 Nō mai haere mai, rauranga tēnama. Nō mai kētō tātou, hui mahi tahi e tēnai rā. Nō re rā, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou koutou. I've come a long way, Andy, all the way from Newlands this morning, not quite as far as some of our other friends. And, yeah, it has been a heck of a week, hasn't it, the last seven or eight days. And actually this morning I walked to Tūtupapa, got off the bus on Kourtney Place, and got off just outside Reading and Kourtney Central, and it was really sobering to actually see what that was like. I've heard about it on the newspaper and seen it on the news and things. And, you know, many of our lives have actually been a bit altered and a bit shaken up in the last week. I've actually seen people's livelihoods really affected and certainly some of my colleagues here today have also fallen to that camp. And to not be too glib about this, someone referred to me early in the week as being an IDP, an internally displaced person, which is the first time I'd actually heard that used. It's usually it's referred to people who are in sort of war-torn countries and maybe, you know, it's kind of like being a refugee but in your own country. And I know that some of my brothers and sisters from the building that I typically reside in, which is an archives on Tenmograv Street, actually here today. Give me a shout out if you're from archives. I have a seat here at archives. I actually used to have, I'll admit to you, used to have two desks, one at National Library and one at Archives. But apparently property said it wasn't a good use of facilities for me to maintain two desks. And Andy actually has taken these desks that I gave up at National Library. Had I maintained that, I'd be allowed back at work. But anyway, I'll just show you. I had a little bit, I took a picture of my desk last week when I was allowed into the building. And really there's only kind of two things that sort of plopped off the desks there so it wasn't too bad. Really, yeah. And actually the eagle-eyed of you might have noticed this. I'll just zoom in for you all benefit. This is a DVD, it's Digital Media. So it's in keeping with the conference. I don't know if anyone recognises the back cover of this DVD. It's okay, I'm going to unveil it to you. It is of course the DVD case for the 2003 classic science fiction disaster movie. The Core. And it is a classic disaster movie. And I mean disaster movie in the genre of disaster movie, not a disaster of a movie. Though some of you might argue that. And I love the tagline. The only way out of their situation is to go into the core. So for those of you that haven't experienced this magnificent cinematic epic, it's about the world that's fallen into calamity and huge natural disasters. We're talking super storms and earthquakes, much like what we've felt ourselves. All around the world because the Earth's core has ground or halt. And so the protagonist, the heroes, must restart the Earth's core and make the world a safer place. Now in doing my research, this DVD is really important to me obviously, which is why I have it at work. But it also relates very much to the things that we've been experiencing here. And a little bit of a spoil here. So if you haven't seen it, I'm just going to spoil a little tiny part of the story and the plot here. But the protagonists find out that these natural disasters are wholly and entirely man-made. These natural and in fact very unnatural acts by man have created these disasters. Does that sound a little bit familiar? You might have heard about some of that stuff in the media. And as it turns out, and guys, I can't make this up. But the thing that caused these events in the film The Core is actually called Destiny. You cannot make this up, people. Deep Earth Seismic Trigger Initiative. And just like the other Destiny that we've all heard about in the media, they're very well-funded, a very well-funded military organisation. Anyway, if you haven't seen this film, I would have brought a copy of it, but I haven't been able to get back to the building to retrieve it. So if anyone wants to see it, I don't know if it's on Netflix anymore. But if you want to hit me up later, I've got one copy. OK, so I can put you on a waiting list. If you do watch it, I just have one plea to you that you do rate it on IMDB. Because it deserves more than 5.4. It really does. It deserves way more than 5.4. It's a dear movie to me, and I think it just deserves a little bit of love. And to be entirely fair, I actually happen to take a photo of my desk about a month ago for something, and so that's what it looked like pre-quake. And that's post-quake. It's just like those things on stuff where you see the ground before and after. Yeah, after before. Not much difference, right? So I can't really blame the earthquake for making my work life a little bit messy. But as Andy said, I work for the Department of Internal Affairs. I work in particular with these two fabulous institutions of the National Library and National Archives. We're actually, some of you may know, some of you might not know. I don't even know Vanina, you know this, Ann. We are hosted within the Department of Internal Affairs and we're part of the division or branch of DIA called Information and Knowledge Services. The Ridgepole from which information hangs. We're also home to a little function called Government Information Services. If you've ever used the gov.nz portal or you participated in the flag referendum, then you would have seen their mahi, some of their work that they've done. And the GCPO, which is another horrible acronym, Government Chief Privacy Officer. And he and his team make New Zealand Government private for citizens and ensure that our information is kept private by our government. And in the sort of relatively short by, I think, the grand scheme of things, sort of time frames, I've been working for just over a year with that part of DIA and these institutions and these functions and in this sector and domain. And in that very short amount of time, I think I've personally grown very attached to the library and to archives and the work that we do. And it's a real affection that I have, that I can say, I love the National Library and I love archives. This is my first NDF. Is it anyone else's first NDF? Wow, wow, we should clap for them. Yeah. Okay, don't clap for me though because in a post-truth era, this is actually my second NDF. I'm sorry. I came last year but I was lurking. So I was just sort of sitting quietly, keeping to myself. I was learning the acronyms. What does NDF stand for exactly? I was just going to some of the talks just to understand what the lay of the land was. So I think it's fantastic we have so many people here who it's their first NDF. I mean, next year you'll get to do the keynote opening address. But I consider myself in this space to be very much a new digital immigrant because this is not the field that I came into naturally. I consider myself though an old digital native. So this is a picture of me from I think the 80s and my first love, not a girl, but an Apple II computer which I've enhanced here through CSI technology. These things are still faithfully working. Faithful workhorses. There's one down in the film preservation lab I think in one of the lower levels of archives. Boy, that was a day. Oh boy, that got the heart beating again. That did. Anyway, being what I'd consider to be an old digital native in a new digital world is somewhat like being a stranger in a strange land like Heinlein's book. It's kind of a little bit strange, a little bit odd. You kind of know some of the lingo on what things are going on, but you need to be shown things. So I had the benefit of coming into this area of DIY to get shown lots and lots of things. I got shown lots of our secret collections and our holdings within library archives deep in the basements and the repositories underneath the buildings. So lots of different types of media. I showed me things that were in boxes. I don't know if any of you, well, some of you who aren't from the library archives if you've been downstairs, but we have a lot of boxes. We've got quite a few boxes. Man, we've got a lot of boxes. Let me just get some water here. We have a lot of boxes. I really like boxes. Christmastime is a really fun time for me and I took a lot of photos of boxes. I'm just going to share with you just a hand for my favourite photos of boxes like these ones here. There's archives up in Auckland. So those are boxes that have been collapsed or about to be put together. Oh boy. Some really good box shots here. Maps. We've got some maps in there. They've just been rolled up. I guess it's hard to find boxes for them, round boxes. Yeah, some cool stuff there. It kind of reminds me of... Yeah, you know what this is? Clearly you do. Yeah, this is lower level 3 in Mulgay. That's right. This is actually my favourite. This is in the Turnbull Library and for some reason this is my favourite set of boxes. It's partly because of the stuff that's inside. But so many boxes. So, so many boxes. Being a new digital immigrant or old digital immigrant in the new digital world, I had people showing me around, but I really wanted to contribute because it's the best way to learn about the field that you're in. And, you know, I'm not a librarian. I'm not an archivist. I'm not a conservationist or preservationist. I'm not a research assistant or a research librarian or a reference librarian. I'm not even a digital variant of any of those. I'm just a plain old, run-of-the-mill, old-fashioned technologist. I work in management. So, you know, managers have ideas. I want it to help. Ideas! I just look at all those boxes and although I love them, I thought, hey, we've got a problem here. We have got one serious hoarding problem here. So, you know, managers are good at processes. I've got a three-step process for our digital salvation. Step one is pretty obvious. You've got all these things, images and things, some of them in boxes. So, you've got to take them out of the boxes. That's a slight complication. We can handle that. I've got an old digital camera at home. It's like a 1.5 megapixel. I can lend that to the library and to archives. We can take some photos. We'll turn them into some useful formats. PDF sounds good to me. We'll digitise them. We'll throw all that stuff. You hear the cloud. It's quite a new shiny thing. I think it's kind of related to the internet or something. But we'll throw all that stuff. We'll just upload that. Upload that to the cloud. The cool kids can just use Google, search stuff and they're happy. Fantastic. And of course, we've got some stuff left over. So then we apply a high energy heat source and we're done. We're done. There is. There is precedence for this, ladies and gentlemen. This is an empirically proven formula. I've done my homework. I did my research. This actually works. We had a big conflagration in the Hope Gibbons building in 1952. So we know that with a fair degree of accuracy that this process works, ladies and gentlemen. At least the last part. I don't know about the earlier bits. It's not perfect. This one got away. Yeah. And as many of you know, actually, that fire was kind of the precursor to the Archives Act of 1957. Sorry, 1957. When actually we realised that we lost a part of ourselves that day. We lost a part of our history, part of our memory. So, you know, we can laugh and have a bit of fun. But, you know, this led to our building being shut. Anyway, no. There are things like Andy and others that this is generally not accepted best practice. Apparently. Yeah, I think it's still got to leave. But we don't do this anymore. So, obviously, I needed to be skilled coming into this work. And thankfully, I had some very good teachers. I had a wonderful group of people from across the library and archives who came to help me work on this mahi of our digital strategy. And I think they are superheroes. They're kind of a blend of Marvel and DC because they don't really mean anything to me. But, yeah, and you'll see some of those names. Some of them are actually here. And he's one of them. He's the Flash, which is pretty apt, I think. It's pretty Flash. But, yeah, and some of these people are probably in the auditorium here, or they might be here later in the day. And over a series and upon the next image, which is slightly irreverent. But our meetings were very much just like Supper's, where we had lots of food and drink and we talked and we joked about stuff. But we also talked about some very deep, interesting and obviously meaningful and impactful and important things regarding our mahi and how it was going to be relevant in the digital environment. And as Andy said, the chosen medium I use to develop our story, our strategy and personally to me a strategy is really just a story I tell myself to get myself out of bed in the morning to come and do my work and to make me keep doing that every day until I die. Which is probably going to be at 100, hopefully. So, I've got a few years left. But it's, yeah, to me it's a story. It's a narrative. It's a thing that keeps us going. That makes us know why we're doing it. It's a story that connects and the figures. It was just a story. So, yeah, I developed this as a comic book. I actually thought it would be easier that was a bit of a mistake. It was actually harder. And obviously I can't sort of like take you through every panel because it's kind of going to be a bit slow to do that. Hopefully that'll scroll up in a moment just so, yeah, it took a little bit of time. It took about a month or so to actually put together that, far out, that crazy comic book to tell our story. To tell our story. And, you know, there's about 200 odd panels in the 45 pages. Some really bad jokes you can tell from today. And a few, I think, big ideas. So, I just want to sort of skim through some of the big ideas in that as a bit of a as a setup for the conference and for the forum that we have here. So, what we've played on very much is this notion of memory, which to me, outside of to this culture and heritage sector a year ago, was this idea where we talked about memory institutions and I was just fascinated. That's such a weird name to use for institutions like Te Papa, the Library, Auckland Museum, Ngatonga Sound and Vision, countless archives and museums and galleries. Memory institutions. And, of course, National Library has some really interesting legislation that dictates what it's got to do just like archives does. Some really bold legislation that enables us to remember on behalf of New Zealand Society and New Zealand Government to be part of that memory. Not on its own, but definitely in collaboration with others. But that idea of memory and time and I think this has been brought into really stark relief in the last week as things have crumbled and things have changed. Our memory is a thing that inextricably allows us to connect our past with our present and hopefully a much brighter future because it's our memory and the things that we remember and the things that we can now do in the future which is actually going to make a difference and that's that sense of thankfulness, the ability to innovate and to be inspired and the fact that when we lose some of that memory then some of our memories of what has happened tend to fade away. The presence may be a little bit dimmer and then I'd really worry that that leads to a much darker future, a darker future where we don't remember about some of the things that we've done we've forgotten some of the lessons, we're not being accountable for some of the things that have gone by in the past. That's maybe a bit too somber. So the world that we're in obviously is moving from that physical information world into that digital information thing we've got the cloud, we've got the internet so that changes the very nature of the memories that we have and the memories are now being digital, they're out there in that shiny new thing called the cloud and we're starting to click those things within the National Library and receiving some of those memories in digital form through archives and we've got ways of going out there and crawling and stuff but we can't get it all and I guess unlike Pokemon Go we don't want to catch it all because some of that stuff we just don't need to know and don't need to remember but it's about having the policies and having the processes to think through that the customers that we're having to deal with are again the customers that you are having to deal with but they're new customers they're not old digital natives like myself but new digital natives like my daughter Lucy she's a maker, she's a learner she is highly empowered she's probably going to be very connected and I hope she's going to be extremely civic minded so she's going to care about the country and the communities that she lives in but that's going to mean she's going to know about the past in order to create the prison in that future and she's going to be growing up in a New Zealand that's very different to the New Zealand that I've grown in and a very very different colour well she won't be taunted by kids hopefully at school for being she's half Chinese, half Chinese and half German probably even more reason to taunt her no I didn't say that and many of our customers haven't even been born yet so this thing of how do we deal with meeting the needs and the expectations and to collecting the past and the present for those who haven't even been born yet and we don't know about what's happened before them and of course sometimes we're dealing with the ephemeral nature of the digital environment and good formats like our trustee Wordstar 2000 we're processing format and sometimes they just don't last and we spend an awful amount of time working through ways to transform them or finding clever ways to be able to resurrect them from the dead using digital technology and of course the C Word has to be spoken copyright this poses all sorts of interesting challenges to us in the digital era for a construct that was obviously designed and developed in a very very non-digital time and it's totally ripe for disruption so we have sort of three themes in terms of that sort of context for our strategy one is about enabling our people who processes our customers with the right tools and infrastructure to do the right things in the future digitally the next thing is around enriching our content through metadata, through linking it through making connections with other people's collections and finally about engaging with our customers those that are now here those that are about to be born and those that can be connected with through emotion and imagination and we want to develop the best digital tools that can really exploit what the digital environment can do for us like totally warping space and time so that the reading room and the artefacts that we have in front of us here in Wellington or around the country can be viewed anywhere on the planet anytime in any place or to experience content in a way that you couldn't possibly do in analog form and this is a photograph that actually I found this on the first day when I came to work and it was digitised and thankfully it was digitised because in this photo when I was zooming in I was able to find my grandmother yeah it did make me cry actually for all the right reasons but I couldn't possibly have done that from the tiny little negative that I actually subsequently touched and held in my hands I had gloves on by the way but it was a little as tiny and it was a little negative space I couldn't possibly have found my dear grandmother in that and of course we're saying to think about the stuff that we have not just in terms of individual artefacts and individual items and records or manuscripts or books but in terms of big content because this is something that we have to offer that no one else can offer that we can take the content that we have in digital form and make it available at scale big content, more than just big data it's the sort of thing that the digital humanities people are dying for they're begging us for it and we have it in our midst we just have to find ways of opening it up we also want to make sure that we are ready and fit for a different type of future where machine intelligence, artificial intelligence agents are actually going to do things on our behalf and for us how do we integrate our content and make that available so that machines can do things on our behalf rather than always having to rely on people and of course in terms of enriching I love this talk about this idea of a hyper-collection here you'll see some other things and there's obviously countless other collections and holdings out there across New Zealand and the world and we love to have a much tighter connection through open data and through our metadata and various classification schemes so that we can create the types of connections that are actually useful and meaningful to New Zealanders and these are things that we've experimented with so digitally NZ with their concepts API was an early precursor of this but that idea that content scattered across New Zealand across different archives and different repositories can be connected around common ideas and things which are actually useful and meaningful to me as a New Zealander and of course we do want to engage with our crowds and crowd sourcing is clearly something that everyone's doing a bit of experimentation with yeah it's an opportunity to do some interesting things like transcription error correction but actually we know that it's just a fantastic way to engage with the public to engage with our patrons and our customers so they can experience the content and the collections and holdings that we have so they can actually experience our memory and we do want to offer great new experiences but we don't want those experiences to be gimmicky we want those experiences to be authentic meaningful and not just using the greatest latest tech gadgetry just to have a fun time and we want to find the ways that are going to be natural for people to experience content in a digital form that they've already done in a non-digital way but doing those in a way that don't break the things that we've come to depend upon we don't want to break the search mechanisms that we've carefully constructed to make it easier for people to find things we want to add to that and we also want to exploit the digital environment for its ability to really allow us to take a many worlds view of our content and our holdings to ensure that we can use different taxonomies and tagging mechanisms and create virtual layers so that things that have only been accessible to certain cultures or ethnicities can be available to everyone in the right way and finally where do we find our customers we've got to realise that our customers are in different places now I took this photo when there were purposely no people in the reading room, it's usually very busy I just don't want you to think that we don't have people in the reading room but but people, yeah, sometimes are in the reading rooms but and this has made a bit controversial are the reading rooms dead? Long live the reading room that's now in our pocket, that's on our laptop that's at our fingertips in our living rooms and our bedrooms because that living room sorry, that reading room is that thing, the cloud, it is the internet it's the worldwide web, it's that construct that Sir Tim Berners-Lee created for us that's perfectly designed and constructed for the types of artefacts and the type of content and in the future the type of experiences that we want people to have so the living room is there but long live the reading room and what happens if we create that reading room this is the final page of this comic if we created that reading room there's an entry on the web and all our customers came to that reading room but there was nothing to read so we have to make sure that the things that we look after that we're stewards of get out there so they can actually be shared now I'm just going to finish real quick the thing before I think we're almost on time this kind of thing, I've told a story here but we have to think differently about this we realise we have to think in three different horizons we have to think about the stuff we're doing right now the stuff that's about to happen tomorrow and we also have to think about horizons which are much, much further off maybe 10, 20 years that are coming at us and how we experiment with them and we turn those fantastic comics into really horrible A3s like that I'm not going to make you look at that because I'm just going to my final closing remarks the world's getting awfully complicated isn't it we're living in a kind of a post-privacy post-Brexit post-Trump post-Truth and reality post-Kokura quake and a post-Pokemon go world thank goodness for that but we're being exalted to make sure that the things we do that the touch enabled the locational where, VR enabled AR enabled HoloLens, we'll hear about that later today maybe we want to be we're told to be data first, brand first mobile first API first cloud first screen first and actually yesterday I saw my wide feed camera first is now a thing with snap spectacles it's all really a little bit bewildering so I asked you today National Digital Forum which actually you're the most digital community around but you choose we choose to come together in person in this place because I think we need to make sure that we become a people first community we need to ensure that the things that we do they cater for all those technical gadgets and wizardries and digital things but we must fundamentally be people first because it's people if we have empathy if we can create actual impact from the work we do as people that have the idea the imagination creates the innovation drives the innovation in our country and also creates the really meaningful kind of connections that you're going to get here for the next couple of days that you couldn't possibly get on the internet thank you Thanks Richard