 It's my pleasure to introduce Janine Delaney who's going to speak to us about the evolution of a Facebook page. So Janine is the manager of Recollect, a software designed and managed by New Zealand Micrographic Systems and as such Janine really works across lots of different communities up and down New Zealand. She's also a professional archivist and has worked on major system projects for the Hocken Library and Archive New Zealand and according to New Zealand Micrographic Systems websites, Janine loves metadata at the Muppets which is a good alliterative combination and her favourite doctor is the Tenth. So please join me in welcoming Janine to present. Thanks. Thanks very much. I'm going to cough and I apologise for that because I'm just getting over what everybody else has had for this entire winter. Despite the title, this is not actually a case study of Facebook but it's more about a digital initiative that is purely community and collaboratively driven. It started out in Facebook but that's really just the beginning of this tale. Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge Heather Newby who's been the drive and heart behind this project. Heather is in the audience. I wish she was here standing giving this presentation but I'm really doing it on her behalf and it's really quite an inspirational tale. So Heather prefers to stay out of the limelight but she has helped me with the content on this and I appreciate that. Heather was born on the West Coast and brought up in Greymouth. She's always been interested in the West Coast and its history and she started a personal Facebook page in May 2014, posting her own photos to it. So that's Heather. I think it's the only photo I managed to find of you on your page and this is some of the content from her personal collection. So the Facebook page got a following. People started commenting and sharing so it became a Facebook group. It was open. It became very popular very fast. The group had 1200 members within a month. People were posting photos. They were sharing stuff from their own pages as you do and the comments were starting to build around it in a big way but it actually got so big that it became a problem. It started to clog up people's news feeds. The decision was made to make the group private which meant you had to join in. You had to ask to join but that didn't stop the numbers growing. It got up to 7,000 members at the beginning of this year but other problems were emerging with so much activity on this site. People weren't seeing stuff or finding things that they'd seen before. As you'll know Facebook works on an infinite scroll so there was no way to sort of track or catalogue or organise this stuff and there's been some amazing content through here. So there were thousands of entries to sift through and that's sort of the task at hand. So the group had built a considerable digital archive and a strong community in less than a year. Facebook isn't an archival platform in any sense. I don't know why I've got that photo there. I let Cameron help me with it so I think he's just picked random photos but that was kind of a cool one. So where do you go after Facebook? The group considered sites like Kete and Flickr but what Heather Soren wanted was recollect as a platform which would retain the collaborative approach of Facebook but ensure that the content and the contextual metadata was managed and accessible. So there's a long term preservation aspect to this. This is the ambition whereas Facebook tends to be a very ephemeral medium even if it's stored behind there you've effectively lost that access to it. So this is where my team came in at NZMS but I don't want to make a story about recollect. This is really a story about the West Coast. Just a point, there is no West Coast group. In the formal sense they're a bunch of interested individuals. They're not a society, they're not formally constituted, they have no legal standing. So they don't have any affiliation with another heritage organisation. No elected officers, no money, no assets. So how do you get things going? Crowdfunding seemed a really real prospect so this is timely, thank you Jackson. After all with 7000 Facebook members could they each come up with about a dollar per annum just to support the site? Heather floated the idea in the Facebook group of shifting the heritage content to a permanent managed site. We had immediate success with a private donation of $3000, just one interested individual. So we set up a site for her because it's much easier to actually get funding if you've got something that you can see and it looks a little bit like that. We also helped out with investigating the funding sites available. We came back with a recommendation of give a little, sorry Jackson, simply because they didn't charge any fees and this group doesn't actually have any money. I also have to say we did quite a bit of pro bono work on this one but Heather is like family so that's what you do for family. So setting up was actually a bit of a challenge. Give a little were really helpful but they hadn't encountered anything like this before. West Coast was not a legal entity so it didn't have a bank account and Heather didn't want to have to handle the money so she wanted the money paid directly to NZMS as the service provider. That took a bit of shoehorning to register both West Coast and NZMS and sort of merged them together in a transparent sort of way. Give a little have nice little widgets so you can drop in there so we did that. And Heather set the target of $25,000, that's quite a lot of money but it was to provide a buffer of at least three years before they had to go looking for more funding. So we got the tool set up and the group set around fundraising and again the Facebook site has been a big part of this. So the two are really running in conjunction so I'm fine if I have it myself. So that's the give a little site there. So yeah on Facebook they started to yeah start putting out the police for money. As you can see from this screen here the campaign is chugging along it's actually up to about $5,500 now but that doesn't include the original donation nor a successful grant application that Heather got of $2,000 from Black Aditrust in the West Coast. There was no plane sailing about the time West Coast launched its appeal. Former Allback Jerry Collins died in a car crash if you remember. There was a huge outpouring of financial support through give a little for his baby daughter. The consequent for us was that the give a little site kept crashing regularly just as our campaign was getting going so people were trying to donate to the West Coast site but couldn't so they were getting a bit frustrated so we had to build alternative links and a way to give donations. Most tragic for Heather's group of volunteers who were working hard on the publicity was that crash the day that they got this feature published in the Grey Mouth Star but to be fair you get what you pay for and we would actually pay and give a little anything. Migrating the content from a technical point of view also had its frustrations. Anyone who has a personal Facebook page will know that you can archive it. It turns out with a Facebook group you can't. The logic is I understand that the group isn't owned by one person so there's no facility to export your data out and I'd just like to underline that there is no facility for you to export your data out. One of our developers eventually built a script and managed to harvest the bulk of the content that was about 10,000 items plus all the associated comments and metadata. It took them about a week to basically nail down the API on that one. We probably also broke Section 2.C of Facebook's pages' tombs of conditions in the process and I think they just underlined the troubling part of your relationship with Facebook is that you don't have clear ownership of your content or full rights over your disposition. So that's my favourite one there. You have just granted them non-exclusive transferable, sub-licensible, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post. And of course you all read the fine print on these things. Interestingly, just as a side issue, one of those happy moments where something pops up in your email at a timely case. This is also a concern for the Society of American Archivists who wrote to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in August this year concerning the ability to download archives for pages created on Facebook. So, not just a problem for us, recognised as a problem by the Society of Archivists in America and obviously trying to do something about that. So they can see a lot of history and heritage disappearing. But back to the West Coast. We managed to salvage what in the internet to be 8,000 unique items once we removed the duplicates and the related discretion threads which was a critical part of it. A group of volunteers set up by Heather commenced work on actually starting to put some metadata against them. So, actually putting some titles and some description and some keyword search terms against it. Plus a whole bunch of geotags as you'll find out. They completed 80% of this in an amazing two and a half weeks. And I think this one's a really inspiring story about what a passionate bunch of people can do with really no budget, no money, but just the desire to do something. The description is not shabby. I'm an A&D archivist, so I have an opinion on the matter. The description is controlled by a template that my team set up for them. It's not that different in templates. We've set up for other sites or have worked with on other libraries for their sites. The fields include the core information such as the title, a broader description, who the contributor of the image was, and it is mostly photos. The provenance of this is known and there's the ability to put in a attribution link if the image was sourced from another online collection. And so, big thanks there and hello to National Library and to Papa for really making this content available because groups like this one thoroughly appreciate it and they are making use of it and they love sort of being able to gather that legally and they're returning the compliment to you by actually putting the links back to your site. And a lot of geolocation, so I'm linking up to Google Maps and Street View. So I just thought I'd chuck in a few examples of what some of these records are looking like and showing off some cool photos at the same time. So this one's got the contributor for the Merchison Museum and this is all volunteer work. This one, the photographer is known and there's actually a page about who James Ring was. So they've actually got quite a lot of his content where the contributor was. They've actually pinned it to Google Maps where that shipwrecker occurred and they put on a copyright statement using Creative Commons license. This is really just a chance to show off some cool images and I think you've probably worked that one out by now. They actually put the Street View in on that one. Sometimes the building's not any different from the old version to the new version. And this one's my personal favorite. I think this is just awesome. Heather has actually put a YouTube video in as the context on what this Pixie Town greymouth industry's fair was. And if you watch that YouTube video, you will totally understand what the whole thing's about. They're also using link data. Through control terms and other connections, they can make connections between images and a broader context of them. So this one, Biddy the Buller, is an early goal prospector. But you can see there's a link to a story about Biddy there. And again, the story links back to the photograph. But there's also a link to a place and there's the information about Westport. So the system's set up to make these connections between things, where connections can be made and they're making use of it. So I mentioned the copyright statements are also being added. This is the contribution page for the community to offer up photographs. And what we did was we put down some quite sort of simple statements. Creative Commons is not a difficult concept to get your head around, but we just wanted to sort of drop the options down to something really simple that people could select from. And the important thing was Facebook comments were all harvested as well and clearly attributed as such. And I think these sort of comments show what a wonderful thing Facebook is. It's the spontaneity of people just having a conversation about something in the detail that comes up. This is about two actors Ian Watkin and Bruno Lawrence and Blurta, which some of you may remember. And this one, a personal favour. I just love the photo of this abandoned tractor and it's got quite a good description about it. It's Stafford Bay in South Westland. But the real detail is in the posting and this one's from Heather again. Quite a poignant story because the tractor really tells the story of an attempt by Polish families to settle in smooth water. And it failed due to a whole range of things. But the worst event was basically one of the men was chopping down a tree and it fell on the house, killed his wife. And the settlement was eventually abandoned. So that tells you a lot more than just it's an old rusting tractor. This is my favourite, so I've just thrown that in for gratuitous use. So I mentioned a team of volunteers and this has actually settled down to a core of seven who are administering the site. Mae Claire, Brian, Christine, Rowena, Laura and Heather are the site administrators. It's a collaborative effort, none of them are paid and they're putting it up to as much as four hours a day each. So it's a really big effort. They're scanning and uploading new content directly. They're responding to email postings and I just took a few snippets out of that one. So there's quite a lot of activity about this site and there's comments coming back from people and questions. And that ability for the community to actually offer content as well. They're reviewing that and improving the description of that. So here the Invisager site is the West Coast wide resource for schools and that libraries could use a two wrangle YY for West Coasters. The team stressed they're not in it for the money or the glory. They didn't set out to compete with anybody or prove anything. But the change of platform from Facebook and the overall popularity of the site has brought about some tension with the local cultural institutions which is an unfortunate thing. There seems to be three themes about this. The first is a perceived threat to revenue. Many of the museums on the coast have photographic collections but you have to turn up to look at them. So there's often a admittance charge to access them. That can be as high as $26. So it's a revenue maker for the museums. They may also work on reduced hours and they may get a little bit of income from selling low resolution copies of the photographs. The West Coast site by contrast, they're not selling anything. I stress that. They're not making money in any way. But the content can be freely downloaded and as a web service, they're effectively open 24 seven. So instead of the collaboration and mutual benefit, you'd like to see the site driving traffic to the museums and the museums getting their material publicised and identified. There is sort of a more of an uneasy standoff at the moment. Other element to this one is, I think a perceived challenge to professional standing. The group has come in for criticism by some museum staff for their lack of professional training or understanding of museum ethics. Yes, they're all volunteers. The irony is that some of them are also volunteers at the museums. And I'd have to say, I don't think lack of professional training does mean irresponsible. Heather and the team have mechanisms in place for dealing with issues and complaints. They're procedures to redact or remove material if required. And they're actually having to deal with quite a lot of this because the legacy of moving stuff from Facebook is actually having to deal with that on a more permanent basis with people saying, why is that up there? I want that taken down. So there's actually quite a lot of maintenance and management around having pulled that data through. And the last point I think is just a personality thing by the sounds of it. What Heather calls Planet Graymouth. And it's just perhaps a character of places where everyone knows everyone and everybody knows everyone's business. But it sounds like it's led to an unfortunate element of suspicion and mudslinging from some individuals. So, unfortunately, this characteristic is also played out in the Facebook rate with a backlash from some of the Facebook members who were not enamored with the idea of paying for anything when Facebook was free. Don't actually realise Facebook is getting your money somewhere else. Heather has had to handle some fairly wild accusations. The example of recollectors ripping off vulnerable West Coasters and the odd act of petty rebellion by some of her Facebook administrators. So if anything, this is a case study of group dynamics and people being people, I think. But onto happier things, how is the site doing? Well, they've got over 9,000 images now uploaded and a whopping 8,442 have been geotagged. So, these people really know their subject matter. For September alone, there were 9,882 visitors and quite a lot of page views. And just as a point of concept, Karasen, I went back and looked at some of the other sites that we host and these are public library ones. Some of them are actually got very active campaigns around driving traffic to their sites. This West Coast one is three times as busy as the nearest one that I could find. That's, yeah. There's 365 registered members, not so good as 7,000 for Facebook, but if you remember that most of the visitors are going to be anonymous people because coming in, browsing, looking at the content, these 365 have registered for a purpose which is to contribute something, to tag something or to upload something. And they've had 197 photos that haven't come from the team that actually come from the community itself. And proof of the pudding, I just picked this one because I thought it's a nice to end with a bouquet rather than a few brick bats. People are really appreciative of it. And if you read down to the bottom, that really sense of that socialness of the site and it's informality. So that's it. Do go and have a look, there's some fantastic content on there. HTTP, westcoast.recollect.co.nz. And if you'd like to join that Facebook group, there's the URL for that one too. Thank you. Thanks so much, Janine. We've got about five minutes so we can take some questions if anybody has anything to ask Janine about the process or the project. So I'm just going to repeat the questions just for the sake of the video that's going to go online after. So the question was, is the API available? Hi, Sarah, yes, there is an API. What do you mean? I suppose it's a question of what you mean by availability. Yes, yes it can be downloaded. It's also, it's not quite there yet but this is going to connect up to digital New Zealand so the westcoast content will be available through digital New Zealand as well. Anybody else? I had a quick question actually, Janine, about the user contributed content. So how does that process work? Do people, does it still go through Facebook and then onto the recollect? Oh, there's, yeah, I missed that but there's actually quite a bit, it's still a bit of interchange there but both sites are working in parallel. So here there's trying to push the more sort of determinant content down to recollect and get people to add it there, preferably with a better quality image but there's quite a bit of cross-pillination as stuff is tweeted up from recollect to Facebook and some content is copied back down from Facebook to recollect. Right, right, so it's kind of a two-way street now in a way, they're both speaking to each other. And Facebook still has its own distinct audience and its own distinct purpose and it is different, it is a different medium. Like you say that almost real-time conversation is something that Facebook facilitates really well. Yeah, I think the gold standard is to be able to emulate that sort of spontaneity and on chat on a sort of heritage site like this one. Yeah, yeah. Cool, well, unless if we don't have anything else, any other questions, we can wrap up a bit early and you can make your way to the next session but let's thank Janine again. Thank you.