I research the waka lying on the beach. I type it all up into a spreadsheet and get them ready to be digitised.
"Once digitised, we'll make them available online through our new platform, Pae Korokī."
From old newspapers and artworks to negatives and glass plates, there is a lot of history to keep track of.
"In 2021 'archive' means that we've expanded our job description," said Harley Couper, heritage specialist at Tauranga City Libraries.
"Not only are we looking after physical analogue things, but we're now trying to make them digital so that we handle those negatives, manuscripts, archives less often, which helps them stay preserved.
"Now that they're digital we can make them available and discoverable online and have the community contribute to describing what they are."
The precious reminders of the past are kept in a special room known only as 'the fireproof room'.
"If you've ever walked out of a hot, steamy bath into the living room and felt your skin drying and thought you better put some moisturiser on: paper, negatives, glass, artworks feel the same way.
"They don't like to go from hot and steamy to dry and cold regularly. They like things to be even," said Couper.
"Paper likes to be between 12C and 16C, and it likes the humidity to be quite low - under 60 per cent - so we try to keep the temperature and humidity in this room at a level that paper feels comfortable.
"However, we've got some negatives from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that like it to be super cold, maybe 3C, and they want the humidity to be even drier."
Should the worst happen, a special sprinkler system will spring into action.
"In this particular room we've got a fire suppression system that doesn't use water, it uses an inert gas," said Couper.
"If there ever was a fire detected in here there'd be a short alarm encouraging you to get out because you like oxygen, and this system is about to release a whole lot of gas that's going to remove the oxygen from this room.
"We don't really want sprinklers in here because you can imagine that archives and negatives don't particularly like being doused in water."
Although the archive is being digitised, not everything will end up online.
"We receive content from the community that is a gift – tuku – but we also kaitiaki content from that community that's more takoha, so we're entrusted with it rather than owning it.
"Sometimes the content we're trusted with, the owners don't want it online.
"Or if they do, they want some controls around it.
"So we endeavour to work in partnership as a memory-institution of Aotearoa, which is an institution that sits on top of the Treaty of Waitangi and responds to our obligations and values from within that Treaty."
Couper says adapting the archives to better represent Māori and Pākehā is an ongoing process.
"We do recognise there are gaps. I think in the past we've been very European-centric and so we're much more interested now in filling in some of those gaps. Sometimes that means receiving content from Te Ao Māori, sometimes that means just being entrusted with content from Te Ao Māori.
Both agree the effects of Covid-19 on the region will be of significant interest to future generations.
"The social-distancing rules - how that has restricted our hapū and iwi to embrace one another through harirū, hongi, kihi as well as being able to express our tikanga on the marae," said Rolleston.
"A lot of our marae are closed at the moment, which has a heavy impact on our people being able to come together.
"So, I think in 100 to 200 years' time if our mokopuna see the challenges we face today, that would be interesting and valuable."
"During the first lockdown we put the word out that we'd be interested in people's diaries of their time in lockdown and we have some content from that first lockdown which has an embargo of 50 years," said Couper.
"People will be interested to know what that felt like, what that experience was like."
If you'd like to take a trip down memory lane, check out the Pae Korokī online archive.
