 Si'n ddim yn gondol i'r ffordd ddod i'w ddweud yma yn y Gwyddon. Fyddo chi'n meddwl am hyn o'r gweithio digital yn y cyd-dweithio yn eu cyd-dweithio. Erddangos, y website gyda'r Ffordd Llyfrgellol o'r Ffordd Llyfrgellol yn 2009. Rydyn ni'n bodi'n edrych yn gwneud yma, unrhyw unig, mae'r gweithio yn gweithio'r Gweithio'r Ffordd Llyfrgell o'r ffordd Llyfrgellol. Mae'r website e wedi'u cael ei bod yn cael ei ffondiad cyd-dweithio from the Government's Digital Community Partnership Fund, which paid for the development and establishment of the site. This presentation is about how a group of relatively small organisations has managed to keep a digital project alive and kicking, a project which sits somewhat outside core business. This paper tells the story of the site, why it is what it is today, and how it has survived, and the presentation will loosely cover this, and those are hopefully not too many bullet points. So what is the Prow? That's what it is for those who aren't familiar with it. So the Prow is a website which celebrates, preserves and makes accessible the unique history and culture of the top of the South Island by showcasing articles which encompass the anecdotes, stories and memories of our residents. The Māori name for the top of the South Island is Tētā i hu, ōtē i waka, ōmai. Tētā i hu was the Prow of Maui's Walker, or canoe, from which he fished up the North Island, hence the name of the site, the Prow. The site was the brainchild of the heritage librarians at Nelson City and Tasman District Councils who sought a need for a central repository for sources of information about local stories which were constantly being requested or researched, sources which were scattered and not easy to find. A storehouse of bibliographies would not excite anyone apart from librarians, nor would it excite funders. So, as a front-end to the bibliographies, the final bid for funding was for a regional collaborative venture that will present short, where research, local stories or articles with a full bibliographly to allow further research plus images. So, an attractive front-end for the working tools that we wanted to use and make accessible for others. The project has always been a collaborative one and the funding bid was supported by Nelson City, Tasman and Marbury District Libraries and Councils, Nelson Marbury Institute of Technology and the Nelson Provincial Museum. It has also received support from regional museums such as the Marbury Museums and the initial bid for funding and site concept was strongly supported by local schools and historical societies. The website was developed locally using Silver Stripe as the platform which was relatively new to market at that stage but offered what we wanted with a bit of customisation. Not a good thing in retrospect. What we ended up with was a site which was made up of pages of interlinked articles or stories. Each page has a standard template which presents an article with captioned and properly referenced images, sources then further sources by format. Having an interactive site which engaged its audience was always important to us and this is why we asked our developers to customise the early version of Silver Stripe. There is a moderated comment feature on each article page, a map feature to locate each story geographically and a user add a story feature. Stories are organised by theme but can also be found by site search, the mapping feature or a timeline. So those can all be seen on that page. This is an article page with a range of images and links and then the bit underneath are the sources related stories and it goes on. OK, so take that back. So who uses it and how and has it been successful? The website has had relatively high use and this has grown over time. Comparing year one to year six users have grown 172% and sessions 157% where 168,000 page views last year. The number of stories has grown too from the original 50 to 460. We get reasonably active engagement from the community, approximately two significant comments a month, we get a lot of insignificant comments as well. A good example of the type of interaction is a recent comment on a story contributed by one of our local researchers on John Ribbit of Hope Junction, a well-known hotelier and community figure in the mid 19th century. And this is that comment where somebody in Ireland has discovered what happened to their ancestor, Percival, which I thought was lovely. We get quite a few of those where people discover things. So we have made some family historians happy. The comments also elitist information inquiries, for example a request for the specifications of the SS Littleton and corrections to or additional information about a story, for example about local schools. We had a comment on Victory School, a new primary school was opened in 1948, located on Vanguard Street. It was soon closed to complete construction and reopened in 1949. In this interval pupils were accommodated at a small church further down Vanguard Street near to Victory Park. Victory School took pressure off Handon Street and more recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. So that was a comment very factual and properly referenced as well. And we get stories contributed, emailed if not always loaded onto the site. The proud has high recognition from local researchers, museums, historic societies and others and has been used frequently by the local media as a source. And a proud story was even referenced in an online discussion about the Red Peak design, which was interesting. A harder audience to engage is young people and students when there are so many sources of information out there. But I believe it is well used by students of all ages when they want information about the region. And this is partly because the proud makes it easy for them to find information. With a huge volume of digitised material now available, the site helps students to navigate through that information and find what is relevant to them and the story they are researching. It locates specific information from a range of sources and makes them aware of where they can go for more information. And how do I know it is used by students? Usage figures definitely decreased during the school holidays. And when I recently spoke to a number of classes of history students doing NCEA assignments on a local history subject to their choice, the overwhelming response was, the proud, yeah, know about that. What more can you ask? So I have spoken about successes now about some challenges, some of which have been, as you see, staff resource, management, vision and goals, training enthusiasm engagement, keeping it fresh and look and feel. Should we retain a known brand or try something new? Some of these I'll address. In the first years of the site's history, we added content by commissioning and accepting stories which provided a balanced overview of the region, geographically, by time and across our themes. The main question then became how to manage and maintain the site into the future. Should we continue to grow the site and add more stories? Or should we just maintain the core we had? This was something our original vision statement did not tell us. If we were to grow and even if we maintained what we had, we had to determine who was managing the site and how and pay for hosting and maintenance. I just picked some pictures up now just to give you a change. So what happened for us was almost by default, but it was possible because the project was a collaborative venture with a presence beyond any one institution. One which gained momentum and support from the community. The small steering group made up representatives of the regional libraries and museum has continued to loosely manage the site and has allowed it to grow organically, accepting and commissioning stories, upgrading the site as needed and supporting the initiatives which have kept the site fresh and engaged the community. Again by default, as I was the initial project manager, I continued to manage the site with input from colleagues at Tasman District Libraries and Joyce Stevens, who is our contract writer. Two of the original group, Cathy Vaughan of Tasman District Libraries and Susan Price of Nelson Public Libraries have retired and I miss their support. However, we get continued support from the Nelson Provincial Museum and the Marlborough Museum in the provision of photographs and research assistance for our commissioned stories as requested. There is a budget line from Nelson City Council for commissioned stories, approximately five a year, site maintenance and development and initially hosting. But this doesn't include staff time. To begin with, Tasman District Council paid for stories and contributed staff time for working on the site. The major contribution from the council is now the provision of hosting facilities. The local firm which developed the site used to provide hosting, but the major CMS upgrade required we moved to direct management of the site by Silver Stripe. This upgrade also required a move to a Silver Stripe compatible server. Tasman District Council host at no direct cost to the site also providing the necessary maintenance which is part of that hosting responsibility. The Marlborough District Libraries continue to fund up to six stories a year and the Nelson Provincial Museum continues to provide images and some research work for the site. Time is possibly the major issue of no specific time allocated for proud work. It tends to be the work I do when I have nothing else urgent to work on or I want something routine to work on. I've read our edited story, editing text, adding links and images, developing bibliographies, all fairly straightforward. Most of my proud time is spent checking and moderating comments, checking, editing and loading stories, or updating stories with new sources or revisions. All stories are edited and improved with images, in-text links and source references. Accuracy and authority remain important. To reduce workloads we have loose reporting responsibilities and targets for the site. I've reduced quarterly reports which document additional content, usage management and reporting are kept relatively low maintenance. There are no major demands made on contributing organisational time or budgets. The site flies under the radar as a good to have small project. A little on platform content and changes and how we have kept it fresh. The original customized silver strike platform customized to allow comments, user adding a story feature and image holders to allow better captioning, served us well for five years, but eventually had to be upgraded to ensure that the site remained robust and stable. For anyone embarking on a new website just to keep customization to a minimum, just to say that the most stressful and expensive part of the upgrade was probably debugging the customizations. The look and feel of the site has changed a little over time. This has been deliberate to maintain a clean recognizable brand for a local audience that is possibly older and less receptive to change. It has also been seen as important to grow the content, however, to reflect what people ask about, what is topical or of current interest and to ensure that we provide stories from across the region and also embrace as many Maori stories as possible. To this end, we commission approximately five stories a year from our original writer, Joy Stevens. Joy has proved an invaluable asset as she is also a publicist and with a vested interest in the site which is rich with her stories, she does a huge amount of publicity for work for the proud at no cost, just through her contacts, writing, social media outlets and so on. In the first few years, she arranged for the Nelson Merl and Marlborough Express to publish proud stories under our logo on a regular basis, just as we have published some of their stories. That's one of them. Another tip, develop local advocates who have a commitment to your project. As already stated, we get a steady stream of articles from local historians and a few from the general community. In addition, we get a lot of content from the Heritage Advisor council. Every heritage activity, plaque and story board has research and stories associated with them and the proud acts as a repository for those stories. The site has been recognised as a council asset. To a lesser extent, we also get similar content from Tasman District Council stories from their heritage plaques which we add to with references and further sources. It's also been recognised as important to develop relationships with other publications. We have a standing agreement that we can put local history stories on the mail, Nelson Historical Society newsletter, Golden Bay Weekly, Wild Tomato, et cetera, on to the prow with suitable attribution. This means that we can be a one-stop shop and repository for local heritage stories from across the region, gathering stories which may otherwise be dispersed and lost. Getting Māori content is a challenge. Initially we approached local researchers and writers, Hillary and John Mitchell, who at that time had cross Iwi approval to write her call set of stories. This collection or theme has not grown much. With eight Iwi in the top of the south, it is difficult to determine which story to tell and who should tell it. Perhaps it reflects a view that the Iwi stories should be presented in their own way and on their own site. Not on a site which presents the stories of an area which is defined by the boundaries of the original Nelson province established post-settlement. This issue is not easily resolved. A key feature of the original project was that it was a collaborative venture. Maintaining that collaborative approach has allowed the site to continue to flourish, dispersing, resourcing across the region. So how have we managed to keep it fresh, attractive and engaging when we haven't really changed a lot? It's been challenging. So we maintain the original look and feel which appear to work well if it ain't broke, but we have worked hard to maintain engagement. So what have we done? Well, we've made a responsive web design. So it looks good on tablets and phones. We have not developed an app partly a resourcing issue and partly because the site is about authority of content and the bibliographies which might get lost within an app are important to us. But others have used the content to create apps and map more on that later. We've partnered with Digital New Zealand and found through the Digital New Zealand portal alongside other digitised New Zealand content. The home page isn't static. It has a story of the day feature, a random story is selected or we can determine the story of the day and latest comments and recent stories are also featured. As a news and views feature, we have a Twitter feed while we decided not to create a Facebook page which would be another site to maintain within our limited time resource. The Twitter presence has allowed some social media engagement as well as allowing us to feed comments and reflect on local issues onto the home page. And the website is harvested by Top of the South Maps. It's self a collaborative project, Nelson and Tasman's GIS mapping service providing regional maps for planning, property information services and recreation across the region. On the recreation layer, proud stories are located at the flag which is the pink one with a link through to the relevant stories. We talk to local schools about the site and encourage any research on local history stories to be submitted to the site. We have had a number of excellent contributions particularly from Nelson College for Girls and it's good for the students to see their work published. It's the heart app an innovative NMIT student developer developed this heritage augmented reality app in 2013 using proud stories and the museum's heritage images. The app uses three dimensional scene recognition technology to share stories and information about Nelson's formative years in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The project which won a substantial grant from New Zealand on Air Digital Media Fund generated significant publicity and local media buzz which benefited the proud. We've worked with the Nelson City Council Heritage Advisor to put the content of heritage plaques onto the proud as I've already said and she has also developed heritage walks some with audio and we've put these up onto the proud using SoundCloud with downloadable maps. Recently we extended this to put up the stories behind the murals on the various mural and artwork trails around Nelson City. The proud has become the key resource for recording and promoting Nelson City Council's heritage work. And there have been some community projects. This year the Marlborough District Libraries funded Joy Stevens to develop a pilot project with the Haberlock Museum Society which had recently developed the Haberlock Museum and were keen to start gathering social history stories for a future project. It was felt that this could be a new area for the proud to explore the historical stories and memories of the people still alive. Two workshops were held in Haberlock aimed at teaching locals how to identify good stories and interview subjects, carry out interviews as well as research, record and write stories. The project has had mixed results in that to date there are only stories in the pipeline from people who attended the workshop. However, we gathered two excellent stories through a dummy interview and there are more stories on the way. And we are reaching youth. The Nelson Youth Council recently decided to run a photo competition where the photo had to be inspired by or illustrate a proud story. This was very pleasing as the youth themselves, unprompted, came up with this theme. A number of very creative photos came out of the competition and they'll be exhibited during Nelson's Heritage Week in 2016. So where are we? Some more pictures? The future and some learning or conclusions for sustainability. So what's worked for us? Content has been king. The site has always been about content rather than looks. We decided against the developers' desire to do some flash iconography on the homepage on setup and glad we did with Flash's recent vulnerability problems. The technology has always been a tool to showcase the content, not whizzy technology for its own sake. We have kept it simple. Many of our target audience are not natural technology users, possibly. It's for them that we have maintained a simple and consistent interface. We have continued to engage students and younger researchers because the content is seen as authoritative. We have researched tool and recommended and referred to by teachers. The proud, yeah, I know about that. We have kept it realistic. We have tried not to be too ambitious. We have not developed our own app. We have not developed a Facebook page and we have kept the site relatively simple. We know we do not have as lot of resource to throw at the project to continue to be exciting and expire. Staff time is limited. So as we've already said, we are more concerned about good content. Collaboration. It's a good thing for the region and no one organisation has sole responsibility for the site. Politically it's beneficial to keep it going. A good example of local organisations working together and this is also beneficial for any future funding application we may consider. And it's a repository. The site has gathered news stories from across the region from a range of sources. We do not just create our own. These may be from published sources for example the Nelson Mail or ephemeral newsletters. In this way the regional and subject coverage has grown organically and it is owned by the region. Interactivity and engagement. The site has always been interactive and has aimed to engage with its comment and add a story features. During the life of the site we have tried a number of engagement activities as well. Twitter, quizzes, a newsletter, writing projects for schools etc. Which have been relatively successful. And we have champions. We have a handful of people in the community who champion the site for us. The City Council Heritage Advisor, local researchers and more. Many of these regularly supply us with news stories. They keep the site alive and important for others. And we have made finding information easier. The site fulfills its aim of helping people find authoritative content or information about local stories by gathering source material in one place. Finding the right information on papers passed or through digital New Zealand can be difficult as there is so much stuff there and the metadata of the source material doesn't always allow refined searching. We try to surface the important source material for our local stories. So what next? I'm not sure. The challenges for the future are to continue to engage and grow our audiences. Gather new content to maintain what's already there. Our key target audiences remain local historians and genealogists. They are generally older so we need to keep the usability of the site simple. And school students, digital natives like interesting and relevant. And there is potential to grow the site as a source of information for tourists and visitors to the top of the south. Whatever we do, however we need to keep our aims and commitment realistic and not try to do what we cannot maintain. We are happy to be known as a reliable and authoritative source of information about the top of the south rather than a piece of whizzy technology. It would be good to be here in another five years. And this is just an overview of what we learned. Hi. First congratulations on your site. I referred it quite a lot and I enjoy it. I had a question about I had a question about the community contributions that you get. Because the quality of the stories in your sites are pretty consistent and good. So I'm quite curious how much with user contributions how much time and effort you spend on editing and adding to it. What kind of turnaround there is and also do you reject user contributions? Do you have a kind of bar, a quality bar? There are some user contributions we've rejected. Partly we've had things that are perhaps just advertising for a particular company whatever. With some of the student contributions then we take the best. So we usually get the batches of them and I usually take the best of them and then we talk to the students about what works and we have done workshops with each of the schools about how you research, how you reference looking for quality information taking across that and the referencing part. We often put the bibliographies on the end ourselves partly because if it's a story that isn't there then it's useful for us to actually have that information because then we can say when people come to the information desk at any of the libraries if they want information about this story then we have to kind of start that whole research process again it's our repository to say go here look at these come back if you need more and it's highlighting those. We do do some editing on stories that don't make so if the English doesn't make sense then yes we sort of likely edit it so that does take a bit of time but actually a lot of the contribution is from historical researchers who produce really good content or it's taken from things that are published elsewhere which is actually really beneficial because all the news, the historical society newsletters, even articles on the Nelson Mail or wherever they're kind of just out there and they've gone and you can find them if you know they're there but if we capture them and put them here then people know that that's that's sort of where they are. Nicola, thank you very much. Love the way that you're so wise about remaining true to your purpose. Thank you. Good reminder for all of us. Did you find that I know it's not about technology it's about the content but of course technology is the means by which that content is shared and maintained. Did you notice an impact when you started sharing content on digital New Zealand? I'm not sure actually because that was done quite early on in the life cycle of the site so it's difficult to know whether the kind of increase was because of that or whether it was happening anyway so it's actually difficult to know and it's actually difficult to pull out from Google Analytics whether people are coming from there or not or perhaps it's something I haven't done and I could do so I'm not sure to be honest. Can I ask another question? Is that okay? So at some point I imagine you'll need to be migrating to a new system have you had any thoughts about that and what it might look like or have you had any sort of technology dreams about something whizzy maybe that could really add value? Not really we've just upgraded to the latest version of Silver Stripe which worked okay and because spent so long debugging and making it work again I'm really reluctant to do something else so I don't know we don't actually digitise and have to store material up there so it is simply a website which has links to lots of other places the images that are there are stored temporarily on there but a lot of them are pulled in from elsewhere so we don't have to think about storing original content so this kind of works at the moment and I would imagine that Silver Stripe is going to remain relatively robust for a while who knows so perhaps it will be someone who takes over from me can go down that route What sort of visitation? 168,000 page views this last year so it's grown I'm never good at remembering figures I should have written them all down it's relatively high Thanks very much