Barry Smith's Football Archive

January 28, 2026

Barry Smith

Barry approached us just before he was about to downsize. He said he had a football collection that he didn’t have space for in the new house and wondered if we’d be able to help him store it; having explored all other options, it was bound for recycling.

We visited his home to find three rooms piled from floor to ceiling with scrap books of newspaper articles, match day programs and photo’s dating back to 1899. This wasn’t just a collection, it was a lifetime’s work.

Clubs and Federations across the country have relied on Barry’s record keeping for over 60 years. Now at 87 years old Barry’s dream is that the stories from his collection are accessible to all New Zealanders.

Barry’s collection was boxed and moved to a storage facility to assess the cost of digitizing it. It was described by one specialist as the best curated archive by a personal collector he had seen in 30 years in the industry, but quotes ranging from $200,000 - $400,000 to complete the work meant we had to get creative.

At the start of 2025 we setup a program, led by interns and passionate volunteers, to digitize Barry’s archive. To date over 25,000 pages have been scanned and nearly 10,000 meta-tagged within a searchable AI-driven filing system.

This means Barry’s archive will be accessible to all New Zealanders and quickly searchable by player/coach name, club, date, article author, photographer and other tags.

As Barry says, the value is in the stories not just the data, and the New Zealand Football Foundation is proud to play a role in ensuring these stories are not lost from the game. Our hope long-term, is that people like Barry, from across the country, can add their collections to this platform, to create an accessible online football library for New Zealand.

Donate

If this project resonates with you, please support us with a donation. All funds will go towards supporting our amazing volunteers, scanner hire, archive storage and digital platform costs.

NZFF Donations

Volunteer

We are seeking more volunteers to help us complete this project. Full training will be provided for the two roles below and can fit around your availability.

· Collection curating - based in Auckland,

· Meta-tagging – which can be done online anywhere.

Contact: info@footballfoundation.org.nz

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