Precis Part 2
National Digital Forum 2005

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21-22 November

Venue: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa)

Writer: Lisa McMullan

Download the full document version of this precis. (RTF 0.25MB)

Sector/Participant Initiatives

Rachel Lord and Heeni Shortland, Sam Searle, Jane Armstrong, Frank Stark

Heeni Shortland

Iwi Radio Research Archivist
Sound Archive Nga Taonga Kōrero

Ms Shortland’s presentation began with an audio example of the type of valuable material held by iwi radio stations.

The Iwi Radio Archive Project is a joint venture between Radio New Zealand Nga Taonga Kōrero and Te Whakaruruhau o Nga Reo o Irirangi Māori o Aotearoa (Federation of Iwi and Māori Radio Stations) which is an umbrella group comprising of 19 iwi radio stations.

Ms Shortland visits each iwi radio station and compiles an inventory on the amount and type of information held. The preservation condition of each recording is evaluated and recommendations made about effective storage.

The project started in February 2005 and already 12,739 pieces have been registered and material held by five stations is still to be added to the inventory. The inventory lists the duration and date of the recording and provides a broad content description. It is expected that around 12,000 hours of audio will be registered on the final inventory.

Ms Shortland used two more sound recordings to illustrate the type of valuable cultural material held by iwi radio stations. In most cases second copies do not exist and it is essential, Ms Shortland said, to digitise, preserve and protect the material to facilitate access.

Rachel Lord

Sound Archive Nga Taonga Kōrero

Often audio is in unstable formats and it is necessary to move quickly to preserve it and then move towards making it accessible Ms Lord said. It is necessary to take a multi-disciplinary, collaborative approach to this. Digitisation offers a feasible and professionally acceptable way to overcoming problems such as preservation and accessibility. However ongoing management is required in the IT environment to achieve sustainability. This reinforces the need, she said, for a multi-disciplinary, collaborative approach.

Ms Lord also highlighted the need to consider rights management beyond copyright issues. In particular indigenous rights management needs to be considered alongside the varying views of different iwi.  In-depth consultation is necessary to address the wairua (spiritual) connection to material and the subsequent reluctance to release it.

Organisations should adopt standards and expertise in audio understanding before undertaking any digital audio preservation. She referred to the following publication for technical advice on storage formats, Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects.

Several examples of overseas digitisation projects and associated budgets were given - the British Library has a budget of one million pounds to digitise 12,000 heritage audio items and in Italy a national project was allocated 95 billion lire to digitise television and audio heritage items.

Ms Lord said a need for solutions exists in New Zealand. The shared training information online is helpful but needs to be funded to be effective.

www.iasa-web.org/tc04/index.htm
www.tape-online.net
www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/sounddirections/

Sam Searle

Digital Library Projects Leader
National Library of New Zealand

Ms Searle delivered a short history about the Matapihi website and provided an update about new developments.

Matapihi is a metadata gateway that refers users to existing digital collections held at multiple repository sites. Ms Searle said web users benefit by accessing multiple digital collections through one website, and organisations benefit because they can surface their collections to users that may not otherwise be aware of them.

The idea was born out of the NDF 2002 presentation about Picture Australia which challenged New Zealand to develop a similar project. The National Library agreed to lead the project.

Matapihi was launched in September 2004, with five partners. In November 2004 it won the TUANZ innovation award and the judges applauded the website for its’ innovative use of metadata, collaborative approach, and the use of a scalable model.

Ms Searle said she was delighted to announce three new partners – Film Archives New Zealand, Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand and the Electronic Text Centre.

Around 75,000 records are now available via Matapihi. New content includes heritage maps, pictorial items and a wider range of material such as contemporary items. The site offers users multi-media experiences and Ms Searle said that this means the use of the Dublin Core metadata standard for cross domain resource discovery has been validated.

Matapihi has experienced more than 40,000 visits since its’ launch. Ms Searle said feedback from partners confirms they are receiving referrals from the site e.g. Auckland City Art Gallery staff reported that Matapihi is responsible for more than 50% of the recorded external referrals to their online collection.

One of the big goals of the Matapihi project was to increase skill levels in relation to metadata standards and the use of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) in the heritage sector. Partners believe staff skill levels have definitely grown in these areas as a direct result of involvement with Matapihi and that these skills have been transferred to other internal projects.

It was hoped that participation with Matapihi would help partners with funding opportunities and although the National Digital Strategy (NDS) wasn’t around in the early days of the project, it is clear that Matapihi’s key drivers: standards, collaboration and scalability, align with the NDS.

Ms Searle listed the following as the next steps for Matapihi:

1. Strategic planning with partners to cover that next 12-18 months
2. Further content development
3. Engagement of new partners
4. Increase traffic to the site
5. Establish a register of technical and enhancement suggestions
6. Continued enhancement of the user interface and back-end processes.

www.matapihi.org.nz

Jane Armstrong

National Library Source Services
Learning Activity Management System (LAMS)

Ms Armstrong described the LAMS project as an e-learning initiative connecting teachers and students across New Zealand with National Library digital resources. Open-source software is used to deliver a learning activity management system to primary, secondary and tertiary education sectors. The Ministry of Education (MoE) is trialing the software in 36 institutions across these sectors. ICT clusters were also invited to participate in the trial. The trial runs from June – December 2005 and the outcomes will be used to provide guidance for future e-learning initiatives.

LAMS enables the digital resources held by the National Library to be brought into classrooms and accessed in a way that is meaningful, interactive and collaborative.

National Library contracted the development of ten curriculum based sequences which utilised existing digital resources. The sequences were modified by the teachers in the classroom situation to ensure relevancy and to provide feedback to direct further digitisation and packaging of the material.

The National Library is looking at using LAMS as a vehicle for enabling content and confidence in the education sector.

The National Library has addressed the NDS’s goal of unlocking New Zealand’s stock of content and providing New Zealanders with seamless, easy access to information which is important to their lives through the range of services and resources that are available electronically through the library, and the intention is for this to grow.

Regarding the second goal of the NDS (confidence), Ms Armstrong said that the LAMS trial had given the National Library an opportunity to offer support and training to teachers, raising awareness about the collections, content and how to access it.

Ms Armstrong pointed out that the National Library’s content collections consist of items held on databases which are described using metadata to make them searchable and allow users to make choices about the context in which they are used.

Ms Armstrong conducted a demonstration of some of the sequences available online. One example was a visual language sequence, aimed at year 13 students studying NZCEA English.

www.lamsfoundation.org
www.natlib.govt.nz
www.macquarieuni

Frank Stark

Chief Executive
New Zealand Film Archive

From the early days of the international film archiving movement, Mr Stark said, it was a basic principle that the material should remain in its’ original format wherever possible’. It was considered generally, aesthetically and ethically questionable to move film based images to other media for anything other than research and reference. He suggested that this position is no longer tenable.

The overpowering quantities of material pouring into archives all over the world, driven by the obsolescence of successive waves of analogue video technology, have changed everything for those archives who have moved beyond the relatively circumscribed world of celluloid. It is not possible to apply the meticulous 20th Century approach of frame by frame restoration and duplication on to comparable media, to video tapes numbering in the tens of thousands. New industrialised processes will have to be developed if the material is to be transferred before all the equipment has broken down. To exemplify this Mr Stark referred to the US Congress Library’s need to transfer film footage held in the pneumatic format. He said robotic systems are being developed to load, play, convert and store the hundreds of thousands of hours of footage.

Digital technologies offer a number of highly desirable properties. Once footage is held in the digital realm it can be organised, edited, modified and copied on an unprecedented scale and with relative ease. These processes do not degrade the footage and if stored well can be accessed relatively easily and accurately.

Digital technology is neither eternal nor universal as it relies on the availability and compatibility of content and machinery. He highlighted the dilemma faced by archivists when deciding whether to maintain old unsupported machinery to provide access to historic formats or to commit to converting huge collections each time formats and technology change.

In 1993 the Film Archive converted its’ database to an application called Filemaker Pro, this led directly to the establishment of the Archives Online database in 2002.

The introduction of DV technology in 1997 as a replacement for VHS for all tele, cine and transfer work allowed the archive to begin to establish the foundation of a digital collection. Close to
20,000 titles have now been transferred to DV.

Mr Stark worked through a scenario to display the huge on-going nature of the challenge faced by staff and volunteers at Film Archive NZ to transfer the current collection to digital format.

Over the next five years the Film Archive’s developmental focus will be on access. During this time Mr Stark hopes processes and technology will reduce the impediments to real preservation work and make preservation more reachable.

Currently the Film Archive is working on the Chapman Project. This project will transfer 20,000 hours of current affairs material which was received from the University of Auckland in 2000. This large homogenous collection of analogue video tape can not be saved from physical decay by traditional methods at an affordable cost. It is also difficult to make the material freely available to the large range of people who may want to access it. The Film Archive hopes to solve both of those problems through a digitisation project.

Questions and answers

How do Radio New Zealand, Sound Archive and the Film Archive survive on the level of funding they receive?

Ms Lord responded by saying that it is a struggle to survive especially compared to similar situations overseas. Resources are spread thinly. She said, the importance of the material helped to keep people going. It is necessary to lobby in an ongoing manner. Mr Stark said the NDS offers a real opportunity and the value and quality of the content held by these organisations should determine relevant roles and a stake in the NDS.

Jane Armstrong was asked how long the LAMS programme would take to download in rural areas of New Zealand where broadband is not available (eg Hicks Bay), given that it takes several minutes to download in central Wellington?

Ms Armstrong indicated that another initiative which the MoE is driving will see Broadband rolled out to all schools. Currently there may be delays while large images download and even though this is not ideal it is a step in the right direction. As technology improves so should download speeds.

Ms Armstrong was also asked how many rural schools were involved with the trial project, how many of these schools have broadband and were any adult learning centres included in the trial?

Ms Armstrong said the MoE set-up the trial and the National Library joined with the MoE because it had contracted the development and testing of ten sequences. These sequences were not trialed at adult learner level as the resources that Ms Armstrong works with are targeted specifically at school
students. Currently other sites e.g. Matapihi offer all web users direct access to collections.

Frank Stark was asked if individuals can access material held at Film Archive, if so, what is the process and associated cost?

Mr Stark confirmed that individuals can access material held by the Film Archive.  A few legal constraints exist in the area of intellectual property. The Film Archive Library in Wellington provides free access to around 23,000 VHS tapes and DVDs for reference purposes. An online catalogue is also available. Also, there are eight out posts throughout New Zealand where smaller versions of the Wellington film archive library are available and inter-loans of material can be arranged.

Sam Searle was asked to explain the relevance of Matapihi to the smaller institutions.

The basic cost of being involved with Matapihi is staff time (averaging 120 hours). There are no direct hardware or software costs. The amount of technical support required is around ten hours at arate of $125 - $175 per hour.

Jane Armstrong was asked: what about the post-pilot plans for LAMS? And secondly: is an update available from Christchurch City’s Self Learning Centre regarding its’ experience with LAMS? 

Ms Armstrong said the trial finishes on 20 December 2005. A forum will be held on 2 December 2005 after which final evaluation will occur and a final report published around February 2006. A representative from Christchurch said LAMS is now being used at the learning centre as a production tool.

A query was made about experience gained through doing new things and being under resourced.

Mr Stark responded by saying it is necessary to chase project funding, and this may mean that projects occur in an order that may not necessarily fit with the applicant organisations priority goals.

Sam Searle said that from the Matapihi perspective one of the biggest problems with achieving critical mass is organisations having to do collaborative work as well as core functions. Rachel Lord said that getting a small project off the ground can have a snowball effect and projects may grow into something bigger as greater value is realised.

The panel was asked about priority measures for evaluating projects that will be funded through the CPF, will priority be given to capturing content that is about to be lost e.g. contemporary music archives?

Frank Stark acknowledged that it is important for Film Archive New Zealand to establish a priority setting system. He said that up until now prioritization has been driven by opportunities provided by other peoples’ projects. He acknowledged the need to find the means and the time to set own priorities.

Realities for small archives

Mark Stevens, Kay Sanderson, Rachel Brown

Chair:  Diane Macaskill

Mark Stevens

City Archivist, City of Sydney Archives, Newtown Project

Mr Stevens provided history about the Newtown Project. The project started in 2000 as a text transcription task for archival access to council meeting minutes and morphed into a web site that went live in 2002. Now the website includes history about Newtown as well.

The Newtown Project relies on volunteers in-putting a total of 16 hours per week. The volunteer team comprises four people, including two retired IT managers who have key skills. These people created and maintain the web site using council hardware and software, and continue to create most and add all content. The project’s dependence on volunteer resources dictates a need for a contingency plan.

The project does not engage in formal community consultation and there is no contact with or by the indigenous community. Content decisions are made by group consensus and are oriented to history and archives of Newtown.

Mr Stevens conducted a brief tour of the website. The tour included:

1. council minutes from 1890
2. the Sands Directory
3. official souvenir books from the 50th and 60th jubilee
4. memories of life in Newtown

A significant amount of content is supplied by the public. Non-project group members can add content to some parts of the site e.g. to ‘memories of life in Newtown’ and ‘family stories’. This content is not modified other than minor editorial changes which are discussed with the submitter.

The project does not receive allocated funding from grants or budgets. Negotiation with the IT team is often needed and the commitment of volunteers is a key factor to the projects ongoing nature and success.

The design strategy is not a perfect fit with other parts of the Sydney City website, he said, and this sometimes causes problems within the organisation.

Mr Stevens said the Mayor has developed a vision to give other cities back their historic identity by developing an online ‘city of villages’. Mr Stevens posed the question – is this an opportunity or risk?

Facts and figures:

Traffic in year ending 30 June 2005: 30145 sessions served / 49494 page views [prediction for 2006: 62K / 200K+].

http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/AboutSydney/HistoryAndArchives/Default.asp

http://www.sydneyarchives.info

Ms Sanderson and Ms Brown conducted a joint presentation. A summary of Ms Brown’s contribution follows this summary of Ms Sanderson’s presentation.

Kay Sanderson

Open Polytechnic of New Zealand

Ms Sanderson said historians are increasingly accessing archive resources on the web.  And they are learning about the existence of archives as a result of web searches.

She noted the vast range of user skills and believes family historians expect to be able to access repositories at the search engine level e.g. Google and Ask Jeeves. To meet user needs archives must offer a variety of access methods and make certain their databases are visible on the web. Simply repackaging existing documents into digital formats does nothing to reveal the breadth or depth of our collections. Well designed databases containing high quality information are needed to achieve this.

Many small archives in New Zealand don’t have an electronic database of any kind, let alone one on the web. Material is still contained in boxes with only general knowledge held about the contents. Backlogs of this type must be processed before significant improvements to access can be made. Resource constraints and governance attitudes need to be overcome in this area.

Staff at the Hocken Library have made it a top priority to tell people what they have in their collections (also a priority of the Canadian Digital Strategy). The Canadian’s second priority is to tell people how to access the collections, and the third is to digitise those records which are used most often.

Sometimes it is impossible to predict the significance of items held in local collections. The significance of a particular document depends on how much is known about its content and context. Frequently a researcher will have the knowledge necessary to recognise significance which the archivist may have overlooked. Ms Sanderson gave the example of a photograph of Mr Tom Long who was a hangman between 1887 and 1898. The photograph is in private hands, however, a digital copy is held by the Wairarapa Archive. Online database searches of major archive repositories reveal no other reference to Tom Long. This she said, may be because there is nothing else, but it may be that the significance of other documents was not recognised when collections were processed.

Many people who have previously been unwilling to donate their family treasures to archives are willing to provide copies. However, she said, if preservation isn’t reinforced by policy and funding the sustainability of these collections is doubtful.

The practice of passive collecting is an important digital issue facing small archives. If this continues to be the usual way of operating, many digital records will be unreadable by the time they are archived. The result could be that future digital collections do not contain personal documentation which informs us about the lives of ordinary people. Archivists don’t have the resources to address this issue. The solution requires more than just preservation strategies.  It also calls for a new operating style on the part of many archivists and extensive community engagement. The way in which central government resources are allocated will be critically important to addressing this, she said. 

The assumption that small archives can reprioritise to divert some of their scarce resources to support broader initiatives is not realistic. The reality is that most are struggling to keep up with day-to-day demands.

Ms Sanderson said attention has been focused on digitising documents selected from existing collections and little attention has been given to the quality and comprehensiveness of archives databases, and even less to the question of capturing and preserving born digital records outside the government sector.

Rachel Brown

Family History Educator

Ms Brown said archives websites allow family historians to conduct searches outside office hours and enable users to arrive at repositories armed with information which increases their chances of success.

Archive websites should not substitute visits to repositories as the touch and feel of documents
can provide personal experiences not provided by digital formats. Personal contact also provides family historians with the opportunity to talk to a knowledgeable person who is likely to know of further documents of interest or different ways of using the indexes and finding aids to access relevant material. Local archivists are also likely to have local contacts that may have even more specialised local knowledge of interest to the researcher.

Ms Brown noted that to enable researchers, websites need to state if the information offered is incomplete. Information outlining how to access additional resources should also be provided.

Access to digital images and databases online can provide family historians with low cost access. However, it is important to provide definitive search results so that users can deduce whether the material available is relevant to them.

It can be difficult for family historians to find all the archives websites and navigating the different site structures also poses difficulties to this user group which has a vast range of skills.

Family historians make up a huge proportion of archives researchers. They are also potentially a very powerful lobby group who can work to promote historical collections in archives and libraries. Libraries and archives need to promote their services to maximise the relationship with this user group.

Ms Brown stated that inadequate resourcing is a barrier to the collection and preservation of regional archives.

She concluded by encouraging those involved with archives to look at the environment they operate in, both locally and nationally, and consider how they are placing themselves in that milieu, specifically in regard to relationships with:

1. An institution’s residential community who may also belong to the second group of import.
2. Descendants of earlier settlers who now live outside the area but in searching for their roots, will conduct a personal visit.
3. Local tourism organisations and also Tourism New Zealand – as both domestic and international tourists are interested in their family history.

www.ancestry.com

Questions and answers

A comment was made from the floor which acknowledged that further consideration will need to be given regarding family history searches via the government portal. And that currently the portal offers a ‘find your family history’ search facility on the portal - this links to Archives New Zealand, the Department of Internal Affair’s Register for Births, Deaths and Marriages and to the National Library.

The presenters were asked: how can people’s identities be protected through the public displaying of private information?

Ms Sanderson clarified that she was talking about collecting, not displaying - with the ultimate aim being access. Archives have always been in the business of placing restrictions on material that needs to be restricted.

A query was made about small archives institutions prioritising digitisation projects over and above the need to construct databases.

Mr Stevens agreed that developing online databases to cover current records should be a higher priority than the digitisation of original records.

Another comment came from the floor questioning the value of data entry enabling the development of databases that result in effective searches.

Mr Stevens agreed that searchability is critical. He gave the example of another major project his volunteer team is involved with: transcribing the contents of property valuation books from 1845 – 1950.

The old adage a ‘picture is worth a thousand words’ was given as a merit for working on both fronts (data entry and digitisation)at once. 

Ms Sanderson agreed that there is a case for working on both fronts. She posed the question that if an image is presented as a promotional tool, then why not a hit on Google instead? In some cases, she said, an image is particularly useful. She noted that sometimes accessing digital images
requires less time than searching text databases, reviewing the subsequent text descriptions and then dealing with written request forms. Digitisation can also enable identification of images that are currently unidentified.

The panel was asked about the standards of metadata we should be thinking about for community archives so that links can be made across archives.

Mr Stevens subscribes to the view of minimalist standards in this particular area. In the local government sector many records are geographically referenced which solves part of this problem. Ms Sanderson favours flexible standards that can be used by people with minimal standards. Fuller and better standards are also required for those who want to achieve these standards. The multiple options currently available can make life difficult for users. She said it is important to adopt standards that organisations can model themselves on, according to their capacity to do so.

Mr Stevens was asked if the Newtown Project produced an increase in demand on council resources.

He said the Newtown Project had not led to an increased demand on staff time or resources. Rather than visiting the archives people are using the website as a resource. Demand on general archive activities has doubled over the last three-years, a large chunk of this increased demand is from internal sources. Mr Stevens has noted an explosive increase in digital image requests. He said
this may be due to the large number of photos on the website.

Collaborative Digitization Project

International Keynote Speaker
Jill Koelling

Executive Director

Technology allows us to see things that we otherwise might miss, hear things we might otherwise fail to notice, and learn from those who came before, about our past, our presence, and the possibilities for our future.

Miss Koelling said it is valuable to digitise cultural and heritage material because all sorts of ‘cool’, weird and fragile material exists and it is important to reveal history and save content once thought lost.

She said to achieve this requires a focus on the C’s, these being: Content planning; Communication; Counseling; Collaboration; Consensus; Compromise and; Copious amounts of work.

In 1998 the Colorado Digitisation Project (CDP) started with a relationship with the University of Wyoming. Now it has 72 partners across10 states. It is 100% funded by grants and memberships. The Federal Government contributes money, partners work on grant applications, and members pay subscription fees.

The CDP directs funds towards digitising material held by repository organisations. The CDP doesn’t hold collections.

The CDP team works closely with experts within repository institutions to prioritise digitisation needs. Every partner has the opportunity to decide what content will be digitised. A large focus is given to what audiences want. Focus groups with users are regularly held to determine needs.

Current projects include: Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection, the development of an infrastructure for digital audio (33 partners in 10 western states) and the Rocky Mountain Online Archive (21 partners in New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming).

Future projects will focus on digitising oversize collections, moving images and creating a digital preservation infrastructure.

Ms Koelling stressed that communication is the key to making collaboration work: ‘Never stop talking to current and new partners as technology and key contacts change over time’.

Ms Koelling highlighted ‘the differences trap’, and encouraged stakeholders to focus on similarities, not differences. It is helpful to create a group and pool resources to achieve goals to meet similar needs. Costs are less when groups with similar needs work together.

All partners must be involved from the beginning - create a plan, follow the plan and change the plan together. Set realistic expectations (including priorities) together and adopt best practices for digital capture, delivery and metadata. Create everything together.

To make it all work it is essential to define the roles of each participant, and share knowledge, infrastructure, costs, and problem solving.

Some challenges to overcome during collaborative projects:

1. different vision, different goals
2. lack of common vocabulary
3. inconsistent effort
4. changing priorities
5. changing staff
6. funding
7. growing pains (high risk time).

Ms Koelling stressed that all of these points are to be expected and can be overcome. She said, ‘collaboration works, if you constantly review audience needs, mission, usability and functionality, and cost models’.

Questions and answers

Ms Koelling was asked to discuss resource discovery across all the collections and whether the CDP harvests metadata.

She responded by saying the CDP system does not harvest metadata, the CDP database is harvestable. The infrastructure is set-up so that all partners create metadata on their own home-grown system and then send it to CDP and a cross-walk is used to turn it in to Dublin Core. The CDP also has a programme called DC Builder, this allows people to obtain a login and password which facilitates remote access to enable users to create own metadata within DC Builder. Once it has passed through quality control checks it is then moved through to the live interface.

The CDP uses a central server that hosts the majority of the metadata, it also taps into four other servers. When a user conducts a search the data base works through Z3950 connection to look at the metadata on the CDP server, it taps into the metadata on the other four external servers and produces a list of results. The results show the user what records are where. Metadata is displayed as well and a link is provided through the Dublin Core field to access the object.

Ms Koelling was asked to elaborate on her work with oversize and unusual material, also to outline project income sources and describe the staff skills required for the CDP.

Budgets are always dependent on grants. Half a million US$ is earmarked for the audio project and the Rocky Mountain online project (quarter of a million each). These grants are dollar for dollar funding grants. Membership fees contribute around US$25, 000 - $30, 000 per year. Last year US$16,000 was generated from training programmes and consulting services.

The CDP employs two full-time people (herself and a project manager) and an IT support person for 15 hours per week. The redesign of the website was project funded (US$20,000) and outsourced.

Ms Koelling was asked if she thinks the quality of optical character recognition (OCR) is good enough to make indices redundant.

She said that OCR leaves a lot to be desired. CDP has compared the University of Utah newspaper project with the Colorado newspaper project as the techniques engaged differ. The accuracy rate of the University of Utah newspaper project is about 30% higher, but the cost per page is almost double. The University of Utah is using optical word recognition software and digitisation occurs from original documents (not microfilm). Accuracy of OCR is dependent on the quality of the microfilm and in some cases it has been necessary to acknowledge that a project is hindered, and perhaps not possible, due to poor quality microfilm.

Ms Koelling believes the use of indices will continue to decrease due to key word searching.

The chair enquired as to how Ms Koelling would start from scratch in New Zealand with the knowledge that funding exists.

From her limited observations it appears groups are very focused on their own organisations. ‘It doesn’t need to be that way’ she said. Users don’t care where the material is held, they just want access. She advised aiming to create a system that breaks down the walls between museums and libraries.

A question from the floor asked about the governing structure of CDP?

The CDP is a non-profit organisation fiscally affiliated with the University of Denver. It operates with a board of eleven directors (elected by members). The board functions as an advisory group and comprises of representatives from museums and libraries. Ms Koelling is technically an employee of the University of Denver, but is responsible to the board of the CDP.

Another person enquired how much of the CDP work is related to indigenous people?

Ms Koelling said around 20%. The aim is to increase this in the future. Currently the CDP is looking at a grant application to run workshops and develop lesson plans for tribes to access and implement. Currently the interest level among tribes is being measured. If the tribe is not on board, funding will not be secured.

Ms Koelling was asked if there is a balance of representation on the governance board and are indigenous peoples represented on the board.

There are no indigenous representatives on the board. The Chair rotates every three years and switches between the library and museum sectors. Currently only member organisations can sit on the board. If an indigenous group e.g. tribal museum became a member, board participation would be highly encouraged.

A query was made about possible access to a policy about best practice in relation to restricted access to culturally sensitive material?

The CDP does not have such a policy. Enquiries along this line could be directed to special collections via a link provided on the NAU website. Karen Underville may also be able to provide information.

Ms Koelling was asked to describe partnerships or proposals she had worked on in collaboration with local, regional or central government archives.

A lot of archive organisations are involved with CDP projects, but usually this doesn’t involve state or regional archives. In the US digitisation of government archives is happening in another arena. The CDP focuses on private collections.

Ms Koelling was also asked how long tribal consultation took, and what were the associated costs?

Tribal consultation takes a long time. It can be challenging to find the person who can give permission and to achieve consensus. The cost is mostly covered by grant funds, time is the biggest required resource.

How is the CDP dealing with the problems faced by small archives and is the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) framework appropriate to deal with this issues?

The CDP is trying to evaluate how useful it is to users to have EADs online. There is clear benefit to some users but it is necessary to consider this from a cost vs. benefit perspective.

Are there any plans to implement an overall system to enable users to order copies of material online? And if so, will rights management be controlled?

Ms Koelling said that the CDP is looking at an interface that will enable e-commerce transactions. A common pricing structure may be necessary. Currently rights management is the responsibility of partners, and often in the Dublin Core records links are provided to partner websites where information pertaining to rights is available.

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