 I'm Jennifer Taylor Moore and this is Tim Jones and we're both regional ambassadors for the National Digital Forum. And today we just want to give you an overview of how NDF has been working in the regions. So each year ambassadors are appointed by NDF to represent the organisation in the regions and these ambassadors are responsible for the dissemination of information regarding NDF as well as organising these forums and events to support the main conference. These forums are funded by NDF and they're held prior to the main conference in Wellington. And they usually take the format of an un-conference, which is where participants decide on the day what they wish to discuss at the event. They submit these topics which are then grouped into themes and then discussed in detail. With a shorter travel time and no accommodation costs required these regional forums are easier for those with smaller budgets to access and this enables the NDF to provide support to smaller sites that wouldn't normally be able to attend the main event in Wellington. It also provides a less intimidating format and more easily encourages active participation from attendees. The target audience is incredibly diverse from large, medium and small institutions from the glam sector to EUI businesses and school archives as well as volunteer run organisations. Some examples of the smaller sites who have attended recent events include the Methvin Museum, the Wanganui Collegiate School, Volunteer Archivist at Putiki Marae, Te Artifi or Te O, the Independent Māori Research Institute for Environment and Health as well as volunteers from historical societies such as the Ellismare Historical Society and the Foxton Historical Society. Some of the positive outcomes of these forums include the strengthening and fostering of networks within each region, connecting up sites with available resources such as National Services to Paerangi and also providing reassurance that other sites are facing similar challenges or addressing like issues and these lessen the feeling of isolation for the smaller regional sites. Further opportunities exist for scheduling by the ambassador of Skillshare events as well as ongoing meetings to review material from the online archive of previous NDF conferences. A particular challenge for the ambassadors is to get the word out about these regional events to those who will most benefit. We rely on previous invitation lists and also on glam sector directories such as the Museum's Aotearoa Directory but because the audience is so diverse it is sometimes difficult to know how to make contact with the smaller sites. Information about these regional events are posted on the NDF website and also promoted in various glam sector newsletters such as Museum's Aotearoa as well as being promoted on social media. I just thought I'd outline for you some of the interesting and challenging topics that have been raised at recent forums and these include a major issue which there is no specific answer for, the future proofing of digital file formats. We have discussed how we can ensure that these digital files remain active, accessible and stable into the future. Discussions have been held around how we can set up a framework or a procedure to manage this process. What file formats are going to be the most versatile with the most longevity? How can we manage and update obsolete file formats and how can we best store and backup these files? We've also discussed and sort of tried to promote the importance of ensuring regular and recoverable backups are maintained particularly at smaller sites that have no IT support or infrastructure. There's been a lot of uncertainty expressed at forums regarding the complexity of copyright as well as how to use Creative Commons licenses and this is also particularly challenging for those sites that don't have an established protocol in place. We've discussed the sharing of data with aggregate sites such as Digital NZ, NZ Museums and E-Hive to name a few and in particular the image permissions from subjects contained in images on these sites which include but are not limited to EWI subjects and the difference between having permission for your own local site versus sharing these images with these aggregate sites such as at the National Library in Digital NZ. Another hot topic is photography of collections. People are seeking advice about what image file formats and sizes are best for storage and use. How do you manage access to these files and how do you protect the raw and master files as well? So following these events, the ambassadors report back to the NDF board regarding these issues and challenges and now I'm going to hand over to Tim who will discuss some of the outcomes from the regional forums in more detail. Thank you, Jennifer. My name is Tim Jones as has already been said. So I was going to talk about some of the outcomes as has been said. This year a group of Canterbury Regional Forum attendees got together a few months after the regional forum to talk about various problems and projects connected with name authority. This issue had specifically arisen at our regional forum in June and seemed to justify more exploration than was possible on the day. Rowan Payne who's here somewhere from Digital New Zealand and Michael Lascarides from the National Library joined this group because we talked about it and they heard about it and they wanted to be there too. The University of Canterbury's project Understanding Place is currently wrestling with naming places with no street names in Canterbury's cleared red zone and Christchurch City Library's manually created index of street name origins is a candidate for conversion into some kind of database with maps or external links. Personal name authority issues are bubbling under thanks to projects such as the fine New Zealand artist's website, the research into early Canterbury photographers and the Canterbury Museum's McDonald Biography project. So this was an agenda free get together but was extremely useful and allowed different project solutions to comparable problems to be explored in detail. It would not have happened without the regional forum. That's a simple fact. So a report on each regional forum as Jennifer has already said issues from forums are fed back to the NDF board and they provide a framework for planning future programs for this very conference. Joanna who is the board's professional development portfolio lead reports that NDF board play close attention to the regional reports so that's good to know and I quote her they were a particular highlight of last year's AGM. That may tell you something about what else was on the agenda but they were a highlight. So finally what of the future feedback on regional forums that we seek and we receive is extremely positive but that's no reason to suppose the forums couldn't be better still. People generally love coming to the forums. One comment that is repeatedly made is that although the network networking and the freedom to think about any idea of common concern is very useful and very liberating the next step which is delivering or organizing or facilitating actual skills training is often missing. NDF will assist with actual training if a need and a trainer can be identified and Jennifer mentioned that. And some regional forums do run as de facto training sessions but this raises the question then of what NDF's role really is here is NDF a training provider? Could it be? Should it be? How many, how would ambassadors organize this? What would the business model for this be? Or is training something that individual institutions and individuals have to organize and therefore pay for themselves. I think it's fair to say that the smaller institutions often come to NDF regional forum in my experience with fairly high expectations of a training outcome which they don't receive. Another point raised in regional forum feedback and not unconnected to the training question is how NDF's regional activities, the forums relate to other national bodies regional activities such as MAs, Regional Hui, their EMP activities, Lianza's communities, the National Services to Pirangi's various programs and probably other sector specific programs and projects that I'm not even familiar with. Now perhaps these activities from these various organizations do all operate perfectly well and independently but you have to think there may be a risk that there's a duplication of effort or that we're chasing the same speakers or the same venues to achieve very similar things and cover the very similar territory. As well as national bodies operating regionally there are of course plenty of formal and informal local groupings and personal connections between neighboring institutions which work perfectly well without any national coordination. Though these connections may certainly be strengthened by events such as the regional forums. As one at NDF said at our most recent event in Christchurch, this forum is worth 1,000 emails. We might also consider the unconference bar camp style event. We might consider whether that's still the most useful way of proceeding. It requires very little organization in advance but it's high risk because it depends on the participants being energized and on the day which you can't rely on. My impression is that it's extremely useful once or twice but does not necessarily bear repeating especially with the same participants. Finally we know that there are parts of the country which the networking opportunities of a regional forum have not reached. We in Canterbury know that the west coast of the South Island is one of those. We're delighted when small clubs, societies, churches, schools community groups come along to a regional forum but this always raises the question of what other cultural organization social groups with collections and digitization issues may be absent. So we've spent 15 minutes showcasing NDF's regional forums and speculating on what if anything could be improved. What I think is really needed though is a bit more research. There exists plenty of feedback and reportage on many years of forums and some more formal analysis than has been possible here would be very useful. Questions that such research might try to answer could be are there any trends or patterns have topics come and gone over time? Are there particular training needs that are simply and repeatedly not met? Or have these in fact declined over time? Do the same people come each year? Do participants get regional forumed out? Is networking such a valuable end in itself that it alone should be the focus of regional forums? Is the conference the best way of facilitating such networking? If you have any thoughts on any of this you should talk to me or to Jennifer or to your regional ambassador or to somebody on the NDF board. You could do any of those things but probably the most useful thing you could possibly do is come to the AGM which is being held tomorrow morning because you may or may not know that NDF itself is doing a bit of strategic planning and this reflection on its regional activities seems to me an extremely logical part of that more global reflection on what NDF should and shouldn't do in the future. So there we are, 8 o'clock tomorrow morning somewhere in this building is the place to come and tell us what you think. Thank you very much.