 Hi, everybody, really cool to be here. Now, okay, as most of you are probably aware, 2016 was, of course, the 50th anniversary of Uprohot being declared a city. Woo-hoo! That was back in May 1966. The Uprohot City Council was keen to make sure that the 50th birthday of this civic milestone would similarly prove another big occasion for celebrating our community. And so to facilitate this, they made special funding available to support commemoration projects. As the custodians of Uprohot's main local history archives, the Uprohot City Library was keen to play a major role in these activities. And to this end, we put forward two main proposals, both of which were focused around the theme of Uprohot during the 1960s, the decade in which it became a city. Focusing on the 60s seemed like a good choice for us for several reasons. For one thing, this was a significant decade for Uprohot, a period in which it was in the midst of this transformation from having been a small rural community into being instead a significant industrial center and dormitory suburb for the capital. But a second and more practical consideration was the fact that we also knew that there were heaps of really interesting records in our archives specifically relating to this time. And this is just one specific example. We've got this enormous collection of images given to us by a local photographer, Rebel Jackson, that wonderfully documented the social life of the era. So the 50th anniversary celebration seemed to us to offer an invaluable opportunity to provide greater exposure to this kind of material. And that became the basis for one of our commemoration proposals, which was to run for a couple weeks at a central city location, a pop-up museum about Uprohot in the 1960s. I've spoken about our pop-up museum project at the recently and the conference, so it won't be the focus of my talk today, but it is something I'll come back to at the very end of this presentation. Okay. Now the final crucial factor attracting us to the idea of using the 60s as a theme for our anniversary contributions was the fact that we knew there were still plenty of people around who remembered Uprohot during this time. Their numbers, however, were diminishing with every passing year, and it therefore seemed vital to us to try and capture the knowledge they possessed before it was lost. And that was what led us to the idea of using the interest generated by the 50th anniversary as a way of driving an oral history project aimed at capturing local people's memories of what life had been like in Uprohot 50 years ago, and it's our oral history project. Now we will advertise widely for, oh, just missed a bit, okay, given our very limited time and staff resources, we knew that the only way that we could get a project like this successfully completed was to employ an experienced oral historian to oversee it. And we were really stoked when council agreed to use some of their special anniversary fund to hire someone for 20 hours a week for a year to undertake this job. That seemed to us an admirably practical way for a local authority to both celebrate a local history anniversary and demonstrate its commitment to preserving local heritage knowledge. So we advertised widely for the position, and we were very lucky in the end to get this woman here, Karen Wilton, on the job. Karen's an experienced oral historian who's done lots of interviews, both as a freelancer for the Ministry of Culture and Heritage. She's shown here with Uprohot's mayor, Wayne Guppy, who was the very first person to be interviewed for the project. It's a real pity Karen can't be here today to present this herself as she was the one who did most of the heavy lifting on the project and undoubtedly the person most responsible for its success. Okay, now as part of her initial planning for this project, Karen consulted with a number of people working in the oral history field, and we were very grateful for the valuable advice and support we received from them. We also, though, did get a little bit of well-meaning pushback from some quarters. This was for people concerned about our intent to make our oral history interviews available and full on the Internet. Their view that it was fine to use a web platform like Recollect to showcase selected excerpts from our project, but that the prime locus of interaction with the full contents of these interviews should remain the precincts of a physical reading room style environment where access and use of these records could be more responsibly controlled. Now, that's a perfectly valid point of view and reflects current debate in this field about the risks and benefits posed by online digital environments. Just like the proverbial Lord, the Internet's giveth and it taketh away. So if on the one hand it offers us these wonderful opportunities for democratizing oral history archives to making their content more accessible, more easily reusable, and more easily interlinked with other content, on the other it creates legal and ethical dangers precisely because of the greater exposure and ease of access it affords. My own personal view is that this is something that has to be considered on a case-by-case basis according to the specific nature of your institution and the parameters of each particular project. In our case, we felt that as a relatively remote and obscure repository without a dedicated reading room, a high-profile oral history collection, or a regular stream of visiting researchers, online access was absolutely crucial if we weren't to risk condemning the memories that people had so generously shared with us from gathering virtual dust on a virtual shelf. Given that we are conducting these interviews ourselves, we felt confident about able to vet them for any problematic or defamatory content and also seeing to it that well-informed consents were obtained. The one area we did end up making changes to in response to advice was to remove people's birth dates from the interview abstracts that we were posting as text documents. This was to provide some measure of protection against identity theft even though that information would still remain available in the audio files. We're, of course, aware that having made our interviews available online, dangerous remain that we need to continually watch out for. In the end, though, we felt that risks of misuse had to be balanced against risks of no use and that the former seemed in our particular situation at least relatively small. Okay, on to the interviews themselves. All together, we interviewed 25 people over the course of this project. Sourcing these subjects was mainly done simply by consulting various contacts in our community. We endeavored to follow a documentation strategy so as to ensure that a comprehensive range of topics were discussed in our interviews. But in the end, there were a couple of subject areas that did emerge where we focused on a little more depths because they had a certain momentum behind them. One of these was Moai Hakona, which was a local Kappa Haka group formed in 1962 that went on to achieve significant national and international success. Created at the time of increased Maori migration to Upper Hut, Moai Hakona was not only Paniwi, but also notably multicultural in composition was a significant number of Pakiha and Pacific Islanders amongst its performers. We were grateful and privileged to have been able to interview several former members of this group who shared their memories of this fascinating and uniquely Upper Hut story with us. And hopefully, here's a brief extract in which Hinnipo, a Maori, Adam Langford, an Englishman, and his wife, Haki Kokonider, discussed the group's revered leaders, Joc McEwen and Auntie Dovey Katane. Is that gonna work? Okay, uh-oh. You got your wish, Simon. At the beginning, met Auntie and Joc McEwen and Auntie Dovey Katane and we loved it, eh? We loved it. We loved to be a part of it, yeah. It was fun, but especially me, you know, I felt so privileged to know Joc and Auntie Dovey Katane and the incredible personality. One of her pet sayings to Adam was, Adam, he said, you'll never make a Via Maori, but keep trying. Yeah, keep tapping on this song. Because you know, it's kind of like showing off in our, it's up to him to show that. Adam, you'll never be a Maori, but just keep trying. Keep trying. I'm still trying not to do it. I'm a bit of a shout out there to the tech preparation guy here because up until a couple of hours ago, I couldn't get any of my embedded media to play and I thought I was gonna have to act out all this stuff. So I'm very, very grateful to him. Okay, another area of focus for us was the thriving music scene that existed in the area at this time. A classic example of a 1960s baby boomer suburb, Upper Hut incubated a striking number of significant New Zealand bands and musicians. And doing this oral history project gave us an opportunity to document the memories of several key players in this scene, some of whom are shown there. And I'll be playing a little clip that uses Wayne Mason from the formulas interview in a moment. Okay. Oops, still not there? Yeah, okay. Our other interviewees, of which these are just a few examples, discussed a broad range of topics, but one constant were those everyday aspects of life to do is work, family, housing, shopping, socializing, et cetera. Oral histories, of course, are particularly adept at capturing this kind of historical knowledge, which often gets missed by other kind of recorded sources. Here's one of our interviewees Oops, no more. Here's one of our interviewees, Brian Pierce, talking about that now vanished Kiwi ritual of Friday night shopping. The night shopping was when everybody shocked, because everything was closed at the weekend. So Friday nights were, Upper Hut was booming in those days. And if you walked up through the main street, there was hardly room on the footpath. Everybody was there. They weren't necessarily buying everything, but you congregated. You went uptown. You took your girlfriend uptown and walked up and down the main street. And you might meet up with this one and that one and stop and have a conversation with this one. And you might go into a shop and have a look at something, but you wouldn't necessarily buy anything. But it was a social thing, certainly for the younger people. Okay, once an interview was completed, the next step was to create a time-coded abstract for it. Here's an example of the abstract we did for Brian's interview. One reason for opting for abstracts over full transcripts was, of course, they're less labor-intensive to complete. Equally important though for us was the fact that many oral historians now feel it's better to provide abstracts rather than full transcripts because of the risk people might substitute reading the latter for listening to the audio itself. And that in turn risks the loss of the oral-based information contained there like accent or intonation, et cetera. And since a digital platform makes audio the interviews easily available, it seems the best just to provide abstracts. Okay, now on to the online presentation of our project. Karen and I put a lot of time and thought into how best to organize this material so that it'd be easy to search, navigate, and link with other content. One of the strengths of the Recollect platform is its ability to manage multi-part audio, textual, and visual material. And the good folk at New Zealand Micrographic Services were great at helping us customize their platform to meet our needs. And we've subsequently been very flattered to learn that they now use our oral history pages as a showcase for prospective clients. So to start with, we had a, we just had a like a sort of graphic there on the front page draw people's attention to the project. You click on that and you get taken through to the upper hut in the 1960s oral history project page. This provides background about the project itself and it also contains links to all of the interviews, each of which is illustrated with a portrait of the participant, sa. Clicking on one of those buttons will in turn take you through to the oral history page for that particular individual or group. On here, you'll find a brief biography about the interview subject, in this case Colin Gibbs, who was a prominent local businessman and politician. In the right hand column there below, Colin's profile picture, you can see that there's also links to subject tagged areas to do with Hazel Woods, which is a department store he used to own, and the city council, borough council, which he was a member of. So that links to other subjects online. Right below his biography, that's the audio files. There are two audio files for his interview and other cases might be four or even five. The number of files simply relate to the digital recording process and the number of times an interview was paused and new audio begun. Okay, and there alongside the audio files is the abstract and alongside that is a link to a related archive of materials that we have that Colin's previously donated to us. Okay, and at the bottom we have related to images. Some of these are pictures that we already had on Recollect, but in many cases people specifically gave us stuff as part of the interview process. So it was a way of collection development in other areas as well. Okay, that's what an audio file page looks like. You know, basic controls, volume play button, volume, et cetera. Because as I mentioned, we had more than one file. We did quite a bit of effort trying to put in, you know, indicate file order and provide easy clicks to go back and forth so people could navigate around easy enough. Most interesting thing there though and I think the most important development of this is that column of blue links down the side, captions. Basically, these identify different topics discussed at specific points in the interview. Providing these links enable users to go directly to that particular section of the audio without having to first listen to everything that precedes it. These therefore create a sort of rough equivalent to browsable text. You can quickly look through, find something you might be interested on and quickly listen to it. Okay, one final enhancement we undertook was to create a series of short MP4 movies which we assembled by editing together excerpts from just different oral history interviews and combining these with images from our archives and in some cases music. These movies covered certain topics that cropped up across several interviews such as shopping, childhood, family life, as well as Moai Hakona and the youth music scene. Repackaging the interviews in this way provided us with a conveniently condensed means of showcasing our collection as well as making connections between stories and observations that have been provided by different contributors. And hopefully in a moment, I'm just gonna play a brief clip from the youth music scene video with Wayne Mason from the Formula Talking and Music used with permission, but from the bitter end. A lot of kids in upper heart in the 60s, there was lots of Bible class dancers, school dancers in school halls, so almost every week in St. John's Hall, Trentham Hall, Salisbury Hall, Upper Primary School Hall, they had dancers, kids were kids, what kids used to do. And so there was lots of gigs for bands outside school and bands like The Bitter End started in upper heart at the same time and Dedication, upper heart college band started at the same time. So we're all tapping that 60s thing in upper heart, which is a very, it was an incredibly good place for having a whole lot of kids together at the same age, upper heart in the 60s. Okay, so once we had the online framework of our oral history project up and running, we held a formal event to publicly launch this new online resource of ours. We made an effort to create a sense of occasion for this event by providing food and wine, creating visual displays and inviting VIPs such as the mayor and our local MP Chris Hipkins. As a celebration of our community, the launch turned out to be a huge success generating lots of warm fuzzies. One of the aims here was to publicize our new online resource. Equally important for us was the chance to publicly show our appreciation of our interviewees by giving them a sort of celebrities at a film premiere kind of treatment, which they very much deserved. One of the many benefits of community oral history projects is being able to give ordinary people a sense of being valued and respected for the knowledge and memories they possess from having lived a particular life they have. Okay, in the final couple of minutes I have left to me, I want to very quickly discuss our other big anniversary event, which was the Pop-Up Museum and which the oral history project also tied into. Our Pop-Up Museum was essentially just an exhibition about Upper Hut in the 1960s, curated from reproduced images and material held in our archives. It was held in this temporary gallery space that we specially built for it was in a second hand furniture store on Main Street and this store remained open for business while the exhibition was running. So you can move back and forth between a second ad furniture store and the museum. The Pop-Up Museum proved extremely popular was our community, we got great feedback about it and received over 2,000 visitors in the fortnight we were open, which is big numbers for us. This is my wonderful colleague Rachel staffing the desk at the Pop-Up Museum. The laptop in front of her was connected to the internet so that any information visitors had about any item on display could be immediately added to its record on that database. We also had a scanner on site so that visitors could bring in their own photos from the 60s and these could be scanned and added to our collections while they waited and we got quite a few items that way. And we also had flyers, as you can see, promoting our oral history project. The oral history project was also incorporated into the exhibition in other ways, like for instance we had these big circle things there dotted about the place in amongst the pictures that contained pertinent quotes that we'd taken from the interviewees. Most importantly though, remember those short MP4 movies that I was just talking about just before that we put together from interview excerpts and archival images. Well, we wanted to make these available on site as part of our Pop-Up Museum so we improvised a kiosk type setup by placing them on a USB stick inserted into a Raspberry Pi mini computer. This was attached to a monitor encoded to play different MP4s depending on which button was pushed on the display box that we built for it. This proved a highly popular feature of our Pop-Up Museum and it was really cheering to see that many visitors spent time sitting around and just watching the entire set of short films pushing buttons to get on to the next one and discussing there was one another. This image of people connecting with one another and connecting with their communities past via stories and memories of everyday life that have been collected, preserved and made accessible by doing digital oral histories nicely encapsulate some main goals driving our project. And it also provides me with a suitable place to conclude this talk. Thank you very much.