 Great, thank you and thank you all for coming. I'm Caroline, so I'm going to be talking about a project that I was involved in at the Metropolitan New York Library Council Culture in Transit. This was a project ran from April 2015 to October 2016 and it was partnership project between the Metropolitan New York Library Council or METRO As it's known, the Queen's Library and Brooklyn Public Library. So it was an externally funded project through the Knight Foundation, a philanthropic foundation in the United States. And they run a challenge, the Knight News Challenge on libraries, and they pose these questions and they ask people to apply with projects for how these questions might be answered. So the question that we were posed in our cycle of the challenge was how might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities. So the communities that we responded to for our project, Culture in Transit, were the neighbourhood communities of New York City and also the library and archive community of New York City. And we united those two communities through the common strand in the project of mobile digitisation. So mobile digitisation, as you can see, just basically exists of us taking equipment that we can digitise collections to the people that need it. So it was comprised of three kits. There were three digitisation specialists. I worked in Manhattan, two of my colleagues worked in Queens and Brooklyn. We had a flatbed scanner, a laptop, a mobile copy stand which just comprised of a DSLR camera and an inverted tripod and lights. And then in our community work we added an outreach kit which just basically existed of headphones and a tablet. So to put our project into context and just to give you a bit of a flavour of the diversity that you'll find in New York City, here are some population stats from 2016 and I think you can sort of reflect on the fact that New York is an incredibly diverse city which makes for an incredibly amazing experience to live and work there. But if you look at some of these statistics and then you think about the communities that make up these statistics, if you go looking for those communities in library and archive collections in institutions across the city, you just won't find them. There's an incredible lack of diversity in representing minority communities in library and archive collections. And similarly, the work that I did with libraries and archives in Manhattan, there's an incredible lack of diversity of libraries and archives being able to put their collections online. There's incredible resource barriers to that. So if we think about digitisation, we can think of some of the barriers to digitisation. So there's often not the people to digitise, not the staff members there to do it, there's not the money to do it, there's not the time to do it, the equipment or the online platform to enable the digitised collections to go online. And so our project really sought to address that need in both communities. And so the work that I did with Metro, so Metro is a membership organisation that provides services to and advocates for museums, libraries and archives in New York City and Westchester County. So the strand of the project that I worked on was developing a mobile digitisation programme where we would take the digitisation services to those institutions who needed them, hence me in the top left-hand corner with my mobile digitisation kit, go into an institution digitising an archive or library collection for them, attaching the metadata catalogue in the collection and then we would host the collection on Metro's digital content platform. We would also give the institution a copy of all the images, so we digitised to archival standards, we created master copies and then derivatives for online access and we gave them a copy of the metadata as well just so they could reuse it however they wished. And we also, as well as providing online access on our digital platform, we also fed all of the content that we digitised through the projects onto the Digital Public Library of America, which is European's cousin stateside. So, as you'll see, here are some stats. Over 12 months I visited 10 institutions and digitised over 1400 items and put them online. And here's just a small snapshot, just a teensy snapshot of some of the items that I digitised and I could spend a whole presentation actually just on the collections themselves because they were just so diverse and rich and wonderful. But just to pull out one example, I guess over the last couple of days we've had a lot of anecdotal evidence and the value of anecdotes. So, I'll just tell the story behind these two posters on the right-hand side here. So, these come from Yeshiva University and it was a collection that I digitised of 177 hand-drawn and printed posters from the student struggle for Soviet jewellery collection. So, founded in 1964, SSSJ was a pioneer in the movement to oppose the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union. And so, you'll see here, these are the digitised images. If you just look back to this slide on the top left-hand side here, this was the condition that the posters were kept in. They were completely inaccessible to researchers because the university didn't have any way of displaying them, so they were just in effect hidden. And so, we had to get creative with how we digitised. You know, we didn't have a digitisation lab. We developed our digitisation kit to be as effective as we could be, and so we got creative with some archival tape and book weights to sort of manage to get the posters flattened enough for digitisation. But the real success story is that we managed to digitise them and put them online and now they're being used not only in the states but elsewhere because they were put onto the Digital Public Library of America. And so, you'll just see here the online access aspect of the project. This is just Metro's digital content platform for hosting the collection and then DPLA pulled all the records from us and put them onto their online portal for international access. And that was a really important part of our project to just have that international perspective to these sort of previously hidden collections. So, that was the work that I predominantly did with institutions in Manhattan. And so, the other aspect of the project was community scanning. So, I spoke earlier about that one of the communities we wanted to focus on was neighbourhood communities across New York City and the incredible diversity that you'll find in those boroughs. And so, in Queens and in Brooklyn, there existed community engagement programmes. In Queens, they operated under the Banner Queens memory. And in Brooklyn, they operated under the Banner our streets, our stories. So, these were predominantly oral history programmes where they would go out to residents and record their stories of living in the boroughs. But we upscaled these projects to include community scanning. And you'll just see here, so this is Queens. These are all of the neighbourhoods that we visited over the course of the project where we held community scanning days in Queens. And then again in Brooklyn, this is where we held community scanning days. And what I mean by community scanning days is that we invited neighbourhood community members to bring in old family photos, old uniforms from high school or from their place of work. Just memorabilia that connected their history to the community and that just told their story of living in their community. And so, over the course of ten months, we held over 50 community scanning days and digitised over 2,000 items. And so, this was really an outreach-centred model. So, at the beginning of the project, we did an amazing amount of outreach, produced flyers, got our name in local papers and local media, just to try and entice people in. And it was interesting looking back now that after all our hard work, no one actually really turned up to the first few events. And we were like, oh, okay. But what we actually realised really early on in the project is community partnerships were key to working with neighbourhood communities. Community partners have the trust of their local communities. And we were working in areas where community members can sometimes have a distrust of local official bodies such as public libraries where we were holding our events. There's a lot of undocumented communities in Queens and Brooklyn that just don't want anything to do with any official public body. And so, we actually realised that by partnering with community groups who already have the trust of their community groups, they were able to basically screen us and say, you know, these guys are okay. You know, there's nothing suspicious. They want to help you tell your story. And so, we partnered with some incredible groups over the 10 months that we ran the community groups. And we also realised pretty early on with the community events that people love interactive community events. So, we originally thought that, you know, we would, it would be enough for people to just bring their items in. We'd scan them for them. But we actually realised with the, particularly the popular events, scanning actually takes quite a long time. And so, we kind of wanted to bridge that gap and sort of engage them in their local history and other ways while we were actually scanning the material. So, we developed a lot of projects. We quickly added, as I said earlier, a tablet to the community kits. So, we used the tablets in two ways. We preloaded all histories onto one of the tablets. So, people could listen to other community members giving their sort of accounts of growing up in the neighbourhood. And we also had one for a community history slideshow. So, other photos of the neighbourhood that sort of would spark memories and conversation and that they could reminisce over. And we also developed more, you'll see in the middle photo here, this poster with all the blue dots on, is basically just a blueprint of the neighbourhood that we were in, that we were running the event in. And we would just invite people to stick a blue sticker where they grew up on the street that they grew up in. And also, just to leave a memory on a post-it note and stick it to the poster of growing up in their experiences of living in that neighbourhood. And so, we really used the community scanning events not only as a way to diversify the historical record of the city by sort of partnering and working with previously communities that just have no history online, as also as a space to sort of empower them to steward their own personal and local history and to really sort of communicate to them that their voices mattered. We used to get a lot of people would be almost hesitant at coming to the events and almost question if we wanted their photos. It was a key message that we kind of had to keep saying that, yes, your voices mattered, like your history is just as important as anyone else's history because your history contributes to the wider history of the neighbourhood and the city. So that was really, that was an important aspect that we hadn't quite grasped how important that would be at the outset. And we also developed a brochure just to, so with community members, we gave, as with the institutions, we gave them their original items back, but we also gave them a flash drive for their own digital images. So just as a way to sort of help educate them on their own sort of personal digital archiving at home. And we didn't just scan in libraries, we scanned in a pub, in a cemetery and we also developed quite a really great and engaging school scanning programme. So basically the children were asked to bring, basically it was a show and tell. So they were bringing old family photos, they would discuss the photos and then we would be scanning them and they would sort of like see the whole scanning process and they were intrigued. And so this is just, again, I could talk forever about some of the amazing content that we digitised at these community events, but here's just a sample. And we've had some great, so the project ended over a year ago now. All three aspects of the project in Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn, they're still going in some capacity and we've had great feedback from community partners. There was recently an event in Queens where they ran a similar event to what we were doing during culture in transit where community members were invited back, who had contributed the first time and they were seeing the images that we digitised for them used to engage new audiences and that kind of gave them a sense of pride that actually their voices and their history mattered and was just as important. So that was the project in a nutshell. We wanted at the outset for our project to be replicable, so this project was not unique to New York. This project could be replicated in any community, anywhere in the world. And so we had the mobile digitisation aspect that we wanted to be replicated, but we wanted people to be able to replicate the entire project. So we basically just put the entire project into a toolkit and we have community, we have a section on communities, we have a section on institutions and we just basically, it's our entire workflows, it's how we develop the programmes. For instance, I think a lot of the time people don't quite grasp sort of being able to quantify a digitisation project, so I kept detailed statistics over my time of how much I digitised and what I digitised. We have downloadable resources for the community aspect, so copyright release forms, metadata forms, event planning checklists that are all there to be downloaded and reused. We have equipment lists, we have a master spreadsheet of every single item that we purchased for the project and if it worked and if it didn't. And then we put the whole toolkit on GitHub, so the toolkit is licensed under a Creative Commons public domain licence, so anyone is able to reuse any of the content of the toolkit on use and they are also able to reuse the project site if they so wish for their own project as we put it on GitHub for that purpose and that was my whistle stop tour of culture and transit, so thanks so much for listening and I'll hand over.