 Maurena colleagues, I'm David Luwone, I think I'll change that to Jacques Luwone. But for balance and for multiple perspective, I'm very proud to be co-presenting with two of our team of four. Can I introduce you to Rosemary Jackson Hunter? Rosemary comes to us from a career leading and enabling front of house and volunteer teams. From both hemispheres and came on board when I left to take us a comment to work at our regional museum. And what a blessing when the boss goes and brings in new talent. And Tiffany Jinx, our historian, emerging young professional. I don't much like that title, I just like professional. And Tiff's greatest talent for me is she's such a careful insurer of community. So we're delighted to bring you Amirahuku, a Southland perspective and share our body of work with you. And can we start with a light hearted look at our te kanga? We'd like to think that Project ARC wins the heart tick. Not just for focusing on Heartland Aotearoa. As you can see, certainly not for healthy eating. But for the value of working shoulder to shoulder with our largely volunteer museums in Southland, there's 14 of them. We're working with 12 of those 14. Two can't participate at the moment because they're in the midst of major redevelopment projects and it's not great timing for them. The sense of community and reciprocity that is at the heart of our project manifests itself often in home baking. But most importantly by working shoulder to shoulder with volunteers, by sharing information with them, and the body of work that surrounds that process. We're 18 months into a two-year pilot and here's the genesis. The idea sparked in Matara with this group of inspiring grandmothers. And I was privileged to work with them for three years. And we reinvented their little cottage museum here. And before we had money for capital development, we realised that we needed to know our narratives. We needed to know our stories. If we were to serve our purpose as the community's memory, then we needed to know what those memories were. At that stage we had time, but not coins. So we decided that a key part of the project would be to assess, catalogue, image and pack this community's collection. And then to share it online via e-hive. And the happy upshot of that is that the collection jumped out of its storage. It came to life both in the little museum here. It's 50 square metres, four rooms and a tiny 1880s workers cottage. But most importantly the museum knew what it had again. It could readily access it and it could share it as an integrated process. And this started to give me the confidence to think on a larger scale. I found myself asking if we can do it for one small community museum, why couldn't we do it for others? If we're going to do that, it would have to be in a strategic and coordinated way. And was it possible to preserve each museum's independence, but still add collective horsepower? Like all museums, but particularly small volunteer museums, storage and adequacy of storage both for size and conditions is a major. And collectively for our regional heritage advisory group we were asking ourselves, is regional storage an option? Is this a sensible long-term goal? And if it were, and that's one of our goals, then of course the collections would need to be ready. And they need to be orderly. And they need to be consistent if that vision was to work. So you can see the two themes that are coming together, can't you? Looking after individual collections, the independence that comes with this, but also forward planning in a strategic way for another larger possibility. The platforms were there and many of them were established by our sector's national digital strategy that's over a decade old now. The E-Hive, a child of that strategy, we adopted it because it was designed from day one for a New Zealand digital ecosystem. New Zealand museums, NZ Digital, National Portals, our sector leaders had already wrapped their head around copyright, Creative Commons, take a bow of Victoria Leishman, and then the strong systems and the ability to process volume from our specialist digitising firms. New Zealand micrographics, there was so much to learn from the sector and apply back to the small volunteer element. And then there was the inspiring photography that was flowing out of our cultural imaging teams. But there were barriers that needed to be overcome. Coming up with practical support for small often older teams of volunteers like you've seen for my colleagues at Matara who weren't digital natives like so many of us in the room. And my experience and my out of the Matara project is that meaningful support requires us to bring our skills to the teams, to bring our equipment and work alongside, not just for a week, but for extended periods. Resource manuals, et cetera, they're great aren't they? But they're not enough in themselves. This list, historical research, collection management systems, cataloging practice, copyright assessment, let alone Creative Commons, condition reporting, assessing, using scanners, high-end digital equipment in its software, preservation packing, storage, directory paths, just using the bloody computer. In effect, it was building a community of collection care. So enough, let's re-inject some soul into this and the community that is at the heart of the project. And for us, this image encapsulates so much of that. You're seeing Joe Clark outside his home on the Waikawa estuary in the Catlins in the mid-1880s. The Waikawa community built this hut for Joe. This role in the community was to row the kids across the estuary morning and night to go to school. For us, and in itself, it's an important capture of how our community supported each other pre-state welfare net, and it's a significant image in that right in itself. But it encapsulates this reciprocity that we're sharing. We routinely encounter objects such as these and they serve to reinforce our belief in what we're doing. What does practical and meaningful support look like? My assessment, as I've said, is a team to work in and alongside our volunteers for extended periods to help to turn before and to after. So our core team comprises, you've got a sense of Rosemary and Tiffany's role. Danny, our photographer, who also brings cataloging skills, so she has that fusion and came out of the Auckland Museum's Advanced Digitisation Project. And Laurence, our conservator who leads the physical care and packing of the collections. But to underpin this, E-Hive is a fantastic tool. Can I just get a quick sense of people who've used it or have a sense of it? About half. It's a blank canvas. It's its greatest strength. But for volunteer museums it's also its biggest weakness. Where do you start with this powerful blank canvas? Which fields do you fill out? How do you fill them out? Why? What matters? And how do you do that consistently? So that was the first major challenge. We owe a huge vote of thanks to the team at Vernon Systems Limited. Paul and Lisa are both here. They and their team have invested hundreds of hours in partnering us to create these standards. That will be a baseline for consistency across this project that Touchwood will help all of the 14 museums as should they all wish to participate. Your professionalism, your support are legend. And those standards have just been released via Vernon Systems yesterday. Obviously, we've done that internally, but now they are a resource for the sector. And we're immensely proud of that. National Services Tauparangi opened many doors to specialist skills for us via the Regional Support Agreement and by targeted expert exchanges. We would obviously need a mobile photography studio. Why reinvent the wheel? And the imaging team leaders from Auckland Museum and Taupapa have been hugely supportive in helping us select equipment and upskilling us in using it. And as you can see, even helping us find staff that can utilise it to its potential. So for me, being part of this NDF community is more than coming to conferences. It's so enabling and a project like this couldn't have happened without that level of reciprocity at the sector level. Okay, the eternal question. How do you pay for it? So Southland is unique in New Zealand. It's blessed with a regional heritage rate. So our three territorial authorities each charge their ratepayers $35 plus just, and that is pooled and administered by a regional heritage committee. It's the engine that's driving this. It had built up reserves. It also had a discretionary grant fund, and by applying part of the reserves and applying part of that annual discretionary grant we were able to fund the pilot for two years. We figured if we self-funded it, showed its worth, showed its system, showed runs on the board, that when it comes time early next year to go to National Funders for Sustainable Funding, we'd actually have a compelling case. I hope that's the case. We started by hitting the road. We invited each museum to select 50 objects for a fortnight. We spent with them. Worked with them shoulder to shoulder to put those 50 objects online. And the advantage of that, of course, is it established immediate relationships, it showed immediate worth, and it treated everyone equally from the start. Then we moved to Wyndham Museum for the remaining 18 months. And Tiffany and Rosemary are going to share our work with that team and that collection for the rest of the presentation. Thanks, David. Top 50s completed throughout Southland. We went to Wyndham. Now Wyndham is a very small and very quiet country town. It has a population of around 600 and falling. It has a dairy. It has a four square. Unfortunately, Wyndham Museum is now closed. It was deemed to be at earthquake risk. And so the museum closed not quite overnight, but not far short of that. But we saw this as a really ideal opportunity for our team to go to Wyndham to see what it would take to photograph, to catalogue and to pack an entire collection, have it packed up and ready while the historical society looked for a new premises. And here you'll get a sense of what Wyndham Museum, interior was like when we arrived. This is one of the gallery spaces. It's probably not unlike quite a lot of other small volunteer-run museums throughout New Zealand. The local historical society started collecting as late as 1988. And it was very much a sense of empty sheds, empty addressing tables, bring us in your old stuff, and they have become the community attic. But nevertheless, it's a very, very cherished part, really at the heart of the Wyndham community. So the collection, and especially the photographic collection, really reflect the enthusiasm that the community had to preserve their identity, to reflect who they really are. Wyndham was a very important part of the country's daring industry once upon a time. There was a time of prize-winning one-tongue cheeses. They were really important. Pipe bands, all the various institutions, the archives, the things that we have connecting to all the groups and societies that met for a long time throughout Wyndham. It was a very thriving community. They supported each other throughout wars, throughout disasters. However, like many volunteer-run museums, plenty of challenges. Those who set up the museum are now well into their 90s. The stories are really disconnecting, provenance and record-keeping very, very patchy at best. So for Project ARC, a fantastic opportunity to discover exactly what was in that collection and also to create digital access because we don't know how long the museum will remain closed for. Our first step was to introduce the project to a somewhat suspicious community. They weren't quite sure. Did the closing of the museum was there anything to do with us? But we were able to put minds at ease. We had an open day and introduced ourselves. We had a fantastic turnout but it's fair to say people were quite suspicious of us initially. On the other hand, we felt we had a huge and very complex task ahead of us. Rather than seek volunteer support, perhaps it was just better to crack on and get the job done ourselves. It was quite tempting to close the doors, lock ourselves in and just get on with the work. But in the end, we decided we'd have two volunteer days a week. We'd have very short sessions, two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. It was on a casual drop in basis. We weren't going to manage any rosters. So I've worked a lot with front-of-house teams working as volunteers in the past and I just wasn't sure with the complexity of what we were undertaking what we could use the volunteers for. How could we break down tasks to make them simple enough to enable them to make a real contribution that actually wasn't taken away from the targets and the work that we had to achieve. However, in the end, we decided that we would see how cataloging would work and we had an idea that they could set up some skeleton records and to be honest, it was going to be a little bit tokenism. However, we set up a template on e-hive and we showed the volunteers which fields to enter and it was repeat, repeat, repeat. We kept it very simple. It was just tiny little baby steps. But you know, within two weeks things had really turned around. Those volunteers were bringing us their local knowledge. They were really extending the records. They were passing on their training to others. They were enjoying themselves so much they started bringing in their lunchboxes. And now at four o'clock, it's really, really tough getting them to go home. And did we mention the baking? The bake-off started. With the success from the cataloging, we gave mini workshops on condition reporting and material identification and people have really enjoyed learning new skills. And honestly, the thing we left to last was the thing that we thought would be most difficult was copyright. But that has been met with such interest and such enthusiasm. It's been amazing. To date, our volunteers have catalogued over 1200 items and that's almost a third of our output. We've approached other tasks in a similar way. Scanning is a solely volunteer activity and for some volunteers, it just really appeals to them. They sit in a quiet space. They can scan, I think our record has been about 78 images in a day, so that's over a sort of five-hour period. It's quite impressive. Packing also, we've got volunteers heavily committed in that area. And I think the trick is that we're providing real work for people. It's slightly challenging and we're always working to agreed standards. And those standards are now ingrained as the new way to do things moving forward. Very recently, we ran cataloging workshops throughout Southland and in the most recent ones, we've taken some of our volunteer, Wyndham volunteers with us. And just the most amazing thing has been to get really positive feedback from other museums. They can't believe how much our volunteers have learned along the way. Now, I like to think this is because of the great training they've received, but no. It's because these people in Southland, they want to work and who better than the community to work on their own stuff? So, do you know what else is great about community? It's knowledge. Sometimes people have this perception that museums know everything, but when you rock into a town and there's like no provenance written down, you really, you don't know a lot. But there are people in those communities that know something, even if it's just a little bit and so we wanted to tap into that knowledge. So how did we do this? We've got a thing that we call policy, which is essentially that we have time for anyone. It doesn't matter if they want to volunteer or they just want to come and be nosy, we'll have a chat with them. And to begin with, people were quite suspicious. What is this museum thing? Who are these people? But gradually, we started getting people coming through the door and now you don't know who's going to show up. It might be the guy who's volunteered for the fire brigade for 40 years. It might be the three odd fellow blokes you've been trying to get hold of for three months. Now, what I love most about my job is the conversations I have with these people. So I think about talking to the 104-year-old Maj Makai who's donated so much of her family history and her collection. I think about the little five-year-old who collects suitcases and seeing the light in his eyes when I told him he could do this job when he's big. We've now actively started speaking to community groups at a talk we did with the Lions Club a couple of months ago. I was told that one of the older fellas in the community, Murray, and his rugby team photo on E-Hive and he the estimated day I gave it made him 20 years older than he is and he wasn't happy about that but he was, I was able to correct the record live in front of the group and that really showed that community the value of the knowledge that they have. With our inviting the community in we would have never had moments such as when Joy Thompson visited with the Memeha Women's Institute and we realised that we had her dad's watch. Joy's dad died when she was 11. She'd never seen the watch and she got to hold it and while she was doing this she told us all about how he'd been a butcher, a baker, how he'd run a circus and how he'd invented the Kirby Cable Layer and while this was happening the other ladies in the group sort of indicated that Joy was losing it a little bit and you know the bit about the circus and the cable layer and all that I started to think well maybe it's a bit far-fetched but it all turned out to be 100% true. This is Becky she's our main high school volunteer. One day she rocked in after school and we happened to be working on the race course collection and we have this photo of Becky's dad driving the famous racehorse Young Quinn and it was really cool to see her as a young person connecting with that heritage. These are other examples we've got heaps I've got like no time left seeing as this is the digital forum I just wanted to conclude with a story about collections online so on your left here this is a tunic that David cataloged and he got in contact with a guy called Barry O'Sullivan about this because as I said provenance is a little tricky the museum label said that this belonged to Dr Rogers when he was a surgeon in the Boat War Dr Rogers was a surgeon in the Boat War but that tunic is not from the Boat War it's a Mirahuku Mounted Rifle Surgeon's Dress Tunic which is a volunteer brigade slowly based in Wyndham making this very rare Barry then looked through all the other stuff we've done in the top 50 and he found this Hisar's uniform to give you an idea of that it's 15 parts and our photographer Danny took 60 pictures of it so it's like a real serious piece of kit and when you're not an expert on uniforms 15 parts what is this when Barry said I've got extensive knowledge on this we were really able to update the collection the collection knowledge Barry's also included these two images in his recently published book which is something that I don't think would have happened had this digitisation project come along That's our allotted time we resisted the urge to do the detail to talk about the standards we could have taken that approach but we thought sharing the tikanga the spirit of it was more essential and Jacques, no I'm okay David Llewani representing Project Act to work with such a wonderful team and such wonderful communities Thank you for your time