BANK RECORDS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25940, 5 September 1945, Page 4

BANK RECORDS

HIDDEN DURING WAR PHOTOGRAPHIC COPIES TAKEN At about the same time as the holdings in gold of the Reserve Bank were removed from Wellington and hidden in remote areas of the South Island, the bank had all its records copied photographically and securely hidden in ease of enemy action. The loss of records of note issues, clients’ accounts, and overdrafts, and many other details vital to the carrying on of a banking institution would have been almost as serious as the less of the gold reserve, and elaborate orecautions were 'taken to duplicate all these. The Reserve Bank authorities early in the war obtained the most modern micro-filming plant from abroad, and set up an establishment at some distance from the bank building, where a staff of trained operators proceeded to copy cheques, ledgers, accounts, and, in fact, the whole of the bank's records.

These records of an enormous bulk, were added to daily, and the copying staff was kept busy throughout the war. By reducing each original sheet to about the size of a postage stamp on the film, however, storage problems were simplified. The photographic copies were dispersed to various “ hiding pla r es ” for safe keeping. A small two-storeyed building in Whitmore street, Wellington, which had once been the city’s art gallery, was used as the photographic studios. The records were copied on to standard 35-millimetre film. Before the war. micro-filming was used extensively in overseas libraries for Saving space in storing back files of newspapers and periodicals, and also for making more readily available rare and valuable books and manuscripts which otherwise could not have been handled and consulted by the public. It is understood that the Alexander Turnbull Library was planning to obtain micro-filming plant before the outbreak of war, and it is possible that the Reserve Bank’s equipment may now be transferred to one of the Government libraries in Wellington, the Turnbull or the General Assembly. Micro-filming equipment was m operation at Army Headquarters in Wellington during the war for the first time, and large numbers of documents for transmission to British and United States military authorities were copied photographically to save the work of retyping. The Reserve Bank possesses the only “ reading ” equipment in New Zealand for projecting the film images up to the original size for easy reading.