 Okay, so now we've got all this stuff. Yes, my name is Adrian Kingston, and I work with Digital Collections here at Te Papa. This presentation is not really about our space. It's just, or at least not about the experience or the exhibition. I'm just using our space as an example to talk about a bigger idea. And that is thinking about content and contributors beyond initial engagement. But let's look at where we are with our space now. Um, for those of you who don't know what our space is, I'm assuming a lot of you do, just go out the door, turn right, and then turn right again, you'll be right there. Take a look in the next couple of days. Basically it opened in 2008. It's, there is a map and a wall, and the primary means of engaging on the floor is by remixing media on the wall. The content that people are actually remixing comes from people contributing the media via the website or a Flickr group or on site. The contributors agreed to a contributor agreement. The content is stored in a custom-built media database which drives the exhibition and the website. Basic information such as tags, dates contributed, where it can be used in the exhibition, are stored as long as basic contributor information such as name, email, sometimes address. That's kind of what it looks like. So it's been five years and it's probably a good time to look at actually what is in there. 17,000 pieces of media, but around about 7,000 of those are from partner institutions such as TAPAPA. So when you take those away, there's about 10,000 actual pieces of user-generated content. That's a reasonable chunk. Taking up around about 800 gigabytes. It comes from 650 contributors who have added at least one image. But as you would expect with this type of project, a lot of people have only added one or two. There's actually 15 contributors who have contributed more than 100 images and they total approximately 45% of the total of the 10,000. The main contributor has added 1,500 images and that's the big blue wedge. This tells you nothing about the quality or the relevancy of the content but it is a way of actually breaking it down into logical chunks so that we can start looking at what's there. There are 13,500 tags across all of the content including the stuff that TAPAPA has contributed. There is a big range but as really important benchmarks, 50 images have been tagged with CAT and 350 with Sunset. A random selection from the very popular which you would expect through to one, bang, bang, bang, bang. Which of course has been used once and is fairly meaningless but still it's there. There is a user agreement and while it looks silly here on screen, it's actually reasonably plain English and reasonably concise but there is a couple of things I do want to pull out that the media contributed is for the purposes of the experience and for the purposes of the experience only. That TAPAPA will keep archive copies of content and time intervals of the wall experience as part of its historic holdings. Archive, content and historic holdings. Archive could mean anything. Content, we kind of know what it is. Historic holdings is essentially meaningless so it doesn't actually tell us what we need to do. So other than the fact that we said we're gonna keep it beyond the life of the exhibition, why are we actually doing it? What do the contributors think that we've agreed to? Do they think that they're part of the collection now? There's a wide spectrum of image quality and relevancy. Some of it breaches copyright. We can't make it available outside of the experience and 85% of it was actually contributed via Flickr so that 85% that 8,500 are in Flickr and under the control of the users who contributed it so why do we need to maintain it? And it certainly doesn't archive the outspace experience. So the bare minimum that we kind of need to do, if you took those words to heart, a basic archive. We could just export the content in the metadata in really simple forms. The metadata we could just have is CSV or XML, a basic file structure for the JPEGs and we could put them on tape and maybe a solid state drive, stick them on a shelf, job done. Is that really what the contributor thought we were going to do? And is that, what does that gain? A dark archive that no one can access? So is there an opportunity to do more? Is there an opportunity now that we have 10,000 images to look at it as a way of analyzing what user-generated content can actually mean for the collections? Are there criteria that we can use or should have used initially to identify images that may be relevant for the national collection? If so, what would we actually need to do? Well, we need to come up with criteria and obviously that's easier said than done. We would need to describe and add content and context. We would need to re-license and get grift agreements. That means going back to the contributors again. We would need to analyze the digital preservation requirements. We would need to store, provide access and potentially reuse, just like we do with the rest of our collections and that's quite a lot of work. So those are our two options. We could look at getting more value out of this reasonably big effort project but why didn't we ask these questions at the beginning? This presentation is not about our space. It's just an example. This presentation is about the many, many engagement projects institutions are embarking on now that involve gathering content in some form from the public. These, of course, aren't new concepts. The words are cliches already. We've been talking about them for years but the emphasis has increased and the approaches have accelerated. There's lots of enthusiasm for engaging with audiences and getting audiences to engage with collections, getting people to tell their stories to contribute their own content in many forms which is amazing. But still very little thought about how to manage the content generated beyond the initial engagement or the longer-term implications and benefits. Digital blurs the boundaries, particularly with the confusion over what exactly we mean by user-generated content, crowdsourcing, co-creation, contemporary collecting and intangible heritage. It's starting to have impacts on the rigor of collecting and preservation. They're not bad things in themselves, quite the opposite but without real understanding of what we're actually talking about. Each of these things are getting confused or even worse used as excuses. We have very different obligations to our formal collections that have been through the formal acquisition process than we do for other types of content, digital or otherwise. So what do we actually need? I'm going to come back to the asterisks in a second. We need really boring things like policy and procedure. We need a clear understanding of what we mean by user-generated content and co-created content and how it relates to the collection development and what our obligations are to that content. It needs to be flexible to allow for new ways of engagement but needs to cover off the basic principles. We need policy and procedure rather than ad hoc decisions made for every project by different people at each stage. We need to be making these decisions upfront, not afterwards when it's probably too late. We need the right skills involved in the project from the beginning, not afterwards when it's probably too late. No project should happen without some consideration of what will happen to the content and the user's expectations and resourcing for this. This means we need agreements as well. Clear understanding between the museum and the user as to what will happen with their contribution during and after the engagement. For media or other things created by users, that means licensing and potentially gift agreements. For anonymous comments, opinions or even likes, it's much simpler but the landscape is shifting and we do need clarity. We need clear understanding of where we can use the content that's been contributed and we need to ensure the contributor understands exactly what's going to happen to the content afterwards. We need information. We're not getting enough information with the content that we gather. The more effort that's required by the contributor in the content creation and then providing it to us, the more effort needs to go into the effort and gathering the information. Minimum information requirements without being a barrier. A draft I'm looking at now is five to 15 fields depending on the context of the collection. And this includes enough contact information so we can actually go back to the contributor if we need to. And the information needs to be maintained and so does the content. Ingest management context linking preservation access. These are things that are generally not considered as part of engagement projects. Not yet anyway. And it highlights the evolving roles of collections information systems versus separate systems that are built on ad hoc basis for each project. Which may not be sustainable. It's not as exciting or as glamorous as the short term solutions which are often based on the newest and fanciest technology but they are more stable, more centralized and more efficient at managing and delivering content. The information can also help us understand our audiences and the collections in the long term again beyond the engagement. An opinion, a geolocation even a simple like of an artwork does have long term usefulness particularly when it's all combined in a single place. Hybrid or temporary systems are inevitable but there has to be a longer term plan as well. Problem is that's all really boring. So I am gonna have to sell it a little bit. If we do this properly it will enable much clearer transparency and clearer expectations creating stronger relationships with our public. It will give us clarity of collection development and help us with the preservation planning. It will help us better understand how people interpret and value and use our collections, our research and our knowledge. It will give us opportunities to build the collection in a more contemporary fashion and also give us a more contemporary picture of culture. It will better enable us to understand the sentiment or attitudes over time. Just a little bit of procedure can make a huge difference. So the asterisks. Now, the thing I just said in the last four or five slides may seem a little heavy-handed but there are lighter examples that we can look at if we just took a couple of extra steps. Post-it notes in the gallery. So we've asked the public to look at a couple of artworks with a couple of questions and ask them to write a response on a post-it and stick it next to the artwork. That's information that's actually really useful for understanding how people interpret and understand our collections. We could get age and hometown not too much information but enough to provide some context for the comment. And then we could actually transcribe the comment and stick it into the artwork's record in our collection of information system and make it part of its documentation. Just like that we have more documentation of the artwork's history. This is gonna be a big one and this is happening already and it's gonna happen a lot more. Asking people to contribute content for World War I. You need to decide up front is this a collecting project or is it not? Is it a hybrid? Are digital copies really what you're after? Or are you after the original? Are you after the individual items already trying to create a big picture in which case how are you going to preserve the big picture? Does it fit your collection development policy at all? If yes, get the right permissions and documentation up front. Don't try and do it afterwards. You need quality content and information planned for storage and preservation and resources. If no, then be really clear to the contributor what will happen to the content after the conclusion of the engagement. Don't promise things you aren't resource to do. Yeah, so our space. We are gonna have to do something when it does come down eventually. If we did what I suggested at the beginning, the really simple archive, I certainly wouldn't be doing my job. But we do have to archive all the content and we will need to identify systems and processes to do this. But it will be much more thorough than what I talked about before. We need to document the experience and that seems to be something that hasn't been identified yet either. We can't archive the experience. Migration, emulation are not going to be possible for something that big. We need to develop a communication plan to the users before it happens and let them know what the change in the wording actually might mean. If we are going to collect some, this needs to be done with curatorial decisions aided by analysis of the content and the data and alignment with the collection development policy. It needs to be deliberate. There are ways of breaking it down and I've already talked about that and we will need to migrate it to our collection information system with full documentation just like our other born digital collections. This will take time and money and that hasn't been identified. So as you can tell, I don't have any of the answers. I'm just seeing a problem that is emerging. I'm constantly having people coming to me saying what do we do with this stuff now that we've finished. Some of you may be thinking that this stuff is obvious and that you're already doing well which is fantastic and there are much smarter people than me working on it already, including the Collections Trust in the UK who are looking at minimum standards and how to make this business as usual. Maybe you just agree about what the word collection even means and that's certainly one of the big things that we have many interesting discussions about. It's bigger than this 15 minutes. There will always be interactions that are out of our control and that's perfectly fine. But if we initiate some of the bigger ones we need to think about what we're going to do with user content and with the contributor beyond the initial interaction or engagement in the long term. It doesn't just apply to big fancy projects like our space, it applies to posted interaction as well. We need to stop thinking about and resourcing the short term, stop thinking about the exhibition mentality. We're doing more with engagement and it's amazing but we can get huge amounts of value for the future for our collections and for our audiences if we make the most of what they offer us. If our audiences offer us opinions, images, comments, effort, we need to respect it, preserve it and learn from it. Get as much value as you can just beyond the initial engagement.