 Thank you, Amy. You almost called me the productive manager, which would be quite something to aspire to, I'm sure. Tena koutou katoa. Tena tumihi kia koe, Amy. Kia koutou. Kietu manatutanga o emahi ana. Go Matthew Oliver. Toku ingoa. Tena koutou, tena koutou katoa. And it's great to see such a large group of people here. I did not quite expect it being in the little room. I'm going to start with a little bit of a disclaimer. When I pitched this talk, I thought I was going to have lots and lots of answers to this question that's been in my head about how publishing at Manatutanga can be a bit more, make a bigger sort of active contribution to both government and to the cultural sector. I've got a few answers, or maybe you might just call them ideas. But the bulk of this talk will be about the sort of things we've been learning over the last year as we've, well, the last couple of years really as we've grappled with the idea of how to update an online encyclopedia. And I want to give a mihi to Martha Van Drunen who I can see over there, maybe Jamie Mackay who might be somewhere who have done a lot of the really hard work that's led to some of the ideas in this. A bit of background. I work at Manatutanga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and their Research and Publishing Group. So we're part of a tradition of government publishing that goes back to about the 1930s with war history, historical atlases, histories of government activity, that sort of thing. But my main focus over the last couple of years has been managing Te Ara and NZ History. They've both built up over many years. NZ History launched in 1999. Te Ara initially launched in 2005 and it's what we call the build phase, was completed in 2014. Without meaning to be mean, and maybe Jamie's not here so I can say it, NZ History does tend towards a bit of a pakiha view of our history and Te Ara made a very explicit attempt to be far more bicultural in its approach and it engaged a wananga, did a lot of translation and so on and took very specific Maori perspectives on many subjects. I've been referring to them recently as sort of legacy or enduring content and that's to distinguish them a bit from other projects the Ministry does that are more time bound and project based. And we've developed a new digital strategy recently and that recognises that these sort of legacy sites are really quite central to the work that the Ministry does in public engagement. It's there to support other projects the Ministry does and those projects are there to support the maintenance of that legacy content. Is this going to work? It does. Thank you to the tech people who sorted this out for me. Always good to start with a panic before I talk. We've got quite a lot of content. There are some figures. It's probably small in comparison to collection databases but it is content that requires constant sort of updating and tending and looking after and that begs the question of where do you start? Do you just keep up with the news? Do you look at sports scores, election results, census data, all those slightly annoying taxonomic discoveries that scientists make about species? It's over the last year. Oops, it's gone too far. No, that's all right. Over the last year we've been looking at the social connections theme in Te Ara. It's one of the 12 themes in Te Ara and it was launched initially in 2011. It's heavy on statistics, you know, census, health data, that sort of thing. So it sort of seems like an obvious place for maintaining the currency of the website. But it's also probably the hardest theme. It's probably the hardest theme given its coverage of contemporary issues at the time which really places that material in a sort of historical... It's sort of a point in time. It's quite useful as a record, I guess, of what New Zealand thought was important or maybe what government thought was important there. So that's a bit of a point. I'm going to come back to that historical significance idea a bit later. It also points to some general issues. One of them is sprawl, the way that topics just spread out right across Te Ara. So trying to look at one subject, you're actually dealing into multiple themes. We've been looking at keywords lately. I'm not going to talk too much about keywords because it's such a simple idea, particularly in this sector. You're all doing subject headings and cataloging and all that for Africa. So it's fairly simple, I guess an obvious example is something like places content where we tend to have a places entry. We might have ewe entries that could relate to the place. We've got biographies of people that relate to the place. And then there are just all the tiny little mentions that filter out into all those subjects. Birds is another good example. We always return to birds. I think it's the large forest bird entry, which appears in the bush theme. Correct me if I'm wrong, Mel. You'll remember. And then we have seabirds, which appears in the land and sea theme. So they're not actually connected in any sort of meaningful way, or at least an obvious way. Keywords we've done very well on NZ History through them. Search engines love it because it creates these keyword pages that are really rich in content without promoting them at all. A lot of people are using them. So sprawl is one issue, but then there are bigger issues. And again, it's not a radical idea. Things change. History changes. But I think the really key thing is what we consider worth writing about changes. And that's quite a fundamental thing. What subjects are we covering? So I think we could take the Te Ara article on digital media and the internet as quite a good example. It was written by Russell Brown in 2014. But even in those short three years, things have changed a lot on the internet. His article covers a lot of the important things that were quite valid at the time. So it's a really useful pointer in time of what we think about digital media and internet in 2014. But when we come to update that, how do we just update... How do we tinker... Well, when we update it, do we just tinker with it to try and give it a contemporary face? Or do we actually have to fundamentally revisit that subject and do an entirely new article? But that's kind of that decision point we have to make. Is that subject worth covering in the same way? Or is there something new that needs to be looked at? I think also changes in society, they also influence the way we might approach a subject. We're currently grappling with the way Te Ara talks about gender identity. And the way society in general thinks and talks and accepts gender identity these days is very different to when some of those articles were published in 2011. It's not that they didn't exist then, but I guess government publishing tends to have a slightly top-down or academic approach to subjects, which may not be appropriate when you're dealing with particular communities. Really to represent communities and even just get the right language into those entries actually means engaging with communities in a whole other way. And there may even be subjects where we stop and think, well, are we even the right people to talk about this? Should we just be pushing sending our audience to other areas to get that sort of information? I mentioned biculturalism earlier and I think the approach to biculturalism and the treatment of a lot of Māori subjects is really quite interesting when Te Ara started and how that was conceptualised. I think today it has the potential to look a little bit like other. We have a Pākehā view here and a Māori view here and in the context of the time that played a really, really important function because we needed to shine a light on Māori culture. It wasn't recognised in the way that I think it's being recognised now as quite a sort of integral and important part of our society. Everybody's culture includes Māori culture and you can see that in the talks we've had just in the last couple of days. I've heard more Te Ara here than any previous NDF so I think things have changed in that regard and that sort of what am I thinking? I guess what I'm wondering is what does that really mean for the structure of a website that is built on quite a distinct bicultural model when we want to bring those things back together? I guess what I'm saying is that writing things down and publishing them is a way of fixing things in time and the print world, that was fine we knew what that meant and the digital world we don't quite know what that means anymore. What we choose to write about and the words we use, I guess the perspectives we come from or privilege all places work in a historical context and it's very similar to the way that museums and archives and libraries make decisions about what to collect, what to discard what to promote what to digitise and so on. I do get a little bit hung up on this it sort of stops me thinking where do we go from this where do we go to from here and sort of doubt starts to creep in if what we wrote and how we wrote it fixes the information in that moment of time I'm going to sound a bit like Carrie from Sex and the City should we change it? Are we somehow breaking the historical time continuum I guess is what I'm trying to say and even more than that if society looks at how we wrote about something 10 years ago and doesn't like it if we change that how do we change the possibilities are we kind of hiding the progress that we've made and even the darkness of our past that is getting a little bit dark maybe and I do just want to pause long enough to acknowledge to the people in the audience who did work on tiara, I can see Mel here Emily's back there and I do want to reassure you that we are still updating tiara and we will continue to update it and I say that very strongly well even though why do you look suspiciously at me but but we do have to do that in a more targeted approach and I think we have to also do it with a bit of a hierarchy in mind there's going to be content that's quite easy just to keep on updating all black scores all black scores a number of women in parliament all those sorts of things can be updated quite quickly but there will be some areas so it's not quite so easy to make that decision and we have to decide do we do a new article or even is that subject no longer no longer relevant to today's society and we should just let that piece of content sit as a historical record so something we are doing we're sort of looking at topic pages as a slightly higher order of keyword links that we can start making and so what we've learnt from some of the audience research we've done in the last year is that people and especially young people they're looking for two things credible reliable information but also they're one of a variety of perspectives that's quite challenging for the government we can't just present the government view anymore or the government's sanctioned view I mean it's still valid but it needs to be presented alongside other views and other voices and other perspectives so our role in that world becomes actually starting to be active in presenting those different views and presenting our content alongside those views and it is really what Pia was talking about yesterday about being a node in the network being very active as a node in the network but developing those critical skills skills of course is really important at this age of fake news and fake history to steal Vincent and Molly's term from a few weeks back we do need to address some of these issues that are going on in society and actually trying to shape how people think about them on the internet so topic pages they'll include they'll be like souped up keywords they'll include lots of information from across our websites but we also want to be linking out to other people more we want to be drawing on the likes of Wikipedia of Digital New Zealand we also want to be presenting historical context around some of that information that we're not updating explaining even why we're not updating it I think too it gives us what does it do for us I guess the benefits for us is it provides a framework around which we can start doing some of that updating work on tiara what we've found from picking 100 entries on social connections it doesn't scale very well it's not a logical way to approach updating an online encyclopedia if we can pick topics that are in the news that we're working in our analytics or they're supporting other programs of activity that's going on either within the ministry across government or across the sector we can sort of zero in on those and potentially even get other people helping us do that updating and maintaining work at the same time that's just a little plug in case anyone else wants to jump in but yeah there is this idea that we can just quickly pop up a topic to support something new and keep the legacy content refreshed and updated to respond to that and I think it might also be a way to bridge those different perspectives that exist within our content we can actually I think it would be very hard to remodel the whole underlying structure particularly around bicotrolism but if we can build something on top that pulls different perspectives together and says yes we do have this fairly pakiha view of a place we've only got 10 minutes left I'd better hurry up we can actually link in the iwi story getting those things working together is really quite valuable well it has to be done okay so I'll start running this was the area where I hoped to have lots and lots of answers and I don't have many answers I have a few ideas to throw out there how can Te Ara act as a platform and I'm using Te Ara as a bit of a shorthand for Te Ara and NZ History and all the other legacy content that we have at a simple level it is being that active node in the network and I think using the topic pages actually really helps with that I think there's a second way is to look at other organisations and I'm thinking particularly of government organisations who are publishing general information it's not to do with their it's not their core business it's not specific campaigns but it's information they happen to be specialists in within government Te Ara has a far greater reach particularly into education and into a general audience than your average government department website and no offence to anyone here who works from the government department website you're doing a great job but I just think in that general information we could be collaborating more around those sort of shared subject areas I could give you a quick example we'll be working with Ministry for Health on information about the 1918 flu pandemic which of course has relevance today it's a key part of the World War I story that we've been telling for the last four years, five years you can tell but you know by placing that within the wider historical context that we have you can get learning points both around history and around public health as it relates today I was going to say that longer so it would have made more sense but never mind other examples we contributed to the Hia Torhu exhibition we're actually hosting all the data and biographies behind that exhibition we had for some time so that was a good way for National Library and Archives to avoid them to rebuild a platform to actually host that material so there's clear synergies there beyond government departments we work with communities we're doing a lot of that at the moment with Iwi at the moment we're working with Ngati Awa to tell their Treaty Settlement story and that's part of the Tatae Treaty Settlement Stories project and again that's about them reaching a wider audience with their story but it's also providing us with other perspectives on Treaty history and being able to provide those to the user I'm also thinking about how we could be a home for legacy content I was talking to someone recently who'd done a lot of research and writing for a to support an exhibition all that material was published online the author went to look for it a few years later on the museum's website and it had gone the exhibition had closed the content fell off the end of the long tail and it was culled that sort of thing it's not a one-off we know it happens but I wonder is it enough to take down really valuable research and then just hope the internet archive saved it and that people will find it I think we need to really think more smartly about the life cycle of legacy content where should it reside long term yes we can turn to the National Library and Archives and say hey you guys can look after this and we hope that they say yes and have the resources to do it justice and put it into context and provide interpretation but I'm wondering if we can take more of a sort of collective effort at keeping that sort of material alive keeping it alive and keeping it going in the context that it should exist and where it is most meaningful for users rather than locking it away somewhere and hoping it sort of bubbles up to the surface so yeah I guess it's that no I think I've made that point legacy content it needs to have a life that's within context and wrapped into a broader cultural set of information so Te Ara and NZ History can provide that sort of thing I wonder if I had another slide no I didn't so I guess that's my pitch really doubts ever present of course so maybe Te Ara and NZ History aren't the places you think of as platforms but certainly around keywords and around topics and being that more active member of the digital ecosystem and the network is the direction we'll be going in I'm going to go off script now and I think there is clearly a big theme in this conference about collaboration and for those of you who have been to NDFs over many years, we've talked about collaboration forever we used to be the young people and we were shaking our fists at our managers and telling the organisations to be better well now we're the grown-ups if we can't do anything as grown-ups we're no better than those managers who shook our fists at all those years ago and I think if you listen to the things that Peer War is saying, that Minister Curran is saying collaboration is the name of the game and in the public service we've had that as a theory for a long time under better public services and this new administration, I'm trying not to get political at this point, but this new administration seems to be very focused on making sure we're getting the most out of out of sort of collective I'm not going to say impact I'm not going to say collective impact anymore but that collective effort and that genuine collaboration around users' needs and we do have shared audiences we probably have well, we have a shared audience we have a shared educational audience we have a shared general audience we've got to do something around collaborating with them I guess the other thing that we really need to be mindful of is how many platforms can we actually support and all these platforms now, we've got the big ones like Te Ara is a major investment Digital New Zealand is a major investment Senataf has been a major investment how do we support those big platforms and it really gets into that question that Peer War was raising what do you take forward and what do you leave behind and I think as a sector we have to make some quite tough decisions about that two minutes left right, I can talk for two minutes easily oh and this questions okay, well I better stop that's probably where I'm going with it but taking things forward and leaving things behind I think that's at a micro level and at a macro level so it's platform based it's also looking within your own content and deciding what is the stuff that needs to keep living what's a historical reference getting those things right and I better wrap up at that point and take any questions I'm sorry if you're going over time so hopefully by now you know the drill if you do have a question can you raise your hand and we'll bring a microphone to you it's a kitschy question hi so I built one of these platforms in the past and I share a lot of the sort of use topics to group things and stuff like that and my name is Walter one question one thing that I've done that helps to make the authorship and the context available in public is to have a version history of any content that is added so that sort of allows you to move forward with a piece of content but be honest about its history and how does that fit into what you envision it does and it doesn't I think I think it's those I guess the idea I'm trying to get to is that there are universal subjects that carry on you know people that there will always be an entry on Auckland but will there always be an entry on digital media and the internet or do we need to be able to split those things in half we look at the people's entries which when they're prepared I think middle eastern groups who are very small proportionate society and so they I think are correct well I'm wrong but just let me make the point particular groups sort of were covered very briefly you know and you know maybe a page of content a lot of those communities have expanded greatly in the last 10 years so just having a version on that one piece of content that related to them probably doesn't do it justice you actually need to split that out does that kind of make sense it kind of makes sense I think that my point is more about there is the ability to capture the metadata of how this thing came to be how it was even deleted and its history alongside the actual content making it available is one way of being honest with and maintaining that legacy as well no I certainly agree with that and if you've got ways you can help us we're all ears Keona Philip Otaka from Museums Arturore I'm putting aside slightly that Tiara and NZ History which the questions there are more about who's the audience and what are you trying to keep current for now but also the legacy issues we've just worked with and Tim Jones is here from Christchurch Art Gallery with him and his team to digitise back copies of Agmans journals and this is particularly for students, museum studies students and others who have been interested so I'm quite interested in in MCH or other organisations who might play a role in looking after some of that digital heritage in ways where it's not clear who's kind of responsible for it and maybe there is a role building on that discussion at NDFAGM this morning maybe there's a role for NDF to help to broker some of those kinds of discussions Yeah I think that sort of well we're coming to the end of the World War I commemoration Program and we've already had people approaching us with their database that they thought was a good idea and they'd like someone to look after it and you get into that sort of it does become an organisational ego well not ego but does it fit our we're trying to achieve at the moment no we can't take that on maybe NDF can be brokering some of the sort of shared what is the shared vision that we're trying to achieve and does it fit into that and can we collaborate around that and we're going to have to leave it at that So let's continue that conversation at the NDF stand at lunchtime so stay in here for how lessons learned and online journalism can help shape museum storytelling online otherwise please thank Matthew and move to your next question