 Thank you Joanna. Kia ora koutou and warm Pacific greetings to you all. I'm here to tell you about a cool project. Earlier this year the National Library of New Zealand for which the Alexander Turnbull Library is a part of was successful with its grant application to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade or DFAT in Australia for what is entitled a Pacific Virtual Museum pilot program. This pilot program will develop and deliver an online aggregation service similar to Digital New Zealand but just for Pacific documentary heritage held in the memory institutions from New Zealand, Australia the Pacific and potentially further afield. It will be a digital space to connect diverse and dispersed people with their taonga starting with photographic collections. The project is in the process of being initiated. It will be implemented by the National Library of New Zealand in partnership with the National Library of Australia. It will run through to the end of 2021 during which time we'll be seeking sustainable funding. And a note, a Pacific Virtual Museum was the name given to the funding proposal by DFAT so it's our current working title. The actual name of the service is yet to be confirmed and it's something we'll put to our co-design group that we're setting up. When talking about this project with stakeholders the common question I get asked is how did it come about? So this talk, this brief talk will briefly outline the strands that have come together to make this project possible now. Good timing is a wonderful thing and it starts in Moana, New York, Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Library's network describes itself as a dynamic group of emerging and experienced leaders from across the Pacific. These leaders wanted to build a collaborative network together to address key systemic opportunities for Pacific libraries including documentary heritage. This group acknowledged that other mechanisms to bring leaders together especially emerging leaders from across the Pacific, from libraries across the Pacific were not working. So the Pacific Library's network was created out of an NALI project. NALI is a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation initiative to develop emerging library leaders. The Pacific Library's network has met a couple of times once in Fiji and once in Brisbane. We're still in our infancy but we have a vision and a strategic plan with goals aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. One such goal for the Pacific Library's network is ensuring equitable access to information to all by reducing digital divides, providing digital infrastructure and giving access to digital resources. Pacific colleagues discuss the various challenges to providing online access to digital documentary heritage and called for collective action. This project delivers that for Pacific libraries. And just while we're here I'd like to note and acknowledge Apeeta Alaphayu, the former director of the National Library of Fiji and president of the Pacific branch of the International Council on Archive. Apeeta was going to be here to talk at this NDF and that's him on the, as you're looking at it, at the front on the far left, so Bullo Apeeta. So why the National Library of New Zealand? Why are we leading this? There's a few reasons. The project aligns well with the purposes and strategic priorities of the National Library. For example, two legislative purposes of the library are shown on the slide above. And also our strategic directions outline the library's intention to, where possible, deliver its priorities in collaboration with others across our broader sector, both internationally and nationally, as part of a knowledge network. But the biggest driver for the library comes from acknowledging that Aotearoa in New Zealand is a Pacific country with a diverse and growing Pacific population. And just a couple of stats from Statistics New Zealand to back that up. Eight percent of people in New Zealand are self-identified as Pacific people and the largest ethnic group for Aotearoa's youth is Pacific people at 36 percent. That's zero to 14 year olds. I think this is huge. Eight percent of the total population but 36 percent of the youth. As a national organization we've got to prepare and respond for this because our country is changing and it will be great. So the library has a mandate, a commitment to work collaboratively, and a community of Pacific people to serve. And so this project fits really perfectly with us and where we're at at the moment. But we also have this at the National Library. We have Digital New Zealand. Many Pacific collections from around Aotearoa are already part of the Digital New Zealand API. And the Digital New Zealand team, Kyoto team, loves working with content partners, many of whom will be in this room, to make Daonga easy to find, share, and use. I know that Digital New Zealand team are looking forward to engaging with and learning from our Pacific colleagues as part of this program. Importantly, Digital New Zealand also harvests from Trove, the National Library of Australia's aggregator service. So the pathways for bringing in Pacific items from Australian memory institutions into the Digital New Zealand API for the purposes of the Pacific Virtual Museum are already established. So we have the Pacific Libraries, we have the National Library of New Zealand, we have the technology and the skills around that. And the third strand, that sort of, or the fourth strand that brings it all together is the key one of funding. Now I'm not an employee of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade or the Australian Government, so I can't really speak for them or their motivations. But the Australian Pacific Step Up strategy is publicly accessible and the grant opportunity highlighted there on the screen for which the library was successful was made in the context of that strategy. And my engagement with DFAT has mostly been as part of the Pacific Library's network discussions I mentioned earlier. And it's been really obvious that the Australian Government shares our commitment and excitement to the education and societal memory outcomes of the project. So it's really great feeling part of something that brings so many different strands together at a key moment for a cool project. But what are we going to do? The project's for two and a half years and we're just recruiting the team now to lead us through it and to help us run it as a Pacific project. We're also in the process of establishing a co-design group from around the region with the focus on Pacific archivists and librarians, educators and researchers from across the islands and in Australia and New Zealand. Our first co-design workshop is tentatively planned for late January sort of February next year when we'll work through some of our key design questions and challenges like what is it going to look like, how's it going to work, how best to connect these collections with Pacific educators. But also some of the challenges around addressing some of the legacies of colonialism and how they've shaped the Pacific collections and metadata that exist in the collections from around the region. We've started some engagement with potential content partners who'll provide the collections and a range of Pacific stakeholders and that engagement will ramp up once the team is in place. From that point we'll develop an initial product so stay tuned for a launch sometime next year. Finally if you're from a collecting institution with Pacific collections you'll be hearing from us but please feel free to come and speak with me or Fiona Fieldsend, the leader in the project while we're here or contact us by email at any time. And finally, finally thank you to the institutions who wrote letters of support for the National Library of New Zealand for our grant application. The Pacific Libraries Network, the Pacific Branch of the International Council on Archives and the National Library of Australia. It's going to be real cool. Thank you very much.