Project History​

One of the original cassette tapes in the LLC's collection

The first version of the Rays of Sound website

2014 - Saving tapes
In 2014, staff at the Language Learning Centre were facing a dilemma. What to do with audio cassette tapes in our collection that held high quality material in Māori and Samoan but were quickly becoming trapped in an obsolete format? We decided that we would aim to salvage some of these valuable resources for the current and coming generations by digitising them.
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2015 - An idea becomes a reality
Digitisation has saved the resources but we were also aware that many school libraries across the motu which held the books could no longer access the audio material. That's when we developed the idea for the website with streaming audio accessible to the wider public. After many hours of web-deveopment work and attempts to track down copyright holders, the website went live in late 2015.
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2016 - Working towards a new phase
After the launch, the LLC has received a lot of support and positive feedback. This inspired us to seek for more resources from the local community. A chance encounter on Waitangi Day in Lower Hutt led to recordings being made with members of the Hutt Valley Cook Islands community. In the meantime, a student project team at Victoria University undertook to re-design the website and make it easier to update. 
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2017 - Rays of Sound relaunched
​Thanks to the efforts of a number of people at Victoria University, we are happy to present a new and expanded version of Rays of Sound.
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