 Hello. I crowdsourced that bio, so it makes me sound fancier than I am. Today I thought that we would, I would talk about the We Are Beneficiaries project and the design and thought that went into that in terms of collecting and showcasing stories of vulnerable people and then hand it over to Valerie to talk about the process of archiving that, particularly in terms of that it was a digital based campaign. So a bit of background into the project. In the middle of the 2017 election campaign, Materia Tude was the co-leader of the New Zealand Green Party and she spoke at her party's AGM about her time on social welfare in the 1990s. She used her experiences to speak out about how the social welfare system in New Zealand was broken, was a broken safety net that needed to be mended. I was a disillusioned voter, politicians were talking about being proud kiwis, about property ownership, big business, rock star, economies, but this was an issue that I felt connected to and it was one of the first times in the election campaign that I felt like someone was speaking about people like me and my friends, talking about the traps of poverty and how messed up the social welfare system is. Within a month, under a storm of controversy over her remarks, she had resigned as the co-leader. I was so moved by this issue that I knew I had to do something and I knew that it couldn't be one voice because even when you're a co-leader of a political party you still risk your job to speak out. It had to be heaps of us and so I thought, well maybe a dozen of my friends who are artists, we could draw self-portraits and share our stories if we shared them within our small networks, we'd kind of feel better and not so alone. But that wasn't really what happened. I popped my story up and then a few other people popped their stories up and then people started messaging us and sharing their stories and saying, I'm not an artist but this is my story and more and more and more and more stories flooded in. Then artists starting messaging us to volunteer via time and energy as artists often do, which is why we're often beneficiaries, to take those valuable stories and create art around them. Some were big stories of outrageous policies and treatment of beneficiaries and some were those tiny microaggressions that occur every day that slowly grind people down. We collected the first 200 stories within two months and presented them as a theme report to the newly formed government by the end of December that year. Having a project takeoff as fast as it did presented some really big ethical questions for us and we had to do some quite fast thinking around implementing systems that kept people safe. So one of the big things that came up was exploitation. I'm a queer person, I'm trans, I'm in the middle of a health services and I'm really used to organisations and media asking me to share my story. We often ask marginalised people to put themselves on display in order to make the case to undo the stigma we face or our society to be less bigoted. This attempt to humanise minorities actually often ends up exploiting us and asks us to put our vulnerabilities on display in the name of the greater good and providing any external holding for us. So it was really important for us that the project was about lifting up voices and centering the needs of the people sharing their stories so that it would be an empowering process for them. The act of creating artworks was a way of showing that we were taking time to really value stories and to create a beautiful way of showing their sometimes very un-beautiful experiences. Talking over was another issue that we wanted to be considerate over. Myself, I haven't been on a benefit for a number of years. I'm not a single mum or a mum at all. I'm parkia and I've only ever had to access welfare for disability reasons for a really short time. I carry with me heaps of privilege and it's really important to me that we don't have yet another white man talking over the experiences of people who are marginalised. Talking over is often a really easy trap to fall into. There's a tendency to take people's vulnerable stories and then speak over them. We were really clear that we did not want to speak over those people. We wanted to use art to magnify the voices of people who wanted to be heard. So it was important we let people use the words that they wanted to use and really make sure that their voices were front and centre. We're grateful to the people who shared their stories and I want to particularly acknowledge the single mums, people with disability. These groups of people on the margins are often subject to the worst treatment within the welfare system in New Zealand. It's also important to acknowledge the amazing work of organisations that are doing work in this area. We often get messages asking us for advice and to be able to pass on these questions to organisations who have the knowledge that is really amazing. So I want to also acknowledge Auckland Action Against Poverty and the Child Poverty Action Group who provided us with heaps of background support and help. We also... another issue that comes up is the real-life consequences of sharing stories in the hope of effecting change. So we know that Materia Turei lost her job. She was a leader of a large political party and she didn't have enough systemic cushioning to keep her job. The real-life consequences for people who are living in poverty, people who have been in abusive relationships, people who are subject to multiple marginalisations could be really huge. So it's important that we were able to anonymise or semi-anonymise people's stories. So even the artists whose stories we gave them to didn't know who they were. We didn't know anyone to ask them for their stories or pressure them to share, but had an open-door policy if people approached us. We would also send the storytellers the art beforehand so that if they changed their mind it didn't have to go live and were able to edit or take down people's stories once they were live if they needed to. Some of the ongoing tensions of the project are around that this was done voluntarily. Most of us were queer and trans people. A lot of us have experience of disabilities. Most of us have been beneficiaries and people were donating thousands and thousands of hours of voluntary labour and it took massive tolls on our mental health, our finances and our lives. We also gifted a really amazing and powerful resource to the Government and we haven't seen that change or even acknowledged the myth of that and that's quite hard. It's hard to set alongside these stories and not have the Government hear them. Also asking artists for free work is the biggest no-no of all time and this is exactly what we've done and it's shit and given that we're not seeing that systemic change come forward at a fast enough pace or I would argue at all how do we keep asking people to share when others are refusing to listen and is it enough to share for the sake of finding community connection for knowing that you're not alone and how can these stories be honoured and I think this is where the National Library comes in. So, I hand it over. Tena koutou katoa. Ko Valerie Love Tokwingua. So I am the Senior Digital Archivist at the Alexander Turnbull Library and I'm here to talk about the library's work with the We Are Beneficiaries project but before I do, I really do want to thank Sam for taking time out of his schedule to be here today and also for being willing to work so collaboratively with us this entire time. So the process of transferring the materials to the library meant a lot of work for Sam and other people involved in the project so I do really want to acknowledge that from the very start. So I found out about We Are Beneficiaries the same way that I think a lot of people did. One of my friends shared it on Facebook and I began following the project and watched from the outside as it began to build momentum and gain attention in the media and I had a chat with a few colleagues in the library some of whom are in this room at the moment about the project and in January 2018 the library contacted Sam to inquire about collecting the digital artwork and other materials from the We Are Beneficiaries project and preserving the project files and artworks as part of the National Digital Heritage Archive. So in addition to aligning with our strategic directions I won't go into that but basically saying that born digital content reflecting contemporary life and knowledge will be readily available for access and research. So it aligned with those strategic directions but the library was also interested in the collection for a few other reasons. So number one We Are Beneficiaries project was a grassroots campaign it was based on social media and it operated in a fully digital way it demonstrated ways in which people are communicating and organizing for change in the early 21st century and some of the posts had gone viral and there were news stories about the project's impact on the general election it tied into our web archivist work to document websites and other materials relating to elections and politics in New Zealand The second reason is that digital materials are inherently fragile and they're often ephemeral so just because content is online doesn't mean that it is preserved if Facebook ever goes out of business or even if one day Sam decides I want to delete my Facebook account all of that content could just disappear overnight So it's important to know that online platforms come and go and it shouldn't just be one person's responsibility to make sure that this content is available and preserved in perpetuity it's a collective responsibility and it's really important to recognize culturally significant digital content and collect it now because there's no guarantee that it will exist into the future otherwise and the third reason and really the most important reason is that the stories and experiences from the We Are Beneficiaries project deserve to be heard and remembered because all too often these stories are not The Turnbull Library aims for its collections to be reflective of the diversity of Aotearoa New Zealand society but like most places we have quite a long way to go in order to make that a reality Lyle Hughes Watkins, who is an archivist in the United States, has spoken about the erasure of people of color and other marginalized groups from the archives with the metaphor of looking at your family photograph album and never actually seeing yourself in it We know that some groups are represented in heritage collections and we know that other groups are barely there at all and not everyone has the time and resources to manage personal papers and digital files in the first place There was the mention yesterday of leisure time being needed to participate in Wikipedia and things like that and it's the same thing here if you are really struggling to get by from one day to the next the last thing you're going to be thinking about will still be accessible in 15 years So again, I really believe that archives and libraries and the cultural heritage sector need to do more to support communities and make sure that we're not just collecting more materials relating to demographics that we already hold We know that keeping digital material accessible in a time of unprecedented technological change is a real challenge for many individuals and organizations and so providing long-term care of the We Are Beneficiaries project archives seemed like a really tangible way that the library might be able to help and we also did want to help amplify and preserve these voices and build our collections so we could reflect a broader spectrum of experience So this is slightly awkward to say with a lot of my colleagues in the room but everybody has been really, really supportive of this project but when I looked at what the Turnbull Library held relating to beneficiaries it was pretty uncomfortable We had oral histories with social workers and women in welfare work but we didn't have anything that was really the first-hand experience of beneficiaries and most of the things that we did have relating to beneficiaries were from the archive of New Zealand political cartoons and so these were materials that were created by people outside the community and a lot of them were pretty awful so these were representations of beneficiaries that have been published in mainstream newspapers sometimes really conservative newspapers and they often portrayed beneficiaries in a really dehumanizing and negative light So it was a real contrast to see what was in our collections and then what this was and it was so very different and so again discussions with my colleagues everybody was on board and really keen to make our collections more reflective and help to address some of that historic representation or lack of representation So the collection itself included the digital artworks produced for the project administrative files including a spreadsheet listing the artists and their assigned stories, publicity materials correspondence and materials for the printed report that Sam mentioned So that included things like Adobe InDesign files, graphics and text and also the social media archives from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram which Sam downloaded and supplied to us So at the time that we began working on this collection the library was still developing policies about collecting social media and the work of doing so intersected across several teams So we held discussions and reading groups with staff across the National Library to determine how best to acquire, describe, preserve and make social media collections available and we were really heavily influenced by the work of documenting the now in the United States and this time last year we held a workshop at the library that Matariki helped us organize with Burgess Jules and Ed Summers on ethical social media archiving and that really influenced our thinking We were also really heavily influenced by Michelle Caswell and others who have written about building reparative archives that center historically oppressed voices and I will tweet out some of the links to their work after this So since we are beneficiaries was a completely grassroots community project it was really important for the library to ensure that we also continued that spirit of collaboration and partnership between the project and the library So Sam and I were in regular communication and checking in with the library's work and just making sure that everything was as it should be and that we weren't making assumptions and we weren't just stepping in and doing things that it was collaborative and Sam liaised with the artists and storytellers to ensure that they were informed of the archiving project and that they also had the opportunity to opt out if they didn't want their stories preserved in the library's collections and as I mentioned in this conference this is really important The National Library is currently part of the Department of Internal Affairs so it was important that everyone was empowered to say no if they didn't want their stories housed in our collections We had lots of conversations about access and permission for certain materials in the collection and also the level of detail that should go into the online finding aid and instead of describing the artworks individually in order to maintain the power of the collective voice so it would be harder to single out individual stories and experiences and to maintain privacy for both the artists and storytellers we decided not to include any names other than Sam's in the online finding aid for the collection and within the library again we had lots of conversations making sure that everybody was on board with the acquisition and processing plan The interactive and fully digital nature of the collection made it different materials received by the library and it illustrates different aspects of contemporary Aotearoa that again might not otherwise be represented in our collections So the most challenging aspect of processing the collection and preserving it from a technical standpoint was the social media archives Again, social media materials contain content from a large number of contributors and can have additional complexities regarding privacy and copyright So we made a general policy decision that social media collections would only be made available on-site in our secure reading room instead of being open access available online So the Facebook account and the Twitter account and the Instagram for the project are open access but the archived research copies do require you to be on-site to use them The digital files including the ones that we've seen in this presentation are available online and are open access The project documentation requires permission for access and again for privacy reasons we didn't retain information that had names or contact details as part of the collection So throughout our work to preserve the We Are Beneficiaries project we aimed to uphold the spirit in which the project was created one of collaboration, openness, humility and partnership where the voices of beneficiaries themselves are amplified I can't say that we've done everything exactly right it was definitely a learning process for I think all of us but we really have tried to again to uphold the spirit of the project in our work with it and again I really do want to thank Sam for all of his work again in getting those digital files ready to be transferred to the library and for trusting us to look after them into the future because that's no small thing and we can't just take it for granted that people will trust national institutions or this sector we really have to continually be earning that trust and being open and transparent and having those conversations and doing the work so we're hopeful that the library can continue to build trust in partnership with the community and it has served as a stepping stone so we've received similar collections from Rainbow Youth with their Outlawed Aotearoa project that Sam was also involved in earlier this year the library launched that project to preserve personal Facebook accounts again trying to just open up the number of voices in our collections and bring in new experiences and different things than what has historically been collected so in collecting social media materials like we are beneficiaries we are continuing the work that has always been part of our mission documenting the lives of New Zealanders today to support the emerging and anticipated research needs of the future and I really strongly believe that we have a duty to interrogate the silences in our collections and to address historical gaps because decisions that we make today on what to select, how we collect and how we describe, preserve and make collections available all has a massive impact on the content that's preserved and what will be remembered as a society and it's really important to ensure that the voices in our collections are not just those reflecting the dominant narrative we must continue the work with communities to uplift and amplify the most vulnerable among us to ensure that their stories and experiences can also be known by future generations thank you all very much Signing has any Sam have you or others involved in this had support for I suppose you could say the trauma collecting and curating this information from CPEG in AAAP it's mostly like I have a therapist that I've talked to many hours about it but there's no there's no money in the project it's all volunteer there's not a holding of it and you know sometimes I've gotten so kind of immune to the stories that I'll just hand it off to an artist and they'll be like oh shivers that's really full on and I'll be like oh sorry like it has been something that has had a you know I can't talk about it without crying but also yeah has deeply affected me and it's quite it's quite amazing what we what we ignore from each other that is happening in our communities probably time for one more three at once I was just wondering from your perspective Sam and Files as well what do you think would have happened to this collection if you hadn't had develop that collaboration and approach to looking after the content and what do you think what else do you think institutions could do to actually sort of encourage that engagement in areas that we're not collecting in or potentially that not that we're ignoring them but maybe we just haven't really put our toe in to have a look and examine those areas Thanks Caleb in some ways I think a lot of collecting is serendipitous I mean you can only collect things that you either know exist or that somebody has brought to your attention and a coincidence that I found out about the collection to begin with so I think it goes back to some of the other things that have been said in this conference about trying to get outside of your own head trying to engage with as many people that don't look like you to sort of get outside of our own personal bubbles that all of us have so yeah I don't really have a good answer for that is there anything you want to add yeah I still think we certainly wouldn't have wouldn't have even thought about approaching anyone to be like this is important to save an archive and it was mostly due to kind of like quite a long process of building up trust between us and me asking lots of questions like what about this you know are you going to collect the facebook messages between people because that's not okay and how do we take out these names and include these ones and that sort of thing so it just took a long time and you were you were interested in that and you talked about the reasons why you wanted to archive it and what was important in that and that felt like a values alignment so it was just a slow building of trust and relationship and things so we have to end that decision here because we have to move on and people don't come in but if we could just give Sam and Velo another round of applause