 Oops, Marina, good to be here today. Okay, I feel like I need to begin by explaining that not only is the paper you're about to hear, not the one Wendy and I had planned to give when we first submitted our proposal back in May, but also just a couple of weeks ago, it looked very much like we weren't going to be giving it at all. Going by our conference abstract, I guess what you'd be expecting today is that we'll be talking about our experiences over the last few months of using this fancy new piece of digital technology, an interactive touch table for displaying heritage content that was purchased by our library back in July. However, as we'll elaborate in a moment, the fact of the matter is that unfortunately, our table actually only ended up arriving last week. And not only that, we still haven't managed to connect it up to our network and we still haven't received any training at all and how to use its content management system. So now if you're thinking, hey, that sounds like a pretty flimsy basis for you guys to be up there telling us about your experiences using this device. Well, yeah, I absolutely agree. And that's why a few weeks back, with great reluctance, when we finally accepted this was the situation we were going to be in, I contacted NDF organizers to say, hey, sorry, but I feel like we have no choice but to withdraw our paper. Despite the very late date of withdrawal, they were remarkably nice about it and I'm very appreciative of the way they handled what was for me a very awkward situation. However, a couple of weeks ago, they did end up getting back in touch with us to say, hey, look guys, we're still holding your slot open. Maybe you'd like to reconsider. They made the point that NDF was just as interested in people discussing their failures or thwarted endeavors, as they prefer to call them, as their successes. Now that's a sentiment both Wendy and I entirely agree with and in fact, that's why we included the possibility of stuffing things up in the title. But still, I have to say I had been expecting we'd get the chance to stuff things up in more productively informative ways and just wait for the damn table to turn up. Okay, but anyway, after talking things over with Wendy, I eventually came around to the idea that, okay, maybe if we instead focus on things like the acquisition process, communication issues, the aspirations underpinning our project, we might just might be able to pull together something sufficiently engaging and informative enough to justify us presenting in a form of this kind. Whether that was the right call or not, you're about to find out. Okay, so a bit of background about our project. For a number of years now, Upper Health City Library has been experimenting with various digital and not, whoops, okay. There we go, got it. I'm not the tech person, so Wendy has to tell me what to do. For a number of years now, Upper Health City Library has been experimenting with various digital and non-digital means of making our heritage collections more accessible in ways that engage our community and invite participation. So it's nice to follow on from the south some museum people were talking before. Our first big step back in 2012 was to set up an online interactive digital archives using the Recollect platform. We were one of the early users, pioneers users of this platform, which is now in widespread use across the glam sector in both New Zealand and Australia. Recollect has been absolutely key to us as a way of pursuing our core strategy of getting our archives out of the storm into the community and also of, here's an example, of leveraging our community's knowledge to prove the quality of the information we keep. However, we also realized early on that a purely digital approach had limitations in terms of reaching all the areas of our community we wanted to in the ways that we wanted to. And so we began to supplement Recollect with other physically grounded forms of outreach, such as these events we called analog crowdsourcing events that were held in our library and also more elaborately these pop-up museums that we'd hold in places outside like a shop on Main Street. What mostly said in common was that they were ways of representing our digitized content in a physical setting while at the same time inviting users to in turn contribute to those digital collections via things like laptops and scanners that we would have on site so people could go and add directly to Recollect. As you can see then, we've endeavored to take an integrative approach whereby we've tried to create feedback loops between the physical and virtual spaces in which we operate, treating these as complimentary components of the same overall project. Last year, however, our manager, Merian Reed, identified a significant gap in this strategy which was that so far we lacked any point of access within the physical confines of our library itself for users to engage with our virtual heritage content. Merian Reed recently at a conference in Australia where she'd seen a demonstration of a digital touch table and she now suggested that maybe we could purchase one of these as a way of displaying digital heritage content within our library in an interactive way. And of course, my reaction to that was of course, cool, you know, fantastic. I mean, that's like the sort of fancy toy that normally only the big kids get to play with. So Merian ended up assigning Wendy and I to develop this project and I ended up getting so excited about the prospect of working with a device like this that I thought, hey, why not give a paper at NDF? However, when it came to drafting the proposal, I did remain aware enough to realize that not only things might go wrong, that things might go wrong, but also had a sense that one of the ways they might go wrong was this whole thing of being dazzled by the latest cool technology tool to come your way. And that's why in our proposal, I put in a line about the dangers of being seduced by the latest shiny technology. Now, Wendy's a super big romance novel fan and so as soon as she saw that I put the word seduction in our proposal, she was thrilled and insisted that we also had to have it in the title and I guess having done so, we figured we may as well run with it. But yeah, when you think about it, cautionary tales of romantic seduction aren't that bad a metaphor for situations we sometimes find ourselves in. To give a personal example, a few years back, I feel pretty hard for this rather beguiling and attractive swivel head public access digital scanner. I found myself really taken by what I perceived as its appealing capacity for heritage outreach and I couldn't help fantasizing about all the wonderful times we were gonna have together engaging our community. Unfortunately though, things didn't work out. I don't wanna go into details, it's still pretty raw. But basically, it was one of those situations where you know you excitedly rush into a relationship without properly thinking things through. Like how well do I know it really? Were we actually a good fit together? And what if this turned out to be one of those high maintenance relationships you always hear about? Was I in any position to provide it with the kind of ongoing intention and support it might need? Anyway, having been all through all that before, I was aware of what dangerous it might be, but I thought this time surely things will be different. Wendy. Anyway, so obviously our project was to get a touchscreen table into the library and we succeeded, there was Cassine and everyone lived happily ever after. We are gonna go into my stuff now, which is, oh sorry, which is kind of boring but maybe kind of interesting. My slides are not nearly as good as Reed's take on romantic, on romance books. And I was so gutted when I saw them because I was like, oh man. And they're not nearly as romantically punny. Okay, so our manager has seen a touchscreen at Alia that Reed mentioned in early 2018 and she really wanted us to get one. Reed and I both had other things on our plate along with everyone else in our library as we were booted out of our building because of earthquake proneness. So it wasn't a priority for the library or us. We had heaps of discussions though in the interim about what a touchscreen tabletop would look could mean to our heritage services and our manager somehow turned it into a need and when all of the hubbub of moving the first time died down, we were tasked with getting one for the library. So I was asked to be the project leader because of my obvious technology expertise and the fact that I'd just done a whole heap of basic work on project management internally. Reed was chosen because he is upper heart heritage and he knew the ins and outs of our collections and would obviously be a key part of the table once it arrived. A few years before we'd actually, our previous manager had actually asked us to look at touchscreen technology as an option for our library but it just seemed so out of our league money-wise but like the poor little servant girl who is unknowingly at Ares, lusting after a rake-ish joke. Once tasked, this time round though, we managed to set up a demo with our vendor at around Christmas time which is always the best time to conduct any type of business. We were shown how other institutions were using it and we were also familiar with some of the applications in New Zealand institutions. They gave us some of the specks verbally and some of us are far worse note takers than we actually thought. We were very wary of upcoming decisions about where our library was going to move to. There were several sites on the table, but they're not nearly as good as reads. We had to make sure that our table would be able to work in multiple spaces depending on where we finished up. So Reid and I whipped up a business plan, a business proposal, sorry, as was expected of us, both knowing that we were more than likely going to get the table. Seemed mildly futile, but it is of course very good practice. Management agreed to our proposal and we were advised that we would need to wait till July the 1st to purchase a table due to budgets. So the money came out of a big budget where money had been used some other way. Creative accounting is excellent. So in the meantime, while we were waiting for July the 1st to happen, we sorted out payment details and set up the vendor so that when July the 1st came round we could just order and pay. We were advised that the table would arrive in late August. Arrival was then delayed until October and then late October. We had lots of emails and phone calls back and forth in between times asking about the order, the setup, the delivery status, about content and our training expectations. Personally, I was feeling very needy and I only like feeling needy when I am on the couch and I want a cup of tea and a cuddle. It felt very, very drawn out. Reid was asking me on an almost daily basis from about mid July if I had heard anything. Occasionally I had, but mostly I hadn't. Until one beautiful November day last week, the call finally rang out across the workroom that our Wendy Reid, your table has arrived. We actually did run out into the library. So this is our table. It came in this mess of coffin and it's like another table at the moment in our workspace. So to some of our staff, when the table arrived, it was a bit mythical. We had been talking about it for what felt like forever. So it's really cool and fun to open it up. I did manage to scratch it. So it was really fun to open it up, put it into place and then to fire it up. And we didn't actually have any idea how to drive it. It didn't come with any instructions. So the table is a 55-inch windows tablet basically and it is definitely quite seductive. My technical expertise came in handy because I had to put the data cable in and then I had to push the giant red power button. There was an email that came a couple of days before which had told us how to get the software required downloaded. I was really excited because I read it very thoroughly. But the connection details that we were given by IT were incorrect and our little project is not a high priority within the scheme of things at council. If you're at Wellington City Council, Porirua, Wellington Water, you'll all know what we're talking about. So we will have to wait to get it connected. We can view Recollect on there which is a really great start but what we're really lusting after is the digital exhibition platform which Reid is going to talk a bit about. Okay, so as Wendy explained, my primary responsibility for this project was to provide the content for our digital heritage table. And my first thoughts were that I didn't want it to end up being just some kind of glorified oversized tablet for viewing Recollect. Instead, I felt it was important that we had specially curated content of its own that was continually refreshed and that presented local history stories in an engaging, immersive way. I was very much aware that other cultural heritage institutions had used similar kinds of digital touch devices to create fantastic displays that I'd seen and enjoyed at various locations throughout the country. So I knew that there were heaps of ideas out there for me to steal from. But yeah, I was likewise aware that most of these institutions were generally much larger and better resource than we were with specialist curators and digital technicians. Still, I thought that made for an interesting challenge and one that might address the question, used to address the question of whether this kind of digital display technology was transferable to smaller scale institutions like ourselves or whether it required a certain underlying layer of organizational infrastructure in order to prove effective. Now, one thing we've always prided ourselves on was our heritage program of Upper Hut is striving to be as ambitious as we can within the narrow limits of our resources. And I think one of the keys to pulling off major projects for small regional libraries like ours is to make the most of the one big advantage you have, which is your closeness to your local community. Accordingly, my plan at all is being to involve our community as much as possible in the process of creating our heritage table displays to give them the sense of investment of the project and not just treat them as in-recipients. And I had some ideas here that I'll just skip over now because we don't have time, but that was always the plan to get the community very involved, make it a collaborative project. But of course, this kind of participatory, organic approach takes time. Even with our original plan, when we thought the table was gonna, we were getting the table in August and we were hoping to publicly launch it in late October during Wellington Regional Heritage Month, I felt that time was tight. As things went on though, and after delay, after delay, after delay, which we've been told to expect a table or at least some training, the prospect of having larger community involvement just got slimmer and slimmer. And it appeared it wasn't gonna happen at least in time for this paper. For me, this was a hugely frustrating experience. The problem wasn't so much not having the table itself, but never having had so much of a glimpse of its back end. I basically had no idea how it worked, what things would look like on it and what it could or couldn't do. In retrospect, there probably were ways, more things I could have done by way of preparing content in advance, but it's hard to keep momentum going with so little information. And given that I also had heaps of other work to do, it seemed best just to wait until the promised training, which always seemed just around the corner, finally came. I still did, as Wendy said, kept on haranguing her, unfortunately, to see if she could at least get me something that I could start with, but her efforts, sadly, came to naught. So yeah, however, at the end of October, we did get a message, finally, from them that said, hey, good news, your table's absolutely, definitely on it's way. Oh, and by the way, could you send us over some exhibition so we could upload these onto the table so they're ready for you when it arrives? And I'm like, my boy's going up several octaves. Exhibitions, what? I mean, what the hell did they think I've been asking for all these months, but for information so I could get on with this? I don't know what happened there and a lot of the blame could be on us, not making our needs well known enough or whatever, but I thought we were being pretty persistent. But anyway, I figure I just may as well get on with it. So for the last couple of weeks, I've been frantically throwing, trying to throw some basic displays together. I sent them over, you know, just everybody loves aerial maps and I thought they'd look great on the table. I'm assuming the table has a kind of pan and zoom function. I don't know how this works. I'm assuming I can also put tags on it to identify features, but again, I don't know. The other exhibition we're quickly throwing together uses this lovely map made for troops to train some camp for maneuvers back in 1915. We've got a series, the idea is, you know, we've got these, you know, that people could touch various points and a photo will come up, a heritage photo from the early 20th century of what opera hut looked like at that time and what things were going on. I emailed them several times saying, here's what I'm trying to do, how does this work? Cause I don't even know what the touch points look like, how the images appear in relation to the text. None of those details. But yeah, they, so I've just ended up throwing heaps of instructions at them, lots of material and hopefully touch wood next week or the week after we'll get something up that looks okay. So I have to say though that, you know, now that we've got the table, I am feeling a lot more positive about things despite all the frustrations and setbacks we got through, even if it does just end up being a glorified iPad for looking at recollect, it's still pretty cool. But I'm hoping it could be something a lot better. And I think it's got a potential to be a really great asset for us. So yeah, for the time being, at least I'm optimistic that this particular subjection story might still have a happy ending. Okay, so I feel like I need to put it out there that Reed's already kind of benched it, but I feel like a lot of what has happened to us through this process has mostly been on us. We are librarians and archivists. I don't know that I really classify myself as a librarian most days, but we don't go around purchasing big pieces of kit on the daily. We have had so much else on our plate in the last two years. So this project has really seemed insignificant at times. The next bit I'm about to say is probably a bit more personal than it needs to be, but doing and then not doing, and then doing this presentation has allowed a lot of different stuff to bubble to the top. So what we really wanted or expected was we really wanted our hands held and gently caressed through this process. We wanted paperwork and specifications for the physical device and the operating systems. We wanted to be able to access digital templates for exhibition layouts just to get us started. We wouldn't have cared if we looked like anyone else. We just wanted to have stuff out and ready to go. We wanted access to the CMS to learn and play so that we could hit the ground running and that the table would not sit out the back for months while we created and learned stuff. Not that there is any room for it in our work room anyway. And we wanted to know what was going on without having to chase as hard as we did. So yes, we definitely could have done things differently. We often have so much going on. It's hard to focus on a project that has become as drawn out as this one. My very basic project management education says something along the lines of a good project is one where stuff happens and happens at a good pace. And I would not say this has happened at a good pace. I'm sure there's probably, I'm not sure that there was a way to rein it in, except perhaps clear communication expectations on our part and we both acknowledge that. So next time, besides letting someone else project manage, I'm going to be clearer with our wants and needs so much clearer. So we, me, should have probably made a proper little project planned. It did feel like it would be as simple as ordering, paying, getting some stuff, documentation, whatever. The table would turn up and everyone would be super into it. We went monitored by management, which is both excellent and terrible, obvious faith in our abilities. But at the same time, we were really held to account for what we were up to. And we did, I did report on it at every leadership meeting that we had, but we didn't really have anything to say except for yes, I have emailed for an update or it's coming in August, I mean October. So we, me, should have pushed more with what we expected to see. So being a pushy nag is not my natural state, although my 14 year old will disagree. Making demands of busy people was not one of my most favourite activities. And it actually all seems like a bit too much work to kick up a fuss and then have to repair a relationship. This is very me. I always had an idea about how the conversations should go and I often didn't include read in them as much as I should have because I knew they needed to be bigger picture at, oh sorry, at that end of the project, whereas I knew that need would, read would end up on the nitty gritty. I felt, and I'm really sorry, read, he knows this. I felt that there would be a time and a place for conversations like that and we are having training on Friday, so I'm fully prepared for nitty gritty. So, read and I have worked together for a number of years in the same team working alongside each other in the library. I'll often assist with technology, help for heritage stuff where I can and I am only too happy to share my local upper heart knowledge with read and kick his butt at five minute quiz every now and then. So working with read has reminded me that not everyone is as chill as me. I'm so chill. Read is very, very considered in his approach and likes to do things properly and I'm a little bit ripped and bust and chill. We both have a lot on our plate. Read more so than me, he has taken on a new role within the library and I just spend my time going to conferences and morning teas and chatting really loudly to customers in the library and occasionally breaking technology. I had a very unrealistic expectation that read would produce or repurpose content for an exhibition on a table that he had no idea what would look like, none of us did. I had faith that he could do it and he has, mostly I think, but it was a really, really rough expectation and he knows that I'm sorry for that too. So just to finish up, I feel with a, I love historical romances, they're my favourite. I feel like that we're headed into this as very naive waves and we are still a little wary, still sort of waiting for the ultimate seduction and our happy ever after. Thank you.