Rate My Professor Katherine Milburn

Katherine Milburn serves as the Liaison Librarian and Curator of Ephemera at the Hocken Collections, University of Otago Library. She manages an extensive collection of ephemera, including posters, leaflets, knitting patterns, advertising materials, and other printed items that capture New Zealand's social, cultural, and visual history. Joining the Hocken in 1989, Milburn has over 35 years of dedicated service, contributing to the acquisition, preservation, cataloguing, and public promotion of these resources. Her work emphasizes the value of ephemera in understanding everyday life, popular culture, graphic design, film, music, and advertising from the 19th and 20th centuries. Recognized as a senior researcher, she supports scholarly access through LibGuides and reference services at Hocken Collections, 90 Anzac Avenue, Dunedin.

Milburn has curated key exhibitions, such as Kaleidoscope World: Forty Years of Flying Nun, co-curated with Amanda Mills, featuring music posters and ephemera from the Dunedin independent label. She has given public talks including Patterns of Behaviour on the knitting patterns collection, a 2018 presentation on He Kī Taurangi under the Hocken Friends talk series, and discussions on 1940s film posters. Her publications feature co-authorship of Railways Studios: How a Government Design Studio Helped Build New Zealand (2020, Te Papa Press), with Peter Alsop, Neill Atkinson, and Richard Wolfe, chronicling the Railways Studios' contributions to New Zealand's graphic design through posters, billboards, and publicity. Milburn authors insightful posts for the Hocken Blog, such as Fantastic Film Posters from the Forties, Stirring up the Stacks #3 on Bycroft party starters, Xmas Cake Recipe from Buckhams ephemera, and explorations of popular culture items. She has presented at the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand conference on ephemera in the Hocken, contributed guest articles to MOTAT on Queenstown promotional ephemera, and participated in projects like Pacific Voices XVII. Milburn's efforts significantly enhance engagement with New Zealand's cultural heritage.