NDF2019

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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?