 Hi everybody. Thanks for coming to this session and thanks to Frank, even though he's talking for sponsoring NDF. It was greatly appreciated, Frank. We'll look forward to your party afterwards. Not least of all me, who's been sweating it all day about this presentation. I'm going to kick straight into it, but a word of caution, there's probably too much content, which is a problem that we face in the world at large. Okay, clearly I'm not an editor because there's a really disgusting full stop at the end of museums and digital publishing, but never mind that either. I am a publisher. And that's a bloody funny thing to be right now, isn't it? Because, oh, and I also run obviously Tupapa's multi-media publishing team and I think that's a name that very clearly locates us in the second decade of the 21st century. I can't remember who it was who said of participatory culture, we are all media producers now, and that's true. But there are three of them by trade in my team and a bunch of editors too. This also means that I run Tupapa Press, which is New Zealand's unique museum publishing imprint, and that I have straddled many a raft of public good commercial, institutional audience focused, and open access copyright protective for some time now. And these are of course all relevant to us at NDF and in life in general. So in this role there's a few questions that non museum people always ask me and just for amusement's sake I'm going to show you them too, particularly because we've never really appeared at NDF either. Do you only sell things through to Tupapa Store? No. Do you only publish to Tupapa authors? No. Do your books have to make money? Yes and no. And then there's this rogue one, this fourth question that I got asked one time. And that scared the bejesus out of me. Not just because of who asked it, although I will reveal that it was a prominent minister with a direct responsibility for Tupapa. But because it goes to the dark and terrifying heart of what the bloody hell it is that publishers even do. And at a time when it's no secret to anybody they are having to quite literally explain what it is that they do and to justify their value or demonstrate at least their value to the wider community. Now and that includes things like Random House putting up you know sort of quite instructive and corny videos about what happens at Random House with the kind of a do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do soundtrack in the background. Anyway, now we probably all think that this whole nobody gets it thing is because of that. And I very nearly didn't include that quote because people at NDF have been seeing it for years and years now. But it's just too bloody good. Publishing is not a job, it's a button. And we probably all think that that's the whole reason and I'll recite the litany of disruptions later. But it probably actually has rather a lot more to do with this. This is a conversation that Max Porter, Eleanor Catton's publisher, had with Kim Hill when he was here in New Zealand a little while ago. No, no, Kim he said. We wear dark cloaks and we move in gloomy corridors. You know, I shouldn't even be talking to you right now. The editor should be invisible, the publisher should be invisible. To the extent that in New Zealand institutional publishing, the fact that we are more often than not the content creators ourselves is often obscured. Now Max was joking, of course he was joking, but like all good jokes it was about quite a true thing. So here's what we actually do, just a few things. You can browse through them at your leisure. But note that none of them is related exclusively to print culture. And note also, and it may not be eminently obvious to you, that it's a very rare and talented self-published author who happens to be able to do all of them. Many people can, but on mass it's quite a rare set of skills. Now just for the record, I'm not proposing for a second that every last one of these functions could not in theory be disrupted or automated or sourced elsewhere or managed in some kind of other hitherto unexplained business model. Although I do share the opinion of the recent New Yorker writer, sorry I haven't had time to Google the article, although I gobbled it up, that disruption is becoming a slightly absurd and over-extracted concept. And I was joking with me a ridge over, didn't it the other night, that you could disrupt the olive oil or somebody could disrupt it. It really has become not quite what it was all about. But because it's NDF, and because we're feeling a little bit bold this year, thank you very much, Andy. And because later on I might even challenge us all to be a bit bold enough to give up some of our favourite firm positions, myself included. I will even go so far to say that Clay Scherke was totally right. And the Publishers Association, of which I am a council member, isn't going to like it if anyone tweets that. It's just that he was only partially right. And it's really easy to be right when you only tell half of the story. Because the value that publishers add to cultural outputs and products, including but not limited to books, was never, ever, ever, ever, ever limited to starting the rusty old clanky old keys to the machine down in the basement. And it wasn't even limited to what Brewster called on Tuesday, maintaining the economy of scarcity. That's a later, later byproduct, I think, of our current environment. So in his excellent talk on Monday night, Monday night's panel at the National Library, Tom Renne talked about how weird it is to be called that IT guy after years of effectively working in books. And I want to say that it's equally weird to be called some of the following. When your workflow has been, except for the final spasm, digital for my entire career, when I am obsessively author and, sorry, user focused. And when some of the practitioners who've made these comments are people that I passionately agree with. Dinosaur, just about everyone, but my husband included. It's bizarre to be called a dinosaur when you don't particularly feel like a dinosaur. Many evil soldier, gatekeeper, megafauna, that's somebody I admire very much and have had many a good conversation with Michael Edson and in conversation with me in 2012 and his perfectly pleasant office in the Smithsonian, Michael said, publishes, they just throw things over the wall of the castle and they hope that they'll land on someone. And I was forced to put him right about that because it's not entirely true at all. And best of all, cocaine snorting fat cat. And that comes from someone I especially admire, Karen McGrane, content strategist. And many of you will have caught it web stock back in whatever it was 2012. I mean, here's a nice charming image from the movie The Last Days of Disco, a personal favorite of mine, in which Chloe Savanie and Kate Beckinsale boogie at Studio 54 by night, no doubt, inhaling the contents of the cocaine trolley. But by day by day, they discover and publish amazing manuscripts and forge awesome careers as you know, publishes. So I'll tell you what, it's enough to give you what Serena Chen called the other day, another life crisis. Remember that? And her very stimulating talk about her comparatively short life. So suffice to say that throwing things over the wall and hoping they hit people is not the kind of operation that we're running here. But I hope to show you a bit about that in a second. But yes, the change is huge, the change is huge. And then there's this, the Peacont local variant. And I started thinking about moas and chickens and which ones die and which ones carry on and it wasn't particularly flattering to be compared to either a moa or a chicken. And so I just abandoned that. But I'm suffice to say that the tide is sucking out on New Zealand international owned publishing right now. And I have some very bold and tangentious and tendentious sorry and kind of exciting thoughts on what this all means for museums and cultural institutions and independence and funding models and the digital and everyone who's a content person and just plain making cool shit that I will share with you of time permits. And if it doesn't ask me later about the farmers market and paste up and punk. I'm not mounting a defence here of traditional publishing models. And I'll be bored to sob if that's what you think's going on. I'm also not charting the state of a beleaguered nation. And I'm certainly not going to enter into a discussion about the future of publishing, because Tom Rene did a pretty good job of it on Monday night. But I can only endorse this timely quotation of Leah Price at that time and it's worth recycling that today. All I'm doing is calling out a corny old cliche when I see it. And I'm published with hate cliches. And we all know how it goes. And here I'm quoting Lincoln, Michelle of BuzzFeed. We all know how it goes. We don't see the paradigm shifting sea change. We're not creating proactive new business models in the wake of this disruptive revolution. Anyone who reads print is a luddite propping up a dying industry. If they don't get on board soon, they're doomed. And sometimes it's hard not to think that this whole thing is just a plot by a bunch of really bored illustrators and Photoshop experts who are trying to cook up more and more ridiculous images of the death of publishing. And here's just a few of them. And are we not kind of at peak, peak ridiculousness, at least in this regard alone, purely in that regard? Can someone make a good picture of the death of publishing, please? If we're talking cliches, this is a good one. It's by Mark Twain, who's a writer. The report of my death was an exaggeration. And I think that's kind of where we are, because technological development like success, we've all seen the picture. Almost never travels in a straight line, but in a wiggly line. And in any case, it only looks like a straight line when we look backwards at it. Because for the indefinite future, we are very definitely straddling print and digital models. And because, as Lincoln, Michelle put it, dinosaurs don't always die, enter again the chicken. But anyway, what does any of all this have to do with NDF? With cultural institutions, with the digital and with museums? I will give you a clue. It has to do with the functional sense of publisher that I used earlier, the idea that you perform a bunch of functions, rather than the vertically integrated industry sense of publishers controlling the technology. And it has to do with the total cultural importance of literary culture, red culture, textual culture, and cultural value. And with what has always been motivated in museums, galleries, archives and libraries, by forces other than strict commerce. You can call it access or philanthropy or the public good, but you know what I'm driving at. So I will now turn to some specifics related to our publishing program, because I realized the other day when somebody didn't give a show and tell that it was utterly depressing to me, and I really wanted a show and tell. So I'm going to try and cram this in real fast. This is some of the stuff that to purpose publishing program has been tasked with on a policy strategy or otherwise KPI-ish level over the past 10 years, but they could apply to any institution. It's the last one I'm the most interested in today. Generate valuable and reusable content data and IP. And thank you for Victoria Leachman for helping me with my emphasis, because I could go deep on any of these ones. So what have we got? In a given year, we sell about 50,000 and sometimes give away about 50,000 individual units in print. I'll get to the digital in a second. That's off the base of about 12 new products of which there are additional print, sorry, digital products, which I'll get to in a second, reprints. It does generate revenue, generates revenue, and this isn't a secret, of between $600,000 and $1 million a year. Those aren't net revenues, but they are the revenues that Tapa receives before the costs are taken off. And they go on to win lots of awards, which makes the museum look good. And they do this. They make people say good stuff about your institution. And sometimes they very explicitly correct the impression of your institution if it's causing you trouble. What else am I going to say? And then really lovely things happen like this, which I cannot resist including. Little pathetic story of Wellington art dealer Beats Booker Award winner. Literary cat fight ensues. Not really. Museums can be the source of stories of vast national significance. And the act of professionally publishing them can get them places that they wouldn't otherwise grow. This is about icons now. I talked about the use of content in IP. This is an example from a classic print publication, icons now. Usually when I meet people from museums, all they want to know is how can I make a collections book. And I tell them please don't. Please make a book that's about something other than your collections. Because by and large they don't perform well. But icons is a very, very nice example of a well-performing collections book. So it was produced in 2002. And some of the places that it has ended up are as follows. There it is in the content from icons now, including the photography and all the indexing information that ended up in collections online. It resulted in derivative print products for very, very different audiences. So there it is in treasures, which was from the tourist market. There it is appearing as five little books that we call little icons that were aimed at a more family-friendly audience. We have a product in development, slow, slow, slow development, which is essentially a, I guess, a, I'm going to say app, but we're agnostic about that right now, for exploring collection items using the content from those books as well. It ended up in the Google Art Project. The content from Icons on a Tower ended up in the Google Art Project. Went to Papa, joined that. And it ended up forming the scripts for a TV series with TVNZ called Tales from Topapa. So the content from Icons formed the scripts for Tales of Topapa that was then recorded, videoed, appeared on TVNZ back when there was a Channel Six. And then the content from that was packaged into a DVD and a print publication that was aimed at small children and their parents. And that has gone on to do really, really well. So I feel as though sometimes the content that we create has at its front end a financial model that shows the entire costs being worn by the book. But that at the other end it's like grey water of London that's gone through everybody's body. And there's washed every, you know the London water story. Anyway, there you go. So that's a nice print example of the same thing. And I don't even know where the hell it's gone. Like what I want to do is a kind of a little track of a couple of pieces of content and really truly draw a map of the really many insane places that it's gone. But time didn't permit. So instead I'll tell you about some other stuff that we do. We are delighted that when Topapa restructured recently, we were able to be merged into a group that included our rights officer, our digital collections team, our photography team, and Topapa's records people. Am I forgetting anyone, Phil? Not really. Knowledge and content. Because at last we were able to focus on maximal reuse of Topapa's knowledge, content, and assets in the publishing sense. And that was really exciting. And as part of that we formed this multimedia publishing team. And its flagship product was Arts Topapa online. Now Arts Topapa was a response to the new approach to hanging art at Topapa. I'm called Ngatoi Arts Topapa. And at the very, very beginning we determined that we would not produce print catalogs for that exhibition. Instead we determined that we would create an online property that was as iterative and modular and intended to grow and reflective of the multiple voices who are interested in art at Topapa as the exhibition itself. We were forced to make it as a mini site due to the functionality that we wanted and the limitations at the time of Topapa's CMS. But it has been really successful. One of the main things that I think your publishing people can bring you in a museum or that publishers can bring in a museum context or people with those skills can bring in a museum context is maintenance of content across time. So prior to that Topapa had been, parts of Topapa had been prone to the exhibition mini site which is made and then abandoned, made and then abandoned, made and then abandoned. And they just build up like so many, you know, what tumbleweeds, I don't know, usual metaphor. But there are no more better, you know, they're no more pure or good than a unwanted print catalogue gathering dust in the hallway, you know, down beside your shop. So we were very keen to get rid of that model. And so we did. So what can I tell you about Arts Topapa online? It is, lost my notes, yeah. So it features online art exhibitions, digital media, events and a free quarterly online magazine called Off the Wall. This is the On the Wall component which reflects all the components of every single exhibition and every single refresh that goes up at Topapa. And it is, the way that it's developed is that all the content lives in Topapa's collections management system, KEMU. So you can always relate the exhibition to the content that was in it. So we do drive it out of EMU as a CMS. The installation views, Off the Wall. So Off the Wall is the online quarterly magazine and it combines our arts newsletter with the abilities that our team can bring to magazine publishing. So online, multimedia magazine publishing. So interviews with artists in video, art multimedia, curator talks, print interviews, studio visits by prominent writers and all the rest of it. Since it launched, we have released six, seven coming up this December for eight issues of Off the Wall including those accompanying Natoy seasonal hangs. We have a growing subscriber database of around about 5,000 users. The site has been well-reviewed in popular media which is a lovely thing to see and it won a prominent web design award at the 2014 Museums Australia Publication Design Awards which was very nice. There have been about 15,000 individual visits and we noticed that they profoundly coincide with links from other sites or that they coincide with really significant marketing from TAPAPA which we can't always throw a resource at obviously but the Warhol exhibition did really well for us in that regard. Right now there are about 23 clips of artists and curator interviews produced by our talented multimedia team and these are growing. Then this other cool thing happened and I certainly don't intend to take full credit for this but this is TAPAPA's channel. So working really closely with Ruth Hendry and Curtin Criminaka and our software development team, my colleague Jean-Marie produced and developed at almost no cost at all. We're certainly talking where are you, Jean-Marie? Are you in here somewhere? No. Yes, less than $500? $150. The TAPAPA channel and the TAPAPA channel perfectly embodies the idea of the reuse of our media assets which up till this point tended to be linked to the exhibitions that had birthed them. So this is the TAPAPA channel. It released in late 1314 with 84 videos, 52 audio clips, nine galleries and before marketing had attracted 1500 visits. It has very very strong engagement statistics so while the numbers are low we have as I say yet to advertise it or promote it really people are enjoying it and using it and this is the kind of stuff you can see and we're excited to say that we are now able to begin to digitise deliberately for it. We have a very modest budget for digitising for it but that's one of the things that I think can come from closer relationships between strictly speaking web people and strictly speaking publishing or media people. What else can I say about this? Some of the cool stuff that you can see. Slide shows. This was another nice flip-flop and this, I meant to say about Arts to Papa so this crazy thing happened right? So obviously it was all released completely free online all the content is freely available and they're released under Creative Commons non-commercial licenses but no sooner were they out there than we realised and they were also produced as floor brochures for in the exhibition some of them the ones that relate to on-the-floor content. We found that booksellers were selling them they were retailing them and so you might know some of you might know Helen and Roger Parsons or their art subscribe their sort of database that they send out catalogs to and we found all of our brochures on their catalog and they were selling them for like four bucks a pop or two bucks pop or something like that and we had to it was a brilliant ironic moment we had to bring them up and say that you can't be doing that we don't want you to sell our stuff these have been you know the artists have agreed to be included for non-commercial reasons and this whole thing is pretty publicly available would you just give us a link and a shout out so it was a very nice inversion of our traditional relationship with Helen and Roger which were something like sell, sell, sell um cool what else can I say this was a really cool flip-flop and obviously it builds once again on credit where credit is due on years of work by to Papa's curators and digital collections team on building information around the berry archive so you probably know who the berries are I'm not going to bang on about it soldier portraits found in Wellington but our team working again closely with the software development team developed an interactive interface so that members of the public could come and try and identify berry boys and they did this in really really good numbers and there were some really significant identifications found so many so that we were able to produce a book out of it and the book occasioned more happiness and more communications from people in in the cargo the real lever for this was of course the role of production shed and the TV show Sunday which drove awareness of the berry boys and dramatized the search for their identities and that was really great for us am I running out of time shit okay we do some other stuff science lies we do them with the rest of the team audio audio obviously behind the scenes things okay a few conclusions I'm going to try and cut to the chase some of these come from my recent Winston Churchill Fellowship trip to America where I met some of these people I believe that they would know what they were doing but they don't know anything more than us that's one of my conclusions the other one of my conclusions goes a little something like this and I want to talk to all of us as colleagues rather than give you predictions and discussions about the state of the nation except that I'm going to say you should totally check out both the online catalog online scholarly catalog initiative and the museum publishing Blicky if you don't already so what do I got to say we need good content strategies and good content management systems and we need to work very tightly together to achieve them we need to collaborate and I feel very strongly about this I would like to see a tighter relationship as we're beginning to see in places like SF MoMA MoMA itself and the Art Institute of Chicago between research digital programming and editorial slash publishing we are living in ideologically heightened times my friends and people freak out about their jobs it's not just me at some of you as well and in these times hypocrisy and contradiction conditions of everything that we do this conference included I have seen publishers share between themselves portable hard drives groaning with pirated material I've seen zealous open access champions make an exception to lockdown just their scientific research article because somehow it's special I have seen passionate advocates of audience engagement and accessibility hit the print button on runs of 1000 copies of heavily funded exhibition catalogues that just happened to have their own names on the spine full of utterly inaccessible text with no discernible distribution strategy and a dark unsustainable dusty future ahead of at least 950 of them before the final indignity of the skip bin my point is not that we're a bunch of frauds or liars or imposters although some of us might feel sometimes like imposters my point is that we ourselves as a culture as institutions as professionals and as consumers are flip-flopping in-betweening and straddling rafts canoes if you will as they drift apart just like what happened to that poor girl at camp in episode one sees a one of girls remember when Shoshana told that guy about that horrible accident that happened to that girl who was standing on two canoes all I can say is that they say you can die doing that certainly it's not without risk or at the very least it's mighty uncomfortable so I have a couple of honestly only a couple of things to say babies in bathwater Alex's talk yesterday was salutary to us to us hell yeah copyright has to change nobody doesn't think that the entire publishers association thinks that but babies and bathwater there is a livelihood at stake when it comes to literature and authors are terrified they do want some degree of protection and I think that's clear printers absolutely not dead we've had our best year ever with products in which the value is bound up in the physical product that ain't going anywhere it's only getting more crazy punk planet I've said this before publicly so I'm just going to be brief about it we're frightened Selena Chen was right the punks are right get your hands dirty DIY teach yourself the skills that you need to do the job that you want to do don't be afraid get out there and make cool stuff and make it for other people cool aid oh yeah drink the cool aid but maybe don't drink at all and hang on I've got another one really briefly it's gone somewhere yeah don't be a dick so when I originally did this piece of work I was in America and it was 2012 and that whole Will Wheaton thing was quite fashionable as a meme you may recall it we'd be dicks when we are frightened let us not be dicks let us remember the lesson of collaboration but it's probably enough pronouncing any questions yes yes sir that's such a good question I want to talk about how not digitising can be a legitimate business model so we absolutely and emphatically want to digitise we have to be really aware of what we prioritise and Phil would agree with me about this there are things that we can digitise that have a far vast audience than our highly illustrated print publications there's every piece of evidence in the world that highly illustrated print publications work like dogs and the technology is not there to make them pretty and enjoyable I'm not talking about fancy apps like the Wasteland or the gemstones I'm talking about what happens to print books when you turn them into basically PDFs so neither the business model is there nor is the technology that is supported in the form of EPUB 3 as yet as an adopted standard there are illustrated books yeah like Blitzfah Blitzfah yeah yeah look it's absolutely part of our plans it's just that we're part of a big institution with a lot of digitisation priorities I believe that Auckland's work was the result of a rather substantial grant yeah all right hopefully that conversation can continue over break which we're just about to head to before we do that if we could all just quickly thank Claire for her work on sponsorship for this conference because sure that's contributed greatly to our experience