 Hi everybody thanks for coming. It's great to be here from Australia. I'm going to be talking about failure and how we work at the DX lab. We're like an innovation lab. I'll kind of go through it in a sec. We are the State Library of New South Wales innovation and research lab started in 2014. We are Australia's first dedicated Glam lab. We were inspired by NYPL's labs and the British Library labs. Very small team. We have 2.6 people. Paula Bray who talked last year and myself, Kahutong. I'm the technical lead. Paula's kind of like the creative director, leader. I'm one of the techie guys. I've got a design background as well. Luke is here. Not .6 of him. All of him is here. He's our lab developer. He's really great with the hardware stuff. He can code as well. He has other skills too which if you talk to him you'll find out. We sit under the digital strategy and innovation branch and it's important to kind of note this. We're separated from the digital library systems and services and they're kind of the business as usual branch and we're under this kind of strategy innovation branch. I should also note that we work really closely with other teams such as the research and discovery team, the learning team, marketing, exhibitions. We run grants, very public grants where you have to apply for them and then we select the winner. It's $30,000 and these support creative and innovative uses of the library's collection data. This is a recipient which we judged about 3 months ago is Mauricio Girodo from New York. His project is what if we let the images speak? He wants to improve the discovery of our collection using machine-generated metadata. He'll be writing his own code to do object recognition, clustering, cool machine learning stuff. We also have a digital program and it's $5,000 and there are two per year and that's an invitation one. We invite creative technologists to research innovative tech and use our data. Everything's kind of revolved around our data. These are very short. They can go from a week to a month. Sometimes they do extend a little bit if the creative technologist is keen to work with us. Right now we have Scout. This is the latest one and it's a drop-in with Mina Thamaraja and she has built this chat bot. You can see it here. It's embedded in this cute little robot. The kids are just drawn to it and they answer these questions. It works out using these questions. It works out their reading level and also their interests. You can't really see it but there's this printer inside the bot and it prints out their suggestions for books. We have these values. These are on our website. Audience first, innovate, iterate, be open, constant prototyping. I'll be referring to these in our projects which I'll talk about in a sec, especially the iteration. For being open, we use open source software. We publish our things. We publish our code as well. We kind of have a bit of a mission. We showcase the collection in innovative ways. We try to engage more diverse audiences. We accelerate technological change within the organisation. This is kind of like a slightly unofficial one. We break down the library silos. We kind of fit in between the gaps in the library organisation. Try to connect teams together. We're kind of like a conduit where we try to be anyway. There are other labs out there, actually. British Library labs, of course. Library of Congress labs is massive. National Library of Netherlands has a lab. There's now a Glam Labs website you can see there. Recently, all these labs got together to write this book. I don't know if anyone's seen this book yet. Has anyone read it? Yeah, cool. Okay. That's good. Yeah. So, Mahendra Mahay organised this and he got 14 people in Doha, locked them in a room for one week, five days, and got them to write this book. I think it's like 30,000 pages. It's crazy. It was like a reality TV show for labs. And yet Paula Bray was one of the participants from our team. I'll talk about some of our experiments now, just through the lens of the theme of this topic. Experiments. So, when we refer to our projects, we try to call them experiments. It sort of takes a pressure off a bit. The framing is important. It's framing for us, but also framing for the public so that they know that this is work in progress. It's not going to be perfect. We're trying to learn something from this. The first experiment I'll talk about asks, what does the face of New South Wales look like in 2018? So, this is an exhibition we put on. It launched in October last year. And it's part of the library's new galleries projects. It's an immersive exhibition featuring thousands of portraits from the library's collection, mixed in with selfies from Instagram and also a photo booth as well. Ran for four months. I'll quickly show you how you get images onto the photo wall. So, we have these two touchscreens and the camera. And then you enter your details. Originally, we had like email and tried to capture a few other kind of details, but we're just like stuff that let's just put your name. And that's it. Let's not be creepy. Okay. And then you go to the wall and probably about 30 seconds, you see yourself on the screen. And you kind of jump up and down and get very excited, hopefully. Yeah, we there was some unexpected behavior, such as people taking photos of their selfie on the wall. So a bit of a weird recursive feedback loop going on there. And then they post that onto Instagram or Twitter. Here's a close up view. It was pretty complicated setup hardware set up three projectors. blending of projectors. You can talk to us later on about all that stuff. So using the photo booth as one way of getting images onto the photo wall, you could also submit selfies via Instagram. And what you would do is take a selfie on Instagram, add the hashtag new self files. And then we would have this kind of bot that would scrape this website, the the actual Instagram website, and then feed it into our system, it would run every 10 minutes, 10 minutes. Oh, quickly. Could you show the camera as well? There's the camera. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little bit cumbersome. We apparently the design was different. And when we when it came back, it was this kind of gigantic thing. Maybe some giant must have made it because it's it's pretty massive. But it worked well. Now I just want to do a bit of a quiz. Alright, because we had a few assumptions about which would be more popular the Instagram photos, because Instagram has this, you know, crazy ability to go viral, or the photo booth images. And I'm going to do some audience participation. Can can people who think that Instagram images would have been more popular? Can you put your hand up? Okay, cool. And then the other way around the photo booth images. They got a right. Okay, cool. We actually thought that Instagram images would be more popular. And you're obviously way smarter than we are. So yeah, unfortunately, we didn't go as viral on Instagram as we wanted. But luckily, we still had the photo booths. And, you know, being a, you know, slightly lazy developer, I was like, Oh, you know, we don't need the photo booth. It's too much work. But luckily, we did it. So yeah, in terms of outcomes, we, the audiences loved being able to participate. We released a website as well. I'll show you a quick kind of preview in a sec. It also led to more continued research from researcher Kylie budge. And also it led to another exhibition called off the shelf. And we were able to turn this around really quickly using a lot of the same equipment, the same code, same servers. We did this in about four weeks, similar sort of concepts. But yeah, we worked directly with the state librarian. And he he kind of likes to go down into our library stacks and just kind of have a look around looking at the interesting books. And he'll take photos of them. And then yeah, it was his idea to come up with this exhibition. So yeah, part of it is actually curated by the state librarian. So new cell files launched in October last year. Orbit, this project also launched at the same time. And it's sort of this two screen experience. They're my two kids, by the way. I might switch to the website. It's no longer up. But there is we are slowly working on a web version. And I'll show you how it works. Oh, this is new cell files, by the way. Okay. So right now, all these circles, these are all the records that people are looking at on our online catalog right now in the library. And it's using Google Analytics data. Every time something pops up, that's when someone goes to that particular record. And you can get a little bit of information about it if you want. So let's go to this one. We can also do a bit of data visualization on this as well. And we can divide it by collection, published, unpublished, e-resource, format as well. Because it's from Google Analytics, we can, well, there's someone from New Zealand that's interesting. And state, and of course, city. And you can do two dimensional sort of graphs as well. I think a nice one is safe country. Okay. So someone from New Zealand is looking at audio. I'm not sure who that is. Could be someone here. Oh, yeah, cool. And yeah, this sort of updates in real time as well. This was iterated from a couple of projects. This is one of them. This is called search terms. We never finished this project. We started it. Just couldn't get it finished or find some way to present it. But we use this research to help fuel the Orbit project. It helped us understand the Google Analytics API really well. I mentioned the digital, digital drop ins before. This is one from last year called field of view. And what you're seeing now is a 3D model built in Unreal Engine using point cloud data that our kind of facilities team use for surveying for building surveying. So not for artistic purposes at all, but useful artistic purposes. And Mike Daly, he built this and it's kind of like a VR and 3D experience. There's about 9 million points in this model. So it's pretty massive. It needs a really, really powerful computer to run. You'd like to use like massive tower computer into our office and parked it there for a few months while working on this. And you can hear from the soundscape that it does change depending on where you are. This is the VR experience. So it can also be a 3D experience as well. So yeah, because it was so technically challenging and also VR is always very difficult to get onto the gallery floor. It didn't make it there. But he did build that beautiful trailer. And we know we blogged about it. We published the work. However, yesterday, we started some kind of like an extension of this project. And we're working with the learning services team to build a VR gamified experience for students. And this is some testing user testing we were doing yesterday with the kids. So this is pretty exciting. So we're kind of continuing on with that project in some fashion. This is a project called the vending library. And this was launched a couple of years ago now. And it was only supposed to be around for three weeks. But it's lasted for two years. And this is a vending machine that's from the 90s. We bought it from eBay. How much was it, Luke? $260. Second hand. Yep. It still works, which is great. And what you do is you hashtag suggest, you post to Twitter, hashtag suggest and vending library. And then we have a Twitter bot that analyzes using a bit of machine learning light. You'll pass 20 tweets. And then it assigns a theme to you and then gives you a collection surprise, which is an item, a record in our collection. And it kind of looks like this. We originally tried to make this the whole thing controllable via Twitter, but it was just way too hard. We thought we'd just come up with a simpler interaction. You don't even need Twitter to use this. You can just randomly press a button and then get your collection surprise. I just quickly show you how it works. So there's your tweet, hashtag suggest, vending library. And then our bot gets back to you very quickly with a code, which is 3.4. And also you can link to the collection as well. And then hopefully you like the record that you got. So yeah, if you've got Twitter later on, please check it out. And here's some more fun interactions with the with the Twitter bots. People love it. Last year, I'm not sure if anyone saw but Paula Bray and Thomas Swing Evans came over. And they talked about 80 hertz sound lab. Was anyone around for that talk? A few people? Yeah, yeah. This was a 5.2 meter tall structure that we somehow managed to get in front of the library. And inside there's this kind of mechanism to crank handle and you can listen to audio generated from those paintings which are on this kind of roller. We, the exhibition only lasted seven weeks. So we always intended to allow people to listen to the audio. So we made a website of it. And that got launched a couple of weeks ago. I'll just give you a quick preview of it as well. I'm almost there with the projects. We've been a bit busy. This one's called Meridian. And this is my first lab project in 2017. You can see those two flat images and their images from our collection, mapped from our collection. And we mapped them around a sphere. Okay. And it's interactive so you can kind of zoom in as well. I was going to try and find New Zealand. It's sort of there. There's also another globe as well. So this was released as a website. And it works on your phone as well. It's going to be continuing as an exhibition later on next year. So that's very exciting. And this is our DXI website right after Meridian. We built a new website because we needed one. And it uses a few kind of modern website building techniques, headless architecture. So we've got separate front ends and back ends. It uses modern UI frameworks. And this is really, really good research for an upcoming digital library project as well. So keep your eyes open for that. And I think this is our last project called Dairy. And this is a tool that my friend Luke here worked on. And it's internal tool to download mass download images from our preservation system. And it's something you can't actually do. Unfortunately, the public don't have access to this, but our internal staff really need it. And when they're building publications or working on exhibitions, it's really well used and really useful. So just to kind of finish up, just wanted to talk about our impact. And we have like an external impact. We have our experiments, our publishing, our blog posts. We have our grants. We have our gallery projects, partnerships with other organizations, and also conferences that we attend. And we also have internal impact. So this is, we've got the front of house stuff, the retail-y sort of stuff, and then the back of house stuff. And that's something we don't talk about that much because it's internal. But we have internal collaborations with other teams, lots of knowledge sharing. We sort of can help consult with other teams because we have quite a diverse skill set. We build internal tools. We have a research that we do and also we contribute to the strategic plan. Obviously, there's a lot of overlap between these two things. And the way we work is we have this experiment, new experiment. Someone will come up with a batshit crazy idea and then we'll do some research. We'll design and build. And we'd like to keep the spec blurry rather than focused so that you can kind of change direction if you need to. And then this is probably the most important step. We definitely always publish and blog. And that's kind of what makes it worthwhile and a bit different. And we do this within a sandbox so that it's fast. If something goes wrong, the blast area is small, let's us become more adventurous as well. And with the publishing, we contribute back to our body of knowledge, which is our website. But then we use this when we do our next project. And then this body of knowledge grows, expanding the knowledge of the library, but also helping expand the knowledge of the whole glam sector. Thank you. So please check out the site if you have any queries. We've probably got time for one or two quick questions if anyone has any. Anyone, anyone? Very quick question. How are you funded? We're funded by the library directly. Yep. A little bit of foundation money as well. Anyone else? No? Cool. Okay. Thanks again, Kaho.