 Hi, thank you for everyone who's joined us today. I was just saying I hope people aren't too excited about talking about volunteers, because I can do that, but that's not partly not what I'm talking about today. I'm going to talk about our volunteer digitisation project and I've chosen today, honestly there's so much that I could tell you that we've learned over the last couple of years, but I've got 20 minutes and we're already running late, so what I've chosen to talk about today is how we achieved it and how we managed to get it done. So it's more a story of priority setting, decision making and project management, and these photos, they're just kind of incidental, but they're pretty nice and it's getting late in the afternoon, so I thought I might illustrate my talk with some pretty pictures, in case my comments get a bit dry. So in 2010 we ambitiously proposed to digitise our terrestrial invertebrate holotype collection using a team of volunteers. For those of you that aren't from the biological sciences, a holotype is the actual individual specimen that a scientist to describe when publishing a new species name, which is then lodged in a public collection. Over the 150-plus years of the South Australian Museum, we've accumulated around 8,700 of these. We don't know exactly how many, but we're getting there, but and by their nature they are irreplaceable of the highest research value and because they're 100-year-old insects, they're very very fragile. They're also dispersed throughout the 5,100 draws of the insect collection, they're the ones in the red boxes, and at the commencement of our project approximately 20% of our insect collection was databaseed. Sorry, 20% of our holotypes were databaseed, but less than 5% of our 2 million strong insect collection was databaseed, and that was in a Microsoft Access custom set up that wasn't in the main collections management system. To make complexity to all of this in case there wasn't enough, insect taxonomy is constantly shifting and contested ground. So to put it politely, our notion of digitising these types and getting them online using a team of volunteers was met with some skepticism. I spent my first weeks in the role being instructed on many floors of the building about the myriad reasons that this would be impossible. We'd never be able to take pictures that were of any scientific use. Volunteers couldn't handle insect specimens. The collection included an unknown number of unpublished taxonomic names and if there would be dire consequences where I'd publish these online. It didn't matter much anyway because I wouldn't be able to get anything online because we were buried behind a fortress of firewalls and we couldn't possibly get the images out of the building. We hadn't finished, but oh hang on, we haven't finished, but we are already talking about the project as a success. It succeeded because of a couple of things. Establishing a set of priorities that has helped guide our decisions and understanding the task as a series of constant small rolling projects rather than a massive undertaking that appeared to be at the beginning. None of this is really rocket science, but what it is is a real world demonstration of some of the common issues that we face when starting a digitisation project. And finally, I'd like to tell you at the end about the fact that the benefits of this digitisation project have been far, far greater than the digitisation of our insect type collection. As I said these photos, they're just incidental. So I started the project without any entomological or digital photography experience. King set out a good project plan. I started cramming with research about entomology and best practice imaging and metadata standards and high end equipment. I quickly realised that I could spend far, far more than my allocated 12 months and millions of dollars creating something that would be really special and not particularly achievable. So I worked slightly and started again. Reviewed the resources that I'm learning from and I looked into guidance generated by bodies, many of which we've heard about today, including the UK's joint information systems committee, European honour, the global biodiversity informatics framework and your very own digital New Zealand. So these resources advocated setting priorities for selection, considering user or demand lead digitisation. And they prompted me to ask questions about why we were digitising rather than what we were trying to do. Understanding why helped Dutton and a couple of key priorities which came to govern how we set about digitising. So I can't plan credit for the group of specimens we chose to digitise. That was in place before I came on board. But it was helpful to consider why we were digitising that group. Scientists can only work on what they can document and name but the inherent slowness of taxonomy and the contemporary rate of species loss means that around the world we're losing species at a far greater rate, far more rapid rate than we can identify and name them. So signatories to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity are called for action to speed the taxonomy process wherever possible. Taxonomists when they find a new species must compare it to all the types of the related species before to publishing the description of the new species name. Finding this often involves tracking down the original species description to find out where it is lodged. And in many cases they'll find that group of insects that they're looking for, group of animals they're looking for is spread across many institutions or if they're really lucky various continents. So seeking loans or visiting collections to examine specimens is slow, expensive and prone to errors. Through this project I've encountered numerous examples of species names that are not taxonably certain anymore or unplaced because they were overlooked in revisions and so forth. So understanding all of this led us to our very first and probably most important priority which was improving the discoverability of these specimens and especially making photos accessible has really demonstrable and immediate research value. In addition to this, these tiny delicate specimens are up to 150 years old. Insects in collections are pretty hardy providing to keep pests out but any reduction in handling has an obvious preservation benefit. So generating high quality digital images, databaseing them and making them discoverable online not only reduces the likelihood that these specimens will be loaned but also reduces the handling by our own staff and local research colleagues as well. Our digitisation project was funded on the basis that we were digitised through the team of volunteers. This is Ellen, one of my excellent volunteers as part of a group of rapid digitisation projects supported by the Atlas of Living Australia. So we needed to get this job done in a way that could be practically achieved by a team of volunteers rapidly and could be finished and reported on as a short-term demonstration project. So focusing on that as our task rather than thinking about it as digitisation of insect collection pointed us in the direction of our second key priority which was which I'm loosely terming efficiency. So going back to my daily cribbing about high-end equipment imaging standards and a pretty snazzy camera, this needed to be reexamined through a lens of practicality within our context. We would have a team of 15 unskilled operators using fairly technical equipment to photograph delicate significant specimens and create database records that must be useful for a very particular research community. So keeping my eye on this reality, I stopped using the term best practice and started using the term best practical results. I stopped looking at the highest quality equipment and started looking at equipment that encouraged repeatable processes. I stopped looking at the meaning of every individual manual control and started looking at approachability and interface, measures to add consistency and ease of use. So I'd just like to describe a couple of decisions that had to be made in the project and how keeping our eye on those priorities of discoverability and efficiency helped us respond to the challenge. As I hinted this started with the choice of equipment, rather than getting the highest number of megapixels available, the latest and greatest high-end camera or the absolute best optics on a lens, it was more important to focus on our aim of getting top notch results from 15 different operators with really varying levels of skill, experience and confidence. So yeah, choosing equipment that encouraged repeatable workflow. Keeping eye on software interfaces and locking down controls for consistency across all of these different photographers. So similarly it affected our decisions about the images that we capture. If you're a scientist identifying the many fairly identical looking tiny brown beetles, often comes down to examination minute morphological elements such as the position of certain hairs or the shape of their genitals. Spent too long with an entomologist you end up talking about genitals, it's a thing. The Harbour Museum of Comparative Zoology provides a really useful online guide to useful angles which one should capture for taxonomy, which indicates that some insect families up to eight different views are required. This would have been prohibitively time consuming and even now with all the experience I've got, I can't guarantee that my photograph of the dorsal posterior view of a ski telem would be captured at the correct angle, let alone one taken by one of my many volunteers. So returning to our focus on efficient quality outputs from a non-specialist team with an eye to rapid discoverability, we created a set of standard views, dorsal, lateral and labels, that's above from the side and just the labels for every specimen. If someone really wants a picture of a certain tegument of a cockroach, they can request it and they can tell me where it is in the process. And in that case we could retrieve the specimen, refotograph it, deliver it and add the image to our archive. I chose to put our time into building an image archive and capturing a smaller number of views of a larger number of specimens rather than preempting every image that might ever be needed. The specificity of entomological research also means that having taken four times as long to take four times as many photographs, we may have found that only a fraction of them would ever be used. The other, it also influences the nature of the photograph taken. If anybody has any experience with insect photography, if you capture something that's a micro specimen, you capture very shallow depth of field. So we have both of our equipment is set up to do focus stacking, where we take a series of images at the same focal length at slightly different distances, montage those photos together and you will get a perfectly in focus specimen. So in this you can see the far legs and the close legs are actually all in focus. That's actually a montage of probably about 12 images. That's slow. We're doing this for our holotypes because it's important to do that. We did a reference photograph set of all of our cockroach specimens for those because they're really just a quick reference for identification purposes. Someone's already identified the specimens, they're not going to be looking for the shape of a certain foot segment in most circumstances. We did a single shot from above with the labels in the photograph. So what we did was make decisions about the requirements of the specimen informing the nature of the photograph we were taking and allocating our time as would be suitable. We also know that in many circumstances we have two million insects. Photographs aren't necessary for all of them. What's necessary for all of them is being able to find a point on a map and being able to analyze that data using the Atlas of Living Australia's web service analysis tools. So we don't need to photograph all of them but we do need to database all of them. Early on I encountered project crippling roadblocks where it came to delivering high resolution images online. Laying up the time of resources it would have taken to overcome these problems, I chose to deliver lower resolution images through the Atlas of Living Australia. The reasons for doing so included that it would free my time to continue the rapid generation of new digital material in what was a time limited project. It also meant we could defer resolving this challenge until a time when we were more experienced and more technically prepared to be able to do so. We will do it one day and it also meant that all the while we were building a robust high resolution archive internally while making collection data, low resolution images and contact details rapidly discoverable. So if someone does require that high resolution version of an image they could find it, find us and ask us for it. One of the biggest bottlenecks in the project was the migration of extant data into the Darwin Corps metadata scheme. In this instance our priorities justified the time that it was invested in it. This data gained so much value by being shared, putting the points on the map, making them suitable for combination with other data sets was part of the whole point of the project and so Darwin Corps also provided a tested, hardy and externally defined framework to improve our consistency and efficiency in the generation and management of data. The project was made up of many small and large decisions where best practice sometimes seemed unachievable but knowing the priorities that were at the heart of our project helped us carefully and considerably fully aware of when we were sacrificing and why sometimes let go of best practice in favour of getting the job done. In other circumstances these priorities justified a refusal to compromise. I'd like to just move on to the issue of project management. Recapping 2 million insects, 8,700 holotypes, some of them database, some are 20 centimetre long pin stick insects, some of them are half millimeter card mountain beetles, some are frighteningly delicate dragon flies encased in half century old cellophane envelopes. In working at how to photograph them, database them, deliver them and manage the resulting digital assets and it's been really helpful and has had unanticipated benefits to see this as a constellation of small projects rather than one giant project. I became really evangelical about a statement that I picked up from the Smithsonian Commons project charter which explained that their endeavour will not come to life overnight nor will it come to life through the necessarily cautious, slow design and build processes that are used in bricks and mortar construction. It will evolve through a series of trial and error over many iterative newly produced experiments. I also found it useful to consider the principles of the agile development and lean project management theories from the worlds of IT and business. Cautious about mentioning these because Simon criticized it as part of his digitisation death spiral this morning. But that lean project management in particular talks about the build, measure, learn pathway which is characterised by small experiments to test and evaluate and refine one's project as you plot the path forward. And what they ask you to do after that is pivot which was changing course with one foot anchored to the ground in response to the evaluation of that small experiment. So it's not wiping the slate clean after any of these little things, it's keeping an eye on those priorities but actually encasing a set of experiments, learning what you can and implementing what you've learned into the next set of experiments. So I do like to characterise our task as a series of small experiments, some of which were well thought out and planned as small projects, some of which just happened to be small projects as a result of circumstance. So at the start and at the very simplest level the equipment for photographing large specimens arrived weeks before the microscope photography equipment. So the earliest iteration of the volunteer program had members of the team working very slowly in pairs to photograph large specimens. Specimen handling difficulties and rough edges that emerged in those first few weeks informed the workflows that I created for the second workstation when it arrived. We took the most structured small small project management approach to data basing. I was very uncertain of how capable the volunteers would be and how we could reconcile existing data with new data and how to re-organise existing data to make it compatible with Darwin core that required metadata schema and also how do you think about one day getting into the main collections management system. So I started data basing experimentally with two experienced volunteers creating very small discrete sets of records in a separate test database of short periods of time. A volunteer feedback at the quality of the resulting records prompted changes to the interface in a second experiment. This went through about four different interfaces before we set a lower procedure and the volunteers were cheerful to be in my key picks throughout the process. Finally the labelling and the taxonomic validity of the names in our insect collection is inconsistent. Where it hasn't been well curated it can be really difficult even for a very experienced entomologist to work out what things are. So thus we started with a very well documented labelled and sturdy collection of 70 QPLD moths like this one here. It seemed a more sensible place to start than the hundreds of eccentrically organised wasps of the early 20th century syphilitic French-American Australian hymenopterist Alexander Gervaux. It's cute. We struggled to work out what it was called. It was commented that in the early days that by starting with groups of well curated taxonomically clear specimens that were in good condition we would only ever be able to digitise the low hanging fruit. I really disagree with that being a criticism. I actually love the low hanging fruit. The low hanging fruit are a really awesome way to learn what you're doing. So I knew that if we waited until I knew exactly how we would digitise the most taxonomically and physically challenging specimens before we started we would never have gotten this ball rolling. So two years down the track we have made it to some of the higher altitude fruit. Drawing on the experience of those earlier easier groups we did make it to crazy Jerome's wasps as demonstrated and straightened out many of those taxonomic issues. We've been able to marry slide mounted dissected material with pinned sources and deliver the record online with images from these separately stored parts of the specimen. And we've got the very the most skilled specimen handler in the team who has demonstrated such care over two years of volunteering and photographing very carefully and very slowly photographing terrifyingly delicate pest damage 100 euro cockroaches. We're now better able to describe and quantify what we can't do rather than assuming that the volunteers can't photograph the fragile dragonflies I know they can't rather than waving a hand across the collection and saying we have unpublished manuscript names somewhere in there I know which ones they are rather than saying that the volunteers can't database and insect collection I know they can. They can't georeference very consistently and they can't test the taxonomic validity of foreign species names but they can create the majority of the record for the majority of the specimens. So returning back to the early skepticism that I faced some of those barriers were accurate and were accurately described but now I can better describe them I can enumerate them and I can quantify those barriers and it's not going to prevent us from delivering what we can. The other benefit of small scale project management needs is that I was able to report constant rolling successes. This helps maintain the enthusiasm in the team of volunteers but it also contributes to the culture change that is still necessary to consider digitisation a core part of the business of the museum which leads us very nicely to my final point that the benefits have been far greater than the photographs of the insects. So yes we photographed more than 6,500 types specimens about 16,000 photographs we've delivered about 4,000 of them online for the others of living in Australia but there's more going up every month. There have been other really significant benefits for the South Australian Museum there are a couple of really straightforward financial and organisational benefits. Firstly, we've achieved state government funding for a volunteer digitisation project for our original cultural collections modelled on my project and led by one of my former volunteers. That will soon see thousands of items from our world renowned indigenous collections going online where appropriate but also working in a bit of digital repatriation and reconnecting with some of these communities which will benefit the community that these objects have come from and also our own records of the meaning of some of these objects. Also we can't claim sole credit for this one but I think it was probably helpful to be able to include images like this in our successful application for a multimillion dollar refit of our entomological collection store in order to combat the persistent pest problems that we have. So part of that project also includes migrating all entomological data into our collections management system which means that it will all soon be available on the Atlas and Living Australia not just the types. This scenario would actually probably have been more challenging to the relevant staff involved having not tested the water with the small groups of a couple of thousand types to begin with. It's also given us timely experience in open data licensing and online publication as during the period of this project the South Australian government has made a commitment to open access licensing of all public sector information. All data and images provided through the Atlas and Living Australia are open licensed and given my experience in this recent project we participated in the Gulf Hack open data competition. So the benefits haven't been limited to our organization. I've taken the role as a demonstration project very seriously. And so if one is interested in our processes our equipment and our volunteer management there are a lot of resources which we published on the Atlas and Living Australia and they've also been picked up by the US based IDGE bio initiative. Oh hang on I've got more bugs left than I thought. So the biggest benefit by far has been the slow detectable cultural change in our organization. Nothing is more effective at eliciting support than success. So coming from a situation we know SM Museum images were delivered online and very few invertebrate records from any Australian museum were online. We're breaking down some of those barriers and being able to demonstrate that many fears were unfounded. And that our new equipment and organized approach to image management has great benefits. So reporting regular achievements as we achieve small milestones has made colleagues aware of our capacity and we've helped with numerous imaging requests from entomology and many other departments. We've provided advice on file management and planning for digital preservation. I and my volunteers for my project always make time to help with these off task activities as it's an opportunity for us to be internal advocates for digitization. So I'm just going to finish off because I'm running out of time. Commencing a large scale digitization project is a bewildering and overwhelming exercise and one of the reasons that many museums haven't progressed as far as they should is because of the scale of the task at hand. In our experience developing and being decisive about the key priorities of what we were trying to achieve became a touchstone that helped make the correct path clear on every practical decision and viewing our massive project as a series of small projects not only made it achievable but allowed a constant program of evaluating, learning and promoting what we were doing. So we're not done yet but we're definitely better at starting than we used to be. And that's my contact details and that's where information about the project has been published online if you are interested. I can send you those details if anyone wants to get into anything. Now we have a few minutes before break and we're up for you to use. So any questions or questions or ideas for the unpacking of this? The perspective of starting a volunteer project like that you talked about the sketches as you put in and how it should start to stop. I wondered also the respect of those working in digitisation or do you already have the biggest questions about how they and how they accepted and throw to the public? We had the unexpected benefit of having nobody working in digitisation. So I'm the person who works in digitisation. No, so we had a collection a data basing managed by collection managers who in many circumstances were reluctant to put too much time into working on that. So in fact anything that could take the burden off of them was while something to be viewed with scepticism probably a little bit of a relief but we didn't actually have within our archives department we have a very discrete digitisation collection that's digitisation program that's very separate from the biological sciences collection in the museum but we didn't have any photography any scanning anything else. So yeah this was it for us and this is why we did it with volunteers is that we basically just don't have don't have the resources to do this with staff and we wouldn't have been able to get funding to pay for staff to do it because it's just not seen as a priority by the groups that we were that we get the money from. It sounds like the volunteers were a pretty significant part of the project how did you find them and how much time did they each dedicate to the project? Yeah I found I put out a couple of calls for volunteers and I even thought that as a bit of an experiment as well because I actually I promoted it through email lists particularly those to do with University Science Departments University Visual Arts Departments Digital Photography Schools our foundation like Waterhouse Club supporters and I also put it on a website and I put it on the South Australian Volunteering Opportunities and I kept track of how people found I made sure I asked everybody how they found it in their applications that were received and also in the people I interviewed and the people that came on board. Interestingly the most successful group of volunteers were the people who founded our website which I thought made something that meant that the people who were the right people to do this and had real dedication to it were actually seeking out these opportunities to begin with the least successful was the South Australian Volunteering site that was just you know I'm getting some government benefit I'm required to do 10 hours volunteering a week I'll shoot off an application to everybody who everybody who will receive it and there was a lot of fairly data applications that I'm sure actually it's been videoed I should have had I never said no there was there were people who were less focused on the task that came through that before that opportunity and science students were good I asked all volunteers to commit at least six months to the project because it actually took a significant amount of time to train them and I made that explicit to them when I asked them but they had to commit either a half or a full day a week so they could do half a day for six months and most of them lasted a year or more so a few students sort of got to the end of a certain year of study and their time schedules changed and they got rid of it they sort of quit the role our retired people I think almost all of them who started with us are still with us three two and a half years later so yeah I did ask them minimum commitment of six months I received about 189 applications in my first round of call out for this and I recruited 15 volunteers out of that interviewed 20 of them recruited 15 so yeah it was a it was a big group that wanted to do it but it also took a lot of time to train them and the biggest scariest thing training them in was specimen handling so we had test specimens we took a great deal of care I took a great deal of notice at their attitude to handling their specimens not just their ability but as far as the process was concerned oh that was it I asked for people who had either an interest or a background in entomology or digital photography but I found quite quickly that you didn't really need either what you did need was digital confidence so you needed to be able to use a computer and not scared if you accidentally changed windows at the wrong point in the process and so we did have a couple of people who probably weren't as digitally literate as they should have been for the project but yeah so I sort of started paying more attention to that further down the track than if they had done entomology at university because really it didn't matter what they were photographing just as long as they could follow the procedure oh just really quickly it seems phenomenal that you managed to retain people for that much time and beyond how did you retain them like were you doing like chocolate brownies every day is there one thing that you can now identify that or did you ask them what kept them there I do you know well I asked them why they left they were just really apologetic when they leave I think communication was the key to a lot of things one of the exciting things that this was this was during the establishment period of the Atlas of Living Australia which was a really big and easy to demonstrate the importance of initiative and so they actually felt like they were a part of something that was really cool and they understood they had really they had better understanding than I did of the fact that this was going to be the product of so many people's work across the country and that their piece was just this tiny little piece but and I was worried that it was going to backfire on us because it took us a hell of a long time to be able to deliver the images to the Atlas and I kept thinking oh god they're all going to get disappointed because they can't see their pictures where they're supposed to be but they had this real sort of champion like cheer me on kind of sympathy for what's going on you know and I kept communicating with them about some of the challenges that we were having I I give them a weekly email update and in that I was putting a snippet of news either about what's going on at the museum or what's going on in the world of entomology I sign up to Google science alerts and put things like that in there and just that communication about them being part of something bigger I think created a real spirit around the project and and yeah they the way they approached me and they had to leave it's like the you know they've run over my kitten or something I'm so sorry I just I wish I could stay on but so yeah I can't put my finger on it I think also because we're asking them to do something which is really technical and really challenging they actually had a sense of pride and you sort of pictures they're pretty exciting they're pretty awesome they're actually even more awesome if you have no background in entomology and you go I've never looked at insects in that way before so it sort of had its own little built-in rewards I have done chocolate brownies but not every week so yeah