 Kia ora kato katoa ko to Turanga Associate Chief Librarian Te Puna Maturanga o Ate Roa. Hello and welcome. Nice to see you. My name is Jessica Moran. I am the Associate Chief Librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library at the National Library of New Zealand. That's just a quick introduction to myself and I will hand over to Mark who will actually be starting the presentation this morning or this evening depending on where in the world you are right now. Thanks Jess. Tena koutou katoa ko Mark Crookston Toko Inga ko Tuturanga Program Director Documentary Heritage o Te Puna Maturanga o Ate Roa. My name is Mark and I'm the Program Director Documentary Heritage at the National Library of New Zealand. My immediate previous role is the role that Jess is in now Associate Chief Librarian of the Turnbull Library and we just changed over recently so this feels like and doing this together this feels like a very public kind of like hand over session. So thank you all for participating, for listening and for watching and a big thank you to the Research Library UK crew for hosting us and being so welcoming for us. I'm with the show. The Alexander Turnbull Library is a research library that is part of the National Library of New Zealand. Our mandate includes the development of research collections and services particularly in the fields of New Zealand Pacific Studies. Developing and maintaining a comprehensive collection of documents relating to New Zealand and the people of New Zealand and as part of the National Library we have a clear mandate to work collaboratively with other institutions having similar purposes including those forming part of the international library community. So this is Jess and I here really engaging with you guys as part of our mandate so that's cool. Just over a hundred years ago Alexander Turnbull, that's a handsome chap on the screen that you can see. He was a collector in Bibliophile. He died and bequeathed what was then the largest private private collection in New Zealand to the people of New Zealand via the crown. Just over 50 years ago the library was integrated into the new National Library of New Zealand and while centenaries are often a time for reflection and celebration, the Turnbull Library used its past to look forward and consider the kind of library it will be in the future and the kinds of collections and services necessary to fill its mandate. This presentation reflects on just a few shifts the Turnbull has made to address challenges and opportunities presented by digital with a focus on access, digitisation, appraisal and collection development and how our digital shift and how our deliberate shift to create a more inclusive library will help position us for changes in the future. We're not sure we've got a lot of answers but we hope our experiences are useful to you and interesting to you. I think libraries at times have been leaders in shifting services to digital. At the Turnbull Library these shifts seem to have happened in clusters, responding to changing societal needs, supporting funding environments and being driven through acts of leadership. The first I want to highlight is the shift to provide digital and online access in the early 90s. 30 years ago in September 1991 staff at the Turnbull Library Manuscripts team made a descriptive record for a recently acquired extract from a World War II diary of Douglas Neil Tiffin. It was the first descriptive record to become available to the public via the library's new online finding aid for archival collections. Just a couple of months later also in 1991 the National Library of New Zealand went live with papers passed the online platform for access to digitised newspapers. The original drivers of the project was a commitment for digitisation to become the primary primary way to increase access to collections. The Turnbull Library newspaper collection provided the source material for this new service. The content was initially presented by as digitised images and was later upgraded to include OCR from 2007. That OCR, that optical character recognition, has gradually improved to be over 98% accurate. The site has grown to become one of the New Zealand government's most used websites with over 50 million page views a year. We're a country of five million so over 50 million page views a year and in the former and the words of former chief historian of New Zealand Jack Phillips papers passed has changed research in New Zealand. The site has expanded now to include all text-based digitised collections that we have. We're very proud of it and we have an excellent team managing it. It took a few years but the archival photographs came on followed newspapers online in 1997 with the time frame service. It started with 8,000 items online but now the library has several hundred thousand photographs viewable online. The leadership and commitment of the library staff in the 90s to digitise for online access is commendable. Some truly excellent people help shift the library from its in-person on-site analogue approach to access with all the restrictions and limitations that come with that onto a path of greater online access. These shifts don't just happen. They require strategic leadership access to appropriate technology and funding, planning and change leadership to achieve the staff buy-in and the change and change the skill sets and behaviours for the shift to be successful. I also highlight them because they represent a strategic shift in thinking that itself has been difficult to shift in recent times. Mostly because in making that shift to digitisation and online access the library retained control over who got to use collections and how they could be used. That's the shift we're trying to shift again now. So what we're seeing in research and have to respond to is the change we're seeing in research and have to respond to is when we're the researcher wants or even demands online access of copies to use for and as part of their research without or with limited interventions from the library. This type of research is often referred to as the digital humanities but it certainly isn't limited to humanities. It involves the combining and querying of digital collections from a range of sources to create new modes of inquiry with research output increasingly shared quickly online. We want to be a more active part of this mode of research but we're still to determine exactly how that would happen and what active means for the research library of now. We've recently established a library-wide working group on digital research to help us address this question and I'm really interested in the Research Library UK community's perspective on how active or passive research libraries of now should be in enabling or participating in digital research. The shift from this passive online access to enabling or participating in use of collections via online channels forces us to address some tensions. We, a publicly funded research library, want to meet the needs of many different kinds of users who have different perspectives on what use and reuse of collections is. At the same time the library relies on collection development from donation by content creators, donors and communities who have a legitimate ongoing need to protect their intellectual rights and property and privacy. Within that space is the amorphous notion of trust, how our digital collections are seen to be used and how the library is seen to permit that use influences donors of archives collections, archival collections. Shifting ourselves to support greater use of collections is taking place. Shifting the perspective of the donors of collections so they provide clear permissions that enable greater use is more challenging. Another perspective on the tension is the reality and responsibility of operating in a post-colonial country and context. We are non-western worldviews of culture, intellectual property and privacy are brought more closely to the foreground with online digital services. For the Turnbull Library and the New Zealand context we have the Kaitiakitanga role, which is most closely translated as guardianship but that's quite a problematic translation in itself, where we have a role to protect, preserve and make accessible the taonga or cultural heritage relating to Maori. Kaitiakitanga sits alongside and often clashes with Western concepts of intellectual property and privacy and acknowledges that cultural heritage collections have a Maori or life force by way of the people that were involved in their creations and that Maori doesn't end. This means that it's incumbent on the library to form relationships with Maori on how to care for taonga and cultural heritage and to determine the role that they play in relation to the spiritual care of digitized collections. So things just escalated quite quickly in the complicated department and that's without going into copyright which I will leave for another time maybe. But in trying to address these tensions through the 2000s the library implemented a confused approach that has led to some collection items being available on different online channels with different rights use or copyright statements which has in turn confused our researchers, our staff and our potential donors. But the important thing for today's discussion is what we've done recently to accelerate our digital shift away from access for access sake and to enable greater use of digital collections outside of the confines of the library and to clear up some of the confusions of the 2000s. In 2014 we released a new use and reuse policy which attempted to address these tensions outlined earlier and help the library navigate a path forward. The policy principles provided a space that enables the library to release control of use of digital collections where it was appropriate to do so but also protect use of collections where it is also appropriate to do so. I won't go into the details of the principles you can find the policy online on the library's website if you're interested natlib.govt.nz use policy we'll get you there but the objective of the policy is important that's what's on your screen now. We've done some things to achieve this goal the shift is still taking place more items are in the public domain creative commons licensing options are now integrated into donor agreements and we've been working within the write statement.org project especially write statements.org project especially around including indigenous write statements within the framework and a big key order to our Australian colleagues who have been great leaders in that space. We believe international responses are important for consistency in this area however our biggest success so far I think has been the culture change within the library including at a leadership level where we are committed to acting towards the objective on your screen. Importantly also is that access is not exclusively part of the vision we've shifted to focus on use however in making this shift we've really only just started I'm interested in other experiences in this area. The final one I'm going to make today is around shifting the point of digitization. Digitization is usually seen as an access or preservation activity focused on existing collections that have usually been in the library for a while. We in the Turnbull library have an ambition into the future of digitizing everything that's important to New Zealanders which is a lot but the library is acquiring analog items at a higher rate than it is digitizing its collections so the percentage of items digitizing is getting smaller. So the shift we initiated in the last seven years is one where we better integrate digitization at the point of acquisition. I'll give a few examples. In 1982 notable New Zealand photographer Arnst Wester deposited her negatives with the library but they were only here on loan. In 2004 though the library signed a further agreement with her agents that allowed us to purchase digitized copies of the negatives and that those originals would then finally be donated and owned by the library and so with the digital items. Over a period of five years Arnst's her family and her agents digitized over 80,000 negatives. Importantly metadata enrichment happened at the same time. To support this shift we financed the project out of our acquisitions budget not our digitization budgets. The library also provided the space for the work to take place onsite in the library and I'm aware the shift in financial treatment is not available to many libraries. We're fortunate to have a healthy acquisitions budget despite an incredibly tight and ever shrinking operating budget. The first pilot worked really well and so we keep going. Next up was photographer Max Eartley. This was spawned photographer who arrived here when he was 10 years old and has made a significant contribution to New Zealand photography. In 2016 Eartley and the library agreed an arrangement for him to donate his original documentary negatives covering his time here in New Zealand 1967 to 75 in exchange for a place to work while scanning the negatives and payment for his labor. Essentially again we were using our collection budget to pay for a professional photographer to digitize their own collection and donate them to the library. We provide the equipment and space and they provide the collection and importantly again the metadata in Richmond. Only Max knew when and where he took those photos and who was in them. There were many to choose from but the quality of the title David's Birthday Heavy Night is my favorite. Overall the project was for about 10,000 images and Max worked in the library part-time over four summers. Flying Nun Records is New Zealand's most internationally significant record label. Formed by Roger Shepherd in 1991 the label tapped into the local post-punk scene of the 80s and 90s releasing records. Recordings by groups such as The Clean, The Chills, The Bats and The Villains, Straight Jacob Fitts. If you don't know those names I really recommend you going and spending a bit of time searching through them. In 2018 the library and Flying Nun Records agreed a donation of over 1200 tapes including 750 master recordings on a range of formats for the library's archive of New Zealand music. What made the difference was the condition of the donation that committed the library to digitize these tapes within four years and make them available to the label for reissuing, remastering or doing whatever they want with. The library retained the original tapes and the ownership of the original tapes and the digitized masters. This was the implementation of a strategic shift in focus for the archives of New Zealand music where we considered utilising the infrastructure objectives and purposes of the library as a mechanism to be the archive of independent music in New Zealand to ensure that a wide range of our music heritage could be preserved and made accessible through time. There's no way these independent labels, music labels were going to be able to digitize their own back catalogs and reissue and make use of them again and as we all know magnetic media is degrading. Speaking of AV and this is a very brief aside in last year's budget in New Zealand the National Library the film and sound archive and Archives New Zealand the National Archives receive funding to digitize the entire government's audio visual collections. It's about over 500,000 items and so we're just in the process of setting up with a vendor in New Zealand who can perform that at that scale and also then maybe use them to digitize all AV in New Zealand. That's maybe a topic for another talk. And finally just recently the library and fulfilling one of its collection priorities on 20th century architectural plans agreed in acquisition and digitization of an entire set of plans by architect John Scott. It's about 10,000 items. John Scott was a notable New Zealand architect of Te Arawa and Pakeha descent who's known for successfully integrating European and Māori concepts into his design. This is my favorite building in Wellington the Fortuna Chapel. So they were four examples and we're now trying to shift our business model to incorporate this approach more into our acquisition decision-making. At this stage we can only run a couple of acquisition digitization projects a year but hopefully the conceptual shift has happened. Digitization is part of acquisition and we start to invest more in this approach. The option to digitize at the point of acquisition does assist the library with conversations with donors especially those big notable collections and discussions that we all we all have with our important big donors. They can take years to reach a successful conclusion. But this is just one aspect of the shifts in collecting and collection development that we're seeing. That's all for me. I'm just going to hand over to Jess really quickly and she'll continue. Carrying on the collection building theme that Mark was talking about certainly I think for all of us collection development and appraisal writ large is draws through much of what we do in research libraries. And while our original founders mandate around collecting priorities and our ongoing legislative requirements have continued to frame our collection development work over time I think that appraisal and how we make those collection development decisions has shifted a bit. And this isn't only a digital shift but digital technologies since you know the mid 20th century at least have certainly proliferated the growth of records and challenged our ability to preserve and manage them over time and digital has only exasperated this. So I think as a profession around the world or at least you know many research libraries we've been grappling for the last 10 to 15 years over how to effectively manage our collections especially in the face of growing backlogs of our uncataloged or unprocessed material. And while there's a growing body of work out there that's trying to figure out how we can manage and efficiently and effectively process this material. We know that much of that work starts at appraisal and with what we decide to collect and bring in. And here just as an aside just I think last week as we were viewing the draft for this OCLC released a new report on the total cost of stewardship for responsible collection building and archives and special collections. And it's really great to see that work and to see the kind of support from the community starting to think about these things. And so we've only had a quick squint skim but I think that a lot of the thinking outlined in there is also the kind of thinking that we're doing here at the Turnbull Library. But before I fully shift into some of our thinking around appraisal and collection building I thought it would be useful to take a look back at the library's growth in our digital preservation and digital collecting capability and how that has kind of framed where we've gone to from there. So our ability to be able to actually collect digital material has really grown over the last 15 years. And a lot of that has been down to the development of our and the development and the implementation of the Rosetta digital preservation system or the NDHA the National Digital Heritage Archive as we call it here. And that's so it's not just the system but it's also all the supporting infrastructure the policy and business rules the the entire kind of system that sits around how we manage and preserve our digital collections. Development of the NDHA began in 2004 and it was officially launched in 2008. And like I said it's not just the system the system is extremely important and forms the core but there's a lot of sort of the architecture around it how it connects to our collection management systems our storage systems our ingest different ingest mechanisms. And as important if not more important is all the technical and digital specialists who work on the system and make sure that we're able to to keep using the system keep it keeps up to date we keep kind of refreshing it and updating as we go. So responsibility for most of this work sits in another part of the National Library but it's really core to our ability within the Turnbull to do our work and we're lucky to be able to collaborate with the digital preservation team. Without our ability like I said both the systems and the staff capabilities to store and preserve digital collections our ability to collect would be severely hampered. And as an aside I thought it would be worth noting that with this establishment of the digital heritage archive it also led to establishment you know of quite a number of new roles in the library there was there is the whole team the preservation research and consultancy team that manages the preservation system as well as within the Turnbull we have we established additional roles for an additional digital archivist web archivists and arrangement and description librarian archivists to work with born digital and digitized collections specifically. So having that system in place and the investment in staff capability to acquire a range described and ingest into that preservation system has meant that we've had a sustained digital collecting practice for over 15 years. Since then we've been collecting in hybrid and born digital manuscript and archives material born digital photographs music and oral history. We've also been in a really fortunate position as Mark mentioned to be able to collaborate internationally around our digital preservation tools and one of the really successful collaborations we've had over time is with the web curator tool. First in the original development of it with the British Library and more recently with the National Library of Netherlands this is our main tool for being able to archive websites. So we have done some really great work during this period to grow our capabilities to collect and preserve digital materials and I think over time we've learned a couple things. The first as Mark was hinting at with the different kinds of access we really learned that our researchers always want more access and that our access is always you know we're always having to keep up and catch up with the kind of access that is demanded by researchers and the second is that while we've made some strides to increase the diversity and the representation of New Zealanders in our collections our web and digital and our web and digital collections have helped with that we still aren't doing as much as we would like or as we need to do to meet our ambition which is to have our collections represent the diversity of New Zealand and the Pacific. So Mark has already briefly discussed some of our thinking around access and I'll come back to that briefly at the end but first some more about collection building. So the collecting history of the Turnbull Library I think is quite similar to other libraries like it. It was established as Mark mentioned through the early collecting of its namesake Alexander Turnbull who was a wealthy Wellingtonian who was an avid book and manuscript collector. The early days of the library as a public institution and focused on building to the strengths of Turnbull's early collection and that really kind of set the tone and the scope for the culture and the perception of the library. It was this research library for the culture of political and academic elite formal academic study. By the 1970s these interests of what we were and how we were what we were collecting and who we were serving had begun to shift and while the library continued to build to its traditional strengths there were also efforts to build collections in previously underrepresented areas including the role of women in New Zealand society, labour history, the role of religion in everyday life. This image here is one that Mark originally found but we both really like because it's actually the kind of the internal library records of early proactive collecting initiatives in the 1970s and 80s since the letters from the then chief librarian reaching out to different organizations and community groups and saying we'd like to you know come talk to us about collecting in your organization we think it's important. So that was happening really through the 70s and 80s and then if we skip ahead to the early 2000s for a variety of reasons that proactive and targeted collecting history dropped off a bit but there was a shift made with more of a focus on online and internet collecting because of the web ability to do web archiving born digitally collecting particularly first through web archiving was hinting that our work to expand the representation of material in the library's collections was due for a refresh and that we could leverage and learn from our ability to collect born digital material. So when the library first started web archiving it increasingly saw the function as an opportunity to document the existence of individuals and community and organizations that were using websites to connect with their people. These were often people in communities that you wouldn't otherwise see in the library's collections so we very much as the library saw that as part of its mandate but I think web archiving was also a really convenient way for us to collect in areas where we might not otherwise have had inroads. So this is just one example from the photography blog click click click click and it's by New Zealand born Samoan artist and photographer Ramoni who was a self-titled barotographer and the blog documents the graffiti and hip-hop culture in South Auckland. So you know as we've been collecting really for 15 or more years in our web archives so really at this point are a massive and largely under tapped resource for research really ready for study and analysis and I think that is people are starting now there's enough distance from the early web that people are starting to understand that this is a great source for research and an important collection and I think that's been really gratifying to the team of web archivists who've been working on this collection quite as a small team that nobody really understood what they got and it's really great to see people starting to interact with this collection and see the power of it. So but for us really the next question is how were we going to take what we had learned from our online collecting and move towards making our collections if we can more representative and inclusive more broadly than just in our web archiving collections. So the first step in this was a major revision and update of the library's collections policies that started the collection policy in 2015. So in the interest of time I won't go into a huge amount of detail and like our access and use policy if you love a good policy you can find our collections policy and our collection plans online on our website but essentially what we wanted to acknowledge in this was that we needed to continue building to our existing strengths but we wanted to lower that priority a little bit and make sure that the voices that we weren't seen we put some resource and some effort into making sure that the library was a trusted place. We also wanted to make sure that we were balancing that sort of the significant paper mountains with the digital collections and we were resourcing and understanding what that total cost of stewardship was to bring in these large collections and that we made choices based on that total stewardship so that we could start to deal with the backlogs of collections that were coming in and not being processed, managed for many years because they were so big. And finally I think most one of the really important things that Mark talked a little bit about was working collaboratively to achieve big goals. I think it was a really important shift in the library to think about our place as one of the kind of nodes in the documentary heritage network and that we need to be collaborating with our colleagues both across Ottawa and internationally to achieve the kind of ambitions for what we want to achieve. So like I said down there one of the ones that we do want to keep dealing with and investing in was our ability to collect and increase our digital collecting capability more generally. So like I was saying we've learned a lot from web archiving but web archiving and websites themselves are not static and so we're constantly having to adapt and find new tools and ways to collect online documentary heritage. So social media has been a huge challenge for the library. Our traditional web archiving tools such as web curator tool weren't designed in the age of social media and they you know social media has been difficult for us to capture using those tools so we've spent a lot of time in the last few years trying to understand how we can better collect from social media and what exactly that means and in developing new responses to social media we're not only grown our digital skills but I think had to learn and apply our archival ethical and appraisal practices to a new format and vice versa and what I mean by this is that social media is a great one for blurring the lines between the published and the unpublished sections and between individual and the collective public and private. So making confident decisions in this area really requires strong digital skills but also strong appraisal skills since just as there's been an explosion of paper records there's definitely been a similar explosion in digital content and a corresponding need for thoughtful appraisal and we know that just kind of trying to collect everything is an abdication of our responsibility in the same way that having huge piles of paper that we don't do anything with would be an abdication of our responsibility. So rather than going to a lot of detail about our social media collecting because there's colleagues in the library who could do a much better job of that than I could I thought I would just talk to you briefly about one collection that brings together some of our social media but also the kind of work we're trying to do around working with communities to collect. So this is an image from the We Are the Beneficiaries Project. Briefly, in the wake of a former Green Party co-leader materialized resignation following statements about our history as a beneficiary in 2017, a group of artists mobilized to create art to share their experiences as beneficiaries in the hopes of continuing that conversation. Over time, artists and anonymous people sent in their own experience and then artists would illustrate that with so this is an example of somebody sends in a story and an artist creates some sort of image about that story and then they would be shared on social media. So they had a Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts and they would share these stories on social media and get feedback and they would just become really viral and so we worked with the We Are the Beneficiaries group to make sure that the artist's perspective and the story shared not to mention the artworks themselves that could be collected and held in the Turnbull Library. And I think what was really interesting about this it was allowed us to use the capability that we had around social media collecting but also understanding of archives so we didn't just collect the social media we collected the correspondence and the background work around creating the artwork and also there was a lot of work done to make sure that because there was a lot of anonymous peoples and their personal private stories that we had appropriate levels of access for the different kinds of content. So when discussing the acquisition the library was very conscious that the depictions of the beneficiaries in the collection up to that point were dominated by the collection previous loan is the Cartoon Archive of New Zealand and here you can see a few examples of what I mean so clearly kind of biased and negative representations of beneficiaries so bringing the We Are the Beneficiaries collection into the library and liberating a mechanism for making sure that story was preserved and available to people allowed for another voice to be heard another version of the story of what it is to be on a benefit in New Zealand. So but I think this is also not only to highlight the Cartoon Archive but to a little segue to a change that we have recently made in the New Zealand Cartoon Archive we've rescoped it to now be the New Zealand Cartoon and Comics Archive and the new expanded scope reflects the library's focus on a wider variety of cartoon and comic art forms to reflect New Zealand's increasingly diverse communities. So as the library heads into its second hundred years it's clear that we need to shift who we are and how we operate if an increasingly diverse New Zealand is to develop and maintain a comprehensive collection of documents of itself and its people which is a slight shift of our legislative mandate to put the emphasis on the collections actually belonging to the people of New Zealand. And in discussing sort of how we want to do this Mark and I've had a lot of conversations and really what you know coming to think about what are the key principles that would underpin this kind of work which is about making sure that there's social you know that the library is working towards that goal of social inclusion and justice and that the way to do that is through a sense of empathy partnership and participation and those should be the way that the library operates and that that empathetic participatory library shifts its collecting focus towards co-creating with communities and sees itself as part of a larger network not as a place and where the power for making those archival decisions is transferred or at least shared with the communities and perspectives that are outside the institution. So the mechanisms for how we do that are open for debate and we're still working on this but I think we have made some small steps that I think we're quite proud of and some of these have been so with this new comic and cartoon archive we have established an advisory committee and this group is newly established last year and the aim is to have a diverse group of participating artists historians and others who are active in the field work with the library and to provide us with advice and connections to networks that we might not already have. The second is the establishment of a new curatorial role specifically to deal with and spend time building those relationships a focus of the role and the small team we're building within that with that role is not simply the acquisition of more material from more people but rather to ensure that there's permanent resource in a permanent role in the library that focuses on looking at our current collecting activities and noticing how well we're not we're doing to meet our stated priorities and taking the time to work with communities and organizations to as we said co-create um that participatory library that we want to see so while the word digital isn't really part of that um we know we need to have a range of digital skills to be able to engage in this space and the current shifts we're going through the library um are digital in a way that spans both the technical and the social cultural axis um we respond to what we've seen and happening in the world around us both digitally and culturally and I think at this point the two are so closely bound together as to be really difficult to bring apart um so one last bit about access before we um open it to questions when we were thinking about this talk as I said we kept going back to the decisions we make about collecting um and how they impact the work and how the needs and the desires and the demands of our researchers need to inform um and impact how we provide access and use to the collections because it really is um when people are collections are activated they become alive and real when people use them when people make meaning out of them um they're no good just sitting in our stores so as mark mentioned at the beginning of this talk we first started putting our finding aids online through an online searchable database in the 1990s um and then that original database was actually maintained and was our collections management system until around 2016 when we migrated our data to a new more modern modern and systems driven standards driven system um so this is just a view of our our current the the public view of our current collections management system um and just wanted briefly highlight that one of the things that was really important to us and that we're then working through now is having a system that we could be compliant with international standards um and in this case international encoding standards specifically EAD and EAC CPF so we knew in the short term this would help us to make sure that we were standardizing our descriptive practice across formats within the library um to make material easier to find for researchers but also um thinking a little bit further we wanted to be able to share our descriptive data more widely and make sure that we were well prepared to contribute to national international initiatives to make these our collections more findable so so far this is taken the form of making our entire our name authorities data records available through places like wiki wiki data um and we also have them on our data page you could download our entire descriptive or name authority files um so we also want and we're really starting to and we're really excited about being able to contribute and participate in international research and projects that are looking to explore how we can connect our collections to each other and to researchers so internationally at the moment we're participating in things like OCLC's um research into entity data management um and some other linked open data initiatives but at the same time as we're exploring that we're also exploring the ethical limits of this kind of international international sharing so how do Maori and indigenous data sovereignty more broadly fit within our sort of western worldview that privileges more and open access and can we hold and honor both views as a research library working at the national library um in a library committed to a bicultural partnership so these are some of the issues that we're working through right now but we know if we get it right um we'll have made a really important step um so I think I will stop there um because we're running out of time and I can talk forever Mark and I both realized we could talk um so much to share um but just to say thank you and I think that we the thing that we know is that this international sharing um sharing perspectives and working together is where we know we need to go to be able to solve some of these big problems thank you so much Jess and Mark um it has been such an enriching talk and I was totally absorbed in all of the initiatives that you were mentioning that I've completely lost track of time as well so thank you both Mark and and Jess we've had a huge number of questions and so if I may uh one ask that we can keep answers short because then we're able to go through a wide range of questions but also if if the lovely audience can give us a few extra minutes I think that would be great but we will try to go through them as as much as possible so I've kind of teamed them and the first team that's coming through is a strategy and particularly there's a question about that the main aim of digitalization is at providing access and considering you've talked about your whole journey and there's over a long period of time how has your digitalization agenda and your digitalization strategy changed with the changing digital context around you and with the changing user needs and their expectations yeah do you want me to take that one Jess? there's a few things like quickly we're trying to address digitization priorities as a as a country and a system so working together with our colleagues on sort of on national and regional priorities for digitization then working together to ensure that the digital collections relating to those priorities that come from our various institutions can be digitized so there's much more sort of cohesive thinking there and we know as I said that researchers want fewer interventions from the library and relating to to use so we we try and focus on things that enable greater use and also we're really trying to scale up as I said the percentage of items digitized is shrinking but that's difficult and that requires appropriate funding and and that hasn't been easy for us at the moment so we've we've got a plan to transform out the scale of our digitization but we're still working through exactly how that's going to be funded but we have some plans that's great thank you so much Mark and if I may follow up on that with another question which is I think Mark you mentioned when you were speaking that there's a question that you want to pose back which is how active and passive research libraries should be in relation to digital research and scholarship I'm just curious about your own view on that what do you think how active or passive it should be damn that was a question for you guys I think I think it's it's a little bit of both we need to be quite clever about it we can't be really active all the time it's just impossible from a resourcing perspective but I think there's a role that research libraries play in the research community and with research methods that I think with this notion of digital humanities I think we need to be a very active player in enabling and activating digital humanities and making sure that what we do is research libraries and what the research communities does do so is um sort of activated and accelerated and so I think our role was to be quite active and really establishing that kind of research once it's established I think we've got a role to probably step back a little bit but we'll understand that further so I think it's a little bit it kind of depends on how active or passive I think we just need to be careful and clever about which parts of the research system in general where we're active about that's very helpful and yes I wonder if you would want to come on to another question which is linked which is do you provide any digital tools available to researchers at this time to support their journey in that digital humanities agenda to work collaboratively with you on research projects that's a good question and I think the answer is mostly not really we that mark mentioned the digital research working group and some of that has been around exploring you know what are the tools that we should be and how should we kind of position ourselves um and our first step was actually realizing that we had some data sets and open data in a lot of different places on the website and we didn't have it in a centralized place and we didn't actually have it we had it in our like policy area as opposed to research so the first step has just been creating a page on our research area about this is where our data our open data sets lives and these are the kind of data that we have and then providing some initial goals on our initial instructions on how to use the different kinds of data sets but in terms of actual digital tools we haven't done that yet it is again I think about resourcing and prioritizing some of that digital digital work and so we're hoping that the group that's working on it now will kind of start to give us some priorities of where we should focus in on some of that work thank you so much that's very well put as well I think we should move to the next theme of the topics which is about diversity and inclusion so I think the first one is for you Jess which is about given the fact of increasing diversity in the library's digital collection as part of your overall strategy how would you frame the best practices in regards to your collection development practices for engendering diversity of voices in the collection overall I think I think that's a really good question I think that I'm not sure we have best practices that we've really established I think what we like we're I was speaking about is that it's about building those relationships one of the things that we we know when we were we could collect a lot of websites and social media because it was quite easy it was on the internet and we didn't necessarily have to have the deep relationships with people to build that trust and that sense that it you know people wanted to put their collections into the Trimble library so I think the first the first thing that we have really recognized is that relationships are really important to this process and I mean we've had I think for a really long time in the Trimble library has been really good at that this really strong with having the staff Māori specialists across the library in the Trimble in different areas so Māori curators outreach people research services people that oral history people that can talk and so we can learn a lot from how we have developed partnerships with Māori and expand that to other communities that we have missed so I think really what we're trying to do at this point is you know know that good practice is not just going out and trying to grab a bunch of stuff and bring it back to the library because and then we can tick that box good practice is really changing the people's perspective of the library as a place that is theirs as well and that they belong to so that they have that sense of of wanting to be part of the library. Yeah absolutely I think digital and collections are the easy part is the sustainability of those relationships which really matters in the long run. Yeah totally and looking at the different element of inclusion there's a question about how you're engaging younger people or those that might feel excluded from formal places like libraries especially because they can feel quite intimidating to some some audiences. Do you work with schools? Do you ensure that your digital collections are embedded in the school curriculum somewhere else? Any ideas or approaches on that? Yeah the library has a whole direct the National Library of New Zealand has a whole directorate called Services to Schools which sort of came out of the old school library service that we used to run here. We kind of have a I think we have mixed success in this area. We have this fantastic so part of that service they curate and create kind of digital collections based on themes around the curricula and make that available available via the web and they make it available to teachers as well and so the services to school directorate of the National Library really very much sees themselves as part of the education system. It's actually funded by the Ministry of Education but delivered by the National Library of New Zealand. We have also this online service called Any Questions and it's sort of the infrastructure and support for it's provided by the National Library but what it is is a service by which students from around the country can connect with librarians from around the country online between 1pm and 6pm and so look it up on our website it's called Any Questions National Library and so we have librarians staff it from around the country and so kids can sort of address their questions there and that was in 100% acknowledging the barriers around the physical barriers and the sort of mental barriers and all sorts of barriers that exist that prevent kids coming to libraries. So that's a great service and it's still a very popular service. That's such a fantastic idea and I'm sure like myself others are thinking about stealing this idea as well thank you for sharing that. I will move on to the next schedule here and I absolutely acknowledge that there's just so many questions coming in this just shows how how enthusiastic people are but we'll try to cover as many as possible. I think there's a question about realistically speaking you can't meet all of the researchers' needs and demands instantaneously and I think probably for this one is for Jess because you were talking about the appraisal policies Jess what are your policies around prioritization for those needs if you can briefly highlight some of those. Appraisal priorities is that or more in this context more about digitization priorities and how do you decide which things to digitize first? Yeah that's in our in our most recent our sort of strategic directions that we established we have this one strategic goal which causes us consternation on how we're going to get there which is digitize everything important to New Zealanders and it's a lot and what is important exactly mean and so one of the first things that we really did was we sat down and kind of came up with a little bit of a matrix of priorities and and we did tie that to collection development so seeing that building digitizing and building our digital collections was like even though there are collections we already had it was also a collection development exercise because we were making these digital collections available so tying it to our collecting plan priorities and then also tying it to so we kind of had a like a matrix of is it is it quite important in terms of the priorities that we have set for collecting how how how open is the access how difficult is it going to be to provide access how difficult is it actually going to be to digitize the material in terms of the format is quite complicated it's so how much you know bank and back how how what's the conservation either is it really need to be digitized because it's quite popular and it's sort of falling apart from too much handling or alternatively is is there so much conservation that would need to be done on this item that it it wouldn't be that high on the list and so use and then kind of rating it against some of those priorities and then seeing what kind of falls to the top of the pile and that was a process and that's a process that we kind of go through every six months and see what our plan is and then have a bigger plan for the year and it works across so it's not just one team that does that we have territorial arrangement and description archivist research reference staff and conservators look at that and that helps us within the term both to decide what our priorities are going to be from year to year to digitize that's a very well balanced approach and I appreciate that we are running over time now so if we can just take one last question and with sincere apologies to everyone who's asked questions which we haven't been able to cover I'm sure we will get some responses at a later stage from Mark and Jess and I hope you will allow us to do so but if I may pick on a last question which is digitization I think Mark you are probably mentioning this that digitization at the point of acquisition is a really bold step and the question is how do you make it sustainable do you and it's funding for digitization something that you discussed with the donors at the time you're acquiring it and is that both for creating of digital circuits but also for its preservation in the long run yeah great question it's interesting that it's seen as bold because we just kind of like came up with it and thought it was a good idea and just kind of kept running with it and it just kept working no that's I'm underselling it there's a lot there is it sustainable not yet we have as I said we have a relatively healthy acquisitions budget and a very challenging operational budget and so that was part of the shift that we took if we saw digitization as part of the acquisition and made it a condition of acquisition we could shift some of our some of our funding around and so that's sort of helped us with scale it's also made us ask the question around sustainability as I said there's only only one or two that we can do a year so we're really picking on those flagship acquisitions where we think we're going to get that digitization benefit immediately um the conversations it really helps I would say with those the the conversations we had for example with the Flying Nun records record label conversation our ability to digitize immediately and sort of bake that into the into the contract into the acquisition contract was such a strategic advantage and it brought the entire community of musicians that sits behind that collection along with us and that really that was actually the third record label we've we've but by far and away the most complicated that that that we have we've provided that service for so sustainable not yet more likely to be sustainable because it's part of acquisition yes I think so we're still traveling that path and making the shift but the understanding digitization within the whole sort of value chain and the whole sort of life cycle of our collections and pushing it further to the front I think is potentially quite a significant shift that will that will change our business model we're not there yet we're kind of in the process of doing that