 Paaka ki marama ti Ke gapatata wala Paan mazut i atha ilama Pagal nai i teks Mouch nowa here effort and I'm sure you've got some sense of what it takes to put this on every year. So a huge thank you to everyone who's been involved and thank you for taking the time to be here. If this is your first NDF then I think you're in for a treat. You know the role of an opening address is to help set the scene for a conference but bear with me because I want to start out talking about failure just kind of an odd way to start but as you might expect it's not all doom and gloom and to be honest I've been waiting years for an opportunity to give this talk so it just feels like the right time. I'm going to start by sharing with you the story of a project that I launched that completely failed and it's not a story that's well known in fact I don't think there's anyone here today who actually knows. So I'm sharing this because I want us to remember that for every amazing idea or initiative or digital thing we hear about at this conference there are probably 10 other failures, stupid ideas, things that just didn't work out as planned and I want to say that I think that's okay. We often hear about failure as being a good thing you know the road to glory being littered with failed endeavours and the likes of you know how not to make a thousand light bulbs before finding success but I regret that we don't talk openly enough about our failures or the things that don't work because learning from each other is about is what this NDF network is about learning from each other and working with each other to do more than we can do alone. In any case let me take you back to 2008 prior to the general election and let me introduce you to in my opinion one of the most fabulous collections we have in New Zealand and that's the New Zealand cartoon archive. Now if you're not familiar with the cartoon archive it really is fabulous its purpose is to collect and make accessible New Zealand editorial cartoons and it has over 50,000 New Zealand cartoons going back from the 1860s and they cover an incredible range of topics to do with life in New Zealand covering social issues economics sport culture history etc. This is from 1899 by Ashley Hunter and it's showing a woman who is turning the helm of state away from the direction in which Prime Minister Seddon wants to head. Gordon Kelman in 1917 here is depicting the sorrow felt by New Zealanders for the number of soldiers killed in the First World War and of course we've got Huma and this one from Tom Scott so the record of New Zealanders and Australians making fun of each other is very well recorded in the archive I think we've got a few Aussies here today yeah you're very welcome so this collection also says a lot about our place in the world this one from the nuclear free era in 1984 by Bob Brokey and our local issues this again from Tom Scott in 2003 and of course politics this one from Rod Emerson in 2010 it's a funny thing being an institution connected so closely to government I think that's not unusual in any way of course you know local libraries and many museums and archives are most often funded by local government and the National Library and Alexander Turnbull Library are both part of internal affairs it's funny in the sense that you know one of our jobs as a library is to support open access to information and I should say those are my words not any kind of official declaration but the role includes holding information in our collections about the political views of society at points in time threatening zone history and yet as public servants we also need to be very careful not to express our own political views and the context of our work you know and rightly so of course so sometimes there's a narrow path to tread with lines not to cross now I've always believed that getting as close as possible to those lines is where we need to be in the digital context things change so quickly for our digital services that often what starts out as risque can be an emergent norm by the time we actually get something out the door but narrow paths and lines of course invite increased risk of failure which brings us back to our story back in 2008 there were a few of us who thought that we could do a lot to raise the visibility of the New Zealand cartoon archive you know to celebrate it and to see more people engage with and get value from this incredibly insightful and thought-provoking you know window into New Zealand life so we hatched a plan and it involved students politicians and a general election you know how this ends right we decided that the best way to do this was to run a competition and get people to create their own cartoons and then use that experience to connect them with the cartoon archive now my recollection is that it was the mid-2000s when we started to see online experiences that were really enabling the creation of new works some of you may remember a service called jump cut which was purchased by yahoo in 2006 it was a space where people could upload video and actually edit it online adding effects splicing frames together et cetera um it was entirely built in the browser though so there was no desktop software and it was kind of a revelation and so we were like where can we get the online equivalent where people can create cartoons for our competition and so we came across a service called pickston based in canada now pickston is still around today um this is their their website you should check it out it is very cool um it's basically a visual environment that allows you um to create and share your own cartoons got templates and tools and and what have you we pretty quickly realised though that we didn't know the first thing about how to make great cartoons um but we were very lucky to get the support of a well-known New Zealand artist who cartoonist whose work is actually in the archive now i don't actually have permission um to share that person's name so they'll need to stay anonymous for now but the important thing was that they helped us figure out how to make this competition work and they started by designing New Zealand objects that could be set up in templates inside pickston and this of course is the Auckland sky tower and then they started playing around with ways to make it easy um for people to get started so the concept being that we'd create a base template inside pickston um that would set the scene and then people could copy and paste the elements move them around um to tell their own story here's another early um story panel that was worked up so that was all well and good but honestly it just it wasn't quite getting us excited um yes we may have seen a few people having to go but it just didn't feel like it would really take off so we decided to step up to that line i mentioned earlier an idea that had been in the back of our minds was that what if we encouraged um people to create their own political cartoons so the New Zealand cartoon archive of course is about editorial cartoons so there is a better fit with that idea and this is prior to the again the 2008 general election and we got this idea into our heads that um you know wouldn't it be great if schools could use such an activity to help teach students about freedom of speech political satire information democracy and all in that context of the elections um and all in the context of the cartoon archive and so the next graphics i got from our cartoonist were of John Key and Helen Clark and I admit to starting to feel a little nervous at this point um so this was heading into a space that could either be wildly successful or um could go terribly wrong in terms of um consequences not just for the team working on this but also for the library and I remember talking to our then director and deputy chief executive at the time you know what they said they said go for it now this was by no means them giving us um their full seal of approval this was them backing us to keep working on it so that ability for some leaders to support their people in doing not just something different but something kind of way out there on the edge um has become an enduring memory for me of that time in the national library and I think it's a leadership quality that is so important in our field of work so I told our cartoonist that we were going for it and could they please work up some frames of people that people could use to express their own political views and I was sent this so I'm preparing for this presentation I was looking at my email correspondence at the time and I said something like great but could we have something with a bit more balance please and in reply I got and if you want to come and talk to me afterwards um you can ask me who this is supposed to be I'm not going to talk about it here um and then we also got this one as well so looking back on this I am kind of amazed we got as far as we did we got as far as the electoral commission um before this was shut down pretty quickly in terms of our goal of trying to raise the visibility of this amazing collection it was a complete failure um nothing happened it was it was a real wasted effort and it was a downer because you know we'd all put a lot of time and effort into this um you know there were communication plans press releases I mean we were ready to go and I felt that we'd had a good chance of reaching people that our library had never connected to before you know and introducing them to their documentary heritage in a really exciting way and part of me now looks back on this um is a pretty silly idea but I also think it's kind of funny um I don't regret it though I think it was still worthwhile because there were other interesting outcomes most unexpected for me um was that the cartoonist we'd been working with became really enamoured with Paxton and went on to establish a significant profile with them for a whole series of um new regular cartoons this work also inspired us to partner with um Auckland Museum on Digital New Zealand's um remix editor later in 2008 the idea of finding or creating online spaces where the public could engage with our collections in different ways and create new works was formed for me during this period and ultimately um this failed effort was the origin of mix and mash the great New Zealand remix and mash-up competition from which over the years we've had incredible examples of New Zealanders interacting to create new works on top of our collections and most of you know about mix and mash but I love sharing examples of the work because there's such talent out there in our communities um that our institutions can connect to and it reminds me that our digital materials are not just for looking at but they can be used and they can be used to create things so entrance um had to include at least one piece of uh reusable New Zealand content um in their works this is a work from Alan Shower called um Cross Cultures which is a remix of images from cartoonist um Dylan Horrocks in poetry by uh Rene Leang we had an interactive Miki Miki uh by Graham Jensen Tarnay's Tale uh by Georgia Rachel and Nicole Chappell um was this delightful mixed media storybook uh about the importance of looking after our forests this is a forestry infographic um by uh Jessica Shorich what happened by uh Sadeflory, Ricardo Scott, Jared Bishop and Alex Gibson was this um remarkable children's story and data mash-up Polaroid from Uncertain Times by Chang Siang Wong An Opal Dream Cave by Jim Yoshioca uh remix poetry from Catherine Mansfield in photographs from the National Library a grandmother by Candy Elsmore tells the story of her grandmother's signing of the suffrage petition and we even ended up with a mix and match category um for cartoons where we finally got to um partner with Paxton this was the winning entry called Trade Me by Heidi Busch so these are all things that came about in part thanks to our misguided efforts with this failed project so what do we take from failure I mean we've all had to cope to some degree with failed efforts in our digital work and there are lots of things um to learn but I want to offer you one takeaway be bold whatever your thing is stretch for something more and look it may not pan out you could absolutely crash and burn um but if we never reach for these things they certainly won't happen and you will always get something out of it in this room you're surrounded by people who can support you and being bold so here we've got ideas to inspire our skills to use and even maybe a little bit of funding to share I'm sure it's out there um and you should just go for it and figure it away because there are definitely better things that we can do better at with that in mind um at this conference we've identified three challenges that we want to explore what you'll find up in the oceania room um where we have our breaks and lunch are three boards that each pose a challenge of national significance on the boards we're first asking for your input on what are the problems in that area I hesitate to say we're completely failing but these seem to be things that are just not working out as well as we need them to and then also on the boards we're also asking for ideas on how to meet those challenges so you have an opportunity during the breaks to think about these things and there should be a facilitator hanging around um so you can have a bit of a chat about these things but talk to each other as well uh during lunch time tomorrow there's also a roundtable discussion where you can sit down and have a proper talk um about some of these things if you're so inclined we'll then bring it back um altogether and report back on um some possible next steps for these challenges so what are these challenges of national significance number one being smart about digitisation so this has always been a challenge yeah um but why do we care we care about creating digital versions of our collections because that's how increasingly people want to access the stuff um and we can do wonderful things to engage and inspire and educate in the digital environment and we're excited about the possibilities um of applying computation and digital humanities and all that good stuff but more importantly I think we face a world where for many people the online source of information is their only source of information and if that material is not there and not online it's like it doesn't exist and it's not good for our society ndf has just had the results of its 2014 digitisation survey coming so out of 63 organisations 58 are planning on digitisation digitising material and making them available next year which is great here's the kicker though 46 percent have no funding to do this work so it's great that we have any go um but we're clearly lacking investment the things that are holding us back are pretty much the same as they were last year staffing funding and time the challenge for us is to get smarter about how we undertake digitisation across our institutions so please join that conversation if you've got something to share and if you're interested in the survey results start in the the ndf board report um that's online online number two is about community content so so what is community content so my definition is that it's the significant material um from our homes our nonprofits community groups social media um that hasn't yet made its way into a um a collecting institution so this challenge comes about from the state that our community kete are in so kete are digital repositories where local communities can load up digital materials copies of stuff related to their community photos videos you know documentary heritage etc and there are more of more than 20 of these around around New Zealand um and there's a specific issue to address about what should happen with these repositories and the material in them but this challenge also recognises that our institutions are not the only ones working to collect and make accessible um our culture and our heritage and our knowledge the broader question posed by this challenge is whether there's a better way for us to connect together our collections um with the content outside in our communities and the final challenge is a bit of a wild card um when we think of the organisations that are part of the national digital forum we often think of what we in New Zealand call the glam sector you know galleries libraries archives museums and that that broader cultural heritage sector but i think we often forget that we also have significant interests in science and technology and information that um you know is knowledge that powers our country think of the scientific information held in our museums for example like through the work that Te Papa does in the natural sciences or all the research undertaken by our university members not to mention New Zealand's crown research institutes data is a precious resource that we and our future generations will use to understand and learn from and i think i think we're facing a growing issue in regard to how we digitally collect and store and preserve and make accessible this research data so i think we're interested in finding out whether this is important to you um and whether you've got anything to offer in terms of what might be done about it so there you go that's my ode to um failure success and challenge and look if these three challenges are not your cup of tea that's okay you know there's a tremendous amount going on at this conference take what you need um contribute what you can and just have fun yeah and be bold thank you um just before um i introduce our first keynote i want to give you a brief shout out to the Skillshare event happening during tomorrow's lunch one of the things that NDF has been playing around with is figuring out how to better share the collective skills across our institutions um there are a lot of organizations that could really benefit from borrowing some skills for a few hours or even a few days and it could be some user experience testing some digitisation planning um you know mobile mobile strategy whatever so the Skillshare event during tomorrow's lunch is going to run a bit like speed dating um and so if you could use some help you should turn up and meet a bunch of people who have put themselves forward to help you may also notice a few people around who have kind of Skillshare stickers on their name tags and um so that your potential Skillshare dates and if you want to volunteer to participate um then you could uh go and speak to the people at the NDF stand um during one of the breaks so it now gives me great pleasure to welcome Brewster Carl to the stage um a digital librarian with a mission to provide universal access to all knowledge it doesn't get much bigger than that Brewster is founder and director of the internet archive um the free digital library that archives the web and makes it accessible to everyone earlier this year the number of archived web pages um in the internet archive hit 400 billion it's an incredible number after graduating from MIT Brewster invented the internet's first publishing and distributed search system called WACE WACE Incorporated created the online presence for many of the world's largest publishers and was purchased by America online in 1995 in 96 Brewster co-founded Alexa Internet which interestingly um I found out it says that it had its services built into 80 percent of our web browsers um which was later purchased by Amazon and in 2012 Brewster was inducted into the internet Hall of Fame for his work to archive and protect the web over the weekend I was reading an article in Wired um about Brewster and he said at the time of his induction into the Hall of Fame that the thing that I've learned about um uh of operating a library of everything is that people don't want to feel like they're being taken advantage of if they do feel like they're being taken advantage of they'll throw things at you they'll throw laws at you they'll try to take you down any which way they can if they feel like they're being taken advantage of so the key thing for me is to stay on the other side of that line he said Brewster I think is someone who knows how to walk up to that line welcome to the National Digital Forum Brewster