 Kia ora tatou. One of the key parts of my role as librarian and archivist for the Anglican Church in New Zealand is to set strategy and develop new ideas for collaboration for networks of Anglican libraries and archive repositories. Most, as you would expect, are small, have no money, have volunteer personnel, poor storage facilities and are prone to head off on tangents of their own. One of the projects to fall out of some of our strategy development was a project called Church Papers Online, which is the focus of this paper, a small idea which grew. So just to give you the context, that's our central building in Auckland. To explain the context a little more, the John Kinder Theological Library, horrible, great long name and that's got a story in itself. As the library and archive for the Anglican Church was national collection, also has oversight and some responsibility for 10 small Anglican libraries in New Zealand and Fiji, as well as oversight of several regional diocesan church archive collections. A few years ago, we agreed with our stakeholder to set up a concept to provide centralised support from our Auckland location. So in brief on the library scene, we cataloged for 10 libraries and have a shared database, and 20,000 items with a significant collection of New Zealand Pacific Anglican Methodist titles within that. We hold partial runs of many church newspapers, but very few full runs of our own. Most of those smaller archives and libraries have got partial runs of various titles. So we got that tempting idea, first of all, trying to negotiate to house them all in one place, which of course nobody wanted to part with their treasures, so that wasn't going to go anywhere. But then we agreed on a collaborative way of working that would bring together the broken-up runs for the use of all as digital copies, would enable our decentralised clientele easy access and offer a research base to the wider public. So we set up church papers online. Church newspapers, you may say, what a limited audience. But not really. They're a pot of gold for researchers. Many church publications have a rich commentary on New Zealand society, on some of the big issues of the day, world wars, royal visits, abortion, buildings that are now historic, social justice issues such as the 1951 Waterfront Dispute. This little fine popped up when I did a Waterfront Dispute search about a chaplain making regular visits out with reading materials to ships that were stranded out in the harbour and running a bit of flak because he used beer cartons to carry the books. He wouldn't even make a murmur today, but this was 1951. There are records of Māori and Pākehā communities providing names and context for genealogists. There are religious reactions to the issues of the day. In 1946, churches were pronouncing on abortion, prison reform, higher standards for motion pictures, conscientious objectives and tolerance in dealing with aliens. One presumes foreign nationals rather than those from outer space. So as a small institution, how did we manage to have 18 Anglican Methodist Church Newspaper Titles digitised and publicly available in four years? So the story starts with a conversation at a Lanza conference probably about 2008 at the National Library stand where I was urged to consider some Church Newspaper Titles of papers passed on a shared cost basis. This fit a well with our strategy and vision. And so we proceeded about a year or further on with much assistance from the wonderful people at New Zealand MicroGraphics to proceed down this track. We started with one regional church newspaper, the Waiapū Church Gazette, 1910-1945, and its short-lived predecessors of the Waiapū Church Times. That's from the east coast of New Zealand. There was only one known set sitting in an open plan office in Napier that gave me the shivers every time I thought about it. The Napier earthquake had destroyed all the other known copies. It was definitely at risk of somebody borrowing a volume and never returning it. So success, the title was digitised and was published as part of papers passed and there was great excitement and general rejoicing and great relief that the single original copy was no longer at risk. Sorry, that's the Waiapū Church Gazette. So on that success story we decided that the next step was to digitise the national newspaper, Church and People, which was 1946-1976. Unlike the Waiapū title, there were many copies around, but all were fragile newsprint. So we micro-filmed first. This was late 2010 and proceeded to the digitisation step after that. And this is where a National Library decision really changed our direction. The rules had changed. To qualify for papers passed, the title had to be at least weekly or monthly publication. General doom and gloom is we did not have the expertise ourselves to take the publication, the project any further and had all those digital pages just waiting in the wings. I just hope that a member of our governing body did not ask for the relationship that year between the digitisation spend and the visible result because it was languishing. There was no other hosting platform out there within price range and our technical expertise. So I began much pestering the National Library in New Zealand MicroGraphics and anyone else that would listen for a way forward for someone to take an interest in developing a hosting platform for small institutions. Getting digitisation money as an annual budget item or from a church organisation for their own title was relatively easy for us and the long-term goal was a title or two a year. But having both the technical skills on staff and development money for a hosting platform was way beyond us and probably beyond most small repositories. It was very frustrating because we had a big collaborative vision, great print resources and no way to move forward. So I kept coming to conferences and I kept talking to people and I like to think that I had a little contribution because of my pestering to the birth of a platform by New Zealand MicroGraphics Services. Sorry, that was just my fun at not being able to do it. NZMS began the development of a platform called Recollect for a range of digital collections and shortly after, a sister product out of print, which is a subset and designed for text-based materials. So I followed the development of this for a year or two and eventually there it was, a weekly in one package, technical expertise, a process, a way of organising digitisation which only required us to check in detail individual items of publication, but most importantly a place to host the resulting data was not our responsibility. Actually it wasn't quite that simple. There was nervousness on our part at committing to a product that was signed under development, but on reflection what software is not always under development and really it was a matter of deciding at which point we wanted to put our toe in the water. We told ourselves that nothing was irreversible. If the product did not develop as we needed it to or a better product came along, we could move the data. So we committed to move to head with an initial two titles and the rest is history as they say. This is going to sound a bit like an advertisement and Andy you probably owe me a licorice all sort of too, but... I just thought I'd just give you what's on the website as to the out of print platform. We now digitise directly from original materials rather than creating any more microfilm as technologies moved on so much that if we want the microfilm it can be done subsequent to the digitisation and with some existing microfilm titles which had already been done years ago we've digitised directly from those more recently. We can provide digital images for uploading ourselves although we haven't done so yet or hand the whole project over. So our criteria for selecting titles we had a wide range of starting points because of the huge proliferation of Anglican the Methodist publishing and in this bicentenary 1814 to 2014 year in New Zealand Kendall's printing presses started rolling in the Bay of Islands very early and the printed word has been a key way of the church disseminating its message but thank goodness serial publications didn't have featured too much in the early days. So our priority was starting with our national newspapers things that were at risk things that are heavily used by researchers and regional titles that were much wider than just church news that would have material that was useful to the wider historian and small interesting unknown titles. We've done the Church Gazette for the Dices of Polynesia because it's just about not available in New Zealand we're about to start on the Southern Cross Logs of the Melanesian Mission which is the Solomon's and Vanuatu area and we've done some small Christchurch titles which finally got unpacked from a container after having been rescued from an earthquake damaged building in Christchurch so we're very aware of the frailty of single title items. A by-product has been the discovery of interesting little things bound between main line church newspapers that have popped out as the page by page work has been done and originally I said take them out don't do them but it was actually easier to have them all digitised as they were done and have the files named differently so as we could pop them out later I think Chris had to do a little bit of extra work around it but it's actually been a really useful process. And then you have the discussion over scanning bound or disbound. Of course once they're scanned disbound you've got a lot of loose pages and this has always been a discussion over the years. One valuable lesson learned by me probably too late in some cases was don't be tempted to get rid of any duplicate titles of anything you may want to scan in the future because it's significantly cheaper to scan from trim pages than having to use overhead camera on bound volumes and we'd been a bit casual with our duplicate copies and I knew I'd sort of haul it away somewhere or other and I just about turned a storage garage upside down until I found them in the shelves where they probably should have been in the first place. So you need to think long range possibilities. The software allows a search across all titles or within a title or year range and links can be made directly from an image to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or as an email link to a researcher which actually really speeds up the process as someone writes to you for something that you know you can find quite quickly and just link them on to it. Where they can be searched through digital New Zealand and some of the drilling down is still not quite as good as we would like. So that's enabling a wider range of researchers to access our material. Though we do seem to have become known quite quickly a visiting Oxford Church History Lecture told me that his students were using our national governance our general standard proceedings which is the minutes of our governance body for quite a significant part of one of their papers but that was really interesting. Many years ago Professor Russell Stone emeritus professor at Auckland University always told and tending historians they needed to read a year of newspaper coverage before they got into specifics. A fair online publication has probably put an end to some of that strategy but then again even a year's reading could fail to uncover what you were really looking for. Our favourite search example was when a researcher asked me what had happened to a piece of the original Marsden Cross Aparau ihe in the Bay of Islands because shortly after it was put up the top of the cross had fallen off as you can see in that left hand and photograph there. There was a story that had gone to be the base of a font at a children's home in Papatau Tau i in Auckland and then had disappeared. So I thought well that seems like an easy thing for our church newspapers so we could have put a Marsden Cross in font and there it was. Probably could have searched for that forever. It's actually now in Wellington that marks the Basin Reserve. So I've got a couple of slides out of the font that it's supposedly part of but there's a story about whether it really is or isn't after having found it. That's the content partner with Digital New Zealand. Sorry, go back there. The title for this paper was Possibilities Are Endless. What I've talked about so far is probably quite similar to what's happening elsewhere but we have plans for a step further. We want to widen the content to include our current digital church major newspapers. This one is our key national paper. It's published online PDFs and every time I go to look for them they've taken them down. So because one of our roles has been to maintain this collection of Anglican Methodist publications we want to add these in as well acknowledging that National Library does have a role here as well but we think we need some responsibility in making sure that we've always got access to them ourselves. So the next phase of the strategy is to offer various church organisations access to their current and semi-current journal titles through the same platform. The two key reasons for this are one added security of the e-files for the future by gathering in one known place but more importantly the ability to search the content because there's a huge amount of really good material that's been published in these and we have to keep guessing about when it was and where it was. So in preparation we have rescued some digital files that have recently ceased and whose longevity on their website was questioned. A question of also, I've put those aside and in the middle of conversations with some of our church administrators about the importance of this project and hope the usual word of mouth will extend the invitations to others. So in summary I would have to say that retrospectively National Library did us a big favour by changing the rules. To have mixed church papers up with the big newspapers would in hindsight have been a mistake. And we would have been very restricted as to which titles we could have up there and probably wider issues over copyright and cut-off dates because we've definitely gone further than papers past us at present. So we have a project that can only get bigger. The key will be continuing to check and revise the parameters or this could get away on us and on our budget. And there's more discussion needed around inclusivity versus overload. But meantime we're just a little bit proud of what we've managed to achieve. Thank you. We definitely have time for questions so has anyone, there's one in the back. Alan Mann-Jackman, I'm the Director of the Presbyterian Research Centre which is the Presbyterian Equivalent of Judith's organisation and I just want to say congratulations. Presbyterians are reluctant to give up funds to do the same so the Anglicans are obviously their puppet solution. But I think it's a really good model for the kind of thing that I'm looking to do and I'm pointing to it every budget year and saying this is possible, this is what we could do and I'll just keep on trying. Well done. Hi, I'm Helgar Alanton, a former law librarian. I'm wondering how much difficulty you had with mis-scanning. I was familiar with material that had been scanned and quite a number of words had scanned from old documents. Scanned and sufficiently well to be searchable. I wouldn't say I've done a thorough search but so far everything I've looked for I've got hits probably about what I would expect to get and no-one so far has pointed stuff out to me. I'm sure there will be mis-scanning because OCR is not. What do you estimate your hit rate at? So many variables from the microvoltaic and quality of the scan and the OCR engine as well. There's multiple variables. But even if we get a good percentage it's better than not at all. The bigger question there is how much effort you go to get it right. The paper's passed, it does some good experimentation on this. You can spend an absolute fortune to see the exponential curve being perfect or you can spend a lot less like a fraction of something different. OCR costs zero in that environment. Zero dollars. So you don't know you don't do any corrections based on just whatever. That's what comes. And we're perfectly happy with that person. Hi, Joanna from the Canterbury Museum. For the initial two newspapers that you scanned to be passed, have you left those up there? It was only the Waiapu, all those two Waiapu ones. Yes, we have and we negotiated with papers passed for us to also have a copy of the files so they're actually in two places. Sorry to hear that you're disbinding still because I think cameras are good enough to do a good enough job. You can move a lot faster than flatbed scanners these days. The very large newspapers like the New York Times don't work very well. But the smaller ones that look like from your pictures, I think the cameras now can do a pretty good job in holding them. Even if they're in bound, multi-volume things, the V-shaped cradles. We're only disbinding when we've got duplicate copies. We've always maintained one or complete set. If we've had spare copies, those are the ones that we've disbound because they are not doing any good sitting on our shelves because it's in a closed collection anyway. I'll ask one final question up here. Have you been tracking use of these since you've been? I knew someone was going to ask me that question and the answer is that I haven't but I do intend to. It sounds like it was a fascinating project and you've created a great resource. Thank you very much.