 On the third of December, I'm waiting for my slide to appear. On the third of December 2008, www.digitalnz.org went live. This website, now fondly known as Classic Search, was a modest little beauty. 25 organisations from throughout Aotearoa worked with the National Library on this project and contributed their metadata so that people could search across many collections via this one website. Tēnā koutou to those people, many of whom are probably in this room. At the time, Digital NZ's search service was just one and a constellation of other activities that the team undertook. Digitisation guides, remix competitions, custom search builders, providing grants for digitisation, hack fests, and even an online video editor. Digital NZ has worked on many activities and like any programme of work, there have been some successes and some failures, some backtracks and some big wins. Over time, the Digital NZ team have focused into a core set of activities. We coordinate the digitalnz.org search engine and our free application programming interface, which is a conduit to all the metadata we bring together, as well as taking care of Supplejack, our open source harvesting software. The search engine grows every day and we now point to the digital collections and six organisations and over 30 million digital things relating to Aotearoa. Maintaining and growing the service takes up most of our time as it grows in its complexities and dependencies. And, if we're honest, things break quite a bit and we're always figuring out ways to fix them. There is, however, frequent cause for celebration. Wonderful new content partners like the Sargent Gallery, Reihua Wanganui's new online collection. Students at Akura Kopapa using Digital New Zealand recently to create stories. And the day in August last year when the new look digitalnz.org was launched. I've worked at Digital NZ for nearly four years and in the first years I was in this role, I'd be out and about talking to people about Digital NZ's work, maybe at the Porirua branch of the National Society of Genealogists or running a story-making workshop for teachers or presenting an introduction to Digital NZ Webinar for librarians. And over this time a quiet question persisted, squirming away at the back of my mind. A question I felt I shouldn't think. A question that seemed sacrilegious to even whisper. However, become totally convinced of Digital NZ's importance, especially over the last couple of years. And this presentation is really to tell you why. I could have talked about everything that's been achieved in the team's 10 years of work. But I thought it would be more interesting to zoom out a bit and think about the wider global information system that Digital NZ exists within. Because I think we have seen change in the last decade in the way information flows, change which has important ethical and political implications for Digital NZ's work. 10 years ago at the NDF there were a lot of hopeful diagrams like this one and we talked about Web 2.0 a lot. The internet was going to democratise the production and dissemination of knowledge. Hierarchies and silos of information would be broken down. The old teacher-student model was redundant. And people would respond to, query and question our collections and new knowledge would be created. In 2018, though, I'd suggest this representation of the internet. Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. I lent this new acronym for Big Tech recently, GAFA. And I know how you NDF glam folklore acronyms. These companies control the majority of what we see and do and buy online. Competition is atrophied and power has coalesced around a small handful of URLs. And we are currently seeing the political, cultural and social implications of this new information landscape where access to content is controlled by a few Silicon Valley-based businesses. The nature of public space and Howie Huey has changed in ways that we're really still trying to figure out. A 2016 study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA analysed the interactions of 376 million Facebook users and concluded that people tend to seek out and read information that already aligns with their views. One way of coping with having access to all the information is just to look at the bits that you agree with. For most people, the websites on this slide simply are the internet. Facebook equals the news and Mark Zuckerberg can switch on or switch off the existence of online media or anyone's website with the twitch of an algorithm. As Duncan Greve, editor of the spin-off wrote in August of this year after a tweak in Facebook's algorithm sent the spin-off's readership tumbling. Facebook has turned from eager accomplice to surly acquaintance in what feels like the blink of an eye. We in the media, and by extension those interested in democracy and all that, need to understand Facebook's capriciousness as the new normal. Politicians such as Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right authoritarian recently elected as president of Brazil, carefully calibrated social media campaigns to simultaneously enrage and flatter their supporters and spread misinformation. It's ironic that we often spoke about the internet democratising information ten years ago because now people are talking about the internet dismantling democracy and the ways in which the digital revolution is eroding our privacy and our autonomy. In a world where post-truth, with a hyphen, is Oxford Dictionary's 2016 word of the year, there are pre-internet truths that still hold. What we read and watch and hear influences how we think and act and vote. No one in this room needs reminding that information is power. In the wake of Cambridge Analytica's micro-targeting of voters via Facebook for Trump's campaign, we're still grappling with the extent to which tides of misinformation on social media influence voting behaviour. Digital NZ's birthday sits a decade behind Google, which turns 20 this year, and this feels like a meaningful serendipity because when it comes to digitalnz.org, I see the question materialising in people's minds when I'm talking to them about the service. Why wouldn't I just use Google? Google is where we find where to go for dinner, what we should buy for our mum's birthdays and the date of the signing of Tertidity or Waitangi. But on the whole, Google is exceptionally good at finding these things and good at finding the collections of digital NZ's content partners. The concerning thing, however, concerning for our culture and for our democracies is Google's veneer of neutrality and its fickleness. It is in Google's best interests to not let us remember that it is, in fact, a business. The EU have made attempts recently to curb Google's monopoly, finding the company 2.4 billion euro in 2017 for promoting its own comparative shopping services and its search results and demoting those of its competitors. And 5 billion euro just in July for contravening the EU's competition laws. Google had been forcing cell phone manufacturers to pre-install the Google search engine and Chrome web browser on its new phones. Beyond economics, there are important ethical questions we need to ask about access to the world's information being so monopolised. When you Google who was the first black American president of America as BBC journalist Richard Gray did in March last year, you find the first search result is this website, which lists seven black presidents before Obama, including Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. I've spent quite a while on this site, fukum.wordpress.com, and frankly it's just really confusing. It's a strange mixture of blog posts about the deaf community, about the history of Nike shoes and heaps and heaps of ads, and it's really hard to figure out who the author is and the purpose of the site, and half the content seems to have been migrated to another URL. In 2018, information is easy to find, but often hard to pass and to critique, and the ranking of search results does not correlate to the veracity of a site's content. To quote Paul Resnick, professor of information at the University of Michigan, the internet has made it possible for many voices to be heard that could not make it through the bottleneck that controlled what would be distributed before. Initially, when they saw the prospect of this, many people were excited about this opening up to multiple voices. Now we are seeing some of those voices saying things we don't like and there is great concern about how we control the dissemination of things that seem to be untrue. In the light of 2018, this diagram starts to mean something ominously different. Other ethical questions about Google's algorithms and the structuring of its search results have been raised by American academic Sophia Noble. Noble's research examines the algorithmic biases of Google, many of which re-entrance racist and sexist beliefs. In her book, Noble cites many warring examples of this, but I've encountered one of my own recently when my sister graduated med school alongside a number of her friends, and I googled historical geniuses to WhatsApp hero celebrity picture of a group of smart people. In the Google image results, we get a sliver of Virginia wolf in the top results, but other than that, there's not much representation of 50% of the human race. And don't get your hopes up. There's not a great deal of diversity on this list. Thanks. These are some thoughts on the wider technology-driven context that Digital NZ sits within, and which has evolved and changed over the 10 years of Digital NZ's existence. But circling back, what does this mean for the relative usefulness or not of an aggregated search engine of New Zealand content? I think I've come to increasingly value Digital NZ because of my belief that the internet should be more heterogeneous. There should be a wider array of public platforms providing access to information, and this is where the importance of Digital NZ and our sister services, Diana Trove in the Digital Public Library of America, exist. I acknowledge the irony that someone who works for an aggregator should be arguing for heterogeneity, and the onus lies on Digital NZ to balance our work, to standardise and to unify with the need to reflect diversity and to preserve the idiosyncrasies of the collections we bring together as the search engine evolves. I've heard consistently over the course of my time at Digital NZ how useful the search engine is to access archives and collections that people would otherwise not know about or are difficult to find. There is also great potential for the future of Digital NZ to be a place where we have access to the holdings of the Crown, all in one easily searchable place. This position is digitalnz.org as an important tool for historical redress. I was also compelled by the recent argument made by Ryan Broderick, a deputally global news director in this article, that as news organisations go behind paywalls and premium content goes to paid streaming services, I'm quoting here, deserts of information will appear where normal people are algorithmically served memes, poorly aggregated news articles and YouTube videos without any editorial oversight or regulation. We have a responsibility then as a sector to continue to provide public and free access to the collections and information in our kaitiaki keeping on, regardless of Google's algorithmic changes or the shifting priorities of Facebook's shareholders. To conclude, here are two quick examples of aspects of our work we could possibly focus on in light of the political and technological contexts I've been talking about. Build elegant and easy to use information portals that normal people can find their way around and which flipped easily across the myriad of devices people use to find stuff online. Our services should meet demonstrable information needs and we should allow people to drive the way these services are built. This is all the user centre design stuff that we all know about but it's very tricky to implement in practice. We should be more transparent about cookies, what we're doing with people's login emails, our analytics, how the results are structured on our sites, how decisions are made about metadata and SEO and be transparent about the colonial biases that are ingrained in the history of our applications and the tongue that they hold. Tell people what we're doing and why more because it's very unlikely that we'll ever see under the hood of Google but we can and should be transparent and as accountable as this ghost shrimp. Actually, I don't know if this ghost shrimp is accountable but you get the analogy. In the last decade, the decade of digital NZ's life, the internet has given us strange and wondrous and alarming things. They're not known yet but they are based in the department, the Department of Development, Trump on Twitter, Family Vloggers, Ardurn on Facebook Live, Amazon Echo, Google Glass, Snowden's Revelations, Cambridge Analytica, Kim dot com, the use of social media during the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement and on-tep content chi i how these changes impact our work and where we fit in an evolving ecosystem. The NDF Conference is a chance to do this and also a good opportunity to acknowledge that there is power in all of us working together because, if anything, digital NZ's 10th birthday is not really a celebration of us. It's a celebration of you.