NDF2019

With a mission to make New Zealand's cultural heritage easy to find, share, and use, answering the question "What can I do with this cool thing I found?" should be a fundamental task for DigitalNZ. However, doing so in a simple, human-understandable, and accurate way turned out to be a surprisingly complicated endeavour. This talk will give a brief look at process of designing our new rights statements, how we navigated the tiptoe path between usability, legal, and business requirements, and what we learned along the way. Fails and successes alike will be shared with equal gusto.

As a museum created by Holocaust survivors to share their stories, oral history is at our core. Survivors were always on the Museum floor speaking to visitors and are an integral part of our education programs. Visitors regularly comment on how powerful and transformative these encounters are. So what do we do when there are inevitably no more Survivors? For many years the Sydney Jewish Museum has been grappling with this question. While nothing will ever replace the experience of meeting a Holocaust Survivor, we know testimony will still have a central role in Holocaust education and this has led us on a search for the best practice in delivering eye-witness accounts. Some schemes fit within our budget and some are pipe-dreams we can’t let go of. Time is of the essence as living witnesses grow fewer and fewer. In this presentation I will outline how the Sydney Jewish Museum has been thinking through the challenge of preserving oral histories, the presentation options and how we have navigated the different proposals and personalities to find the right solution.

Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū has recently embarked on a project to address the preservation of its collection of over thirty time-based media artworks. This collection encompasses work made using film, slides, video and software as well as mulitimedia installations. The artworks are inherently variable and cannot be adequately supported by traditional collection management procedures. Common issues include problems of corruption, obsolescence, interpretation, storage (physical and digital), documentation and training.

Our project team aim to ensure we improve our working practise across the Gallery, positively impacting our colleagues, and reaching further in to our relationships with artists, donors and vendors, lenders and borrowers alike.

Louisa will speak to some of the challenges the Gallery has faced in embarking on this project, highlighting examples from a current exhibition Wheriko - Brilliant, as well as our hopes and ambitions for the project as it unfolds.

Raranga Matihiko | Weaving Digital Futures is a Museum based education programme that is funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Education. The programme delivers rich and engaging opportunities to learn of and with digital technologies to those with limited digital learning opportunities, while increasing access to national and local exhibitions and collections. Te Papa leads the contract and have partnered with Te Kōngahu Museum of Waitangi, Tamaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, and MTG Museum in the Hawkes Bay to deliver this programme to schools and kura in these regions. Each class accesses a bespoke, in-depth learning programme over the course of a ten-week period. This session will outline the research that sits behind the pedagogical approach, highlighting the results which has evidenced: teachers and students using the museum as a rich context for deep learning, social impact and experiences improvement in student and teacher understandings of creating with digital technologies understanding of digital ways to take existing knowledge and using it to retell or create new knowledge examples of student learning with digital technologies within the museum context

For many years, The Auckland Museum’s Natural Sciences team have been interested in the biodiversity of their backyard Pukekawa, Auckland Domain. In 2018, The Auckland Domain Nature project is was officially set up which aims to regularly conduct biodiversity surveys and encourage visitors to observe the natural history in Auckland’s oldest park.

Learning programme CSI: Pukekawa, citizen science investigations, was established to get students outside and record observations on citizen science tool iNaturalist. This global website allows scientists from the Museum, NZ & those across the globe to identify and interact with students’ findings in the Domain. The schools that have participated so far have been very enthusiastic, and this has led to some exciting, and sometimes unexpected bonus outcomes.

A humerous and personal reflection on a decade leading digitisation projects. We'll take a journey through the past, look at the highs and lows, the things we've learned and most importantly what are we going to do next?

Bonus points awarded for picking out the pop culture references...

The trials and tribulations of reusing digital public domain content provided by New Zealand GLAMs from the perspective of a member of the public. I will discuss my experience attempting to reuse public domain digital surrogates placed online by a wide variety of New Zealand GLAMs. The problems and issues I have faced will be considered as well as the methods and workflows I have used to attempt to overcome these challenges. I will make suggestions on how GLAMs can improve the experience of New Zealanders and others wanting to reuse digital surrogates of public domain content provided by GLAMs on the internet.

From July 2019 to July 2020, I will be the Mittelhauser scholar-in-residence at the State Library of Queensland. In this residency the development of a methodology for cataloguing sounds within the State Library’s collections—both extant, and newly collected—in a way that makes historical sound more searchable and perceivable by researchers and the public. This presentation will examine the basis for this project, its methodology, and its projected outcomes. Sound is a powerful trigger for individual memory; descriptions, recordings, and reconstructions of sound often form a part of our attempt, not just to describe the past, but to make the past convincing to each other—to make it present. In collections, a single sound recording can provide the same multilayered information as a photograph—a multiplicity of details about past experience, not necessarily linguistic but affective. The examination of sound in this way can provide a rich understanding of past experience.

Five years after the Vancouver Public Library started collecting personal stories, our team was given the space and time to look back at what we have wrought: nearly 400 individual interviews and well over a thousand individual audio and video clips from a number of projects, stored in an attractive, stable repository built on Islandora. The team began working on a recalibration of our Islandora installation in order to improve user experience out of our main concern – that users weren’t able to discover the most relevant and appealing content. After years of frantic collection and production, we found ourselves in a situation of having too much content and too much content that didn’t really meet our quality standards. What to do?

As good librarians, our instinct is to curate and to weed. As interviewers, connecting with our subjects, our instinct is to include EVERYTHING. Our biggest project, Story City, comprised of over 300 interviews, has forced us to finally address those two warring philosophies in the context of a collection comprised of very personal stories shared directly with library staff. A recalibration of Islandora would help us improve discovery through more robust search and display functionality, but this would be a partial solution – we had to take a hard look at how we collected, what we selected for addition to the collection, what we didn’t include and how to treat material that had been added but may not have relevance or value to the user. This is the story of our journey - process, technology, philosophy.

Digital technologies and the Internet give museums wonderful opportunities to engage and empower audiences through open access to digital collections. So who is leading the way and what approaches are they using?

Fresh from co-leading a global survey of open access in the GLAM sector, Douglas and Victoria will share insights into the key trends and challenges in this space. Douglas draws on his twenty-year experience of working internationally in museums, archives and art collections, and reflect on his current work at Europeana.

In line with their everyday digital lives, people today expect deeper and more personal forms of interaction with museums and their collections; participation, not passivity. For cultural heritage organisations, enabling open access to digitised public domain works should be seen as an important driver of democratisation and greater societal relevance. However, embracing this vision requires cultural institutions to remodel themselves from knowledge arbiters to welcoming facilitators; new attitudes, policies and practices are needed. So what is the big picture of open access in the GLAM sector today? Where is innovation happening and who is driving it? What kind of challenges does open access pose to museums and how might these be overcome? In this presentation, Douglas will explore these questions and provide a broad perspective on the field.

This session will be in the form of a presentation delivered on Douglas' behalf by Victoria Leachman (@VLeachman), followed by Q and A. You can engage with Douglas about this presentation on Twitter at @CultureDoug. 

Auckland Museum is the only Museum in the country to pilot the new curiosity machines - Museum in the Box (http://www.museuminabox.org/). In this presentation, we will take the audience through our process of selecting objects, 3D printing the objects, creating audio pieces (including foley) and then delivering them to schools. We delivered our first box in July, so will report on how they were received and what tweaks or changes we have made to ensure it has maximum impact.

In 2019 voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, Google Home) are now managing upwards of 1 billion tasks per month, whether playing music, providing directions, booking appointments or searching the web. While a traditional Google search would provide a user with multiple pages of results, allowing them to select the best match to their query - a voice search can only deliver one result per search. The system, whether Amazon, Google or Apple is mediating the information, sitting between our users and our content - directly selecting what to show and what to hide. So how is this going to impact museums? How should we prepare for this new model of interaction with our content?

What does baking have to do with digital projects? Our answer is community.
Project Ark's goal is to assess, catalogue, image and pack Southland's 14 small museum collections and share them online in a strategic way. The two year Pilot is funded by a regional heritage rate levied by our three Councils. Our team of four professionals are currently based at the Wyndham & Districts Museum, working alongside its volunteers. The Project relies heavily on community engagement; knowledge is shared over smoko and delicious home baking. Common systems, standards and a regional eHive community are the foundation tools but the soul is our communities' connection with their heritage. Our presentation will share this spirit alongside the Pilot's genesis, delivery and our long term aims.

The DX Lab is the State Library of NSW’s innovation lab. We research and experiment with the Library’s collection, building experiments and exploring emerging technologies. Our job is to try new things - but if we fail, we fail cheaply because our team is small and we work quickly. We peer into the future, explore possibilities and return to the present to adjust course. The Library’s business-as-usual teams can then take our learnings with much less risk.

This presentation will give a brief overview on our unique role in the Library, unpacking the development and risks of our recent experiments. These include, #NewSelfWales (https://dxlab.sl.nsw.gov.au/newselfwales), an award winning digital exhibition and website, connecting Instagram selfies with the Library’s portrait collection. ORBIT, a real-time data visualisation of our web analytics for the online collection. Field of View, a 3D and VR experience of the Mitchell Library, merging point cloud data with the Library’s collection. Lastly, the Vending Library - a playful collection experience, powered by a Twitter bot that uses machine learning to recommend a collection surprise for you.

I will discuss the impact that the DX Lab has had on the organisation, putting the reader and visitor first in everything we do. Our method of working can be applied to any team given the permission to fail.

Understanding Place is a research project that seeks to explore the relationship between people and place in the Christchurch residential red zone, a 600-hectare area of severely quake-damaged land that once housed over 5000 residents. It sits between a participatory archive and a deep-mapping project, and is centred on the Red Zone Stories app, a tool that enables people to capture and share their stories about the red zone, to speak to things that are important to them at a community level, and produce a cultural layer on the map. Rather than the traditional approach of well-defined survey questions, Red Zone Stories follows Presner, Shepard, and Kawano (2014) in offering an open-ended prompt and allowing the participant to respond to the red zone on their own terms. The University of Canterbury has well-established procedures to ensure research is carried out ethically, but using an app to collect data raised new ethical questions that hadn’t been considered before at UC. What does a consent form look like in the context of an app? How do you protect the privacy both of your participants and of other people around them when you’re giving them free rein to create their own data? How do you amplify the voices of the elderly and disadvantaged, when they are the people least likely to own a smart phone? In this paper we discuss these and other ethical dilemmas we faced, and the solutions we found. Presner, T. S., Shepard, D., & Kawano, Y. (2014). HyperCities : thick mapping in the digital humanities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Te Papa recently completed the redevelopment of its natural-history zone, Te Taiao | Nature. This fully bilingual zone merges mātauranga (Māori knowledge) and science, is highly immersive and interactive, and inspires action to protect the natural world. 
 
Frith Williams will explore the key interpretive principles that guided this transformation, including around the use of digital technologies, and share examples of their expression in the exhibition space. The redevelopment was driven by a new mission, new ways of thinking about and involving audiences, and a new approach to measuring success. Tough topics are confronted in creative, inspiring ways, with the aim of empowering audiences well beyond their visit.
 
At a time when many museums are renewing, Frith will touch on key challenges faced and lessons learned along the way.

Over two years ago the Digital Experience team at Auckland Museum started planning and developing a Digital Product Toolbox to enable streamlined and efficient delivery of digital experiences for our visitors.

During this session I'll share our journey and how Auckland Museum's Digital Products are coming to life, including Digital Labels within the Carried Away: Bags Unpacked exhibition, the Image Gallery within Journey to Aotearoa: Tupaia and the Endeavour and what's coming up next.

Identifying, contacting and engaging missing shareholders constitutes an enormous challenge for Māori corporations, iwi and hapū across Aotearoa New Zealand. Without accurate data or tools to harmonise existing fragmented or conflicting data sources, issues around land succession, opportunities for economic development, and maintenance of whānau relationships are all negatively impacted. Māori Land Online (MLO) is the key public-facing portal for documenting and managing land succession information. It is, however, a complex system that has serious legacy issues which impact on opportunities to harvest, analyse, and visualise the rich whānau, whenua, and te reo cultural data held by Te Kooti Whenua Māori / Māori Land Court and Toitū te Whenua / Land Information New Zealand. Researchers at Victoria University of Wellington have developed a culturally-tuned semantic web/linked open data (CIDOC-CRM) information architecture as a framework to knit together and explore relevant and accessible data in order to find missing shareholders for Taranaki-based Parininihi ki Waitotara Corporation, Inc (PKW). Funded by the National Science Challenge Science for Technological Innovation this foundational work is grounded in Mātauranga Māori and Māori Data Sovereignty principles, and has faciliated a prototype web app to assist in shareholder disambiguation and a generative model that reveals latent structures in the MLO data as they have changed over time. This work is also a key step towards our goal of building an interoperable data infrastructure capable of unlocking Māori-Crown data for a prosperous economic, cultural, and socially revitalised post-settlement future. Presenters and researchers Rhys Owen and Rere-No-A-Rangi Pope will share the project's work-in-progress on behalf of the other co-authors Sydney Shep, Marcus Frean and Valerie Chan.

For almost a decade now Upper Hutt City Libraries has been experimenting with ways of more effectively encouraging community use of and collaborative engagement with our Heritage Collections. Initially this led to us establishing a successful interactive online presence through our Recollect website. Later, we complemented this with non-digital forms of outreach, such as ‘pop-up museums’, that took place in community locations outside of our Library but which were designed in ways intended to build upon and feed back into our digital Recollect content. While we’ve been very pleased with the results of these initiatives we’ve recently identified a gap in our approach: namely, a lack of engaging ways for users to interact with our digitized heritage content within our Library itself. To overcome this we recently purchased a 47” Solus interactive touchscreen surface table with the idea that it would provide our library visitors with a novel means of exploring various kinds of curated digital heritage content. While devices like this are now fairly common in larger GLAM institutions they remain a relatively rare presence in small local libraries like ours. This raised concerns that we might be falling into the trap of letting ourselves be seduced into purchasing shiny new technology that, in the end, we lacked the resources and expertise to utilise effectively. To guard against this we invited a broad range of colleagues and community members to share ownership of this project with us. For example, we sought technical assistance from our Council’s GIS team, and help with developing content for the table from local heritage organisations. This paper offers a brief but honest account of our collaborative effort to implement this new tool and is intended to provide advice and cautions to other small GLAM institutions considering following a similar path.

Kei tua o te whakamāoritia: e pehea ana Te Rua Mahara kia whakapai ake ngā tikanga me ngā ratonga ka taea kia tutuki ai ngā hiahia o Te Ao Māori

​Beyond translation: How Archives New Zealand is improving its culture, systems and services to meet the needs of iwi/Māori

On 6 December 2012, the Auckland Council approved the strategy document for Auckland Libraries. This document laid out a 10-year strategy for Auckland Libraries. It declared that while physical libraries will continue to be important, the digital library will see the most significant growth and change, putting the library “in every pocket” by 2023. Are we there yet? Following the creation of the ‘super-city’ of Auckland, seven public library systems within the region were combined to form Auckland Libraries - with 55 branches and four regional research centres, each with significant archival collections, each using different collection management systems. Post-amalgamation, Auckland Libraries had hundreds of databases in the digital library, over 70 of which were created in-house. The challenge: merge all the regional archival collections into one unified collection - with a single collection management system. And combine this with all of the in-house research databases to create a single search across all of the Auckland Libraries heritage resources. The result: Kura Heritage Collections Online https://kura.aucklandlibraries.govt.nz/digital/ How did we get there and what did we learn along the way? The first phase was discovery: how many databases are there, with how many records? How much use are they getting, how much is obsolete, superseded by content already available online? One major discovery – Auckland Libraries’ created content was getting way more use than the subscription databases. Our unique content is what is most valuable to our customers. The next phase was to design a process to select a new content management system and publishing platform for all of this unique content. Kura Heritage Collections Online was not to be an aggregator – pulling together the results from four separate regional heritage collections, and a diverse range of research databases, but single-search across a single, unified collection. We used a collaborative process to select the collections management software, one that included all the stakeholders. Teams that ordinarily had ownership of only one step in the workflow, and tended to work in isolation, were invited to consider the whole. This process led to a major shift in the way we work. This presentation is a progress report on how Auckland Libraries has been working towards achieving the goal of putting the Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections “in every pocket” by 2023.

Hear from a wide range of team members who applied a diverse range of skills towards Te Papa’s latest suite of interactive digital labels for the Te Taiao Nature exhibition. Perspectives, challenges, and outcomes will include:
- Planning and Workflow
- Hardware selection - IA, UX, and digital design - Specimen photography workflow - Media research and production - Bilingual writing - Curatorial perspectives workflow
- Content Management and Publishing
- Spatial and case design considerations for digital labels - Te Papahiko – Te Papa’s software development, presentation, and deployment platform
- Analytics - Value delivered to visitors

In July 2017, Metiria Turei, co-leader of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, spoke publicly about her experiences as a single mother on social welfare in the 1990s. In sharing her own story of feeling forced to lie about her flatting situation in order to provide for her infant daughter, she advocated for a more compassionate system, and for greater support for families and children living in poverty. Following her speech, the hashtag, #IamMetiria began trending on Twitter. However, there was also a strong backlash against her, and three weeks after her speech, Turei resigned citing “unbearable” scrutiny on her family. In the wake of Turei’s resignation, a group of artists began sharing their experiences as beneficiaries and creating art to document the struggles of current and former beneficiaries in Aotearoa New Zealand. This resulted in the ‘We are Beneficiaries’ project, which began sharing these visual stories online via social media. Since its launch in August 2017, the ‘We are Beneficiaries’ project collected, illustrated, and posted over 240 stories on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and is still ongoing. In January 2018, the Alexander Turnbull Library, the archives and special collections for the National Library of New Zealand, began working with the ‘We are Beneficiaries’ project to collect the digital artwork, administrative materials from the project, and the social media accounts, in order to preserve these materials as part of the National Digital Heritage Archive (NDHA). Sam Orchard will give an overview of the origins of the project (content, motivations, technical aspects), and the connections between art and activism. He will also discuss using art to humanise and destigmatise marginalised voices, and the important role of community development practices and ethical storytelling in social media activism. Valerie Love will discuss the Turnbull Library’s work to archive and documentation from the We Are Beneficiaries project to ensure that that its digital artworks and social media presence would be preserved long term. She will address some of the issues that live at the intersection of archival practice and the expressions of community and culture on the web and social media, such as consent, privacy, and gaps in traditional collections.

Interested in knowing where GLAM can take us all? What are the implications in adopting the GLAM paradigm mean for the future of memory? What would the GLAMtopian Archive look like? Gionni explores these ideas through the experiences and experiments undertaken across the past three years at the University of Newcastle's Cultural Collections GLAMx (GLAM to the power of "x") Lab, placing our students in contact with all forms of human expression, and collaborative professional expertise, across deep time, and its resultant expression across a myriad of digital and 3D VR forms for emergent educational and entertainment purposes.

Locative media uses technology to create digital experiences anchored in the physical space. Unlike the internet, locative media ties digital information to a specific place, creating opportunities for hybrid experiences that start with the physical environment and expand on a localized digital overlay. In this short talk, I'd like to share my experience working on a locative media project called Invisible Islands, a technological framework for creating information "islands" that can be used as a base for online/offline experiences. This project has had iterations in Aarhus, Denmark in partnership with the University of Aarhus; and Montreal, Canada in partnership with the National Film Board of Canada. The Islands can be used to create interactive historical city walks, archiving street art and other ephemeral art practices, and site-specific cultural experiences. Locative media can have profound implications for the GLAM sector, and we are only just beginning to tap into its true potential for creating participatory experiences in an urban environment and activating under-utilized spaces. As part of this talk I will present the Montreal iteration of Invisible Islands: "Les îles invisibles" - in which I collaborated with well-known Canadian writer Daniel Canty. A story is told in fragments that the public has to collect by exploring known and lesser known parts of "le quartier des spectacles" in Montréal.  

Listen to a range of vendors to the GLAM sector share tips, tools and technologies that are valuable for a range of GLAM-sector organisations. 

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum Archives are the largest and most complete record of the Khmer Rouge actions against the citizens of Cambodia during the reign of Pol Pot. This unique archival collection of materials held within the Archives of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (TSGM) are mostly paper-based with the main exceptions being the photograph and negative collections along with the microfilm reels, which are themselves a copied rendition of documents and photographs. The Archives is located in rooms where previously prisoners were held and there is evidence throughout the digitization room of its former prison state including cell numbers on walls. UNESCO and the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) have provided funds to digitize the Museum’s archives. KOICA writes about the Archives   The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum archives constitute the most complete existing documentary picture of the Democratic Kampuchea prison system. The prison was a fundamental part of the regime under which around 2-3 million people lost their lives. In 2009, the archives of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum were recognized as world documentary heritage of international significance and were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register. The archives of the museum contain photographs of over 5000 prisoners as well as their “confessions”—many extracted under torture—and other biographical records of prisoners, prison guards and officials. The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum Archives were inscribed into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in July 2009. Upon conclusion of digitization, the Archives will be accessible via the World Wide Web using Greenstone , open source digital library software developed at the University of Waikato (Hamilton, New Zealand) and endorsed by UNESCO. The challenge for this project was to create a digitization capture and post-processing solution that was both high quality yet straightforward and uncomplicated for an inexperienced team to learn. The digitization team has been trained by experts on the most critical imaging skills in order to achieve maximum quality and production results in a very short time. Besides the digital images the most important aspect of this project is training and capacity building, Brechin and DDD decided to train the Museum staff and digitization team not only on a specific part of the digitization process but on the whole process. Even though digitization projects may seem like a high-skilled factory process (protocols, quality control, standardization, etc.) it makes sense only if the different parts of the production is understood and mastered by the technicians who work on it. The project is a collaboration between the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a Cambodian library and museum service bureau; a Canadian imaging service bureau specializing in archival cultural heritage digitization and preservation consultant; an Argentinian digital library consultant; and an Australia based metadata expert with oversight and funding provided by UNESCO and KOICA This paper and presentation will describe the digitization process at the Museum, training of the staff, collection of descriptive, technical, and administrative metadata, and the creation of a database of images and metadata with a Greenstone web portal for the digitized Archives.

Every exhibition at ACMI is considered a pilot to test experience and technology for future exhibitions and Wonderland was no different. The Wonderland exhibition opened in April 2018 at ACMI and went through until October. It’s an immersive and theatrical exhibition that celebrates the screen history of Lewis Carroll’s timeless stories. The Lost Map of Wonderland is an NFC-enhanced paper map and is the visitor’s companion device throughout the exhibition. It is integral to the exhibition experience — in-gallery and at home after the visit. Previous exhibitions had shown us visitors had an appetite for richer, longer content online so we wanted to test this with a more full post-visit experience. This presentation will give the audience insights into the design of the map experience, the challenges we faced, the evaluation including how it’s performing on tour and how we are applying what we learnt to the biggest project of all, the museum redevelopment.

In 21 meaty minutes, this talk will deliver macro-scale ideas with a day-to-day influence on our digital decision making.
Firstly, I'll introduce the Silicon Valley Story of technology and how this shapes the way we use, talk about, and work with technology … until the geopolitical events of 2016 changed everything. A once-neat narrative – of technological solutionism, tech as a neutral platform, and computational thinking – has become incoherent, and a range of actors are rushing to fill the void and tell new stories.
I’ll then speculate on competing narratives by using intense memes to help reframe our thinking - and showing why this is important in the very long term. 
Finally, the GLAM sector is full of sage technologists who are also quite conveniently tasked with gathering and amplifying the stories of our times. So what can GLAMs in Aotearoa offer up as stories or frames to aid those outside the sector with wiser technological decision-making? What might we contribute to The New Stories of Technology? And within our day-to-practice, how might we shift our frames for digital thinking?
I'll aim to leave 5 mins at the end for all your gnarly questions, answers, and comments.

During Tech Week 2019 Puke Ariki Library offered VR (Virtual Reality) experiences to the community, exploring the theme “Technology that is good for the World”. During the sessions we observed customers reactions to their experiences of VR, and also asked their opinions by way of a survey. We observed the bringing together of all cultures and ages in our community, from families to individuals, with shared experiences that invoked the emotions of everyday life.

We would like to share our findings with you. Our decisions around technical equipment and evaluation of it, the setup of our “Tech Lab”, how we also took VR around our Community Libraries, our customers reactions - their joys and sorrows, our reactions to offering a programme such as this and the ease of doing so. We will also share how we were able to bring experiences to people who would otherwise not have been able to achieve them such as those with disabilities or mobility challenges. How humbling it is to open up the world and universe to people and be able to “change lives” (customer quote) through our libraries.

Where VR has to date been expensive technology that people have been looking for the real purpose of, we believe we are starting to identify benefits. As technology develops, becomes more accessible and affordable and more people create content, we see opportunities to enrich the lives of people in our community through this technology.

Projection mapping allows for the invigoration of forgotten spaces, the enlivening of events and the oppotunity to present content and creativity in new and exciting ways. While huge festivals around the world have showcased projection mapping, the opportunities are now available for communities to produce cost-effective and engaging events on grand scales. In Palmerston North we have exploited the system to provide an enhanced experience for visitors to our spaces, and to run specific events, such as the “Modular Projection Blaze” and “Firing Line”. Collaboration has been a key tool in realising these events, with buy in from various community stakeholders. The talk will include numerous visual and audio examples of some of our events. The greatest benefit for the library has been the opportunity to partner with creatives, enabling them to deliver wonderful benefits for the city. Projection mapping has so many moving parts it requires the library/museum/council to slip into a supporting and enabling role. The result is greater than the sum of its parts. Another part of this story is that it’s value led: Must be epically cool, conceived in the Manawatū and greater than the sum of its parts.

One of the goals of the He Tohu exhibition is to provide better access to three constitutional documents that continue to shape Aotearoa New Zealand: He Whakaputanga (known in English as the Declaration of Independence), Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and the Women's Suffrage Petition. Yet these documents are both fragile and on permanent display in Wellington, preventing their display in other places. How could we met the goal of increased access, and the request from Iwi leaders to take these archives to the people? One answer was virtual reality. Using high definition photogrammetry and a team of writers, curators and musicians, a virtual representation of the He Tohu document room and its three taonga tuku iho was created as an experiential treat and learning resource for those unable to visit the exhibition in person. This presentation explores the creation of the He Tohu VR experience.

50 years of New Zealand music from over 5,000 artists from a major New Zealand publisher on one hard drive!  As the largest digital deposit received under Legal Deposit legislation this was both tremendously exciting and overwhelmingly large. This presentation will describe the processes and tools NLNZ used to convert a spreadsheet and 3.5Tb of 250,000 files into ~6,000 bibliographic records and digital items.  We’ll discuss the broad approach, highlighting where things did / didn’t go to plan, and concentrate on a few tools and techniques we used to turn this large data store into a well described collection. Richard will get into the record keeping side of the problem – how did we find and link duplicate bibliographic records? How did we deal with name authorities? How did we automate the creation of thousands of new records? Jay will get into the technical side of the problem – how did we link items on a spreadsheet to a files on the hard-drive? How did we pull data about a file when it wasn’t included in a listing? How did we break the collection into manageable chunks? How did we use other people’s data sources to help verify our approach for making sense of the multi-terabyte file store?

Wāhine Toa: Women in Defence is the first collaborative, online exhibition of its kind produced by the New Zealand Defence Force's three service museums. The exhibition was curated for the Suffrage 125 national event programme and explores the journeys of women serving in the New Zealand Defence Force since gender integration in 1977. The online exhibition is currently available on the Air Force Museum of New Zealand website and features video interviews with New Zealand servicewomen and a variety of digitised archive material relating to recruitment in the Navy, Army and Air Force in New Zealand.

Due to resource constraints, the decision was made to use a digital platform in the form of an online exhibition on the Air Force Museum's website. The project team believe that this approach ultimately helped align the project more closely to the official Suffrage 125 commemoration aims of diversity and accessibility, as well as creating the perfect opportunity for collaboration between museums.

This paper reviews how the NZDF's three service museums collaborated together, including how they overcame the challenges of developing an online exhibition within the constrained Defence IT environment and physical distance from each other. The project team will share what they have learned from the exhibition development process, web analytics, the potential and possibilities of physical display, and securing the exhibition's online future.

To view the exhibition, please go to https://www.airforcemuseum.co.nz/whats-on/what-to-see/exhibitions/wahine-toa-women-in-defence/