A labour of love by Dunedin historian Gordon Parsonson has proved crucial in a University of Otago Library project to place online thousands of New Zealand's earliest missionary archives.
Mr Parsonson (94) is a retired Otago University academic who has studied missionary initiatives throughout the Pacific.
He has transcribed many thousands of pages of handwritten Samuel Marsden material, both journals and letters.
The fruits of more than 20 years of this work will be made available online for the first time next month. He was ''very happy'' the Marsden material and other early mission-linked archives would soon become more widely available, via the internet.
After being accidentally locked in the Hocken stacks one afternoon in the 1950s, he begun reading some of Marsden's journals, and was hooked.
The pioneering Anglican cleric was a ''quite remarkable'' man and a ''very vivid'' commentator on a wide range of topics, including sheep breeding in Australia and theology in New Zealand.
About 3700 pages of material - about a third of the archives which Mr Parsonson had transcribed - will become available online in November.
Placing thousands of New Zealand's earliest missionary archives online would revolutionise research in the field, and give historians new clues about European and Maori contact up to 200 years ago, library officials said.
These original missionary archives were available because of the foresight of Hocken founder Dr Thomas Morland Hocken, who transported the early Church Missionary Society archives back to New Zealand from England in the early 1900s.
They had since been safeguarded at the Hocken facility.
Hocken librarian Sharon Dell paid tribute to Mr Parsonson's ''astonishing'' contribution, through his transcribing work.
Available online next month would be not only Marsden journals, but also 593 letters - ranging in dates from 1808-23 - between Marsden, and missionaries Thomas Kendall, William Hall, John King and others involved in establishing the earliest New Zealand missions, Ms Dell said.
Launching the online archive had been timed to coincide with the commemoration of the bicentenary of Marsden's first sermon in New Zealand, on Christmas Day 1814, she said.
An associated two-day symposium, titled ''Dialogues; exploring the drama of early missionary encounters'' will begin on November 7, in association with the Otago Centre for Research on Colonial Culture.
And a related exhibition, titled ''Whakapono; Faith and foundations'', will open at the Hocken Gallery on November 6.
