 Hello everyone. I appreciate you all coming. It's probably partly Sarah's doing, seeing as her session also isn't on. And Sarah is the reason that I joined the NDF when I came to New Zealand, so I'll give a shout out to her because she'll probably see this afterwards. Yep, my name's Leanne Ross, as you can probably tell by the accent. I'm from Ireland, although it sounds a bit more British because I'm from Northern Ireland, which is technically in the UK, geographically in Ireland, and it's very complicated. We thought over it, let's not talk about it. But I live here now, I'm married to a Kiwi. I've been in New Zealand based in Dunedin for a year on the 5th of December. And the reason that I joined NDF is not because I work in the glam sector, so like a lot of the people that have come and talked over the last two days to share their learnings with you all. It comes from a passion for the sector as a visitor, as a user, as a citizen, a global citizen. And so there's a serious imposter syndrome because this is honestly one of the best conferences I've ever been to. I've been to a lot, I've spoken a lot in terms of what you're sharing, your attitude, the detail and the knowledge it's coming through. So hopefully this session will be a little bit more just about either giving you some inspiration creatively from things that are happening elsewhere. More often than not, what I find with things like this is that you realise you're doing the same things or you're already doing better. And for a small nation to a small nation, I know how important that is to get that confidence that actually you're not behind, you're leading the way. So if all you go away with is confidence that compared to the UK or Ireland you're doing a really good job, then I have done my job and you can enjoy your coffee for the afternoon. So often when you come from a small place like Ireland that is so steeped in history and an awful lot of people have said to me when I came here, don't you miss the history? Don't you miss the ancient ruins? And I do in one sense and in the other sense I don't. What I've found in New Zealand and the parts of it that I've been to and everywhere I go from Nelson all the way down to the North Island I will try and get to a gallery, I will get to a museum and a library, it's how I judge a country really and good for you, you're all doing it quite well. Although I miss it, New Zealand has such a rich history and culture and the stories that you tell are so emotive and so that's really pleasantly surprising for someone who moves from somewhere that's considered to have such a long and rich history to come to somewhere that the rest of the world considers to be relatively young in the grand scheme of civilisations but actually there's an awful lot in common between Ireland and New Zealand there are two islands that economically rely quite heavy on tourism and it's a tourism industry that is fuelled in both nations by the stories that you're telling and stories about your place and stories about your people and so while I could list lots of things that the two places have in common one of the most poignant and compelling for people like me who come from Europe is the stories that link the two nations stories like this one that I'll just put up briefly this is my husband's mum is one of the young girls in this photo and that's Belfast which is my home city and they emigrated here in the 70s in the height of the troubles during the war and an emigration journey like mine but not like mine because they spend two months on a boat and I spend 36 hours a month about it on a plane but the fact is that these are really profound stories and they're passed down from generation to generation and the concept that has been talked about over and over again at this conference is that essentially that is what history is and it is your storytelling and it's a job of museums to tell those stories that we're not actually profoundly linked to sometimes sometimes they're stories that don't interest us sometimes they don't have a personal, they don't resonate for us sometimes they're actually deeply uncomfortable for us and we don't want to have to hear those stories but they're important nonetheless so what I want to talk about today is some examples of how those stories are being told to younger generations using technology and why that is an important thing to try and do for museums so I know that it's important not just because I love history and museums and galleries and arts and culture but I know it because I'm actually an agent of the change that sort of threatens the way that you've traditionally done things runaway play is a games development studio in Dunedin and it's a company that I'm currently working for although I've consulted with lots of different businesses and industries over the years they make games that are based factually they're based on nature and they're all about a love of conservation and trying to get people out into nature and trying to give people access to the facts about nature if they can't get outside and yet the next game that they're going to be launching in December is a virtual reality game so it's bringing those very environments into people's homes and a lot of people would argue that that's actually counterproductive to the whole campaign to get people out to get them physically experiencing things but the fact is that I'm someone who's been on holiday to Egypt I've been inside a pyramid, I was 16 to this day it's the best holiday I've ever had, nothing will top it but the fact is that not everybody can do that not everyone can experience that for a myriad of different reasons and those are experiences that over time as everything gets older and needs to be preserved they're experiences that might not actually be open to everyone they might have to close for good so we have to recognise that there will be a place to artificially experience some of that history and some of those stories so the first lesson that I want to talk about and give an example of is partnerships that's been talked about a lot, collaborations here one of the things that I've heard about in the other sessions about technologies like VR and AR and this sort of thing is that they're very expensive there isn't an awful lot of adoption in terms of the pace of the development of headsets and the cost of designing them so this is one example of how there is a lot of funding available from companies whose best interest it is in for people to adopt technologies to try and leverage that funding so that you can get the help from them to develop such products one of them was Google Street View I don't know if anyone saw this Ireland 2016 joined forces with Google Street View to mark a special year in the nation's history so it was the 100 year anniversary of the Easter Rising which was when the rebels fought Britain for Irish independence it's an award-winning virtual tour but really the whole aim of it was to bring the stories of the rebellion to life for people whether they were on foot physically in Dublin or whether they were anywhere in the world and all they had was a device and it was six cultural institutions that came together to provide the stories and the artefacts for it still available online if you want to look it up and take a look and basically through the tour which was narrated by Hollywood Irish actor Colin Farrell which is either a pro or a con depending on your personal preference for Colin Farrell so visitors were able to stop in front of city locations like this one which is the GPO and they could explore photos, videos there was personal letters and witness statements that had been narrated there was artefacts and photos of those that people could look at and now we know that walk-in tours aren't anything new countries around the world are using those for 24x7 tourism access but the use of the Google technology in this partnership gave it the ability to lay over lots of different images it meant that a lot of cultural institutions could bring their stories together in a narrative that was really seamless for someone who knew nothing about it and it really brought a tiny country sort of important story to a global audience and that's particularly important for nations like Ireland or New Zealand where there are a huge number of people dotted all around the place who can't physically get back for an important event like that the second lesson I do want to touch on VR and AR and I talk about this while being really aware and very passionate about the fact that I will always believe that physically inside a museum is a very important and wonderful place for people to be it's why I've brought my son since before he could talk but I still think that there is a place for this technology and the example I want to show you is from Titanic Belfast I don't know if anyone has been as far as Belfast but obviously when Belfast opened its own Titanic museum it came with an awful lot of press and back in 2012 it was this big impressive hull shaped building it was on the shipyard actual slipway that Titanic came off from and obviously that's a story for Belfast as a city that is extremely important to who it feels it is and its place in the world but the 360 degree tour which is kind of an offshoot of a way to do VR without having headsets and give people that kind of similar experience it ended up becoming a real standout pace for the museum now I want to show you, I have a video it's only a few minutes long and I want you to bear in mind that it's been taken on someone's phone so it's not the same as when you stand and you look around and that's all you can see but it'll just help you when I try and explain why I feel it works so hopefully this works because they've embedded it now it keeps going on and on it takes you up out into the sea the reason that I show you that is because in my opinion the reason why something like that works so well in the museum and this is a museum that has personal letters things that have been pulled from the shipwreck it has a Disneyland ride that goes round a shipyard with workers in it and the smells and the sounds and yet that becomes a standout pace in a museum where you can go on to a replica of the staircase and have a Kate Winslet selfie which we've all had when we've all had one and that's brilliant and that's fantastic but why is a 360 degree tour the one that everyone shares and the one that everyone talks about and it's because for the first time for us it shows the scale of it the sheer scale of it and the sounds and the way the lighting changes and so when you get to the end of the museum and we all know how the story ends and we've all heard it and we've all been touched by it but it's so much more impactful when you feel the size of it and you just think hi and the people and the why and that's why because really for a lot of modern audiences we have to work so much harder to make them feel and we have to make them feel so that they really grasp the enormity of some of the stories that we're telling and there are museums like the Epic Museum here in Dublin who are trying to experiment and partner with companies to make their own VR sort of programmes and they are working really well especially among school kids who you're trying to tell them this dramatic story of Irish immigration from the Dublin docklands you know when they're ancestors and really they sort of need to be able to see the people and hear the noises and see the ships because it's just so far removed from the life that they're living but these technologies can be used for fun as well and there's nothing wrong with a bit of fun while we're trying to educate people the Wax Museum in Dublin used some AR technology when they relaunched to sort of gamify the place in a Pokemon Go style and yes it was a bit of a treasure hunt and this sort of thing for children but actually what worked really well for adults was when they placed their smartphones over the Wax models the faces moved and the voices told the story that you would traditionally read on a card beside it and it just gave people that something extra that really made them pay attention and feel and again that's always what we're trying to do and this kind of technology is being used more and more you know you've got galleries who are using it sort of artistic masterpiece exhibits coming in and out and it just does work really well because as much as we would love people to put their phone down for five minutes the fact is that they're so used to using it and they're so used to sharing with it that it does kind of pique their interest and so there's no real harm in doing that you know we're appropriate the second last lesson is digital lifestyles and this is an important one that I want to share because I feel like an awful lot of the challenges for organisations that are very tight on budgets is that you're constantly trying to find ways to bring the technology in and actually you can just take your message out to where the technology already is the platforms already are, people are already hanging out so one good example of this was the Guinness Storehouse this is one of the biggest really the top tourist attraction it has over a million and a half visitors a year so this is where Arthur Guinness and the Black Stuff was traditionally in still is brood but they had a challenge where they actually wanted to attract more international visitors and they wanted to bring the museum to a place where it was more than a museum it was more like a lifestyle choice it was a place that people wanted to come and hang out and it was seen as a cool place to be so they partnered with Airbnb and they came up with a campaign on St Patrick's Day where the Guinness Storehouse was turned into a luxury apartment and it was listed as the most exclusive residence to stay on St Patrick's Day obviously you couldn't buy it because there was only one it was a competition and a lucky couple won it and again you can look some of the information up about this online but the great thing about this is that they didn't have to create the technology for it they just had to partner with someone else who already had the audience they were looking for and they just had to be a little bit creative with it and a bit more fun and the offshoot is that they got tons of PR coverage tons of social media discussions and sharing and it was all amongst that target demographic that they sometimes struggle to get inside somewhere stiff and boring like a museum and all of a sudden it was a cool place because it knows who Airbnb is and it's got this fun competition and maybe it's a place we want to go and it really worked and it's a good lesson not because it was fun and quirky and we all think we're cool but because it worked because it got the audiences talking about it and it got them in the door and the last lesson I want to briefly touch on is social communications I think you all do this really well I spend a lot of my life online unfortunately for my husband and my child but I do watch how a lot of the museums and galleries and libraries here are communicating on social media and they do it really well but a simple way to both do research about whether or not your messages are hitting the right audiences so to reach new audiences at the same time is to take a bit of a risk sometimes and hand your channels over to some of those audiences and I can see marketing people completely freaking out and that's okay but it can be done and it can work well so bear with me I'm from Northern Ireland which is extremely risk avert very traditional, religiously oppressed some might say by its political system but even there three of the top museums, the Ulster Museum Transport Museum, Ulster American Folk Park they all took part in an initiative called the Teen Twitter Takeover Day try and say that before Afternoon Coffee it's the brainchild of a UK-wide organisation called Kids and Museums you've probably heard of and it's all about connected museums with teenagers and as the guys in the talk before me spoke about that this is an audience that is particularly at risk from disengaging with history and culture an audience some of us would argue are in particular need of engaging with history and culture and they're also heavily reliant on digital technologies so the museum brought them in and allowed them to take over their channels for the day after being warned about what they could and couldn't say this is some of the offshoot of what they came up with and yes some of it's very fun, it's very fluffy but what the museums were able to gather from that was how they were talking to their peers and saying how do they communicate they want to share they expect to come into a museum and be told that mobile phones are banned and they have to have a respectful silence and they think it's a stuffy place and they can't have any fun and so they were able to share in that way and the museums were able to find out how young people talk about these kinds of things what they wanted to know about the artefacts and what channels do they want to be communicated with on and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has won numerous awards for doing this on their Snapchat one of the most famous ones is a Roman statue that's sort of dancing and they said that Beyonce stole the moves from there because it just says all the single ladies underneath it, it's fantastic and so many young people engaged with this content and came to the museum specifically because they thought the museum has a personality and they get me on my level and so that's a purposeful strategy for them that has actually won them a ton of awards it saw them beat off the Met and the Museum of Modern Art for a cultural engagement award again, not because it was quirky and cool but because it delivered results and it actually worked so to close I believe that the stories that museums have to tell are really vital for the informed advancement of our society we undoubtedly want to visit them we will always want to be in the physical presence of artefacts we will always feel emotionally overwhelmed by that experience the first time anyone does it and the more that we do it the more that we get out of it in our lives we don't just want to say digital re-imaginings of things that will never be enough for us but at the same time it would be naive of us to think that technology isn't changing our preferences for how we communicate how we take in information and where we want to hang out and where we want to spend our time so there's no reason why that technology, the fun and the excitement and the interest that it brings has to be excluded from the work that the glam sector does in order to actually help you to achieve your aims so that's it thanks