 Thanks Claire. Can you hear me all right? Aloha awinala. I don't know a whole lot of Maori but that's of course that I can come in Hawaiian which has got to be a related language. In other words, good afternoon. And mahalo and kia mihi especially to the organizers for choosing my presentation that this is my third NDF ever. And a special mahalo to Andy Fenton and the crew at NZMS and Recollect for making it possible for me to be here. If I hadn't had Andy and NZMS, I wouldn't be doing this now. And I'd also like to thank the entire country of New Zealand for being just so damn beautiful. I grew up in a beautiful part of the United States in Montana which except for the lack of oceans reminds me a bit of New Zealand but I have to have to say every time, the third time that I've come to New Zealand now it's it seems more beautiful than the last time. So I'm here to talk about something perhaps not so pretty. This is the Toesling Genocide Museum in Nampen, Cambodia. The museum itself is an old school S21 that was used as a prison during the Khmer Rouge, the reign of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979. The Khmer Rouge actually existed all during the 60s and the early 70s as well before they overthrew the King and his government and then ruled from 1975 to 1979. The Toesling Genocide Museum archives are actually a UNESCO sponsored or UNESCO memory of the world registered in July 2009. This is a project sponsored by UNESCO and funded by the Korean International Cooperation Agency and of course with a collaboration of the Toesling Museum and the Cambodian Culture and Arts Ministry. And once the project is finished these archives will be internet accessible although at present we're not quite at that stage yet. So I mentioned before the Toesling Museum and its archives are housed in the S21 school, a prison for Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge regime. From here prisoners typically went to the killing fields which are not far from the center of Nampen. When the museum was, when the school was liberated or when Cambodia was liberated by the Vietnamese in January 1979 there were only seven remaining prisoners in this prison. I mentioned already that these are inscribed, that the archives were inscribed into the UNESCO's memory of the world register in July 2009. They're especially fragile because they were mostly put on low-quality media, schoolbook paper for example, photographs with no particular attention given to long-term preservation. And the museum itself is not exactly ideal for climate control, very humid as you could imagine and with an unreliable power source. During the Khmer Rouge it's estimated that somewhere between a million and a half and two million and two and a half million people were killed or died of starvation. During from April 75 to 19, to January 1979 if you figure two million people that's if you to make it to bring a little bit home that's over four years, thirteen hundred seventy people per day, 57 per hour or one every minute either killed or starved. What finally ended the Khmer Rouge regime was during this time their army also conducted cross-border raids into Vietnam where it murdered people and burned villages. Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and by January 1979 the regime was gone. What happened here? Here you go. So these are the companies and institutions that collaborated on this project. I'll come back to the top two in a minute but the governmental partner is the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, the Korean International Cooperation Agency funded it and UNESCO and the museum itself are the principal collaborators who helped organize the project. Brecken is Brecken Imaging is a Canadian imaging and preservation company of a handful of people. They sent a preservationist, a conservationist to Phnom Penh to essentially guide the entire project team in preserving the materials. Digital divide data is a company that I've worked with for many years. It's a U.S. non-profit that recruits young people in Cambodia, Laos, and Kenya generally from the countryside or the slums. In any case they don't have many economic opportunities. They do have an education. DDD gives them a job trains them in computer skills and whatever and other business skills gives them a job for six to eight hours a day and as well as full benefits and a scholarship to the local university. So when they come to DDD these kids aren't very skilled at all. They learn skills but as far as skills for preservation or conservation they're non-existent. Just some brief statistics about the project. U.S. half million to do everything, the imaging by all the equipment and do the actual work, pay the people, pay the staff. You can see the activities, cataloging the catalog at the Toe Slang Museum was not particularly good so a lot of work was in cataloging the materials, preservation in a place that's not very well, that's very humid and that doesn't have a good climate control. You can imagine that there were mold and other issues with the schoolbook paper on which some of the convictions were written. Scanning and capture, image editing and post processing and finally capturing the descriptive metadata and building a website around it. Ten staff from Digital Divide Data, these are the students I was mentioned and eleven staff from the museum. The museum staff was by and large also mostly unskilled staff. One of the principal goals of the project was to build the capacity and train the museum staff so that in future they could do it by themselves. I mentioned that actually I didn't mention this is the largest repository of such materials in Cambodia but it's not the only one. This project was only for the Toe Slang Genocide Museum archives but in future there may be more added to it. I'm not quite sure why this is so pokey in. There we go. So we designed a workflow process for this and decided rather than teach some of the people, some of the process, we would train everyone on everything and that turned out rather well. You can see some of the material, some of the equipment that we used, some of the training that we provided. We actually did follow the page digitization standards. If you don't know what page it is, think Metamorphose. It's about the same thing and provided all of the metadata descriptive and technical descriptive metadata was captured in two languages, Khmer and in English. We had to supply a lot of equipment. Most of it was brought in from abroad. Most often hand carried. For example, all of the cameras, all of the lights were brought in from from elsewhere from Canada or from the U.S. The computers, some of them were sourced locally but specialized computers were not were brought in from outside. We also had to install air conditioning. That was one of the features of the tender from UNESCO is you have to buy air conditioning. By the way, you also have to supply internet access. There was no internet access at the museum before this project started. They did have computers but they were isolated computers and rather old computers. You see here an idea of what the materials are in the Genocide Museum archive. Photos, confessions, biographies, revolutionary magazines, Khmer Rouge handbooks, the microfilms were actually created by Yale University and one other that I can't remember right now but they were duplicates of things that have all of things that were already in the archive. You get an idea of how we captured the materials. Either Fajji 4 star, you don't get much better than that or Fajji 3 star depending on what material type was captured. All of these were captured. Some were captured on a flatbed scanner but most of the materials were captured with a camera. I mentioned the team had a very limited skill set like no skills until this project started. Lots of power interruptions. Most of these cameras and lights were driven by battery packs that were charged when the power was on. I believe that since we started the project it now has continued a UPS installed but I've not been there to actually see that. The targets were particularly time consuming and troublesome to teach the staff how to use them. Well, you can read this for yourself and if you can't read it fast enough I understand that these are going to be online. Again, another slide illustrating the difficulties that we had to overcome. The pictures that you see on your right are the actual digitization room. When we put that equipment into the room we couldn't touch the walls. The walls had to be left as is because on the walls you'll find things left by the prisoners. The workflow, first prepare the materials, the usual remove staples. Take the mold away if there's any and mostly you had to treat all the materials for mold. Prepare the documents. These are three teams. The members of the team rotated but three teams, one would prepare, one would capture and one would do the editing or whatever else needed to be done to the images. Finally, the files, all of the files were stored on a local network attached server and transferred from there to digital divide data's production offices in Phnom Penh and from there to AWS. That's strictly for preservation. The Cambodian government is very sensitive about not having these materials leave the country. For the descriptive metadata, we had the assistance of an Australian metadata expert and she knew quite a lot about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge as well as the post-lang archives. Some of the difficulties in capturing the descriptive metadata was the vocabularies in the 70s have changed a lot since the Khmer Rouge. There's no guide for transliterating a name or a place name from Khmer to English. Lots of fields to capture just because of the diversity of materials and what do you do? What about the ethical questions? What do you do with this information that is often extracted under torture? Also, if prisoners were interrogated by more than one person, there's going to be differences in their confessions. What do you do? Capture both? Ultimately, there will be two databases with one with documents and one with images. The languages as I said are going to be both Khmer and English at least for now. Khmer already exists. Most of the staff, all of the staff speaks Khmer but there's very limited English. That's still a work in progress. I want to show what some of the descriptive metadata looks like. It's a little bone chilling. At the top, you see a list of the content types and underneath some of the descriptive metadata. One of the stipulations of the UNESCO tender was that the data be crowd accessible. First, they wanted crowd sourcing which means to me and I think to most that the crowd Cambodians will be able to contribute or comment or correct whatever descriptive metadata there is or add comments to photos and so forth. After several months of debate, it was decided that comments won't be allowed. People may correct data and the corrections must be reviewed by an administrator of some sort before they're actually published. Researchers may be granted special access and administrators, of course, can do anything they want with the data. But part of the website is multi-level access controls so that an ordinary Cambodian, an ordinary user of the data can see some stuff but not other stuff. It's also possible to make corrections or make other additions to the data itself but only if you register, only if you're a registered user, an unregistered user can view it only. You can read this for yourself but there's not a whole lot of research about this period in Cambodia. Some of the reasons for that is it's very, it was of course very traumatic for Cambodia. Other reasons are well if you look at when this happened in 75 to 79 so the Khmer Rouge existed before most of you in this room were born. I see a few gray hairs so I know that you'd at least heard about it from that time. The older generation, the people who experienced the Khmer Rouge, don't talk about it. They don't talk about it to their young people and the young people don't ask questions about what happened then. So it's like a blank spot in Cambodian history because, or perhaps because the Cambodian population is so young, about 70% of it is under 30 years of old, they look more to the future than to the past and this is from a region of the world where ancestors and where the past is honored. I didn't think my slides were that. Okay. The copyright law in Cambodia says because these are educational materials we do have the right to publish them, but should we publish them? Some people are looking for answers to what happened during that period in Cambodia. Often foreign researchers, but it could harm the families and if you think about the age of people who might have participated in the Khmer Rouge regime, let's say they were 20 when the Khmer Rouge came to power and were probably in the army. So would they be now 60, 70? Most likely they're still around. They may have government positions. How do you publish data or should you publish data about what they might have done? This is the website that's still not yet online. Some of the issues around what should be exposed and what not exposed are still being worked out between UNESCO which wants everyone to see everything and the Cambodian government which is far more conservative. It wants to restrict access to at least some of the metadata, but this should be, if things go according to schedule, this should be online early next year. This was a project done by people with very limited skills, but because we had a very talented and skilled conservationist, Jacqueline Vincent from Brecken Imaging, guiding the project, everyone, all the members of the project team, learned everything and can at least in theory do it by themselves in future. We were also quite fortunate because we had a project manager who was born to Cambodian parents. His father's family left Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge came to power, moved to France. His mother's immediate family also left Cambodia and moved to France, but most of her family stayed behind in Cambodia and the project manager to this day doesn't know what happened to his mother's family. He's 29 years old. He had a university education in France and came back to Cambodia to lead this project. I don't have anything else to say. You can look for some more information at these URLs if you like. You can see some of the photos of the project team in work. The one in the lower left, that's a photo of the project manager. The one in the lower right is Jacqueline Vincent, the woman from Canada who did most of the preservation and conservation work. If you have questions, I'm happy to answer them. Thank you so much for that. I've got about 50 questions, but I'll start with one. The decision to do the whole thing in English and the local language, was that a hard decision or how did you arrive at the decision? Had it only been in the local language, that would have contained it more and made it less susceptible to international scrutiny? Did those thoughts go through your mind? They certainly didn't go through my mind. The crowdsourcing bit, I thought though this is not going to last when I first saw UNESCO's stipulation that this must be crowdsourced or crowdsourcible when it's completed. I think the Cambodian government is less worried about the international view of this data than it is about the Cambodian view of this data, but that's only a guess on my part. I don't really know. That was a stipulation of the project to begin with. Because most of these descriptive metadata fields are in Khmer, then it makes more sense to put it in Khmer. Even in English or not, well, there's not very many people outside of Cambodia that speak Khmer, so it should be in English as well. The cultural safety for the people who are working with this, I've been to this museum. It's incredibly traumatic. The photos in particular are not always when the prisoner is alive anymore. You can see evidence of the torture. It's really heavy stuff, so it wasn't touched at all in it, but I just think these Khmer people working on this about their own people are just really worried for their, at the end of the day, how traumatic. It's awful stuff. I can't speak to it at all because I've not been, since the project started, I helped get the project underway, but since the project started, I've not visited there. If you really want an answer to your question, I can put you in touch with the project manager. He's probably the best person to ask that question of. But I agree. To me it would seem terribly traumatic or depressing to work in a former prison where you can see evidence of the torture and whatnot every day. We're out of time. Would you like to join me in thanking Frederick?