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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.  

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.

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.