 Welcome back everyone. I'm Phil Edgar, I'm Manager of Digital Collections here at Tepapa. It's my pleasure to chair this session this afternoon and to welcome Dave Sanderson, as a First Speaker, he's a project leader of imaging at Auckland War Memorial Museum. He's talking us through their digitisation work at the museum over the last year or so, which I've had the pleasure of witnessing in person and it's pretty impressive. Dave had a sell-out workshop yesterday, so he's coming off the back of that and I look forward to a good presentation. Hello everybody, it's really nice to be here and packed house as well, which is quite cool. Thank you very much for turning up. So as Phil mentioned, I'm the project leader for Collection Imaging at Auckland Museum. If you want to have a nosey at some of the photos and the websites that we're talking about as we go through this, feel free to hit Auckland Museum.com slash Collections. And if you want to tweet at me now or later, that's me, the big lanky ape. And if you need any help later on or just some suggestions on how not to do presentations, feel free to send an email through as well. OK, so I'm not going to labour too much about how and why Auckland Museum is doing its big range of collections readiness projects. I'm fairly sure most of you will have heard about the myriad of things Auckland Museum's been up to over the last few years. But quick potted summary, we've got a big future museum document which is overarching everything the museum's doing and we're trying to do loads and loads of really, really cool things over the next 20 years. Some of the most obvious stuff might be changes in the building that you'll see but you'll have seen our website, Collections Online for instance. And one of the many things that we're trying to do is the Collection Imaging project that I got brought on board to run in January last year. That's us. We're quite pretty. We sit up on the hill, quite proud of us. So one of the big questions we get asked straight off the bat into the really serious stuff is how are you paying for all this stuff? So I went and sat in a room with our finance guy a little while ago and I was like, hey, come on, I'm going to speak to some people soon and I need to explain how all this is paid for. Educate me on financials. And he went, Dave, stop. Just tell people we've been saving. All right? And then he actually explained it to me and after about 10 or 15 minutes of me getting very, very confused about how financers work we really came back to the idea that essentially the museum has been saving. So that's the easy way to explain it. But the serious thing is that we've kind of had grand ideas about what we're trying to do in transformation of the museum for a while now and for about the last decade we've been putting a few sort of pennies away in the piggy bank for a little while and now we're drawing down on those. These collections readiness projects that the Auckland Museum is doing are just one batch of the kind of programmes that are pulling down on that capital funding. But as I mentioned, some of the other things are like the new galleries that come in and open and you'll see a very quick peek of one of those a little bit later on. So the collections hub, this is how it used to look and this is a public gallery, right? So this is what we closed. Sorry, but we closed the public gallery or two down. We had to ask permission for a while because say we had some tours booked and kind of school groups coming in and cruise ships coming in and that kind of stuff. So it took a little while to achieve this. This is what our coast gallery used to look like telling the story of the New Zealand coastline. It was quite nice. The boss at the time was the head of natural sciences. He wasn't that sorry that the gallery was going because he needed a bit of a refresh anyway but he did look pretty cool. And next door to it was this. This was the oceans gallery and it had a lot of big cool sharks in it and a fake sea wall and everybody liked to come in and take their selfies with the sharks. So we didn't take that away because the sharks still exist and they can still do selfies. It's just somewhere else now. Those two rooms now look like this. This is the collections hub and it's home to four projects which I'll go through in a second but anywhere between about 15 and 25 staff depending on the stage of the projects we're working on dedicated basically to get the collections of the museum ready that kind of building block foundational stuff about how we transform the digital experiences onsite, offsite and online. Where the sharks live now looks a little bit different. This is where we take our pictures. I'm very, very proud of this studio. It's quite cool. It's like our little toy pen really with all the nice toys inside it. Lots of cameras and kind of fancy lighting as you see. But I'm going to go into that a little bit more later on. So you've got the space. You close some public galleries down. Public can't get in there anymore. Well done, Dave. Congratulations. Now what you're going to do with it, I guess, is the next question. So those four projects are touched on. We're just coming to the end of World War I collections readiness programme. That's allowed us to get a lot of the collections ready for two galleries that are opening very soon. One of them actually just opened a couple of weeks ago. The new Po Malmahara Discovery Centre. And another one coming up soon. So watch this space for that. We've got a collections cataloging project going on which is looking after human history, natural science and documentary heritage material. And we also have the Pacific Collection Access project that the museum is pretty stoked about. Proud about, to be honest. Primarily because we're working very, very closely hand-in-hand with the community groups. And I guess sharing that role of knowledge holder as opposed to kind of completely taking ownership of that. Working hand-in-hand with our communities. And then us, the Collection Imaging Project. And we get the joy of photographing all this stuff. I just want to kind of show off a little bit here for a second because this was the launch day of the Pacific Collection Access project. And these are our kind of island communities coming in to say, hey, thanks. You know, you're working with us. We've got our collections out. We can reconnect with them. As a bunch of photographers sat in the corner of this room supporting this work, it's quite a spiritual experience and quite humbling to actually be around stuff like this happening. And this happens quite a lot. So we're very, very lucky to be working in an environment like this. And off the back of that, we're supporting it by taking images of these Pacific Collection materials. This one's a fan from the Cook Islands. This is a ceremonial ads and some of the carving on those. What we're trying to do with the photography of the Pacific material particularly is really focus on some of those construction techniques and the crafts that have been lost over decades and centuries in some cases and try and reconnect those lost arts back now with contemporary communities. So we're quite lucky that we get to photograph some really cool stuff. So as you're probably well aware, if you walk into an institution like any of us are with a camera, somebody kind of comes up to you and goes hey, can you come and take a photo of this? Pretty much everything is on the table. So one of the things we needed to try and do right at the outset is define what we're not going to do. So a quick breakdown of that. We don't do marketing and events images. We still have external contractors and actually our marketing team who do do that. Which is quite nice for us because that means we don't get called in at 7 o'clock to do an opening of a gallery and that kind of stuff. We get to go home at the end of the day. It's quite nice. Conservation imaging is still done by conservators. They know what they're doing basically. They're the best people to understand the conservation needs. Business is usual collection photography which is I guess where the collection managers are working on things like their accessions, their day-to-day work with the collections. That's still done by them as well. Online content, we've got a fantastic online team who deliver the stuff that you'll see on social media, on the blog and that kind of thing. They do that but they're also quite good at stealing images from pretty much anybody who can make them in the building as well. Our pictorial and documentary collections, that cataloging aspect of the team I mentioned before from the cataloging project, they do their own scanning while they're describing but the biggest stuff comes to us and we still also work in partnership with external contractors for digitisation of that as well. So that's what we don't do. What do we do I guess is a good question. So we're going to take a little detour into here about we bought this stuff. If you're nerdy in the audience and you like your camera kind of stuff, this is for you. This is made by a mad scientist in a shed in his place in Richmond, Virginia. It's a BK Plus imaging system and the collection imaging project was responsible for purchasing this and getting this underway to digitise really small tiny type specimens of natural science material. To show you what that actually means have a look at this. This came out of the first week of this equipment being in the building. That's five times ten times twenty times or fifty times life size that we strap in a 50 megapixel camera onto the back of. So we're quite stoked with this but that was actually just our test stuff. These days it looks a little bit more like this. That little line for those of you who might not be able to read it basically shows you that this insect is just over a millimetre long. It's an image made up of over fifteen hundred slices compacted together to produce that. It's pretty cool stuff and if you're into that kind of science angle of imaging we do all this stuff all day really kind of get our geek on with it. So in the main studio the stuff that we do can kind of neatly be summed up within that space. So the Pacific Collection Access Project and the Collection Catalinguine Project. What that really means is the efficient way for collections to come out of storage through those cataloging projects and to us where we digitise 100% of those materials and then go back into storage. The efficient way to do that is kind of different to the efficient way to do imaging in its own right. So we work on smaller batches of material for this in a slightly more responsive way. We do work, documentary heritage a couple of weeks from now we've got a new photographer starting on doing artwork and paintings. Their focus is just on that. And then the collections backlog which is a phrase that we bandy around quite a lot but what it really means is everything that's been cataloged that doesn't have a picture yet and that's quite a lot of stuff. So we're not trying to do all of it we do have a prioritisation list but this is our kind of good bulk programmes of work. So I guess how do we do it is a good question. So I'm going to introduce to you this concept that I came up with a 90% rule and it's a bit of a mental idea of mine but I guess you guys should be able to kind of see this tangentially in your own work, in your own museum's institutions. If one example you've got that really really bad stuff you know the one that somebody's got a blue glove on and the background of the picture is like part paper background and part gym from the next department and the colours are at all over the place and it's basically one of those images you've got one but you're a little bit embarrassed about it. Every institution's got them I know you have. On the other extreme if you've got like the art house kind of auction catalogue really really high end imaging stuff what I theorise is if you hire the right people and you give them the right tools and environment you can do 90% of that art reproduction work but really quickly which leads us to how we staffed it over the first kind of 12 months now almost exactly we've had three photography positions running it's actually been a little bit more like two and a half because one of our guys has kind of moved on to work within another organisation teaching and one of our guys is a little bit shorter on ours as well but they're all from outside of the sector and for those of you who've got an interesting photography outside of this sector you'll know that if you've ever tried to charge money for anything everybody's competing for every last dollar right so in order to make any kind of a living as a photographer you've got to scramble and do it really quickly and get as many dollars out of it as you can so our commercial photographers know that time is money they've come into it with this really really good background of much a lot of time spent in studios doing lighting and so on and it's that that we've latched onto but it's also worth mentioning we've got a fantastic rights specialist in our team to kind of work alongside them Sarah Powell is very much a museum background person and is really really good at her work and she kind of clears all of our images ready for use online as well as programmatically trying to get stuck into a lot of the other backlog of things that need rights clearance so going back to the studio the way that we built this and designed it was to try and make it quite modular and scalable pretty much every piece of equipment in there is designed to stick together or pull apart we've done everything from like fossils at about 5mm in size through to things that are about 5-6m wide and we need the flexibility to essentially be able to photograph any of that stuff and the research from this came from a trip about 18 months ago to go and study the Smithsonian's rapid capture digitisation programmes where they have really really cool big conveyor belts going that are really deeply impractical for anything but that one specific job I'm very envious of them but I think we'd need like 30 or 40 different conveyor belt lines to try and deal with our collections we had to look around numerous studios here in New Zealand as well most notably National Library and Archives New Zealand but actually the real solid gold stuff was to go into the commercial rental houses up in Auckland where it's not uncommon for a photographer to book the studio for a couple of days and somebody will the front of the jet airplane in for an air New Zealand advert studio rental house that has to be able to deal with all of that kind of flexibility is where we're getting the way that we design our stuff from the old scanning factory that I ran at Archives New Zealand where we had 24-7 scanning around the clock with students how we deal with the digital information that comes in and out of our studio is pretty much piggybacking straight off that and we actually went and pillaged farmers in the warehouse the city department stores here because they used to subcontract our work now they've invested in farmers case really quite a lot of money into nine studios to bring all their TV and all their photography advertising in house so they're kind of useful and very much not glam sector the equipment we bought really really good stuff solid workhorse equipment it's expensive but it's not the most expensive stuff you can buy there's an age old adage of buy cheap buy twice I think with that kind of equipment they're really cheap by many many times so we've kind of invested in this to try and get something which really works long term we shoot everything tethered to laptops you'll see there that jens operating the laptop with a colour accurate screen and actually a USB cable through to the camera and actually all the photography is really done from a laptop itself removes all the variables and allows us to get the quality control aspect in right up front so this is how we designed it and for those of you who can't quite get your head around the little arrows and what they mean I will be sticking these slides up on slideshow afterwards but the idea was that the camera we'd kind of use a laptop for no other reason than just merely an operational tool the data would flow straight through it to cross a purpose built network onto our photographers PCs fantastic it's the line of least resistance and gets as close as we can to automated processes except it doesn't work because it looks a little bit more like this we actually have to kind of get the data onto the laptop first and then copy it across later we do however get all the naming the colour exposure, the accuracy and everything that you could possibly kind of control about the photo right at the point that you hit enter on the keyboard there's no alteration later on but the reason that we struggle with this is because we went through pretty much every piece of tethering software you can get your hands on we tried all of them these are the big four that we tried we've had problems in some way, shape or form probably most notably that the naming section of the menus in these software apps are quite deep and in Capture One's case I know a lot of people use that in the industry but when you're operating it on a PC inside a big corporate IT network it's really not that stable so we've had to move away from that and we're actually using something called DSLR Remote Pro which is painfully simple but it doesn't actually do very much either and the issue that we have with that is that the image preview doesn't really work that well across the network only locally to the machine so not quite perfect still grates my OCD a little bit but it's quite practical as a solution for us when we do a shoot each collection group that we bring in we'll assess the job right at the beginning and really kind of nut out what the whole collection is going to need and we'll work alongside curators and collection managers to get that stuff done once we're happy we know what everybody wants we'll shoot some stuff, provide some samples and we'll get a rubber stamp and once the rubber stamp's on there there's no re-reviewing things afterwards cos that's where our efficiency comes from about then treating the entire collection like a production line with no alterations we work very closely with our collection care team and I'm very proud to say that despite the fact we've got three photographers who have never worked in this sector, we've never had any handling issues with collections at all so I'm quite stoked about that but of course people who are photographers in this sector are also creative people not robots right so every now and then I like to try and take the little artifoto and that creeps in which they're not supposed to do but we kind of turn a slightly blind eye cos it keeps them motivated and people like pretty pictures so providing we keep that one on that little knife edge we're kind of doing all right there naming schemas, when we name those files it gets with a unique identifier which automatically links through to our collection management system we do some triple checking there because we photograph something with a label in we type it in ourselves and part of the attachment to our collection management system also cross checks it as well again I think our error rate at the moment is below 0.1% so we're quite happy with that as well very very jealous by the way the Smithsonian's barcoding system but fortunately we haven't quite got the budget to do that so we are still typing this stuff in this is what the process looks like at the moment, we spit the files out four file formats, raw, DNG, TIFF as the archival masters and JPEG into our collection management system and then when some wizardry happens and a digital content platform and goes off into collections online which I'm sure you've all heard about before that's changing we've got signed up a deal with Piction to be our new supplier of our dam software at the museum and I want to give a shout out here to anybody who's either doing a digitisation project at the moment or is thinking about it if you can get your IT department behind you in helping you you're on to a winner our IT guys are absolutely awesome and we're very very grateful for their support while we've done this so going back to that pre dam state where we are, I've dreaded a nice little green box in here and it's just to try and illustrate that the archive that we've got at the moment it's not really very archival at all what it is is an organised set of file servers and folders some people can read them and write to them but it's not very locked down as access goes we also have some extra magic happens which is where we attach the images into our collection management system so we've got some really cool automated scripts going on there and some which were written specifically for us thanks Paul for that but it's still not entirely automated because we do require people to actually do that work so what we're trying to get to here is in this new state with a dam system coming online at the moment is that we'll just fire out the one file from the camera and let the picture do a lot of that work and connection afterwards you know, let technology do what it's really good at this is starting to kind of get the museum to ask a few questions about digital preservation we're essentially making a big pile of digital stuff that we're going to have to try and keep for a while so how we've digitised stuff right from the very first click of the camera has been with this in mind to try and be platform and software agnostic and provide stuff which is stable but it's also starting to get the museum to have to think about how we create data wisely with that view of long-term storage and preservation of the stuff in mind and the museum is already involved with born digital collecting so this is all big sort of scary stuff and very sort of frontier kind of work and we're very grateful that we've got people out in national library and national archives here we can lean on for that support and if you add over the top of this the fact that we kind of advocate to the open-glam way of working and that collections are open by default and things are not kind of accessible only where it's appropriate or there's a really good reason not to you'll start to see we've got a pretty vivid picture about digitising stuff and trying to release it out there to the world Sarah, our rights specialist is working with the rights holders and we're actually approaching people now with a default licence we're asking people to assign to their work is creative to the common CC buy we do give the mother options as well but that's where we try and start from and we're also really proud that the museum has got a cultural permissions policy in place not just for Māori material but also for Pacific material as well those of you at the copyright workshop yesterday would have seen some of that so this all sounds very very wonderful you know there are like little tweety birds and sunshine flying around now and it's all very angelic so surely something must have gone wrong at some point our lovely new lights which were the first one in the country the early batches of those had very duff flash tubes in them and they all got replaced they work flawlessly now but they didn't for a while the little USB cables those of you who are into this recognise the orange brand I won't name them these things are highly expensive in New Zealand and utterly useless and continually break not a big fan of having to pay that much money for 5m cables that don't last very long and we also rely on Wi-Fi apps via an iPad to be able to control the lights when they're high up in the ceiling in the air that only works really really well when it's outside the building because we've got lots of Wi-Fi interference in the building no matter how many things we keep switching them on and off with so it works when it feels like it as a way to illustrate the logistics win we did the Lanverta but study skins and we photographed these very sort of uniform photos of the entire collection fantastic really good efficiencies, works really well but as a logistics loss these are Suba which is the little cuff that goes between the blade and a handle of a Japanese sword we did a really good job setting these things up but there are only a couple of hundred to go through and actually the efficiency part the production part of that is not huge but it is overall the efficient process for the whole collection sub to working we are also slightly victims of our own work as pretty much every day when somebody downs they go no we can't take your LinkedIn profile photo sorry and we just have to concentrate on our collection so some wins the first 11 months we've kicked over 50,000 images of over 15,000 collection objects these are no Photoshop no editing straight out of the camera perfect as they are and I'm quite proud of our team being able to knock out images like this these are eggs they vary in size from a couple of millimetres through to the moa egg there there's no work at all needed to get these to look uniform like this which gives us huge potential for online and our digital interactives we got to do a bit of science and got it to structural colour and we figured out that hummingbirds and kind of iridescent feathers only reflect light at certain angles and certain wavelengths so we worked alongside our curator to figure out how we light and photograph this so you actually see the colours and images we had to get a bit funky with our lighting and it would be really good to have a bit of a nerd off both with our curators doing science and those doing lighting quite cool and some grey areas this is where we're going to sneak into the little galleries just open for those who haven't been to Auckland yet this is Ed Hillary's Order of the British Empire medal and we got given a job for our galleries team to kind of go hey here's the Apple watch and 120 World War medals can you kind of make these look the same thanks it's not what we're here for but for the museum it's much more cost effective and it can kind of allow us to do it inside and subcontractors for a week or so to do this work that needs to go out and bring somebody in from outside remembering here, no Photoshop to produce this it's all straight out of the camera and this is what it's been used for a big six metre screen on the wall in the new gallery and I'm going to give a shout out to our new Paul Marmahara galleries just taking just as it's being finished off because it looks really really pretty you should come up and see the exhibition in the space because everybody likes pretty pictures right we're going to show you a few of those photographers' faves these are necklaces and jewellery from the fingers collection of the fingers gallery up in Auckland see here like the power trying to light those so they look like power as opposed to just blingy things very very difficult to do this is a good day at the office to be able to have an iconic New Zealand bird come out and we got to sit there and photograph the who here those iconic tail feathers that was a nice day at work tui close-ups this is a two and a half times life-size close-up of a hummingbird this image is going down really well at the moment everybody wants to steal it to use for like some fundraising kind of material and we got to work on the Susan Holmes collection recently these images were both for the collection imaging side of things but also used for a bit of promotion and blog content and some publication so we went slightly to town on these and Jen who her background is in fashion was a really happy lady for a couple of days while she was photographing these dresses so this is the point where I'm going to hand over to you we've got a few minutes a couple of minutes five minutes or so any questions from any of you at all and there is a microphone going around for those of you who actually want to ask them as opposed to just hollering from the back Michael I was wondering if you could talk about the Māori and Pacifica addenda to the permissions are you following any sort of standard or is that something that you've come up with on your own it's kind of been developed largely in house I mean there's a lot of sort of collaboration goes on across the sector we're not kind of like flying completely blind on that but the policies the Māori ones been in effect for a couple of years now and the Pacifica reuse policies come out just in the last few weeks actually and we have kind of I guess consulted with other people other people who are working on this but we've kind of finalised and got over the line ourselves I think and I guess there's opportunity in there we try and kind of look after the I guess the review of an image request largely internally but we do go out to the community groups where that's necessary and appropriate to as well Gary just wait for the microphone if you don't mind for the video thank you we've recently set up an organisation for Matariki New Zealand a strong focus of that is the repatriation of Tonga from museums back to Murai in a digital form how would we start that process moving to the museum that's a very good question so we have got some work going on a little bit where we're starting to look into that we've got a team at the museum who are working on I guess liaising with the Maori and also the Pacific communities if you like after the talk I can kind of put you in contact and get you some details the kind of people we need to work on that it's something we're very aware of but I guess in relatively early days for the museum to be working on that this facility there just a little more of your thinking behind keeping three archival file formats yes good question because I know a lot of organisations don't necessarily do that so we shoot the raw file formats that come out of the camera and honestly we don't really mind that much which camera it is it's just the best tool for the job at the time but of course the raw file format is completely proprietary not just to the manufacturer but to the file goes they're also inherently fragile long term so Adobe released the DNG format the archival raw file format if there is such a thing it seems it's still proprietary to Adobe and it doesn't conform to any ISO standards so we keep that as the nearest thing there is to an archival raw file format but of course neither of those really long term are completely stable and the nearest thing that we've got is a TIF but that does bake in all of the options that you would tweak around with a raw file you don't get to work on those again so by having the three of them we kind of think that's like a belt embraces approach that we can try and really provide the best option we've got long term and then the JPEG to be honest with you is largely there for access we have little web versions up on the website but if you do download one of our CC by images it'll be the highest JPEG you get access to cool thank you very much and thank you guys