 Kia ora koutou, and thank you, Rowan, for that lovely introduction. As she said, my name is Flora Faltham and I am one of the two digital archivists at the Alexander Turnbull Library and I am here today to talk to you about a collaborative digitisation project that we did from about, I think I have the dates in the talk, but it's about February 2017 to June 2018. And before I crack into it, I kind of wanted to talk about the three strands of thinking that actually really motivated me to give this talk. The first one is the Photographers' Archives and Legacy Project, which is run and orchestrated by a photographer called Jim Sotherm, and it engages really thoughtfully with how photographers think about the relationship between their work and their archives and also engages really interestingly and I think quite powerfully with the way that cultural heritage organisations present as predominantly opaque to professional photographers and I would also argue working artists and this project that I'm going to talk about was kind of a mini version of that journey and discovering that for myself and I really wanted to share what I learned in that context. The other person who really inspired me is Melody Beals, who gave a talk earlier this year at the National Library, completely unrelated to photography, but she talked really powerfully about the need to share workflows and to kind of render visible all the ways that we have to manage and massage and manipulate large quantities of data and lastly of course I wanted to codify what I learnt for myself because in work we take on these tasks, it turns into a project and all of a sudden you have designed and executed a completely replicable workflow but also like what did you actually learn and also hopefully if I'm talking about what I learnt then anybody else who is interested in this kind of model will also be given some things to think about upfront that we at the ATL didn't necessarily have the opportunity to. So, first up, who is Max Eartley? Max was born in Switzerland and emigrated to the Waikato with his family in 1956. He did a BA at Auckland University and has been a serious documentary photographer since 1967 and he's been exhibiting work since 1970. In 1975 he returned to live in Switzerland where he worked as a photographer and teacher. He's come back and forwards to New Zealand and he was teaching at the Dunedin School of Art between 2007 and 2012 and he was back in New Zealand to do the work that I'm going to talk about today, obviously. The collection I'm talking about today comprises the photographs he took between 1968 and 1975. During this time he was studying, he was photographing for the Auckland University Student Magazine Crackham, he also worked taking photographs for the Waikato Times, he also worked at a pub called the Kiwi and he also taught photography at Elam. And when I talked to Max about why he took photos and how he chose his subjects, he just sort of said very nonchalantly that he always had a camera with him and he photographed everything, that it wasn't really a choice. And he recognised that every time you photograph anything, no matter how small, you are capturing an historic moment. And this philosophy plays out like so wonderfully well in his images. So there are photographs of very important political events and cultural events and the collection captures the built environment in Auckland at a time when there was a lot of change. But it contains lots of these incredible small details which illustrate what people wore, how people looked, what they bought, how they socialised, what they were eating, what they were buying. And he took heaps of really, really affectionate portraits of his family and friends and he was really immersed in the artistic community at the time. So it's a really, really, really phenomenal record of daily life in Auckland and New Zealand social history. And I'm just going to grab my phone so I can time myself. So the digitisation project ran from, as I said, February 2017 until June 2018. The idea kind of developed around 2015 when Max contacted the library about donating his archive of 35mm film negatives. He did have an existing relationship with the library. We already had digital copies of some of his prints but we didn't have any hard copy negatives. And it was during this discussion that it was Max himself who suggested coming to scan the material also. And it ended up being that the negatives were donated to the library to be cared for in perpetuity. But the scans were what we purchased and we could pay him for the work which I think is a really important component of this. And so I'm some of it self-evident but why was this a valuable model? And I asked Max again what motivated him to contact the library and suggest the collaborative digitisation. He reflected that it was a confluence of factors including there was feasibly robust technology. He had an existing relationship with staff which meant that he knew that this was the kind of work that we did. And he was also aware of the significance of his work and I think it's a really important point. He said that during the 1990s and the 2000s he'd become aware of the fact that he had photographed an important cultural moment and that he felt he had a responsibility and that anybody doing documentary photography or creating art had a responsibility to rise to the occasion of preserving their material and making it safe in an appropriate place. Which I think is a really beautiful philosophy. He was also uniquely interested in people having access to this material and when he describes his ideal access situation he always describes it as like baskets of treasures, baskets of cream, like baskets of beautiful things. He's just really concerned with people finding something strange or beautiful or interesting to them like when they want it. So the fact that the library was able to give access to his material on a stable public and long-term platform was really important. And from the library's perspective it was an impossibly valuable and unique opportunity to work so closely with someone who created a collection. So as archivists we're always trying to infer meaning and kind of explain the importance of collections but often you can't, you will never know as much about a collection as the person who created it does. So having, being able to work with somebody who knew so much about the collection and could name almost everybody in the 13,000 photos was really, really, really significant. And it's important to acknowledge that this work straight up would not have happened without Max. So we do have some imaging technicians but it's a lot of resource to create that many scans. So it wouldn't have been something that could have happened in that time frame without Max. And Max also participated really broadly in the life of the library. He gave a talk to staff. He talked to a lot of shop with our imaging technicians. He's a very gregarious man. He did an oral history. So not only was he able to give us insight into his own collection but he was able to give us a lot of insight into how it was to be a photographer in the 20th century in New Zealand. So talk about the impact of technology on photography and just really provide a beautiful insight into something much more broader than his own work. So the first thing I really want to get into is the division of labour during this project. And the list on this slide is something I put together in hindsight about all of the resources and the skills you need to get everything done. And of course you can break each of these down into a sort of very specific subreddits of activities, I guess, but in the meantime I'll just do like a shallow dive. So you need a photographer, sort of a donor or an artist so the person who made the material and is interested in doing the work to scan it. But you also need somewhere for them to sit and you need money to pay them. You need somebody who has a curatorial role. You need so that person who is responsible for the collection, both physical and digital, as a whole from the perspective of your institution. And someone who can be the final point of decision making from the point of your institution. You also need some project management expertise. So somebody who has oversight of the whole workflow and understands how all the components fit together. But you also need some metadata gurus so people who can ensure that the descriptive data meets your organisation's requirements. But you need a data wrangler as well so someone who can manage all of those scans. And you also need a technical troubleshooter so people who can deal with technical failure at a moment's notice, because I'll talk about that a bit more but there was a lot of that. So if this is the list of resources and skills, here's how they were distributed across the people involved in this project. And I think the first thing that you might notice is that there isn't a one-to-one ratio of responsibility to staff member, which I hope is heartening for smaller organisations considering this kind of work. There was about four of us who were like regularly and consistently involved in the project. So we wore multiple hats. We swapped hats. We sometimes tried to wear the same hat. And the point about that is while you only need a few people to do the work, it can be very logistically difficult to manage. So I was talking before about how you need project management. We didn't have a project manager. And if anyone, it was Natalie, the photograph curator. But as soon as it came to developing the workflow for managing the scans on mass and processing those and loading them to the digital preservation system, that is squarely in my area. So I kind of took on that responsibility. But that was really, I think, quite confusing to have to be making operational decisions and also be designing the workflow at the same time. So Natalie and I both reflected that. It would have been super helpful if there was a person who had oversight of the whole workflow but didn't have to be down on the weeds making operational decisions. And the project crossed a lot of boundaries at the library. Max required a lot of specialist support from a lot of areas. And we didn't have a clear way of streamlining that support or communicating across all of the people involved. And I think that also ended up being really confusing for Max. If we'd had some sort of project management oversight, we could have had one point of contact for him and he wouldn't necessarily have to ask four different people because he wasn't sure what the guidelines of our roles were. So I guess if I was doing this again, I would recommend that we think really clearly about whether or not we have one person as a point of contact, somebody as a project manager or to go with the model of having a bunch of people liaising with Max. And I guess the other thing on that note is that no matter what, you will always end up doing things outside of your job description. And I think that's just because you just end up putting out the fire that's in front of you rather than getting somebody else to do it. And that was most apparent for us when I was thinking about the technical troubleshooting aspect of it. So it's things like really near the end of the project, Max's, the spreadsheet that Max was using to create descriptive metadata had completely crashed. And it turned out that Max hadn't really been saving his work very frequently. And he lost about 11 days worth of work. And he rang me and he was just like, hey, Flora, I've got this problem. And I was like, wait, what? And since he's Swiss German, all of his software is in German or French. And so I had to quickly Google the German word for auto recover and try and kind of like ferret around in the kind of applications data folder. And the reason I ended up doing that is because I was there at the time. So, you know, I mean, that was fine, but it was a very, very panicky half an hour, I can tell you. So the big question for me, I guess, with all of this is, is this what we intended? How close was this to the original plan? And I guess insofar as there was a processing plan, yes, it was close enough. But the interesting thing was was that the information we had about how to do this work came from the donation agreement, which in retrospect is not the same as a processing workflow. So it sets out things like the conditions of donation and things that the library and Max would respectively bring to the table. And de facto gave us a set of deliverables, things like Max would scan every frame of every negative, but that isn't the same as a processing workflow. So we had enough to start with, we knew where we had to get to, but we had to make up a lot of stuff in between. And if I was doing this again, I would set myself some really like clear guidelines about the differences between the conditions as set out in a donor agreement and then create something really specific to use as a processing plan and think about things like milestones as well as deliverables and just really think about this in the context of project management. So I'm just going to talk hopefully quickly about a couple of components that were different to our usual practice and the implications of this on the project. So I'm going to talk about the arrangement and description work first. So as I just mentioned briefly with the crashing computer saga, it was agreed that Max would capture the descriptive metadata using a template that we would provide. And that was really interesting for me because we needed to design a template that met our organisational standards, met the rules for archival description and that somebody completely untrained in description could use. And we had about a day to do it. So that was a really interesting exercise in having to figure out what we genuinely considered the most important metadata and see if I could actually explain to somebody what archival fields mean. Max very gallantly rose to the challenge, but we did scale back the amount of descriptive information he provided over time because it was just unreasonable to expect him to do the stuff that we had set out for him in the first instance. And the kind of descriptive side of the project fostered a really interesting philosophy of letting go, which I know archivists are really good at. Max and I had talked about him transcribing information that was written on the original negative sleeves, but I'm fairly sure that in many cases he editorialised this information and without checking 3,500 envelopes against the original records, I won't know how accurate this information was. So we learned to be comfortable with that and we learned to understand that we were seeding control about collection metadata and that was completely okay. And I think one of the things that is really important about this is that we were comfortable with that and we rendered that transparent with our descriptive metadata. The second thing I wanted to mention is that it became really, really clear that Max understood his collection completely differently than I did. So the way that I envisioned the scans was that they would be essentially digital surrogates of the negatives and Max would create a record for every negative and the scans would be associated to the negative record and everything was arranged chronologically. That was original order and that was that. Max thought that was really nuts. For him, the value in the collection was as a whole body of work that someone could dip into his baskets of treasures and baskets of creams and he wanted the material to be arranged thematically or by subject and anything that reflected more than one theme put it in more than one place. And it was interesting when he created the negatives he actually, he did put them in series. He had 1969 to 1970 was N because he was using a Nikon camera. 1974 to 1975 was M and when I asked him about that he was like, I was like, what camera are you using? He was like, yeah, a Leica. And I was like, why is it M? And then, so and that speaks to me about the question about the digital creators panel got which is about which part of their work they want to carry on into the future. And Max doesn't mind about dates or duplication. He wants people to find connections and treasures. Obviously, the Strictly Archival Way did have value because it allows you to understand the photographs in their original context. But I guess it's a question of expectations and if I was doing this again I would have a really long conversation with Max about how he viewed the collection what he thought was important and hopefully find a way to represent both of those views in a finding aid. So the digital collection management aspect of this project, this exceptionally compelling slide, is where I learned the most and was the most resource intensive part of the project for me. So when I say digital collection management I am referring to the following things. And let me tell you how wrong that slide is. I didn't learn a lot about managing digital collections because that part was easy. And I could take any one of the points from the previous slide and describe all the ways that what we intended did not work out. So take, for example, finding secure storage for Max's scans. Part of the initial agreement was that Max would provide a hard drive for the scans and we would transfer them to the ATL servers and batches. Unfortunately, when we looked at his hard drive we found that it had a file on it that our corporate machine said was a virus. And let me tell you, at the National Library when your virus scan comes up with something, the IT department rings you. It's freaky. So we had to go back to the drawing board at a moment's notice and we had to provide Max with a series of USB sticks because that's what we had to hand. And that had a really significant flow on effect. So there ended up being nine batches of donations but Max, like any good record keeper, took backups. But that meant that there was huge amounts of duplication when all of the material was finally accumulated. This included exact duplicates but also intellectual duplicates where the content was the same but the image had been slightly edited. So I think there was upwards of 15,000 duplicates and I had to spend a lot of time kind of unpicking those. And where I didn't feel comfortable making a curatorial decision about something that Max had edited, I had to go back to him. Doing QA at scale was incredibly time-consuming and I mean it took months and I don't want to put you off doing this work but you have to think really seriously about the time. I had to develop several Microsoft Excel formula. I had to figure out what was missing after each transfer and what had happened to it because of course when you transfer data there's always one thing, one number is always out. I had to check that every negative reference number matched a set of scans. I had to check that every set of scans matched the content of the descriptive record and I had to check that the right frames were in each set of scans and I'm working with like 13,000 things at this point. And there was a lot of data to clean up in the end. It only takes one set of scans being in the wrong place or one folder being misnumbered to throw everything out. And this meant I had to consult Max a lot so there was a lot of backwards and forwards like two steps forward one step back and I can't think of a way around that like the perfectionist in me wants to do it once and do it right but I had to go back to Max and lucky for me he was very generous with his time. So I guess the point is is that collaborative work does not necessarily cut down the need for significant commitment of resource within your organisation. There was a lot of very meticulous work that needs to happen at scale and I guess what I would always recommend and we were quite lucky in this is that you structure the scans in any metadata in a way that minimises clean up and just enables checking and know your limit so for most of the checking I was able to do it using the digital data I didn't have to spot check every hard copy negative I could have spot checked every hard copy negative against all of the scans but that would have taken me years so there might still be some errors out there and I ended up having these very long notes to myself and notepad plus plus imagine this nine times over heaps of work so this is the last thing I wanted to mention which is that we did all the QA the files are in the National Digital Heritage Archive and the project is complete and I feel really proud of what we achieved but there are still lots of questions and these for me this is the most important thing and it's kind of the fact that collaboration is a very human process and I think this is about recognising the fence that the fence between the professional and the personal blur when you're collaborating in this way and I think that we have a duty of care to donors because for Max this was a really strange time he spent a year living in the in his youth and he was just looking at photo upon photo of his young life and he said that was a really kafka-esque experience for him and really really really emotional and I think it has to be okay that that's emotional and that be something we can talk about the second thing is obviously that how important it is for archivists and heritage practitioners to work closely with donors not just because that was an honour for me but I think this this relationship makes us better archivists and it's even more important in a digital context because it helps us scope collections so when we're working on collections with digital files and the thousands or hundreds of thousands where they digitised or born digital we need to have conversations with donors about what they value in the collection because we can't and shouldn't take everything so Max with Max it became apparent that he didn't see certain kinds of draft images as valuable so he didn't scan them so I was really struck by the importance of that part of the work and the last thing is that this model worked incredibly well ultimately in the case I've just described but it was time and resource intensive so how would other organisations do this or how would our organisation do this with other photographers or artists in a way that was great for everyone Max was incredibly proactive in the process and that was partially because he already had a relationship with the library so what about the photographers and artists who are creating an archive but don't have a relationship with the library or don't understand their part of their work as an archive and I want to think about who this model might exclude and how we support early career photographers or any other kinds of professionals who don't have a relationship with the library and I wanted to think Natalie who's the photograph curator and Max for talking to me about their experiences of this process and that's me maybe you have time for one question Sorry if this is the one question Was Max working on-site or was he working remotely? No he was on-site yeah he had a desk on level one of the Alexander Turnbull Library and when his spreadsheet crashed he was on-site or on-site he was on-site yep he was there so he rang me and I came down from my from my desk and I think it was a really valuable part of the process that he was able to be there yep Jess Oh that is a great question he he is actually doing that work now so he designed a thematic structure and then we gave him jpegs of the whole collection and he wants to arrange it thematically himself this wasn't a part of the original agreement but he is doing that work and there might be some further discussion I don't know yeah I love I love that way of looking at the collection though because I think it's so unarchival but like so beautiful It's not a copyright question because I know he's the owner of the material but I spent a lot of time on the Kiwi in the early 80s and I'm wondering if I'm in those photos and do I get the call on whether they're published or not it's a great question so just to point you at rest Andy is the Kiwi in like the early 70s so um you probably it was bulldozed in 84 I think yeah I think I had something to do with that as well so I hope they are they are publicly accessible and I hope that anybody who identifies himself in it would come to the library and have a discussion yeah there was we haven't had anybody identify themselves yet but I'm sure we will because they're really really public I don't want to get pulled southerly I want the stuff out there and open but it does make me wonder about when you publish this stuff yeah um yeah what is the guidance that big institutions like yours are offering is there something there that we can take a lead from or because it's not specifically copyright law is it no but I mean I think we probably have this question with all born digital and digitised information that's publicly available I don't feel necessarily qualified to speak about that I would hope that we put everything out in the spirit of good faith and that if somebody had a response to it or felt that this was somehow violating their rights as somebody who was in the in the photograph would come and approach us and I'm not actually sure how that conversation would go that would be with Natalie the curator and there would there would be a conversation I feel like Thomason could answer this question I can say I don't really have a like a official answer to it but we get a lot of people on digital New Zealand commenting via just by the kind of really clonky old Facebook plugin that we have requesting kind of items to be taken down details to be changed and yet really isn't the onus is on the obviously the contributing contact partner to decide what to do with that but I think one possible solution is just to and I don't know if the National Library even actually does the super well is just to make it really clear and really easy who to email yes yeah and I think on so on Natlib it's like you sort of have to scurry down into some other like contact us page ask a librarian which is not that helpful so just make it really easy and clear for just normal people to know who to contact yep yeah and then be open to that conversation yep I think we are open to that conversation and so maybe maybe it's that connecting those two things which is the kind of the missing link there yeah so Andy if you see yourself in the Kiwi please go to the ask a librarian form I'll be tweeting it yeah yeah um that ended up very much like a speed data there and I'm so sorry that you didn't get out some questions so please find I'll be around go thank you