New Zealand loses heritage buildings every year. Earthquakes, storms, neglect and demolition all play a part, and once a building is gone, the physical record of it goes with it. A team of researchers at Unitec Institute of Technology wanted to know something simple: is digital preservation actually happening among the people who work with heritage buildings, and if not, why not?
Their study is one of the first of its kind in New Zealand, and the findings are worth understanding, whether you own a heritage home, work in construction or planning, or just care about the places that make up this country's history.
What is digital preservation for heritage buildings?
Digital preservation for heritage buildings means creating and maintaining accurate digital records of a structure so its form and detail survive even if the building itself does not. New Zealand loses heritage buildings every year to earthquakes, storms, neglect and demolition, and once a building is gone the physical record goes with it. Researchers at Unitec Institute of Technology surveyed 156 New Zealand heritage professionals about how digital tools are used across the sector. They found broad agreement that digital records matter, alongside a persistent gap between that recognition and consistent practice, shaped by fragmented standards, limited funding and uneven access to skills. Digital preservation is therefore less a technology problem than a question of whether the sector commits to keeping the record.
The research, in plain terms
The study surveyed 156 people across four groups: industry professionals (architects, engineers, surveyors), government staff, community members, and academics. Everyone answered questions about whether they use digital recording tools such as 3D laser scanning, drone capture and photogrammetry, and what stops them from using these tools more.
The researchers grouped the responses into three broad themes.
Why people value digital tools. Many respondents said digital recording lets more people experience a heritage building, even people who will never visit it in person. Several pointed to the emotional weight of this. One participant, discussing traditional Māori buildings, put it simply: they "may not physically last long enough to admire their beauty for the next few generations."
What actually works, and what gets in the way. Everyone agreed digital tools produce more accurate, more detailed records than traditional hand-measured drawings, especially for large or complicated buildings. But three real barriers came up again and again: the cost of the software and equipment, a shortage of people who know how to use it and interpret the results, and clients who see digital recording as an unnecessary expense rather than a safeguard.
What people want to see next. This is the part that matters most. Respondents were asked what New Zealand should do differently, and the answer that came up consistently was a shared, searchable database of heritage buildings, something along the lines of what the United Kingdom and Italy already have. Right now, if a building has been digitally recorded at all, that record usually sits on one company's hard drive or one council's server, disconnected from every other record in the country.
A gap that keeps showing up
This isn't a new observation, and it's exactly the gap that stalls digital preservation before it starts. New Zealand's heritage rules are split across different laws and different organisations, with no single group responsible for pulling it all together. Industry bodies have raised this before. What this survey adds is confirmation, in the words of the people actually doing the work, that fragmentation is still the daily reality, not just a policy footnote.
The researchers were direct about the stakes. One respondent raised the case of the Edwin Fox, the last surviving mid-nineteenth-century East India trading ship in the world, sitting in a dry dock in Picton and exposed to ongoing seismic risk. Without a digital record, a loss like that isn't just a building disappearing. It's the physical evidence of that history disappearing with it.
New Zealand doesn't lack the technology to fix this. Laser scanning, drone capture and photogrammetry are already in use here, just unevenly, and usually without anywhere central for the results to live. What's missing is the coordination to turn scattered individual efforts into something the whole country can actually use, a properly maintained, accessible home for this information rather than another disconnected project. That's the real opening this research points to.
What this means for the future of heritage in New Zealand
The researchers didn't stop at describing the problem. They asked stakeholders directly what should happen next, and three things came through clearly.
Prioritise buildings under real threat, not just the famous ones. Respondents pushed back on the idea that only officially listed Heritage New Zealand buildings deserve recording. Plenty of places at risk, from small local landmarks to sites like the Edwin Fox, sit outside that list but matter just as much to the communities around them. Going forward, digital recording needs to follow actual risk, not just official status.
A shared database isn't optional. It's the next step. Almost every respondent who raised this framed it the same way: without somewhere central for these records to live, each individual scan quietly becomes a disconnected record, effectively orphaned data. The UK and Italy already treat this as standard practice. New Zealand's next real advance in heritage protection depends less on more scanning and more on finally connecting the scanning that's already happening.
Today's digital record becomes tomorrow's teaching material. Several academics in the survey pointed out that a proper digital archive doesn't just preserve a building, it becomes something future architecture students and researchers can actually study, long after the physical building might be gone. That compounding value only shows up if records are kept somewhere accessible, not scattered across individual hard drives.
There's also a less comfortable part of the picture. New Zealand's heritage protection laws have been genuinely unstable in recent years, with planned reforms introduced and then repealed in quick succession. Whatever legislation eventually settles, this research suggests the country will still need the same thing underneath it: an actual, coordinated record of what heritage exists and what condition it's in. Law can set the rules. It can't substitute for the record itself.
Why this matters beyond the heritage sector
It's easy to treat heritage buildings as a niche concern, something for architects and historians rather than everyday life. The survey pushes back on that. Respondents kept returning to a simpler point: these buildings are part of how communities recognise themselves. A local landmark shapes a neighbourhood's identity long before anyone thinks of it as "heritage." Losing one quietly changes how a place feels, not just how it looks.
That's true for the country as a whole, and it carries particular weight for Māori heritage specifically. One respondent in the study spoke directly about whare and wharenui, noting that the materials and construction techniques used to build them mean many "may not physically last long enough to admire their beauty for the next few generations." For taonga and sites of significance to iwi and hapū, a digital record isn't a replacement for the physical building or the relationships tied to it. But done properly, and led by mana whenua rather than done to them, it can be one more way of holding onto something that climate, seismic risk or time might otherwise take away entirely.
None of this is abstract. It shows up in whether a grandchild can one day see the building their grandparents described, whether a small town keeps the landmark that anchors its main street, and whether the next generation of New Zealanders inherits a physical history that's actually still there to inherit.
The people behind this work
This research was carried out by Iman Raza Khan, Renata Jadresin Milic, Bin Su and Viola Vadász, based at the School of Architecture and the Digital Heritage Research Centre at Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland. Their paper, "Learning from practice in the digital age: 'Digitalisation of heritage in New Zealand'," was published in Architectural Science Review in 2024 and is freely citable via its DOI: 10.1080/00038628.2024.2371057.
Work like this rarely gets attention outside academic circles, but it's exactly the kind of research that should shape how New Zealand approaches digital preservation of its heritage buildings going forward. It's also a big part of why we do what we do. Every heritage site we bring online is one more building that exists somewhere lasting, searchable and open to anyone, not locked away in a single office or lost the next time the ground shakes.
