 Hi everybody, nice to be here and apologies in advance if I talk rather fast But I foolishly give myself a lot to cover here. And so this might get a little manic at times Okay, now for the past couple of years the upper-high city library has been Experimenting with ways of inviting greater community involvement in the building of its heritage collections Oh It works our primary vehicle for doing this has been setting up of an interactive online database using New Zealand micro graphics Recollect platform This is it here and as you may be able to see it currently holds over 20,000 digitized photos over 400 digitized publications and over 150 digitized manuscripts I've spoken about recollect at previous presentations. So we'll be going to details about it here Although, you know, you could talk to the people at the good people at the NZMS stand if you want to know more information Suffice to say Recollect has various features that enable users to contribute information to items as well as picture tags and geotags Users are also able to download and reuse high-res copies of these digital items Most of which like this are covered by a creative commons 3.0 license Okay, now there were two main purposes behind the input implementation of our recollect site The first of these was to facilitate crowdsourcing information about our collection items from the community The second was to facilitate greater community engagement with our heritage collections Using these items as social objects through which people might connect with one another Ironically, perhaps these kind of web 2.0 style principles have also led us towards developing non-digital strategies aimed at attaining the same objectives The reason for this was because we initially encountered some problems with the uptake of our site that we attributed to the digital divide Namely the fact that many of our target audience were seniors our communities who are less than comfortable with using technology of this kind So as a way of getting around this we started experimenting with what we thought of as analog crowdsourcing techniques one of these involved Printing off hundreds of ace a three sheets of paper like this with themed selections of our images on them from our collections These were then passed around and what we called our way the way we were events This slide is of our first one although we've had a number of held a number of these since that one We usually put on food and beverages at these events to try and create an informal social atmosphere People are able to pause through these heritage sheets at their own pace and share memories about what they see was one another They are also invited to write comments on the sheet itself if they wish or on post-its notes and stick it to it hence analog crowdsourcing As was our recollect website events like these serve as a way of getting our archival collections out of the storeroom and into the community Okay, now this year as a further extension of these kinds of archival outreach activities We ran what we called a pop-up museum with the title memories of Main Street As was many of our best ideas. We stole this Or at least I should say we were strongly inspired by Auckland City Library's successful Dominion Road stories oral history project Where they took over an empty shop on Dominion Road for a few days and used it as an inviting space for people to come and record their memories of that area We too wanted to both tell and retrieve stories about an urban location By setting up a temporary space within it for that purpose in our case We wanted to trace and capture the history of upper huts Main Street, which happens to be called Main Street By establishing a pop-up museum for four days in the local mall, which happens to be called the mall For various reasons we are unable to use an empty shop with actual frontage on Main Street for this purpose So as a way of still keeping a presence on the street It's on the print on the street itself. We created these Individual bespoke posters for the event. I think there were around 50 of them Each of which showed what a particular location on Main Street looked like sometime in the past These were then given to the prison occupiers of that building to put up in their windows This created a sort of in situ exhibition of its own where people could walk down Main Street and view these periodic glimpses into the past For instance the spot where that church there stood up until the 1970s is now a McDonald's And the petrol and the petrol station is a cafe As you also notice the poll all the posters had QR codes attached with which meant that smart people with smart phones Could pull up the record of that image from recollect and learn about it learn about the site while literally standing in the street Okay, now this is the pop-up museum itself which despite its grandiose moniker was a pretty modest affair We are a small institution with limited resources It's simply consisted of printouts of heritage images blew tack to the walls With other images lying around for people to leave through Nevertheless is proved effective enough for our purposes and over the four days. We were open it attracted enthusiastic crowds Indeed we as was our the way we were events It was very important for us to create a relaxed social space Where people could interact with one another So we put on tea and biscuits and provided comfy sofas Indeed we had a number of elderly visitors who were there every day. We were open and just sort of hung out In terms in of our objective of creating a space for social connection around heritage content our pop-up museum proved quite a success It also worked well in terms of our other objective Which was to capture and record people's memories about this area before that information was lost and this was where digital technology came in Here for instance is my colleague Jane with a digital recorder capturing people's stories as they reminisced about the pictures They were looking at this information is now in the process of being transcribed for adding to our recollect site We're also intending to put audio extracts from these recordings up there as well In addition to this we had a couple of laptops on location Connected to our website this not only enabled us to search for and show people other pictures of Main Street that we hadn't included in the Exhibition it also allowed us to immediately record any information They provided us with directly onto the recollect record itself and doing this of course was also a good way of Introducing people to recollect and explaining to them how it worked Finally we also had one of our laptops attached to a flatbed scanner So that people could bring along their own heritage images and have these scanned and added to our collections while they waited And we got a number of very useful accession through doing this Yeah, so in the end we got really great feedback from this event and numerous quests to do it again We're currently looking at ways of better presenting our Main Street material online Perhaps by creating a special section on recollect specifically devoted to Main Street This is part of a more general drive on our part to try and develop our recollect site from being mainly an online Database into a more general local history reference space where our collection items have added value through also having been repackaged into online exhibitions educational resource kits, etc As a first tentative step in this direction We started on constructing a special World War one resources section This of course is an attempt to cater to the interest in this event generated by the centenary commemorations We're currently going through As you can see on this slide slide one of the subsections we've got here will be devoted to providing brief Biographies of local ANZACs. We haven't actually got anything up there yet, but that's going to be a major focus for us in the coming months Another of the subsections as you can see there will provide transcribed copies of First World War letters postcards and diaries that we hold in our archives And those of you who were lucky enough to be at Mia Ridge's very inspiring address yesterday We'll appreciate how valuable this kind of online digitized content can be in providing all kinds of researchers with Contexts about people's experiences during the war This example here is of a collection. We've just completed It's a complete set of letters home from sapper Rupert Christie Covering the time from when this young man first began his training at Featherston camp up until when sadly he was killed in France in 1918 These 500 pages of correspondence were all digitized and transcribed by a small team of community volunteers That we had working at the library and they did an excellent job This was a very immersive project and perhaps not surprisingly ended up being quite an emotional experience for all of us involved Okay, upper hut has a particularly strong connection with the First World War so it's being the site of transom camp The third section of our World War one resources pages endeavors to tell the story of how upper hut was transformed by the war Through presenting an online exhibition of images from our collection These images are all linked to their location on this 1915 Trentham maneuver map Trentham camp maneuver map of the area By clicking on one of the orange location pins there You can view photographs and retext about what was happening at that spot at that time One of the main aims here obviously was to try and increase people's local local people's awareness of the history of their everyday surroundings For instance clicking on the spot mark to see takes you through To this site here This is near the center of town And it was where during the first award New Zealand's remount remount depot was kept This was where all the horses in the country that have been purchased to serve with the military overseas We're initially brought for processing nowadays, this is a site of the local pack and save And here's another example that I don't have time to talk about but it's a spot on the hut river where Soldiers used to go for bathing parade Okay, now one of our aims in creating World War one resources section like this was to try and develop something that might also be of use To local schools as a teaching tool As such it became part of a pilot program run by the library in collaboration with a local school made stone intermediate This pilot program was called World War a hundred quest and it took the form of a series of engaging Curriculum curriculum aligned challenges for students that involved learning about the first world war These challenges were arranged in the form of a bingo card So that kids could opt to do four in a row or three in a diagonal or complete the whole set Tasks included things like finding out about a family member involved in the war Researching a technology use at the time that sort of thing Several of these tasks specifically entailed using our recollect resources such as creating a slideshow about the remount depot Or using the 1915 map of upper hut to compare a contrast a particular upper-hop location then and now The quest also sought to incorporate digital New Zealand's delightful play cards against the library app Which I don't know you're familiar with this allows you to construct a deck of cards using two search terms on papers past In this case I transform and Gallipoli To assist kids in undertaking these challenges a special page of books and online resources to do with the war was set up on the library Catalog that's a handout. We gave to schools to explain to students how to use it and what they could find through you know online And this slide here is of me visiting Maidstone Intermediate and showing the students the kind of resources that We had available on recollect We got a very good buy-in from the school on this project which ran over last term We're currently going through the evaluation forms teachers filled in to find out what worked and what didn't And the plan is to roll out the quest again next year for other schools We're also working on trying to develop something similar aimed at secondary students okay The projects I've discussed so far all involved an element all involved an element of local community collaboration and the time remaining I want to briefly discuss other collaborations grounded in the interconnectivity of the web Now of course one of our objectives in digitizing our heritage collections in the first place And putting them online was to try and get them seen as widely as possible In this regard we've had two recent experiences where some of our digital content has sort of gone viral At least in comparison to the very modest number of hits we usually get And it's worth noting that in both these cases it was the collaborative involvement of other websites that enabled us to achieve this The first example is a fairly straightforward one Like many cultural institutions with online digital content. We've got an APA arrangement with Digital New Zealand yay Who's federated search capability greatly increases opportunities for the discovery of our material Now as part of their ongoing efforts to increase visibility of their contributors collections Digital New Zealand have recently taken things a step further by entering into a relationship with the cult international heritage photography website Retronaut and we were fortunate enough to be a beneficiary of this new arrangement when Retronaut recently Curated a set of our images from the 1960s of young people dancing This selection was put together around the theme that hey even back in the hip 1960s teenagers on the dance floor could be endearingly awkward Retronaut set of pictures was in turn put upon mashable the big news aggregator website with which they have a content sharing arrangement Within a few days these images have been shared over two and a half thousand times on social media like Facebook and Twitter As a consequence of this collaborative chain then these decades old upper-hut images have now been widely viewed around the world While there hasn't been much of a flow and effect to our own website We've never least been thrilled by the enormous exposure. It's given our collections Now the story of our other experience of going viral this year is somewhat more involved It starts here with this Google Analytics page for our recollect website As you can see our visitor stats are trundling along there at a pretty modest rate When all of a sudden right there in the middle of June they dart upwards to like six times the numbers we usually get We've dubbed this the two good spike Partly because we knew the results were too good to be true in terms of any sustainable increase but mainly because They have to do with this man Those of you the New Zealanders of certain age will of course recognize so and too good a well-known broadcaster of the 60s 70s and 80s Now so and too good was also a proud upper-huttian Who in 1984 promoted a fronted a promotional video for the region which we've got available on recollect It was this video that our recent influx of visitors had all been coming to see Obviously it appealed lot at its appeal lies in the way it provides an entertainingly nostalgic time capsule view of upper-hut of What upper-hut was like during the decade of big-hair jazzy size and Commodore computers However, the video itself isn't the crucial part of our story here since we've already had it up online for like nine months and without many Anybody paying much attention to it The reason everybody started noticing it all of a sudden was because it had been linked to this by this site a Facebook page called old upper-hut Now over upper-hut had been set up a couple months previously by two lower-hut based woman Its content consisted almost entirely of photographs that had been taken either from our recollect site or from the Alexander Turnbull Now it is sort of hypocritical of me given that we have a very staunch open access Policy, but I'll own to the fact that I originally felt a little miffed about this site You know like these people were somehow stealing our stuff But what was really pissing me off, of course was that they were having so much more success with it In terms of attracting visitors their site and people posting comments and interacting with others They were far outstripping the kinds of numbers. We were getting on recollect There are obvious reasons for this of course by being on Facebook They could hook into a vast network of people already familiar with the basic interface Who didn't even have to make a special effort to visit the site, but could keep up with it from the comfort of their own Facebook page Still given how much hard work and thought we've been putting into trying to grow our own online community It all seemed well rather and fear that it should come so easily to others In the end though common sense prevailed and we saw that this was basically a good thing in terms of getting our collections out there So we set up with this meeting with the woman involved and running the old opera hot site and we said well done You're doing a good job And we proposed this collaborative Arrangement whereby we tilt them out with content by alerting them to new material and other stuff that we had it digitized Though we hadn't made available yet and returned they we asked that they help us identify information that people had posted on their site about items in our collections and Facilitate us transferring that to recollect so that we can ensure that it was preserved for the future There are more than happy with this proposal and what followed turned out to be a mutually beneficial and supportive Relationship so yeah, we end up feeling pretty flea-pleased with ourselves about this By choosing to accommodate rather than compete with Facebook We seem to have found the best of both worlds on the one hand We could benefit from its enormous popular appeal was out on the other hand having to put up with what from our Perspective where it's less appealing aspects, which I don't have time to elaborate on here On a personal level. I was also pleased because I knew I had this conference paper coming up And I thought okay. Here's a nice little success story to talk about unfortunately At the beginning of this month's this entire arrangement was suddenly derailed For reasons too complicated to go into here old opera hut decided to close down their site was one week's notice Well, not exactly trainwreck. I just wanted to use that image This was a bit of a disaster in that apart from whatever information we'd so far managed to recover for recollect Every comment that had ever been posted on old opera hut had now vanished into the ether If the story up to this point had shown the advantages of using a third-party social media platform Maintained by an independent community group for local heritage purposes, then this brought home the disadvantages Given that there still seemed to clear demand for a specifically dedicated local history Facebook page Opera hut library made the very hurried decision to set up one of its own and this has just gone up Just a couple weeks back Now while this might initially seem like this is just doubling up on our recollect site One of the things that seemed to come across to us from this episode was how web 2.0 enabled heritage databases like recollect and social media heritage sites like old opera hut Facebook Build and serve communities in different ways They therefore shouldn't be seen as simply alternatives to one another But rather as different tools with different strengths that can be used together as part of the same heritage community engagement project That at least is the idea will be experimenting with over the next few months. Okay. Thank you for your time Absolutely brilliant wished that I didn't have to start slowly Sneaking up the stairs Because I wanted to hear more actually and I could hear you were hurrying up towards the end I'm sure there are loads of people who'd like questions could ask somebody on that side perhaps you over there Could you grab the mic just behind on the stand and would you mind being the mic runner? Thank you Do we have any questions and please do use the mics over there in the corner if we could have the mic up there, please Anybody else want to be the second person to ask a question on this side? Just to get the mic there in time Okay, please go ahead. I just wondered Did you track the visits that were coming in through the QR codes and if so what? How many visits did you know some easy questions? No, we didn't And I'm not I hate to confess my ignorance, but I'm not quite sure if we could track how How they came in via that so I'm not actually sure how much uptake that got it seemed like a good idea We're keen to experiment with it Those of you who happened yesterday saw The talk about augmented reality We'll see that what they did in Nelson was a much fancier version of that and it's something that we'd like to try out too But yes, we don't know what response there was for that at all. We have time for one more question Anybody Okay, well two questions, sir if we could start over here and if you could be really brief, please, thank you how much of the Work that you did but what you set up was How much was recollect the particular use of recollect in behind that like how much did it need recollect? How much did what was the whole thing based on the the functionality that recollect provides? What based the Interaction the community interaction Yeah, it's a recollect remains as I said we've kind of Interestingly enough had to be a local community thing was a base in the local community We've had to find ways of not just being online, but merging our physical and our virtual spaces and the comments on we do get a lot of comments on post on recollect one thing I didn't mention about recollect Which is absolutely crucial is that it also allows for a Volunteer editor access so we can give certain people access to the back end as it were and Those people have and there's two in particular and they've posted thousands and thousands and thousands of items on our Online for us good items. So that's another way that it's facilitated, you know crowdsourcing adding content Hi, we thank you just a few quick answers from you about engaging with Elderly in an aging community in terms of some of this online content other than tea coffee and printouts What kind of other quick hints could you have about? engaging them With collections obvious things, but one thing is Respect being prepared to listen You know One of the things that's hard to capture what they're telling you because they'll look at things and they'll go off And they'll tell you fascinating things, but they'll jump around and go on and on and on And you just have to be accommodating of that that that's the important thing and And make yourself available and I do get people popping in all the time into the library and telling me useful information But again one of the frustrating things for me is they tell me fascinating stuff And they think by telling it to me that it's been recorded, but it hasn't and I have to find ways of capturing it Which is where the digital recording Thing was is we're experimenting with that Great. Thank you so much