 Kia ora. So my name is Renee Shalu. I come from the traditional unceded territories of the Musqueam, the Squamish, and the Selwattooth nations, otherwise known as Vancouver. Sometimes I call it Auckland North. So a little bit about the city, just for context, if you don't know about it. So Vancouver, it is actually a lot like Auckland. It's a maritime seaside city. It's been inhabited though for over 8,000 years by our host nations. The white people showed up in about the 1800s to cut down all the trees and drop all the animals. And now it's a pretty big city, a lot of IT, a lot of tourism. We're at about 630 population at the last census with 250 identifying as immigrants and 15,000 as indigenous persons. So we've got quite the diversity thing going on. A lot of different languages, different alphabets. Let's see if I can make this work. No, this is fine. Okay. And this is just hit this? Yeah, just hit there. There we go. So I work at the public library. These are a couple of our branches. We're a 23 branch system. We have our flagship downtown branch. Can you see there? Okay. It didn't move. There we go. Okay. So Vancouver Public Library, fancy building in the middle. We've been around for over 100 years in our various locations around the city. We have a lot of active card holders. So you could see our numbers here. We've got over 269,000 regular card holders, a lot of uses of our spaces and our collections, both digital and physical. I work in our systems or our, sorry, our digital services department. So it's our organizational chart. And that's me with the ponytail in the middle. And it actually looks startlingly like me. And I actually have a green kayak that I sit in a lot. Anyways, so we've got three portfolios. We've got our digital collections. So ebooks, the databases, et cetera, et cetera. We've got our web folks, our UX, and they manage our Drupal website. And in the middle, community digital initiatives, what is it? We're not sure, but it's from a strat plan created about five years ago, based around some reports around social isolation and people feeling like they're not part of their community. Like I said, a lot of newcomers, not just from outside the country, but inside the country as well. So we were mandated to use, collect stories to use as ways of connecting people, of different backgrounds, different places in their lives. So we started up with a couple of oral history projects. The first one was about the West End, and it was a hundredth anniversary of one of the high schools down there, secondary schools. And then after that, another small project on Chinatown. And we also did something that was really interesting, is digitizing a quilt. And quilts, it's a series of banners that were handmade to commemorate the missing and murdered Indigenous women in Vancouver. And it's carried in a commemorative parade every year. So that's actually a really at-risk physical object that we took high-resolution photos on. We collected some stories about the women themselves, put them up there. So if you've got a computer or a phone, you can have a look at it. So you can see that we're the smallest of the three teams. So we've got some challenges trying to get these projects going. So that's our team. So we've got an assistant manager that was me temporarily. I'm back to being the librarian one, yay. And we've got a library technician. And we've got our graphic artist who has made our site so gorgeous. So this Vancouver is our repository platform. We use Islandora, which is a Drupal fedora, kind of dearly. But we really made it look a lot different than normal Islandora sites, which have tended to be institutional repositories. We really went for look and feel. And actually, one of our hopefully future community partners described it as, oh, it doesn't look like a website. It looked like community. And, you know, I kind of did a little of the cheering up thing. So you can see it is a collection of collections. And each separate collection has a separate tile. So you could see this isn't the whole deal, but we put a couple of other pieces of content in there mostly just to sow the seeds when we only had a few projects opening up. So Story City, you could see there it is up at the top and about the project. So Story City was part of Canada 150 plus, which was a happy birthday to us. The plus was to acknowledge that there were other people there first, and we want them to be involved in the celebrations. So sorry to get my notes down here. I've got them really, really big. So I don't have to wear my glasses. Here we go. Okay, so we got a fairly large chunk of money from the feds. They were flinging it about. And we spent some of it on extra staff because you saw we have a pretty small team. And we spent some on recording equipment. And we were mandated to go out there and collect a whole lot of stories, at least 150 from all over the city and try to be as diverse as in your inclusion of different communities and voices as you can. And then to present them in a mapping format to be able for our users to be able to explore with a sort of geographic entryway. So these are our pillars and our scope for our project. So we want to collect people's stories about journeys to Vancouver, the evolution of Vancouver's neighborhoods, and personal stories as a way to explore the interwoven, ongoing journeys and experiences that come together to make up the fabric of the city and then to focus on our First Nations, our host nations, but there's also quite a few indigenous folks who've come from other places in North America. So diversity and inclusion. So we worked for months on on collecting these interviews. We went to community festivals. We had in library special recording sessions. We had out library special recording sessions. I went to church for the first time in about 20 years. Nothing bad happened. So at the end of all that, we had over 360 individual interviews. And that's with a team of four working. So hooray for us. We launched in October. And what we had done is we'd cut up those interviews into small manageable bite-sized pieces. We tried to stick with the scope of the project and go for as wide a variety of topics and people as possible. But we really did go for the inclusion of people. So with the exception of seven interviews, I think, each of those 360-ish people had something included. So that ended up with over 700 separate objects or excerpts from interviews. So we ingested them into Islandora, into this Vancouver. And the mapping module that was created for us, we just had to add geographic coding for it to appear on the map. Okay. So we finished by October, even though the birthday actually happened in July. And so there was quite a bit of fanfare. We got some media attention. Our marketing department was really behind us. We got posters. We got social media. And then we had an event that was fairly well attended at the Central Library. We got our favorite people. And they came down and told stories. And it was quite crowded. And people really seemed to enjoy themselves. And we got a lot of use at the beginning. There needs to be a better way to do this. So at the beginning, we got a fair amount of usage. And if you look at our page views, if you could see that, we're looking at since we launched over 11,000 page views. So it's not horrible. But the problem is things fell off fairly quickly. We generated a lot of interest and then that interest waned. That was our bad. But so a couple of people I've spoken to already today were like, oh, you're doing fail stories. I like those. So hopefully we all like fail stories. So I mean, there are amazing things about this project, just the experience of doing it, talking to people, the skills that we built, the connections that we built, the map elements of it are fantastic. But yeah. Anyways, a lot of the problems came after the fact where we just left it alone. We didn't. There was not care and feeding. So why is that? So common organizational elements, I'm sure many of us are familiar with them. So we had a lot of staff movement. And when you consider how small our team is, one person leaving that team makes a huge difference. We had two. One has since come back. Hooray for him. As of last week, I was like, yes. Second part is these are pretty unique skills. So we have a pretty shallow bench. So if somebody leaves or has other projects to work on trying to get somebody in to do some of this work, who can do it, right? I'm not saying I do it particularly well, but I know how to do it. So I don't know. Is there an appropriate rugby metaphor to talk about a shallow bench? Okay. We'll stick with baseball. I was hoping for hockey, but whatever. And then there's the problem of the new things coming along. So we know this meme, right? This translates down here? Okay. I just want to make sure. So here are projects that we've worked on on to and we're really lucky that we live work in a really great corporate culture that allows us to innovate. So we're on to virtual reality stuff. You can talk to me about that later if you want. There's some really cool stuff we're doing. We had a live exhibit in the library when we opened up the new spaces on levels eight and nine are top floors. We created this beautiful public space for programming and exhibits, and we got drafted onto that team. Again, great experience, but took up all our time for a really long time. So our collections are going, excuse me, and we just kind of left them out there thinking we have done well and people will look at them. Well, of course, we're wrong. We saw the numbers. So here's the problem is innovation at the expense of maintenance. So this is something that's hanging above my desk right now. It's been making the rounds on Twitter. So how much are we hurting ourselves or missing out by failing to appreciate the value of maintenance at the expense of innovation? We love to innovate. We love because it lets us learn and expect it allows us to improve ourselves. But if we don't take care of what we have, then that's a problem. So what should we have been doing in the meantime or at least trying to make time for in the meantime when we're working on each other's on all these other projects? So maintenance, yeah, but the second part is really, really important and you can't maintain unless you engage because engagement is maintenance. It is checking in with your stakeholders who are your users and it's user testing and it's user collection assessment. So it's making those connections with your biggest user or your biggest stakeholders, your users as opposed to your boss and your board. And it guides you in your future. So how you treat your current collections and your new collections. I'm just checking my time. I'm probably going to have to skip a few things. But anyway, so situation right now we're in is we're redeveloping our site. We were given a room to be able to get a development environment set up for the first time for our team to learn Island Dora and be able to fix some problems with it. Our solar doesn't work properly. And if you can't search, yeah, you can't work, you can't search properly. You know, no filters, no faceting. Just don't even get me started. The map isn't searchable. It's a little bit of a problem. So we're looking at that. But it's also the time to just step back and look at those collections and think about them and think about, okay, what happens in the new platform? Do we treat everything the same or do we treat it differently? Another thing that has happened in the meantime, though, is we are in talks with a group called ARCA to actually migrate to them off of our own servers and they maintain Island Dora. And this came not that long ago. So now it's like an extra thing where we're actually possibly moving right out of the joint and then upgrading to Island Dora 8. So suddenly all of these things are happening. And we have no idea where we're going. So that's kind of putting us in a position of, uh-oh. So looking at the collections, and that's one of the things I've been really tasked at. And I will let you know, because of these things that have happened with the redevelopment and the migration, not even close to where I thought I would be by the time I got here when I sent my proposal, I thought we'd actually have a bit of a plan. No. But as a librarian, one of the first things we think of when you are maintaining your collection is. And, you know, to some people that's very frightening. I know there's different corporate cultures around retention and whether or not you should take things out of your collection or not. So do I have to explain this meme? Okay, somebody didn't know what it was last night. I might have mocked them. So, you know, I'm a public librarian, have been for 20 years. I'm a voracious reader. I throw out so many books. It's frightening to some people. So, yay. Then there are. This is my interpretation of archives and museums have that mandate of preservation and retention that public libraries just don't. So moving on. I'm still a librarian. I understand that there are a lot of risks associated with with these unique digital objects, these heritage, possibly heritage objects that are essentially irreplaceable. But yeah, I'm a librarian. There are reasons to weed, not the least of which of my boss telling me to. But you want your collection to be precise, tight, interesting, engaging. Chris this morning, he articulated it very well around, we gave them less to see or lessen the page and saw more. So even with search and other ways to explore, you can have too many things on your page. And we have too many things on our page. It was Story City for sure. So 700 things, even with even though the map scrolls really nicely. Again, it's not searchable. So weeding. Yeah, so there's risks with it, beware. In this case, the emotional factor, this is actually ours. I know there are librarians out there who are emotional about weeding books, I mock them. And now it's coming home to roost. We are the creators here. So we feel ownership because we, you know, we were the audio recorders and producers, but we also spoke to these people. We sat down at tables with them, we shared coffee, we share tea. And it would actually hurt to kind of get rid of their stuff. So there's also the community factor. Could be problems. Somebody comes back looking at Story City and not finding their interview, their Annie's interview. Bad community relationships. So best practices for weeding digital heritage collections. Yeah. We're making them right now. A lot of people in this room are making them right now. And it is a cross-sector thing. So we all, we're all coming from different directions. So I'm going to skip that. But if anybody doesn't know Seema Rao, she's really good, but she's talking about maintenance and sharing about maintenance. Talking just about retention criteria. I am getting close to my time. I'm going to skip some of this stuff. But there is stuff around judging your material for quality enduring value to local history and heritage. But who says? So for books, we are relying on professional, you know, professional reviewers for stuff like this. But who does it in this case? Who says? So this is a nice statement. I'll make these available, of course, about democratization of digital collections. Talk about, just want to mention usage. We don't know how people are using this because the metrics gathering tools for this mapping module aren't what they should be. So that's going to be at the top of our list when we improve everything. Because, oh, sorry, I'm one behind. Yeah, so usage. Your practice is only good as your yardstick for assessing your collection use. So Google Analytics does some stuff in Islandora Analytics does some stuff. We're really having trouble getting some meaning out of that. So I'm scooting through this. Some things that we learned from a later project called What Changes You can have look at that. But the biggest lessons are scope your projects. Bigger is not better. We had that 150 person, you know, cap and we're so scared of not reaching it that we ran right by it and didn't say stop. Just stop. We were a lot more curatorial with what changes you. We only included the things we really thought popped. So that makes things a lot easier for maintenance. You don't have to make those judgments after the fact. Going back to platform. So collection is only good as your platform. So just lessons learned with that map module. We would have been a lot more, I think, demanding if we knew some of the stuff around not being able to search and what happens when we try to measure usage. So up shots. We cannot properly envision how to treat our collection until we solve some of these problems. So around curatorial exhibition possibilities with the platform, your analytics and public input. So I want to get a rating and commenting feature in Islandora 8. We've got an Islandora developer in the room. So we can actually get, you know, on the spot judgments about the stuff by the people who are using it. Doing some information gathering, literature searches, cross-sector conversations. How's my time? Am I fine? Okay. So where we are is right. So this is what we're doing. I'm doing some information gathering. I'm doing literature searches. I'm contacting. Some of you may have gotten emails from me directly. I will be following up with you because I'm not getting responses to find out how these types of collections are being treated across various organizations and do a cross-sectoral comparison, but that instinct to weed and instinct to keep. And then this is starting to form the beginnings of a policy best practices statement. And as we get more information, we will be solidifying that. And we're actually going to review that statement after two or three years. We're also doing some collection assessment right now. I have a lovely young woman, Chloe, who is grading all 700 and whatever objects are in there based on a point system and then making notes. She sent me an email this morning just saying how hard it is, but it's actually less hard for her than it is for us because she wasn't part of the team and that was intentional. Chloe's actually an auxiliary and I brought her in specifically so that it wasn't our decision. Anyways, something else we're doing is we took some of those stories for repackaging and to regenerate interest and are putting them out as an e-book this week. It's very exciting. We took some of the real tiered jerkers and hopefully that will bring some users back into our collection and we can start engaging with them again. So that's the catalog record. I'm very proud of it. Look at all that metadata. Something else we're doing to get people back engaged with the content is connecting to our collections through our main catalog. So we're not putting individual records in there, but we are using a new feature called featuring catalog with bibliocommons where you can tie a search into another resource. So if you look up the subject expo 86, which was a big fare that happened in Vancouver, we show up fourth in line. So this is brand new. I did this just before I left and nobody knows it yet. I'm dripping with power and hopefully that will bring some more eyes and again we can try to get more engagement user testing, put a survey up, who knows. And then we want to do a program called memory lane where we're taking some of those stories and we're taking them out with groups of seniors to use them as conversation generators and it becomes sneaky user testing as well as again getting that story city collection out there. So we think that would be a fun way to do that, been trying to get that one off the ground for a while. And then we all know my tours, yes. So we are clients of theirs. We have a couple of tours based on older projects that we did, but yeah we can relook at that story city stuff and put it in there. And I think I'm there. So yeah, so like I said we're nowhere near where we want to be but we're going to get there and just being here for me is going to help me come back to Vancouver with hopefully some ideas and some connections for people who I can pester and bother and etc etc. So, oh I had, I even tried, it says Kiora Rawa to you but I accidentally got rid of it but thank you.