 Tēnā koutou katoa, te porahi tuku iotanga o Pukeariki ko Andrew Moffat taku ingoa. Ia gadaftinu, nō i'm Andrew Moffat, Heritage Manager at Pukeariki, from Tropical Taranaki, or in the heart of Tropical Taranaki it is. And we're here today, myself and the currently absent Millie, to discuss a little digitisation project that we've got running involving a large collection of photographic negatives which we call the Swains and Woods Collection. So what we want this session to do is to be a really useful session for people in terms of sharing some of the trials of this project which we're starting to stack up quite a few of both, to be honest. So what we want to do is run through, share a few of these which will hopefully inform the projects that you're working on in different ways. And it was really interesting to see Cliff's talk just before in terms of the different ways that the cake can be sliced, I guess. So we're dealing with a different kind of collection here, but similar issues so we can get out of the way. So firstly, for those of you who don't live and breathe a project like we do at Pukeariki, a little bit about the collection. The Swains and Woods Collection is a large collection of studio photography. The photographic where negatives is an important part of the equation created by the New Plymouth photographic studios, Swains and Studios and Bernard Woods Studio. So Joseph Swains in there, you can pick him out. On the left he established Swains and Studios in 1923. Bernard Woods took over the studio together with his dog in the 1960s and then his daughter, Ginny Woods, assumed responsibility for the business in the 1980s. So what they did, they took photos. And the resulting collection of these years and years of practice, a very successful practice, was a large collection of studio photography. So we've got primarily studio photography. As someone said before, there's a lot of weddings, a lot of school groups, a lot of sports teams, that sort of thing. But also you can see we've got people of tractor in there, a bit of industrial heritage and some beer kissing. So a little bit about the project. I guess there's different ways to deal with this. So I was really interested this morning to hear about how the digitisation project can kill institutions and I think that that is a very real risk with something of the scale arrives on our doorstep. The collection arrived at very short notice in 2005. It was offered to us and the donation was brokered. And what it effectively did, it came in from some storage where it was stored and effectively a garden shed and arrived on our doorstep. It was a deal brokered by the Nicomath genealogists together with some of our staff. And this is the state of some of the negatives when they arrived. They're actually in surprisingly good condition and a lot there you can see they're sorted by, they've got some identification and are sorted but I guess skeletally identified would be a good way of saying. And I won't go into the details but there were things that we were discovering well let's just say we found maggots. So this effectively doubled the size of Pukiatiki's pictorial collection. You see I've highlighted massive challenge. That certainly was on a collection management front and so with the help of some outside advice and with a lot of head scratching on our behalf, we came up with a plan you can see at the end of three phases. Cleaning, rehousing and cataloging the two portions and then moving on to digitising the collection which I think we are all enjoying and that is the phase we are in now. So another thing to mention, this is a huge effort in terms of resource and the reason that this hasn't killed us or we haven't just got them sitting in the same state as a huge amount of external funding that we've been able to secure over the years. Taranaki Electricity Trust, the TSB Community Trust and lotteries were very important as well in the first phase of the project and also obviously we're part of the New Cymru District Council and the genealogists have been a huge help if I said and a lot of the support broken by the Pukiatiki Trust. So we're talking in total about $1.2 million of external funding over the life of the project from 2005 through to the digitisation and it's also been a tremendous team effort in other ways. I might get into trouble with this slide bringing up a few unfettering photos but I wanted to get across some of the scope and you'll see there's some white areas there with people who haven't made it in. I'm really aware of the support we've had from a number of institutions, National Library, chief among them and individuals as well. So it's been a huge team effort with the technicians cleaning, rehousing and cataloging the collection. It's easy when you say it like that but that's been years of hard work in the making to get us where we are now. So where we are now, here's a shot from our collection store and we couldn't fit in all the boxes but you'll see we've got a SW11 up there going right down to SW271 is the number of boxes I'm told which the collection has stored in. So quite an impressive array there and a lot of work to do. So of course these were, the collection was there but really until the digitised the collection of studio photography is not much use to anyone so that's where the digitisation comes in. We'd like to hand over to our digitisation coordinator, Millie Mitchell-Anion. This has been a big project for us so Millie's going to talk you through the next step. Which one do you push? Okay, awesome. Kia ora, I'm Millie Mitchell-Anion and I'm the coordinator for the Swenson Witch digitisation project. I'm going to talk about running this project, the equipment and processes we use, what it's taken to get it off the ground and just some of the few trials and triumphs we've encountered along the way. I'd also like to take the time to shout out to the National Library without their support. We'd be a little bit lost. But, rather than dropping in the deep end I'm going to briefly explain our process before moving into the technical stuff. We're simply capturing an image of a negative on top of a light box using a camera. So then we're inverting that image in Photoshop. But yeah, scanning the negatives wasn't investigated but we thought camera capture was a much faster and more efficient way to do it in the well run. Especially when 110,000 negatives enters the equation. But straight into the nitty-gritty, a light box is specifically designed for negative capture. The Canon camera we use has the capability of capturing raw files around 26 megabytes in size. We use a 50mm lens for larger negatives and 100mm lens for smaller negatives. The UV filters are on our lenses to prevent damage from the massive amounts of light filtering in. And then we sandwich the negative in between the light box and a sheave glass which is specifically designed to eliminate mutant rings, which as you can see from the cat picture here like where the arrows are they're undesirable in a digitisation project. We work with dual monitors. One higher quality Dell and the Philips is our secondary. In terms of software we are using camera raw to capture the raw image files. Adobe Bridge is a general file management tool and Adobe Photoshop for editing our raw files. We use Vernon, a collection management program for our text and image records and FileZilla for uploading our records to the web each day, might I add. Onto storage, IT had been involved from the outset of this project so we have a dedicated 6TB server hosted by the New Plymouth District Council solely for Pukiyariki images. I also asked about the server before I came here and we use a storage area network which is just a large can of disks all interconnected and configured for non-stop operations. This is at the council which is then backed up in another location within the city and this information is backed up again and taken off site by a third party installed somewhere securely in the depths of Taranaki. So we're feeling pretty confident about our digital storage situation. Onto training this week's awards team training began with Mark Beauty coming up from the National Library to train Ruth Harvey, Charlotte Stase and I. As you can see, Ruth, Charlotte and I are hard at work. During training Mark ran us through all the different scenarios we might encounter over the course of this project. Basic things like making sure file names were correct, files were the right size, working on banal things like file structures even though they're very important. We cemented the processes we use developed generic workspaces for Photoshop and Quick Actions. We spent a couple of days running through the project seeing what cropped up and even Andrew had to learn the basics. Yeah and then together we all trained the new Swains and Woods team members who are Claire Richardson otherwise known as Doctor QA me, Vice Vernon Amber Cookley, Professor Procesa and Jacob Metaitoga none other than Captain Catcher. So I explained a little bit about camera capture before but for a little refresh we start by sandwiching a negative between the lightbox and a layer of glass. We use camera raw to capture the image files in raw format and then those files are then saved on to our server. Alright, so technical bit. From there we cropped and stranded raw files and then processed them as 16 bit TIF files in Photoshop. We have action set up so it's only one click one button to convert the image into the right colour profile flip it and invert it. We'll then bring in the levels making sure not to use any detail by introducing true blacks or whites adjusting the mid tones and sometimes using curves to enhance them. After we've finished processing we'll save them as an 8 bit TIF. Once we've done a batch, they're ready for another team member to pair with you and check the quality of our work with all this QA. As we're checking the image we're checking that the edge is not compromised the image is sharp and we check for here and dirt that may have been added during our processing. We check whites, blacks, mid tones this is all quite a meticulous process as you can imagine. We check that all the whites and blacks are within an RGB range of 14 to 245 and another aspect of the QA is a general audit as we're going with our Vernon records which were already pre-done in stage one and stage two. And so there's also the ability there to add extra detail about the images once they're digitised we can start adding extra terms and tags so that they're searchable. Our final TIFs end up being about 17 megabytes in size smaller JV is then linked to for our online records and so it got from this in Vernon to this by the end of the day and then during our daily uploads the record is updated online. All of what I've seen so far is the easy bit since starting this journey to digitise 110,000 negatives we've had our moments and being tested on numerous occasions so in the beginning we had a bit of an issue with dust cotton gloves were leaving small fly away fibres on everything so we switched to nitrile gloves we made a Tyvek dust cover dubbed Casper the Dust Free Ghost for our camera copy, stand and light box Sorry because the collection came to us from a garden sheath not all the negatives were in great condition so there's always an issue trying to determine if a mark on the images is pre-existing and perfection or something we may have added so we're all experts at the game here versus scratch we also now clean the lenses once a week because at one stage we captured thousands of images with a small halo piece of dust on the lens which we then had to recapture you know learning curves another issue we've had to tackle is the shaky suspended floor we work on when someone walks past our workstation it just shakes a little bit so we've managed to work through this by capturing a faster shutter speed and it hasn't been an issue so far and Newton rings even though we use Newton ring glass pre-existing fingerprints on the negatives can look like Newton rings and give us a fright but it keeps us on our toes so we were asked during our job interview if we could deal with repetition so we took a flag here and said I did underestimate how many babies and brides they were going to be in a studio collection and I confirmed that people did get married and have babies in the 40s and 50s one day we checked our raw capture folder only to discover we've been shooting in low-res JPEGs for about 700 images or so they're about 200 kilobytes in size so useless so there's nothing we could do apart from recapture them raw backlog so on the topic of raws we're still struggling to find a balance between our raw capture station working faster than our processing and QA so we currently sit on between 5 and 10,000 raws of our sleets at any one time which can be a bit of insurance policy or it can lead to other problems like capturing a piece of dust on them for a while and consistency and taking a while to produce consistent style amongst the team and it's still something we're constantly working on and another hurdle is colour processing we've got issues of blue hues image quality reflections and the list goes on because colour digitisation hasn't been done on a large scale yet we have no model to base our processes on so we're figuring it out as we go and another major curve was the failure of the server because it was amazing but it felt like it at the time one morning we arrived during our first week and all the work we'd produced so far had disappeared into the ether somewhere it was however a simple problem and solution IT just changed the way they backed up our server but you know there was a few heart attacks that morning this however wasn't the end of our computer wars one day our 600 gigabyte Swanson Woods folder had disappeared in its entirety suspecting the worst that had been deleted we rang IT and they searched and they couldn't find it and so they were able to restore our data so everything was restored by the next morning so if you think about that like 600 gigabytes of data more heart attacks so yeah having an amazing server is worth it and it's already paid its dividends but you know it looks like the issues and trials we've had might outweigh the triumphs but those trials are small fry in comparison to the massively rewarding outcomes from digitising the collection I mean just look at the amazing images we get to digitise we're starting to connect to the collection in a place like a lot more than I thought we expected we see things that make us laugh and you know particular triumphs of ours include learning about people in the collection for instance this is Merve Luke a cyclist from Timaru who won the Round the Mountain Race in 1946 and one woman rang me up to tell me her son had won the exact same cup in 1997 what she then took to the pub filled with beer and then scolded um another triumph is just how quickly we're working despite the trials we're having we really had to keep that in mind as we're challenged by the various trials of the project we're also working out quicker ways to do things even on Vernon when we would have copied datis and now do XML imports and exports and there's now potential to apply these methods across the collection in lots of other ways and another major triumph is the day to day problem solving and finding solutions for it but I think above all the biggest mahi is when someone from the public is able to connect to the collection because of the digitisation work we're doing because that's what it's all really about so um yeah I'll hand you back to Andrew yeah so um Millie's led into that very nicely that you know we now are faced with the challenge and the ongoing challenge of what to do with this amazing resource that we are in the process of creating so you see the quote there from Jeffrey Batchan we couldn't agree more that we need to do things with this collection we can't sit on it it's important that we whether we take a scanning approach or not I guess so we are doing a number of things with the collection digitally and otherwise we're using the newspaper and the themes of Artifact of the Week and also a Can You Help Us column so these are two different ways of connecting the collection with the community we're getting great the Can You Help Us is just asking for identifications on a photograph each week and the data news and we get a huge response from that so normally the phone rings pretty hot on a Wednesday morning doesn't it Millie and we get sometimes a lot more information than we bargained bargained for which the team we treat each thing as a real gift and it actually lifts us sometimes I guess the first call might lift us more than the 50th but nevertheless that's all part of the process and we really value that engagement we record that information in Vernon and update the record of course you'll see there the Inglewood Dramatic Society in full flight there that refers to a series of digital exhibitions we run around the Taranaki region this came out of some sponsorship from the Taranaki Electricity Trust initially and it's a series of rotating digital exhibitions where we feature a lot of locally relevant content from the collection and again we're getting identifications through that and amazing community connections we're actually touring a part of the Swanson Woods exhibition around the region as well yeah so that's part of it we do like Swanson's themselves at the Winter Show we do hold exhibitions as well we've had a very successful one which those are, you saw those cutouts were from which Millie was modelling so well before yeah so we've had that been a great way with really giving the community ownership I had a question raised before to me like well is everyone really interested in those photos of weddings and babies and actually the answer that we've had so far is a really resounding yes people take huge ownership in this collection and it's got to grow Jacob here looming a little menacingly behind the light box is promoting our behind the scenes tours that we're running as well we've had a demand for that and yeah we've been well subscribed so showing people what's actually involved obviously we're getting things online as Millie said on effectively a daily basis perhaps not counting today seeing Millie and I are here while the team is still hard at work but yeah there'll be some big uploads coming later in the week and part one of the things that this has forced us to do Millie alluded to this collection is effectively stretching what we're doing in other areas so we've started using the Swanson Woods fresh feature which is a weekly summary of the freshly digitised items and we're getting people checking back weekly and sometimes daily I think on what the team are uploading so another thing that Swanson Woods collection has made us tackle is start to tackle commenting directly on our browser as I've mentioned people are wanting to engage with the collection, identify it and otherwise make comments so we've added the function there together with some great work from Vernon thanks Paul added the commenting function there which basically is very easy to do it's just a matter of an email address and name and your comment in there and it's been working amazingly well we've been getting a great range of comments the flow has been coming on everything from you know John coming in from the hay panic there for the photo and not too keen simple identifications through to some amazing detail that we've never thought elsewhere so we've just recently changed the flow to start with there was enough for one staff member to keep up with that and respond monitor and update the reports but we've had to switch to a team approach because we're getting a big response now so the team are needing to chip in to make it manageable of course our friends at Digital New Zealand I had to mention them are part of our digital strategy over the years so every record with an image attached is harvested now to Digital New Zealand on a weekly basis just another great window in to the collection and obviously we have some tremendous stories of engagement that are coming out it was difficult to pick what to talk about but really I couldn't go past talking about Palmer here briefly as an example she's obviously a beautiful woman from Australia and was lured to Taranaki this bloke here Rex Rex Hopkins who's a farmer from around the coast and they were married in New Plymouth at St Mary's Church in December 1955 so I mean obviously a pretty amazing story in some ways or quite typical but the thing that really brings in a life for us is this contact now this you may recognise him from the previous photo he's hardly changed but I told him and he's the kind of guy who laughed when I said that as Rex so Rex is now over 80 but an amazing character and he had contacted us previously when he saw or had been made aware of the photo of his wife and he wrote us a lovely letter basically quite a touching letter really about how he was so thrilled to see it in terms of it being shared and treasured and was obviously incredibly proud of his wife who has contracted Alzheimer's in 2002 and is now in hospital he can't care for her but he visits her daily except he spoke very touchingly when he visited he came in and basically had a very short notice dropped in to see the project and we gave him a quick tour and I don't know Milly was talking about problems with dust previously with the project and I think there was a lot of dust in the air that day because they were rubbing their eyes quietly as Rex was recounting the importance of this photograph to him and showing his appreciation for the project and I think you could count for a lot of things when you get stories like this sort of starting to emerge and Rex then lessen the next day popped in with a bottle of bubbly but this is all about not trying to gloss over the problems this session so while we have numerous examples like Rex's there's also worth acknowledging that we have problems as well I guess one that I wanted to raise is we can feel a bit lost in the ethical woods like Pinocchio here because this collection was never created as obviously a public record it was a collection of private studio photography we're running into quite a contemporary collection sure we start back in the 1920s but we're running right up into the 90s and we have had instances where people have not been as thrilled as others when they found themselves or something related online we've had instances of people whose marriages have ended often the way they would want and then they see their wedding photos online obviously we've had issues where people have raised people's past criminal records who are featured online as well so what we need to do we're basically developing a case law for want of a better term we're dealing with these on a one-on-one sort of a basis where we basically consider the case while we're considering the case which somebody puts forward we look at it carefully and then we explain our reasons obviously we're all about access for this collection but we're operating within constraints and wanting to respect the community so we really look carefully at it and we'll then explain our reasons for the decision and either put their image back online or perhaps leave just as a text record or take it down completely it's something that I can't give you answer on exactly how to deal with every case but I'm confident that over the time we're going to build up a pretty substantial we want to be consistent and open with people basically so that's how we confront that we do have digital limitations like everyone this bloke I actually used to pay rugby with I was delighted to find delighted to find him in the collection he had a very good sides here but basically yeah we've got a great I think I'm really happy with the progress we've made with our digital presence over the years and together with working with Vernon and Digital New Zealand it's been great but I'm conscious that there's still a lot of room for improvement our search function could be improved our image size our flexibility there are a lot of things which we're going to continue to work on possibilities for the collection looking to the future pretty limitless to be honest we could do things like letting the artists in and we're going to continue a huge focus for us will be that bridge building to the community but that's got to happen in various ways and can never stop really for us so I'm really interested seeing Chris's presentation before lunch in terms of the names and matching other data sets because we're going to have a huge data set here and we'll be really interested to see those sort of possibilities what we can do but really like this this beel rabbit here you could never predict that this sort of image would be in the collection and here it is just like a big fluffy rabbit on top of a polished pedestal we don't really know what the future holds for this collection and what really lies underneath that we haven't discovered so I'm really looking forward to carrying on with an open mind to be honest so that's ripped that from us we've got a huge amount of work ahead of us I should say I don't know if we actually mentioned but since the digitisation project was underway we've got an excess of 25,000 negatives digitised but as Millie alluded to we're just in this phase of getting colour off the ground which is going to be a whole another set of challenges and we've done a lot of the easier parts of the collection hats first so it would be great to keep that up but I can't imagine that pace will continue so I'm happy to take questions to either myself or Millie if we've got some time I'm not sure how we're placed so around copyright then you've got to keep the copyright on all the images so you have the rights to republish all the stuff that's out of copyright I guess obviously a vex tissue for everyone I don't know if there's really a blanket answer in terms of when we get requests in terms of taking an image down for example if somebody is in that image then that would be a key thing for us here and you're asserting copyright over the digital the scans that you're doing you can promise those under my term incredible at the moment it's similar I think in a way to where Nelson's at we do like we're processing well you know we'll provide images people can, anything that's online there just so long as they provide a link to it we'll let them use it in terms of we'll be processing images through the image service as well for the high res things we've looked at creative commons but we haven't looked at instituting it yet Genie would sign the creation over to actually sign the copyright as well so I guess what we want to do is navigate the somewhat murky water in the best way we can but that was an important pre-condition before we would take the collection back from 5000 more things could cause problems how do you get around that do you have a sampling thing to check the quality we do now we didn't think we needed it but then we found out via that incident that we did so now we go forward and check