2007 National Digital Forum conference
Digital Realities: Communities, Convergence and Sustainability

PowerPoint presentations and video recordings of the conference are available on the GOVIS website: http://richmedia.govis.org.nz/. Please note that this includes only those speakers who agreed to have their presentations recorded.

Conference 2007 Day One | Conference 2007 Day Two | NSTP Un-conference Day

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

Day One - Thursday 29 November 2007

8.45 – 9.30am - OPENING

9.30 – 10.30am – Keynote

Chair:              John Garraway, NDF Board Chair respresentative for LIANZA

Speaker:        Leith Haarhoff, Culturenet Cymru, The National Library of Wales

Presentation:    Sustaining Gathering the Jewels

Many of the libraries, museums and archives in the small country of Wales are involved in the creation of digital content, none more so than the National Library. But Gathering the Jewels is unique in that it brings together representatives from 200 libraries, museums and archives in the largest collaborative digitisation project in the country. The bilingual website (www.gtj.org.uk) now features 26,000 jewels of Welsh culture and history, from 120 contributing repositories. They are digitised, described and translated by Culturenet Cymru, based at the National Library. A government grant allows the website to grow and continue serving up some 9.5 million pages of digitised content to approximately 1.5 million users each year.

Can this project be sustained in the long-term? Can a website, which was developed before the advent of the likes of Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and Google Maps, continue to keep pace with the changing needs of its on-line community? Individuals and community groups in Wales have not been slow in creating their own digitised collections. How can this convergence of national and local, institutional and personal content be exploited to maximise its potential for all stakeholders?

How can the project remain relevant to its contributing partners in the heritage sector? Is there still a role for a central team digitising collections from Welsh repositories? Does the uncoordinated distribution of digitisation activity throughout the sector deliver best value for repositories and end-users? Can lessons be learned from distributed, yet well-coordinated national projects such as Matapihi, Picture Australia and Images Canada?

Can Wales learn something from the experiences of other small countries, such as New Zealand? Can the cross-sectoral collaboration, which inspired Gathering the Jewels, help Wales to develop a digital content strategy of its own?

From 1998 to 2001, as Head of Reprographics at the National Library of Wales (NLW), Leith Haarhoff set up the digital imaging unit and developed standards for digitisation at NLW. He was a member of the Digitisation Strategy Group and helped to develop many of The Library's digitisation policies and the first digitisation strategy document. From 2001 to 2002, he was responsible for managing digitisation for the all-Wales collaborative digitisation project, Gathering the Jewels (GTJ), in partnership with 120 libraries, archives and museums across Wales. The original project budget was £1.5 million and the project is now supported by the Welsh Assembly Government. It is still the largest collaborative digitisation project in Wales and the website now features 26,000 jewels of Welsh culture and history. (www.gtj.org.uk) Since 2003, Leith has worked for Culturenet Cymru, a wholly owned subsidiary of The National Library of Wales, and has been responsible for managing a number of national digitisation projects in Wales. Books from the Past involved the digitisation, OCR and encoding of out-of-print Welsh books (www.llyfrau.org). Glaniad is an international collaborative digitisation project about the Welsh settlements in Patagonia, Argentina. Their Past Your Future – Wales (www.tpyf-wales.com) is a project which digitises the personal collections of people in Wales who remember the Second World War. Culturenet's latest projects include intergenerational digital storytelling and digital community archives.

11.00am – 12.30pm – User Generated Content

Chair:           Brian Flaherty, NDF Board Chair representative for University of Auckland Library

Speaker:           Bill Macnaught, Puke Ariki

Presentation:      From rhetoric to reality

Puke Ariki in New Plymouth is the first integrated public library, museum and visitor information service in New Zealand. We have been grappling with the task of connecting the rhetoric about the digital age to the reality of life in a medium sized city district in New Zealand. We have taken a ‘cross-domain’ approach to the pursuit of digital opportunities.

• When we opened in 2003 we won plaudits for our ‘Taranaki Stories’ on our website www.pukeariki.com.
• Two years ago we changed our policy to permit free internet access for any Puke Ariki member.
• A year ago we created an experimental public wiki called www.taranakiwiki.com as a project assisted by $100k from the Community Partnership Fund. The purpose of this was to provide a platform for user generated content about Taranaki to complement our professionally generated website.
• At the same time the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded us over $300k for the cataloguing, conservation and digitisation of photographic material in our Swainson Collection. The project demonstrates that much heritage material needs considerable work done before it can be digitised.
• In recent months we have provided workshops for school students to be tutored in digital video production by local professional film and video artists through our education programme. The workshops gave young people the skills and the inspiration to create content for themselves.
• At the time of this year’s NDF, Puke Ariki will be joining the first wave of the Aotearoa New Zealand People’s Network.

We are now planning a new Digital Strategy for Puke Ariki. It will build on our experience and will lay a path connecting Puke Ariki with the National Digital Strategy for New Zealand. Our case study may help other organisations with their plans.

This presentation shares lessons learned throughout the experience of participating in Matapihi by Auckland City Libraries, one of the first five partner-organisations to contribute content. Consideration is given to what has worked and what hasn’t, factors for success, and what is on the horizon as Matapihi moves forward into the future.

Speakers:           Greg Jennings and Jeremy Cauchi, Archives New Zealand

Presentation:      War art online

In 2007 Archives New Zealand launched its War Art Online database, completing a project to digitise the National Collection of War Art and make it accessible online. This project was a pilot project for the digitisation of select parts of the Archives New Zealand holdings and the development of the infrastructure and capacity for more large scale digitisation work and long term development of programmes around digital preservation, online service delivery and development of descriptive systems. As a result the project involved input from most parts of Archives New Zealand’s operational groups. The primary driver for the project was to enhance access to a significant collection for which existing access channels could only provide limited access to. The project needed to overcome a number of challenges, including upgrading of the metadata and other descriptive information for the collection, development of a public interface that would be able to stand alone but also fit well and in future be integrated with other public interfaces, particularly the main finding aid system Archway, identification and resolution of quality issues such as artworks which had suffered damage, and the intellectual property issues inherent in a collection with complex provenance.

1.30 – 3.00pm - Sustainability and Convergence

Chair:              Andy Fenton, NDF Board representative for NZ Micrographic Services Ltd

Speaker:         Shirley Williams, Tessa Copeland and Helen Coulson, Ministry of Culture and Heritage
Presentation: Te Ara: Learnings after four years

In 2003 at the first National Digital Forum the General Editor of the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Jock Phillips, presented an outline of plans for a new digital Encyclopedia of New Zealand on the web. That project was warmly endorsed by the forum. Four years later the Encyclopedia has become Te Ara; we have published almost 350 entries, over 1 million words, 8,000 images, 1,000 maps and diagrams, and about 500 film clips.

In the process the team has learned a huge amount about preparing material to work well on the web. In this presentation we will examine three areas where we have developed examples and experiences which are worth sharing. These are:

• Text: how do words work on the screen? How do you express important, complex or technical ideas on the web in an accurate and accessible way?
• Images: How do you make photos come alive, so that they become more than mere illustration?
• Maps and diagrams: How do you involve users in interacting with graphic material so that they learn in an enjoyable way? What makes for good visual design?

Speaker:       Paul Rowe, Vernon Systems Ltd

Presentation:             Software as a Service: A new web based package for managing collections

Recently we have been investigating how to resolve issues commonly faced by small museums when implementing a collections management system. Typical issues include funding the purchase of a traditional desktop based system and server, maintaining the associated technical infrastructure, keeping on top of data backup, applying software upgrades and exporting collections information to display on public website. Last year the company began development on a new web based cataloguing system designed to address these issues. The new product, eHive, is a hosted application where collectors can create private accounts for cataloguing and administration of their collection. No separate public access system is required – records are simply marked as being available for public viewing whenever appropriate. Account holders pay an annual fee to use the service which includes access to the software, a secure and robust server environment, a professional backup schedule and ongoing enhancements. This is similar to the model used by other web applications such as Flickr (an image repository), but is a first for the museums sector. National Services Te Paerangi has chosen Vernon Systems to undertake the redevelopment of the New Zealand Museums website. The website will be extended to allow public visitors to view collection objects and stories. The redeveloped NZ Museums website will use the eHive system as its backend. Participating museums will have the option of cataloguing content directly in eHive through the web interface or importing content through a standard format. This presentation will give an overview of eHive and the related NZ Museums website redevelopment. Vernon Systems has been dedicated to developing collections management systems since 1985, and is well known for Vernon CMS, a fully functioned desktop Collection Management System.

Speaker:    Chris Hay, Lumen

Topic:          Convergent digital experiences in culture and heritage

Over the past year we have installed a range of digital experiences for the culture and heritage industry.

1. The Te Puia galleries in Rotorua, New Zealand represent the latest convergence of digital and tactile interaction design for indigenous cultural tourism. The Whare Tapere gallery is based on years of research and consultation with key Te Arawa kaumatua (elders), and uses 3D game technology and multi-user interaction to introduce visitors to the layers of stories in the Whakarewarewa valley. This preserves the history of the valley in a form that is engaging and accessible. The kaumatua Te Kepa Marsh passed away at the culmination of the project, and this has become an irreplaceable living record of his wisdom and knowledge.
2. The Think Maori gallery at Te Puia is an immersive space that combines animated films and interactive experiences to show how Maori culture can be seen through the forms of the Whakarewarewa landscape. It is designed to be a tool for guides rather than an independent experience, as the local Maori guiding economy is a crucial lifeblood for the region.
3. Lumen has been awarded the contract to build similar interactives for an indigenous museum in Melbourne, Australia. A recent interactive developed for Tourism Australia shows the way that landscape based stories can be woven into a tactile interactive. Lumen has created a range of portable interactive installations for Tourism Australia to showcase the natural and indigenous experiences available across the continent. The interactive map is a walk-on interactive that uses the feet to tell stories – as indigenous Australian stories are generally told in relation to footprints and walking.

The implications of this convergence are:

• It is a prototyping/design led exercise – don’t try and over brief it – it is important to let the concept evolve during testing and development.
• Of the converging disciplines – games are the lead driver – this implies a need to create playful, discovery and reward based experiences.
• The production values need to be exceptionally high to engage visitors.
• The interaction needs to be applicable and appropriate. It might be all that takes place given the attention span of many visitors (i.e. people may not read a word or watch a short film, they may just play).

Examples of this work can be seen at: http://www.lumendigital.co.nz/case_studies.html

3.30 – 5.00pm – Making Content Accessible

Chair:              Bruce Ralston, NDF Board representative for Auckland War Memorial Museum

Speakers:        Suzanne Jones, UNESCO Communications sub-committee member; Clare Coman, Project Evaluator, 2020 Communications Trust; Megan O’Donovan, CWA New Media

Presentation:             Living Heritage

Living Heritage is an online bilingual (English-Maori) initiative that enables New Zealand schools through an inquiry approach to develop content for and publish individual websites about a heritage treasure in their community (www.livingheritage.org.nz). Living Heritage preserves history and culture in a digital format for every generation, and allows children to present their view of New Zealand on the Internet. In acknowledgement of the value Living Heritage provides it received Digital Strategy Community Partnership Funding in 2006. The Living Heritage initiative has received national and international recognition. The UNESCO communications sub-committee developed the UNESCO Living Heritage Award in 2004 to celebrate the achievements of those schools and students successfully working with digital media in New Zealand. The Award was recently presented to three more schools to acknowledge their contribution.The project is supported by CWA New Media, National Library, Ministry of Education, 2020 Communications Trust, Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Library and Information Association Aotearoa (LIANZA), Maori Language Commission, and UNESCO (NZ). This presentation will outline the background to the Living Heritage initiative and the way its structure utilises digital media to contribute to the preservation of heritage. The involvement of schools and students will be showcased along with the structure, guidance and support they are given by the project team. Living Heritage has undergone a formal evaluation to quantify the achievements over the last year and the findings will be presented.

Speakers:        Gordon Paynter and Tracy Powell, National Library of New Zealand

Presentation:          Revitalising the papers past historic newspaper collection

Papers Past is one of the National Library of New Zealand's most popular websites. It contains over a million digitised pages from more than 40 newspapers published in New Zealand before 1910, and is a valuable resource for researchers, genealogists, historians and students. Until very recently, however, Papers Past lacked features that are taken for granted in other projects, particularly full-text search. This presentation will describe a National Library project to investigate the use of Optical Character Recognition to provide textual versions of historic documents, and how it has led us to revitalise Papers Past and ensure its sustainability with a new look, new features, and a new focus on our users’ needs, abilities and resources. We start by discussing our research into the existing community of Papers Past users, and what they wanted from the website. The project proceeded in response to the user demand: full text search was the number one request, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) was the only practical and economical way to provide the necessary full text. We then describe the issues we encountered when applying OCR to a large-scale newspaper project, including whether to implement article-level access; the varying accuracy of OCR output and its impact on retrieval; the costs and benefits of additional manual processing such as headline correction and article categorisation; the effect of incorporating local dictionaries on OCR accuracy; and the difficulties of explaining OCR output to users. The next step in the revitalisation of the site was building a prototype user interface to make the collection searchable and accessible. The prototype was built upon the open-source Greenstone Digital Library Software developed by the University of Waikato, and has since been given a new look and feel, ready to become the new public face of Papers Past that will ensure its long-term future as a product that meets its users' needs.

Speaker:        Moira Clunie, Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind

Topic:             Making a digital difference: Technology and information access for print-disabled readers

In a world transitioning from analogue to digital, most information is still published only in print format. Specialist agencies like the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind convert print into formats like braille, audio and large print for blind, deafblind and vision-impaired readers. Cost and timeliness are barriers to equitable information access, limiting opportunities for participation in citizenship, culture and lifelong learning. Digital content and technology can be profoundly enabling for readers who cannot access standard print. This paper will describe the ways in which the Foundation and the international blindness community are using technology to transform information access for print-disabled readers, and the potential for digital content to help create a more inclusive society.

Well-designed digital content can be independently accessed using adaptive technology, and text can be structured, searchable and portable in ways that analogue formats are not. Digital publishing processes improve the efficiency and flexibility of accessible format production, increasing the range of content available. Online delivery provides immediacy of access and allows for more independence and privacy in selecting and obtaining information. Open digital standards increase the potential for collaboration with international blindness agencies and with cultural organisations within New Zealand. The Digital Strategy's Community Partnership Fund has helped the Foundation towards its digital goals. The first funding round supported a pilot study that tested an internet-capable talking book player with older library members who did not have computer experience. Results were very positive and this technology will be further developed to replace RNZFB's cassette-based postal library service. This year, the Community Partnership Fund is supporting the Foundation to begin producing multimedia DAISY textbooks for school students, to investigate using synthetic speech to further unlock the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre's digitised heritage content for audiences who read with sound, and to develop distance learning programmes in adaptive technology.

5.00 – 5.15pm

Sum Up – Summaries, Discussion and Questions