 Kia ora. So, whu? Established in 1980, City Gallery Wellington is the capital's main contemporary art museum. Feels like a funny place to say that, but here we go. And one of New Zealand's key art museums. We're principally funded by the Wellington City Council. In 38 years, across three buildings and under the leadership of five directors, we have run a program presenting over 600 exhibitions plus many, many more events. This is the first, but maybe not the last of my bad jokes. If a tree falls in a forest, it might be art. But if it isn't online, does it make a sound? Arguably not if it's in a box file. Then it just whispers to an independent contractor like me. In 2015, City Gallery Wellington applied for a lottery grant to digitise our analogue archive. On the proviso, we'd work with MicroGraphics New Zealand who are here in the front row and hire one part-time researcher, me, to sort the materials for digitisation and to publish them online. The archive project actually had a really long fuse across many staff. One idea was to digitise everything for presentation. But by the time I was hired, this had been consolidated into 100 shows from across the gallery's history. The archive project was envisaged to coincide with a redevelopment of the gallery website so that the two projects could dovetail and create a bigger online presence overall. The aim of the archive project ultimately was to convey the life and times of our exhibitions to bring them to life on a web page. How did we achieve this? Mainly through the gentle magic of this SMA scanner. I don't even know what it's like to use this piece of equipment. For me, the material factors of the project were very easy because MicroGraphics New Zealand did that part of the job for us. I just want to pause here to say a few words on formats. It was originally imagined with this project that a lot of costs would go into digitisation but for several reasons that didn't really transpire. Primarily because most of the material was 2D and 3x required for the new website ended up being pretty standard, i.e. JPEGs. We do also have TIFFs at about 6,000 pixels of everything available online but most of what you can see in our past exhibitions files online now is simply a JPEG or a compressed PDF. Why did we digitise the archive? Collecting museums see their legacy as tied to their collections. Both Auckland Art Gallery and Te Papa have prioritised getting their collections online but City Gallery doesn't have an art collection. It was set up from the get-go to support contemporary art. The gallery's shows and accompanying publications are its history but also its legacy. Most of that legacy was purely analogue. There was no visual record of the majority of shows from 1980 to about 2005 on the gallery's former website. There was also little and or inconsistent written records on shows. For instance, a small show might have a 1,000-word entry and a significant group show that occupied the whole space of the gallery might have substantially less text on it or it might have an entry based solely around its publication. Audience, from the outset was perhaps a controversial idea that this history is worth recording and making available for the public even if it is not widely used. That's especially tough to achieve for small institutions that are always forward-planning, always marketing the next show, the next event. As the Chief Curator, Robert Leonard, who has overseen this project says, you're only as good as your last show. Perhaps especially when the history of the organisation isn't really visible. Bringing the archive online in the form of these past exhibitions was never expected to drive loads of clicks to each web page to make the history available to people, researchers, historians, students, artists, colleagues and institutions, both here in New Zealand and abroad. There was also an internal audience. As staff have come and gone, as staff do, many of the team didn't have a grasp of the gallery's history either. That history wasn't readily available to view. The other factor, we also make our past shows more relevant today by bringing them online for a generation of Google researchers, not unlike myself. So, now we're more able to flash back to shows like Flashback from 1989. See what I did there. A show built around a timeline of early gallery achievements when the gallery was still at its first address on 65 Victoria Street. I can know because I've read the timeline that was made for that show that the inaugural director, Sedin Bennington, started on April Fool's Day in 1980 with a staff of three in an annual budget of $40,000. He resigned in 82 and Anne Philbin replaced him. When she left in 1985, she told the Dominion Post, when you work from a gallery that is not beautiful or grand, that does not even have a fridge or public toilets for functions, you have to sell your ideas. The Gallery Archive has revealed cyclical problems of infrastructure, building, audience, attendance fees, but also all the great ideas. How much the staff, the council, the city have invested in this gallery over time and how much Wellington and the visual arts infrastructure have grown. From the controversial Robert Maplethorpe retrospective in 1995, which was campaigned against by the Christian Heritage Party, you can see them here in the express at their rally for righteousness, which was held on the opening of the gallery, but they weren't the only protesters. Nine-day-old Willie Pearce was also unable to attend the show because of its R18 rating. Only about 10% of work in the show was explicit. One of the most protested works was a portrait by Maplethorpe of three-year-old Rosie Boudry, which was just a little girl with a little bit of her genitalia showing. It was a commissioned family portrait, and you can see that riff on the old Absolutely Wellington, Positively Wellington campaign. Someone logged and ad Absolutely Positively pornography, which was complaining specifically about that image. We can also flash back to the Halcyon days of our partnership with Sachi and Sachi, which was at its zenith during the 90s, and this was some of the advertising for the Maplethorpe show. Perhaps it's also worth noting that the Jono Rotman show from 2015 of mongrel mob portraits is the most clicked-on past exhibition for the gallery. That's followed closely by Creamy Psychology, the Yvonne Todd Survey in 2014, and then by the popular and iconic Kusama Survey of 2009, including this bespoke work that she made for the Gallery Exterior, Dots for Love and Peace, still remembered by so many people and visitors to Wellington. I can also share with you the little tidbit that this very beautiful installation, Fireflies on the Water of LED Lights in a Darken Room, had a dock over about five inches of water, and several viewers did fall into the water, causing ripples in the local media. So, these shows and many, many more are now all on our website, simply presented chronologically under past exhibitions, and you can see there that you can search by date along the side, or you can scroll, scroll, scroll. To date, we've published 105 analogue exhibitions ranging from 1980 to 2008, which is about when our digital archive begins. We've published 2,891 slides, 320 transparencies, remember those, 187 photographs, and 60 publications have been made available as PDFs. We've also digitised over 230 items of rare ephemera, which range from small pamphlets to posters to invitations on, you know, even invitations on blocks of wood, and we've done some TV footage, especially of the old Sachi and Sachi TV ads. In addition to our work on the analogue archive, we originally proposed to bring back the last four years of our shows online, but we've stretched back to 2010, and we're currently trying to, you know, get to the very beginning of our records on our drive, which I think are around 2005, on the former website, there was often no more than 10 images, maximum for each show, despite the fact that there's extensive visual records for each show, each opening, each event in the drives, so we're really trying to bring more of that online as much as we can. How did we do it? Here's another one of my bad puns. Stuff Stuff was a touring show from 1983 by the Fabric Art Company, a collective of Wellington woman who met during a workers education association Fabric Art course. The title Stuff Stuff is also perhaps a good analogy for the archive project. How much Stuff Stuff? What Stuff Stuff? What do we put? How do we organise it online? You can see there the baby in the sink. That's essentially from the digital archive. That was a slide, but Bruce there, the black and white photo of Bruce, he was in the box files. Box files contain everything that makes a gallery tick, from the finances to old artist CVs and before emails, outrage letters to the editor, letters to the director, outrage letters from artists to the director, and beautiful hand-stitched letters like this from the Fabric Art Company to the director at the time of the gallery. One of the most charming items in the archive. So the information for the archive is all analogue, really, and the conceptual model, funnily enough, was pretty analogue too. Robert Leonard and I discussed and looked at a few different sources, but it was really this fired-in book that informed the approach we took to presenting the information. And this book has essentially a blurb or miniature essay written about each show. It provides photos of the shows, but also maybe social history photos of openings, etc. And it has key media, it has key reviews to do with each show, and it wasn't afraid to show those really nasty reviews and reviews of opposing and clashing opinions, and that was an influence. So how we made the cut took some sifting. We decided really what we were going to capture was what was forward-facing, so what was published, what was exhibited for the public. So install shots, some social images where we've got them, catalogs and publications, reviews and media coverage, as well as some old TV clips. One key decision was not to digitise press clippings. That definitely saved time and money. However, it did mean that I had to read them all and understand them, you know, to work with them. So for the Maple Thought Show, there were over 300 press clippings for that show. The limits of the website once it was developed posed just certain given constraints. We couldn't add files larger than 50 megabytes, so we made the decision to just present the catalogs as PDFs and we also needed to make the decision whether they would be one-page or two-page spreads and we made the decision for two pages, as that suits most but not all of the materials. So here's just an example, a screenshot of what an exhibition entry looks like, and you can see there that we chose to do a header which has basic information like the artist, the sponsor, the dates and other venues for a show. I can tell you, working with the archive, one of the hardest things to establish is dates, what dates a show actually happened and especially the dates that it toured. Then the little miniature essay is just underneath there and we try and put in things of museological interest and just things that bring it to life so that you can see the actual history texture. For instance, of Stuff Stuff, which was very popular, the director said it's a little bit like the movie ET, you hear people talking and they're on their fourth or fifth visit. And then along the sidebar there, that's where we add the links where you can just download the PDFs, publications, et cetera and up the top there, of course, you can see where the image gallery is. Stuff Stuff has over 50 wonderful photos to look at. We decided to be really simple with the presentation of these on the website with what content we put next to them. So we haven't put photo credits, we haven't put lenders, collectors, et cetera and we haven't made works lists available at this point. Extra detail can be sought by people who come to us. So the key decisions were really to write the past and the present tense to help to bring it to life, to keep it simple, stupid, just to keep it really visually uncluttered and try and keep the message on the visuals. Also the archive will dictate itself. You can't present what isn't there. Karanga Karanga, a very important show, one of the first shows of collaborative Maori woman art from about 1986. Sadly there were only two existing slides for that show and both of them weren't in terrific condition. Also I will say lots of shows that have copious installation shots but sometimes no solo shots of works and then it's really hard to make that leap to life too. So there are examples of that. And then there are examples like Maple Thought which is a really extensive exhibition, one of many and it's hard to even know how you would clearly represent how that show looked if you didn't have over 50 images of it at least. Also number four there is a fold out Te Kino Maori CD-ROM cover. Do I need to say more about that really? Te Kino Maori was a wonderful show from 2001 that was a partnership with Pataka and it was the first time that City Gallery and both and Pataka had made a CD-ROM and presented it as a publication in an exhibition. So ultimately the archive has enabled a shift and we've switched from a website model where exhibition entries are just retired from comms entries to ones that we consciously go back and weed and prep in light of what happened and then we add full visual documentation to them. Problems, what were the problems? Mainly internal heat, San Serif some of the most intense heated conversations were about the type of fonts we would have on the website. Searchability, can you find it on a mobile? Home pages are dead, this isn't spectable this isn't in the budget. Just the usual project management stuff. How do you find it on Google? We did look into content management systems but just because of the nature of this project it's not a collection. The exhibitions were shown as such and that's how we've chosen to represent them in the website. I also did take some good advice in the beginning and I knew I wasn't going to have more than 5,000 items but it seemed perfectly manageable to put them within the website that was being developed. Budget, need I say more. We've promoted the website mainly just through social media. It's the sixth most popular page on the website and people spend three minutes on average looking at archive pages. Fault in installation which is still visible of course on the front of City Gallery has had over 1,300 unique views. That is logged as a current exhibition because it's still happening. After that the top archive exhibitions are Kusama 410 views, Parihaka 367 views and so on. But some of the entries of course have about 10 views, usually the ones that haven't been on there for as long and I notice both Kusama and Toyo Ito who are popular international artists have quite a lot of hits on their pages. Everyone 70% more are coming from Google straight into the pages. So what did we learn? We learnt that things change. Things really do change. Fashion changes. Buildings change. Now see here from 1990 one of the most visually busy shows I've ever seen. The Cappuccino Bar changes. Posters, events change. Catalogs, catalogs are a design and caps your within themself. I only just say this as a researcher. Sometimes the format can mean it takes extra time to access the content as magical as that format might be, materially. Exhibition making. There's a really deep and rich history of exhibition making within the Art Gallery's archive and within all the Art Gallery archives within this country I'm sure. Also Brodsky and Utkin, I couldn't look past there before and after shots. The Russian paper architects came in 1992. They built monument with architecture students in Civic Square. Several days later it collapsed. We don't get wind like that in Moscow, they said. It was project management. Digital. You might think you're preserving the past but are you preserving a CD-ROM? I guess for me as a bit of a luddite I'm sure that's maybe a little bit obvious coming into this project. I thought digital was forever so it's really interesting to reflect on the fact that no format is necessarily forever. How soon is your work going to carbon date? Especially if you're just working on preserving images for some future audience. My recommendations. The limits of our website meant that the formats we've published online were really affordable so the investment really became a bit more affordable for us. Who understands your archive? Who understands the way your archive is organised and can access that information quickly? To what end? Reproducing everything might seem like a good idea but sooner or later someone has to sift that information. So our archive project has definitely created more consciousness about how we archive within the gallery and how shows now are slipping into the past tense. Also file names. These are just two really pragmatic little bug bears. I've developed quick, simple abbreviations around the show titles but with Maple thought there's 80 plus images so you're probably reading RM1, RM81. I don't know what the easy solution is to that. You could spend an age just trying to make great file names but I wish I'd had more awareness about it maybe when I started. It is good for forward planning. Also just final dates in a works list. The 80s and 90s works lists are really patchy and the more creative the artist, the more a title might not look anything like the work in question. So those are just some pragmatic kind of wishes for the future. For us now, as we have exhausted our original lottery grant, it's about how do we continue this archiving into the future? How do we continue to develop this? Really the idea would be to bring all of our history online and I'm sure everyone else desires that as well. Thank you. Yeah. Hi. Cool. An observation and a couple of questions. The Christchurch Art Gallery, the Auckland Art Gallery, now City Gallery and a few other galleries like the physics room and Arts Space have all got now quite a chunk of archival material but it's a bit scattered to the wind so it's kind of a that whole idea of the corpus of the New Zealand particularly contemporary art stuff is kind of a bit of a rosy thing to think about. So I'm wearing my physics room X-tier person hat on. But my real question is about copyright because we all love that. So like something like the publication you've got substantial publications like the See Here Now publication that's got about 20 10, 20 major New Zealand art writers. Did you contact all of those people for copyright clearance and I can answer that right now before you finish. No, we didn't. We have published all of the books that City Gallery Wellington has published. So now See Here is a City Gallery Wellington publication so it's been published online just as it is physically available in various derelict places in the world today. So no, when the publication we've only published City Gallery Wellington publication, sometimes those publications have been in partnership most notably with Victoria Press I have contacted Fergus and we have talked about that and they've been fine with that. But no, I have not gone to every writer of an original publication to say it's now online. So is that an issue? Is that an issue or every artist? I mean it's just, I don't think you have to answer that question because it's a difficult one. Yeah, it is. It's a difficult question and it's a difficult issue. But my second observation is that you haven't OCR'd your PDFs? Haven't OCR'd them? Optical character recognitions so that No, no, we haven't. That makes them less Google friendly. Yeah, that was indeed one of the discussions early on. There is further detail and layer we can add to it that definitely hasn't happened yet. At the moment it's kind of been it's been hard enough getting to this point. But it's been a very concrete project too. But yeah, there's definitely more we could layer in. As I say in some ways it was quite an analogue it's been quite an analogue approach to the digital. Hi. I'm Tim Jones, I'm the archivist at Christchurch Art Gallery and Paul Sutherland kind of stole my question. But I wouldn't at whether Digital New Zealand isn't the place to bring the Auckland Christchurch archival history of exhibitions together. We've got stuff stuff photos and parihaka on our website and it would be fantastic to be able to link them up with yours and Auckland's and see how the show varied from place to place. We should talk. Can I ask one more question? That's the thing about the past tense and the present tense. Our master list of exhibitions is on our website. When exhibitions are closed what do we do? We haven't grappled with turning everything into the past tense. Went on the day the exhibition closes and if you've got any solution to that I'd love to hear. I guess my quick answer is no. Like I don't think the archive is ever full of quick solutions and I wouldn't say everything in it. I think most of our blurbs advertising the shows are written in the present tense as well. The master list I was talking about are to some degree to do with catalogs. How familiar is it to look in a file and find ten master drafts of the final catalogue and I'm as guilty as anyone. Indeed Robert and I were just talking this morning about how websites are now our master list in our archive. Yes, I definitely think galleries should connect. Most of the shows we've archived have originated at City Gallery but there are exceptions. There are exceptions. Thank you. Thanks.