2008 National Digital Forum
Creating Value in a Digital New Zealand

PowerPoint presentations from the conference are available below. Please note that this includes only those speakers who agreed to have their presentations made public.

Keynotes

George Oates, Flickr

http://www.slideshare.net/george08

Flickr has grown to an archive of over 3 billion photos in just under 5 years. Once upon a time it was just a start-up with a handful of members. How did it become the world-famous photo sharing site it is today? By building a passionate community - or, more accurately, lots of co-existing communities, all bustling around the

same place.

What better place for public institutions to share their collections? It turns out the enormous Flickr community is very interested in The Commons project on Flickr. The key goals of The Commons (http://www.flickr.com/ commons) are to “firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.”

A founding member of the team that built Flickr, George Oates was the Lead Designer of flickr.com for four years, and recently moved into the role of Senior Program Manager, leading The Commons on Flickr. Her keynote presentation at NDF is called “Human Traffic,” about how designing for community might actually be able to help public institutions can create digital value through platforms like Flickr, by creating an engaged, conversational and generous community.

Paul Gerhardt, Archive for Creativity

Public Expectations and Public Use

The BBC’s Creative Archive project was ahead of its time. However, it raised important issues for publicly funded institutions: Who “owns” their content? Who has the right to “access” it? Further, how can the copyright arrangements established in an analogue age work with a technology which enables users to transform works as well as to view them? Paul Gerhardt, head of the UK’s Creative Archive Licence Group, looks at the lessons for digital projects, public collaboration and the reconciliation of commercial revenue with public value.

Forums

Digitisation for Access

Joanna Newman - The place of uncatalogued collections an online indexes in a digital New Zealand

A great deal of wonderful work is going into digitising a relatively small number of physical documents, images and artefacts to make them accessible online. Is this, however, taking resource away from description of collection backlogs and publicising their existence? Are we restricting access and use to these collections in future? How important is it to let the public know the total cultural resource available to them? How do we ensure reasonable, on-going funding for the underlying functions which protect and make accessible collections? Joanna presented some of the issues and invited discussion aimed at understanding different perspectives and possible future directions.

Joanna Newman is President of the Archives and Records Association of NZ (ARANZ) and has been involved in the archives and records management field for about 20 years. Most recently she has managed Wellington City Archives and is now an archives and records consultant.

Digitisation Standards

Stephen Clarke - Archives New Zealand Digitisation Standard

The Archives New Zealand Digitisation Standard: This presentation discusses the principles and processes outlined in the Archives New Zealand Digitisation Standard which is in the process of being adopted as an ISO Standard and an Australasian AS/NZ Standard. The presentation addressed the issues arising in moving from digitization project initiation to delivery and the impacts on digital preservation and longer term access of digitised material.

Stephen Clarke is a Senior Advisor in the Digital Sustainability Programme at Archives New Zealand. He arrived in New Zealand from the UK in early 2006 after working in local government archives and as records manager for the National Museum of Wales. Stephen has produced a range of recordkeeping publications and has studied for a MSc. Econ in Archives Administration at the University of Wales. Stephen is an elected member of the NDF Board and is on the NDF Conference Planning Committee.

Digital Preservation

Markus Brantl – Bavarian State Library: A perspective

The Bavarian State Library (BSB) its Munich Digitisation Centre (MDZ) deals since 1999 with the issues of long-term digital preservation, which is now in an advanced but still experimental stage. In its role as universal and world-wide renowned research library with nearly 10 million volumes (among them 100,000 manuscripts and incunabula) BSB has a strong need to preserve and to reuse the often cost-intensive digitised contents. For this reason MDZ started in cooperation with the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich - funded by the German Research Foundation - the BABS project for building up a technical and organizational infrastructure for the digital long-term preservation for digitised and borndigital library materials. Currently MDZ and the Supercomputing Centre are running the largest retro-digital archive in Germany with 90 Terabyte of data. The presentation describes the practice born approach for long-term preservation and gives an overview of ongoing other projects.

Peter McKinney and Kevin De Vorsey – Digital Preservation – issues and initiatives

Across the library sector there is a growing awareness of the need to preserve digital materials. The National Library of New Zealand has undertaken a concerted programme of activity centred on digital preservation. In this session shared some of our current thinking and activities in this area.

Peter McKinney is the NDHA Preservation Policy Analyst at the National Library. Before this he worked on various digital preservation initiatives in Europe.

Kevin De Vorsey is the Digital Preservation Analyst in the National Digital Heritage Archive of the National Library of New Zealand. Prior to joining the NDHA Kevin worked in the US National Archives and Records Administrationand the American Museum of Natural History.

Stephen Clarke – Digital Sustainability: Issues and perspectives

Demonstrations and Workshops

Adán Tijerina and Allan Smith - Our Space

Adán and Allan demonstrated the process for inclusion of media in the OurSpace database. This included an in-depth look at the role of the website in the holistic visitor experience as well as the user interfaces designed for moderation, theming, and tracking of media.

Adán E. Tijerina hails from the Pacific Northwest of the United States where his early experience as a legal advocate quickly turned him into an impassioned educator servicing populations in volatile and challenging environments. Since his arrival in New Zealand, Adán has completed postgraduate study in Human Development and Educational Psychology and has earned a crust as a professional musician, producer of cultural events, and as Director of on of the country’s most successful small brands, The Matterhorn, before taking on his current role as Manager of the OurSpace experience at Te Papa Tongarewa.

Allan Smith is Director of Projects for Gibson International which is an interactive multi-media exhibition company working out of Wellington and Paris, and part of The Gibson Group. He leads a team of innovative software and visitor experience developers who are currently working on technology for public site collaborative interactive learning and fun.

Helen Donaldson and Sarah Padey - The 1908 City of Auckland Map

As a touchstone for the development of Auckland city, and due to the rich content it contains, a hundred years on this map is one of Auckland City Council’s most frequently referred to archival items. However, access to and further use of the valuable information contained within the map was constrained by its size and format, limited opening hours within the archives’ reading room and the quality of the available reproductions. In its centennial year, a review of future access to and use of the map was warranted. This would involve an investigation of possibilities for improving access to the map though good quality digitisation and the provision of online access, aswell as an assessment of the physical condition of the map with regard to its future preservation. This pilot project was also intended to inform future digitisation strategies for existing collections within Auckland City Council’s archives.

The outcome of this project has seen the creation of several sets of good quality map images and the provision of a online database, searchable by the names of streets, buildings and places that appear on the map. There are also future plans to geo-reference the map images and to link them to the 1908 valuation rolls. The latter of which will provide a digital record of who owned and lived in the properties displayed on the map. This presentation allows us to share our learnings throughout this project and to provide a demonstration of our new online tool.

Helen Donaldson provides technical support to the archives team and her work involves the development of the team’s databases, both internal and online. She has worked with the council for 3 years and prior to this worked as a website manager in the UK.

Sarah Padey has worked at Auckland City Council in the area of archives and records management for the last 9 years, the last 3 years as Archives Manager

Kylie Ngaropo and Marlena Dijkstra - National Register of Archives and Manuscripts (NRAM)

NRAM, the National Register of Archives and Manuscripts began in 1979 in paper format, and is a register of archival collections held in museums, local government bodies, libraries, historical societies, community repositories, and in-house business, educational, religious and sporting archives throughout New Zealand. It has subsequently been converted to electronic format via the Web, and in 2004 Archives New Zealand took over management of the system - hosting and administering it since then. In 2006 the Community Archiving group was established to foster relationships with community organisations - helping them get better use of the material held by Archives NZ and sharing expertise to help them manage their own archives.

NRAM is a part of this vision and is intended to help increase exposure to community archives and raise their profile in the community. This will be achieved through a better user interface, the incorporation of international archival descriptive standards, open data exchange protocols that will facilitate data sharing, and the provision of what will effectively be a simple archival management tool to contributors. This demonstration presented the preliminary prototype built to illustrate and test these concepts.

Kylie Ngaropo is the Community Achivist at Archives New Zealand, and is responsible for the development and implementation of a national training programme and resource development to empower communities, iwi, hap ū and M ā ori to care for and manage their information more effectively. Kylie is responsible for the management and development of the National Register of Archives and Manuscripts which will assist communities to better manage their archives and make information more readily accessible.

Marlena Dijkstra is the business analyst working on the NRAM project, focusing on ensuring that the new NRAM will meet the requirements of the community, and has been involved since May this year. Prior to this Marlena has worked as a Web business analyst and consultant for over 12 years.

David Adams and Keziah Singleton - Digitisation of Chinese Publications

Between 1920 and 1972 at least four Chinese language periodicals were published in New Zealand. Mostly hand written, hand illustrated and laboriously cyclostyled, they provide an eye-opening and moving insight into the political, economic, linguistic, historical and social life of the Chinese New Zealand community.

With the support of the Chinese Poll Tax Heritage trust and the New Zealand Chinese Association, Auckland City Libraries and the Alexander Turnbull Library have collaborated to make large runs of three of these periodicals available online. The Alexander Turnbull Library provided microfilmed copies of the journals and expert advice on digitisation, while Auckland City Libraries contributed project management, indexing, and web enablement. The process of creating the digital content has been long and challenging. Working with material in Chinese script gave rise to a number of issues, and ultimately led to the development of a new delivery platform and public interface. The end result is a resource which reflects the unique nature of the material it contains.

David Adams, Coordinator Copying and Digital Service, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand. Manages the in-house team of specialised Technicians coping and digitising heritage collections for Library programmes such as the national newspaper preservation programme, Papers Past, Timeframes, and on demand digitisation from external requests. Currently Chair of the NLNZ Digitisation Programme Committee.

Keziah Singleton is the Digital Collections Co-ordinator at Auckland City Libraries, responsible for planning and delivering projects to digitise heritage material. Keziah is the project manager for the Chinese journals digitisation project.

Kathy Longson - Open Sources Initiatives at Archives New Zealand

This interactive session discussed the Archives New Zealand’s experiences with open source, and demonstrated some of the systems and tools developed at Archives using open source technologies. It included a discussion of the open source options available for digital archiving, drawing on recent experiences developing an interim digital archive based on existing open source software. Using open source has allowed development costs for projects to be kept relatively low, while also facilitating the sharing of software with others in the archival or wider communities. The session focussed on issues faced and lessons learnt from Archives New Zealand’s open source development experiences.

Tracey Parsons - Parliament TV Replay

Parliament TV Replay – providing members of Parliament with online search and browse access to the televised proceedings of Parliament. Since 17 July 2008, the proceedings of Parliament have been televised and made available as a stream from the Parliamentary website. In conjunction with this, the facility to browse or search for archived Parliamentary TV content on the intranet has been developed and launched. This initiative replaces a manual analogue media monitoring service whereby members of Parliament had to ring to request TV items to be replayed to them. The launching of the new intranet functionality, PTV Replay, enables members to access this key content at their desktop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The technical solution works by leveraging off timestamps which were already being added to Hansard as part of the Hansard production system. By slightly modifying the timestamping business process, linking from online

Hansard to specific Parliament TV clips has been enabled. As soon as Hansard text is published to the website content management system, a link to the video content automatically appears. This approach allows members of Parliament to search and retrieve all intranet content regardless of format. If a user searches on a member’s name, for example, they can potentially retrieve the text of Hansard speeches, the associated PTV clip, oral questions, and TV news items mentioning the member.

Tracy Parsons is the Information and Knowledge Manager for the Parliamentary Service. She was the Project Manager for the Parliamentary Television Storage and Retrieval Project.

Graeme Austin - What’s ‘public’ about the‘public domain’? Is copyright’s flipside a flop?

The “public domain” is frequently championed as creativity’s saviour. The more stuff a society can untether from copyright, the more creative it will be. On this view, copyright is the public domain’s nemesis: it chokes creativity and impedes the rise of a brave new “remix” world. In reality, the position may be more complex. To characterise the public domain – or “the commons” – as “copyright’s flipside”, the opposite of the species of “private property” known as “copyright”, may be too simple. The concept of the public domain reflects a cluster of difficult legal, social, and economic questions. Given the importance of the “public domain” in discussions about the role of copyright law, it may be helpful to get a better sense of what this concept really means. This workshop will explore some of the complexities associated with the concept of the public domain – and what might be at stake when the “public domain” is invoked in debates about the future of creativity.

Graeme W. Austin is the J. Byron McCormick Professor of Law at the University of Arizona, Rogers College of Law, where he is co-director of the Program in Intellectual Property. A specialist on international intellectual property law, he is the author of numerous books and articles in the area, including International Intellectual Property: Law and Policy (LEXIS, forthcoming, 2008, co-author with Hennessey, Perlmutter & Dinwoodie); Human Rights and Intellectual Property (Cambridge U. Press, forthcoming, 2009, co-author with Helfer). He holds a J.S.D. (doctorate in laws) and L.L.M. from Columbia University in New York, where he was the Burton Fellow in Intellectual Property Law. A graduate of Victoria University of Wellington, Graeme was formerly a senior solicitor in the Auckland office of Chapman Tripp. He teaches regularly in the LL.M. program at Melbourne University, where he is a Senior Fellow. He has presented numerous lectures and seminar papers at leading institutions, including Princeton University, NYU Law School, Vanderbilt Law School, Columbia University, Te Papa Tongarewa, and, in May 2008 gave a series of lectures on U.S. intellectual property law at the Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa, in Lisbon. He has also addressed the World Intellectual Property Organization (Geneva) on cross-border intellectual property issues, and in September he spoke on this topic at the 2008 Conference of the Intellectual Property Society of Australia and New Zealand in Adelaide.

Vanessa James - Creating Lasting Impressions: Report on the Coromandel Community Digital Storytelling Project

More than 70 people, aged from 16 to 86 years, are involved in an ongoing project to preserve and share the history and memories of the Coromandel community using Digital Storytelling. “Lasting Impressions”, the Coromandel Community Digital Storytelling Project, aims to:

• Create a collective memory of community by recording and sharing common experiences
• Increase access to information about Coromandel’s history Produce Digital Stories that can be shared by the community in an ongoing way.
• Build the sense of community in Coromandel with a resource that bridges generations Assist older people, especially those with limited computer skills, to make Digital Stories.

This presentation discussed the methodology, successes, issues, and outcomes of the project. The project involves a broad cross-section of the community. Story topics include historical events, travel,

immigration, and family. Portable equipment, which can be set up at any site, is used, and permanent resources are being established within the community.

Outcomes include sharing of stories:

• In free public screenings
• On a dedicated webpage
• On DVDs provided to storytellers
• In an archival library
• In permanent displays at the Coromandel Museum and the Kauaeranga Valley Department of Conservation visitor centre.

Vanessa James is a lawyer, policy analyst, documentary-maker, and most recently the director of the Coromandel Community Digital Storytelling Project, a collective community project to record and share the history and memories of the Coromandel. Her role within the project includes planning and management, running Digital Storytelling workshops, arranging funding, and liaising with the community.

Lynda Kelly - Audience Research

What is audience research? This workshop covered the meaning of what audience research is, through focusing on the develoment of audience research in museums. Lynda showed how audience research is conducted and will discuss audience research in a Web 2.0 world identifying future trends.

Lynda Kelly has published widely in museum evaluation and writes the Audience Research in Museums blog with a readership of around 500 per month. She also administers the Museum 3.0 social networking group where around 200 museum professionals discuss issues related to museums. Lynda is particularly interested in visitor experiences and learning and how these can be measured, young children’s learning, Indigenous evaluation, as well as the strategic uses of audience research and new technologies in organisational change. Lynda is happily obsessed with all things Web 2.0 and curious to see how this will change the world that museums operate within and the ways people learn. In 2007 she completed her PhD in museum learning, and now that’s finished is looking forward to the adventures the new web world will bring.