 A more maula conhed beisECa w excitement I have the information service management company I look after a website Digital I will come into the NDEF for a number of years now and I will find it really interesting and engaging but something that I have noticed focus右 y awws as a bagshja mon Pop отс Going digital mōrwtwords delivery and engagement. Now don't get me wrong, all that stuff is fantastic. I love social media, web, mashups, mobile apps, everything. It's fantastic. So many wonderful ways and innovative ways to engage with our audiences. Much like this photograph, that's very sexy stuff. Digitalisation, on the other hand, is not sexy. And I came to wonder if, perhaps, digitalisation had simply become old-fashioned. And I raised the question in my mind, was digitalisation still relevant? I'll be interested to know what you think. OK, today I'm going to talk to you about the Glass Plate Negative Project, our good old-fashioned digitalisation project. First I'm going to give you a wee bit of background about the museum and then I'm going to tell you how we transition from the analogue world into the digital and how that was necessary before we could conduct a vast opinion of the project. Then I'm going to talk to you about a thing that I call digital bounty. What do I mean by that? Digital bounty is the rich digital collection that is resulting from the project. And at the end, if we bring such a good audience, we're going to have some cake. Nelson Prevention Museum is the leading primary heritage organisation in the Nelson Tasman Districts. We operate two public venues. Tarnaca 445 and Central Nelson is our education and exhibition centre. And we have a research library and archive at Isle Park Stoke. This is where we help the collections and where we do our projects. We have an extensive regional collection. The crown jewel of which is our photographic collection. Recognised nationally as a significant collection, it's estimated at one and a half million images. It's almost a complete photographic record of early Nelson, Prudently present day. At the heart of the collection are the Tyree Studio and FN Jones collections. It's made up of film negative and glass plate. Off the glass plates, we have 150,000 in total. And they range in size from quarter plate right up to 12 by 15 inch plates. And it's a beautiful, beautiful collection. Up until 2006, access to the collection was limited to vibrance. They were contained in these grey boxes under subject category. So it's very, very limited. All our reproductions were through wet dark cream processes. And we had no online access or catalogue. So we would face a lot of institutions with challenges. We had increasing demand for access to the collection. And of course preservation of that collection is probably the most important. And where anyone that works in the museum, it's like working in a relationship with someone with a dual personality. On the one hand, we want to lock things up, keep them safe, keep them in dark storage. On the other, we want to engage with our audience. We want to share our history. So to the rescue, digitisation. In 2006 we conducted a digitisation pilot project. We looked into digitisation best practice and came up with a lesson that we learnt from other institutions where we learnt learning and making our own. Digitalisation is not a perfect science. The idea was to establish a framework for doing digitisation projects. So what did we do? We created a centre-based digitisation studio, efficiently referred to as the Great Bunker, and we started off flat-weed scanning. We then moved to digital photography, and we upgraded our IT infrastructure from home PCs running server 2000 to a fully integrated, late server environment with our very own web server. It was a happy day for me. We also implemented the Vernon Collection Management System as our collection start-up base. And the Vernon web browser as our online catalogue, which we call Collections Online. Okay, the Glassplate Negative Project is funded by the Grants, both public donation and public grantment. We had actually a collection services requirement to move glass plates from wooden shelving into steel cabinets to better particular. And we thought, what a fantastic opportunity to digitise them on the way through. And so we set about doing initially a time-in-motion study to see if it was feasible. And under the results of that study, we were able to convince our governance board to give us the green line to seek further funding and extend the project. So we were successful in that, and we were able to employ staff, purchase equipment and set about the task of digitising those 150,000 plates. The project's been running for just over two years now, and we've digitised and relocated 69,000 plates. And 34,000 of those are now available online. What did we do? Okay, the project, I have three paystaff who work part-time on the project. They work in cares. And for simplicity, there are two roles. The role on the left, illustrated by Errol there, is what we call the catcher, and the role on the right, illustrated by Ian, is retrieval. Errol's role is to capture up all the data. We use Excel for our data capture, because it's really quick. And we have been ultimate use of the abbreviations and auto-correction feature in Excel to speed up that process. So, for example, SPW, if you type that in, it resolves to studical for everyone, and we have a lot of those. And so one of the other things that we capture is the condition of the plate going through. So, for example, Errol will resolve to emulsion of them. The card on the left-hand side there is an innovation that the team came up with by themselves, but it's fantastic. All it does is reference the plate, the four corners and the full sides, and they're able to use the shortcuts that they've developed to quickly enter in the condition of the plate. So, that data capture is great. It's fantastic. We capture name, title, description, catalogue's notes, the location it comes from, the old location, and the new location it's going to, plus, of course, the condition of the plate. We capture the image. We capture the images directly across the server to a storage server, so there's no card, no need to download. It's directly where we want it to be. We capture them as camera raw, and those, for the time being, are going to be our precipitation masters. Errol, who is doing the data capture, is also the photographer using a mouse, and camera software to capture it. Now, the reason we take two photographs, we take a picture of the enclosure, as well as the plate itself. And as you can see, the reason we do that is there's an awful lot of information written on the enclosure. Now, we don't have time to capture all the cataloging information there, but by photographing it, we can go back to any time and reference it. The enclosures to capture is lower risk due to JPEGs and the plates as high risk camera raw files. Ends job is to retrieve, and of course, collection safety is the most important thing. So we have padded boxes. We handle movement of those plates as carefully as we can. His job is to retrieve them from the wooden shelves, and then bring them over and position them ready for camera, for the camera to capture via Errol. And once the capture process has gone through, Ian then put them into designated locations in the steel cabinets. Just go back one. The steel cabinets are lined with preservation foam, and we use S3 card as separators. They're very tightly packed to stop any kind of movement, should there be an earthquake or the like. Meet Gepap, Gepap Grevet. He's one of the project team, but he also happens to be a very talented photographer, and he has been using the images that he's helped to digitise in an art project that he's been working on for the last year, and I'll tell you more about that in a minute. He works an extra day at work as the post-production technician, and it's Gepap's job to turn the camera raw files into modified master tips. So we should have mentioned before we capture the plate emulsion cider, so we avoid any damage to the emulsion. So his job is to invert the plate in terms of back-on-line, and also flip his orientation. Now, it will take in the nature to do every single image as you move through. So we make use of actions processing in Adobe Photoshop and bridge to do all that repetitive task work. So we have a PC with all that set up and we run it in an iteratively through a folder. So the next day, Gepap can come back and work on the tips and modify them to be aesthetically pleasing, which is what that is about. Then we have a process of converting the Excel data and importing it into Vernin. It has to be verified first by the Photographic Collection Manager, and then it is important into Vernin and the image is attached, and then it is exported to our collections online groups. Now, the project was going along at a swimming rate. It was fantastic. It had a momentum of its own. It had far exceeded our expectations. Then on the 22nd of January this year we had some really bad news. As a result of a detailed engineering report into the seismic and tear-regear of our building, we were told to get up because we were the great crime. So we had to close the doors to both staff and public and relocate to different premises, but we couldn't have friction with us. So until a remediation plan had been replaced, we thought there would be a number of weeks. Nine months later we finally had a solution. But unfortunately we had to suspend the project over that time. We literally had to prop up the building, and it's been very, very trying, but I'm very pleased to say that in mid-October last month we were able to keep the project off again. I believe that we should always celebrate milestones, even if it's a public acknowledgement of the job well done so far. When we got to our 30,000th late, which represents a third of the way through, we did a story online and told the story of a sample elderish, sorry, and we don't know anything about her, other than her name. Anyway, we wrote a story about her and the fact that we were a third of the way through, and our collections trust CEO Nick Paul packed up on the story, and in an interview with Katherine Ryan on the Lightning show he said it was a great example of a technology hoping up collections so that people could engage with their past, which was very flattering, and good on you know. Which leads me into talking about Gear Pass again. This is Gear Pass project. He is doing a series of images for the World War War 100 project, and what he did is he took images from our collection of from Efring Jones' collection of the Taekwere military camp. Taekwere is about 50km out of Nelson, and soldiers train there prior to departure to overseas during World War I. Gear Pass walked around paddocks of Taekwere, comparing hills and geological features until he was satisfied he found the right location, and he took a photograph of it. And with the aid of Photoshop created these amazing augmented reality photomontages. It's a really good example of what I was talking about earlier in terms of digital bounty. Gear Pass is starting to harvest that bounty that we are creating. Another project I'd like to tell you about is the Heart Project. It's a heritage education augmented reality tours, and it's a mobile app based on a paper-based education program that we have with our original schools, where they walk around Nelson and using a smart device like an iPad or a mobile phone that will overlay a historic photograph on the scene that I see in front of them. It's a brainchild of David Bryden, who's a second year NMIT student, and it's a collaborative project that we're doing ourselves. The Nelson City Public Libraries, Nelson City Council, and NMIT themselves, Nelson Melbourne Student Technology. And we of course are able to access our own collection and it's going to be a fantastic resource for our own WW100 project. Okay, cake time. I wanted to talk about this idea of digital bounty more and the easiest way to do this is to do it in an analogy. So if we think of digital content, and it's the whole shooting match, there's digitisation, collections, engagement, social media, the whole works, there's a cake. Then the flour, eggs, milk and butter you would liken them to our collection objects. The raw materials of a cake. They stay in storage are really waiting for us to use them for something special. The work of digitisation is like the mixing of the ingredients. It's hard, tedious work but the resulting cake mixture can be used to bake into something special. The cake is like the digital bounty. It's like our digital collections but as a cake better first comes out of the oven, then the cake will pass without announcing it. If you were able to sink your teeth into it it would be very delicious. So not until we ice it and put it on display do we start to trick people in and this can be likened to social media, web apps all that really interesting exciting engagement stuff. Once it's iced, people take notice and everyone wants to have a bite. The very important point is the same fit with digitisation. The more cake you have the more people want it. So the more we do as institutions the more we digitise the more cake we can make and that way we give everyone what they want and what they like. Thank you. Any questions? I knew someone was going to ask it. That's another pet project that I'm working on. At the moment through our collections on website you're able to use the images for research. No worries at all. If you're researching, just go for your life. We do if you want to reproduce it then we do require you to go for a reproduction process and tell us why, for example, if it's for commercial use there is a fit. Generally speaking, if it's for a research project or non-profit we don't charge a reproduction fee. But at the moment the reproduction rights are very tight. Personally, I would like to see us move towards creative commons licensing specifically on our copyright material but when I'll be here. Thank you. I have a question about the blade store up. Is the storage delivery I'm just thinking of local councillors who are quite aware of so was that the storage or the technology of the server was that part of the lottery or I see a lot of digitalisation approaches will go for the money to create the data about the storage and ongoing access that is something that's needed for bonding. I'll just write the image. We it wasn't part of a grant it was capital expenditure just to give you a bit of background we're a CCO we have two local authorities that are 50-50 shareholders and us we're a charitable trust and essentially they're bulk funders and we then are able to create our own direction and there are a lot of advantages and disadvantages to that. One of the advantages is that we have autonomy over our IT infrastructure and so essentially we put in the money to create the late centre but it meant that we had total control over it and so one of the things I mentioned is that we have our own web server and the advantage of that is that we can put on as many of our images as we want without having to worry about hosting costs and at 34,000 and growing the presentation earlier talking about $600 a month for hosting for video data we couldn't afford to do that but we can with our own web server and it's just the cost bandwidth and we've got an extremely good partnership with the local ICB does that answer your question? Yeah. Thank you.