 So thank you. I'll have another start. Just one thing I'd like to say right at the beginning isn't the DXLAB project, it's the DXLAB. We're here for the long haul, not for the short term. This talk is about building the DXLAB from scratch and what this was and why we do it and then Paula will speak about what's been happening in the last six months and what we've produced. We'd love you to tweet about us and this is our handle and please join in the conversation. The State Library of New South Wales is the oldest library in Australia. The library's collections document the heritage of Australia and Oceania from discovery through settlement from the 15th to the 21st centuries. The collection is currently valued at $3.15 billion which makes it one of the most valuable collections in the country. Over the past 10 years the State Library of New South Wales has created a substantial amount of digital content through a major digitisation program focusing on manuscripts, artworks, photographic collections, oral histories, maps and published works. In 2013 the library receives substantial funding to ramp up this digitisation project which will result in around 20 million digitised images being made available progressively over the next decade. Substantially increasing global access to the library's collections and providing important benefits to regional areas and creative industries in particular. Some of the highlights from the digitisation program for 2014-15 include 53,000 World War I Dari pages which brings our total up to 168,000 digital pages. The scanning of the 2,800 digital slides from the Mars Dunphy Glass-Latin collection which are a collection mainly to do with establishing the national parks and bushwalking associations in New South Wales and Australia so they're beautiful. 13,073 digital digitised subdivision plans out of a collection of 40,000 of these subdivision plans which are the original sales material for the opening up of a large number of Sydney suburbs. We've digitised Shakespeare's First Folio, The Gould's Birds, a whole lot of manuscripts, subdivision plans as I said, Sydney Rock's area albums and the Mars Dunphy bushwalking maps and in conjunction with external partners we have digitised millions of newspaper pages, The Building Magazine, the New South Wales Government Gazette, six and a half thousand hours of oral history, four and a half thousand David Scott Mitchell books, 48,000 Tribune negatives and some Dixon pamphlets and I'm sorry I don't have a number for that one but we're working both internally and externally in mass digitisation progress. To add to this process in 2014 the library went through a major organisational restructure as if we didn't have enough to do. All the divisions and branches in the library were reviewed and realigned to better focus the library's workforce with the new strategic priorities of the organisation. As a result of this restructure the existing Digital Library Services Division which covered the areas of ICT service delivery, digitisation services and library systems and websites was recreated as the Digital Experience Division also known as DXD. This new division has four branches, client services and support which is a realignment of traditional ICT services delivery to include library systems and website support. Digitisation and imaging services which continues digitisation as before but with an expanded project management focus for the outsourced mass digitisation project. Digital project management to better manage the increased number of technology related projects and the new branch of digital strategy and innovation which I manage. This branch includes a strategy and a policy team, a business engagement team and the new DX Lab. The DX Lab is the first dedicated digital innovation lab in an Australian cultural heritage organisation. We are very proud to lead in this area and excited by the possibilities that this lab offers the library and its clients. We take our inspiration from the British Library and the New York Public Library labs but we are determined to put our own stamp on what we do and build our own relationships and partnerships with a wide variety of collaborators. The GLAM report of 2014 identified the need for organisations such as libraries to place innovation and digital services at the core of our business. The establishment of the lab as a permanent part of the digital experience division is a recognition by the library of the importance of this role of digital services and innovation in memory institutions. An important part of the success in the planning of the implementation of this lab has been the fabulous support it has received from the top down. We've had constant and total support from both Alex Byrne, the State Librarian and Robin Poir, the Director of DXD and the CIO and from all members of the Executive as well as enthusiastic reception from the idea for the idea from the Library Council which is the main governing board of the library and the Foundation more importantly who is the main fundraising body for the library. This combined with a wide-ranging program of staff engagement in the implementation process has meant we have been able to hit the ground running. It's absolutely been adopted by the library as a whole. The values and mission of the library are to of the lab, sorry, represent a new way of thinking for libraries. We aim to be proactive rather than reactive, inclusive and collaborative. The DX lab is also the next logical step in the library's digital excellence program. Three years into the mass digitisation project and on the eve of a deployment of a completely new collection management infrastructure and a totally rebuilt website the time is ripe for us to be focusing on finding new ways to deliver and interpret this massive amount of digital content. We want to work with both educators and students, writers, researchers, creatives and other interested glam sector partners. We aim to develop ideas and experiment with new technologies and platforms and find new ways of unlocking the treasures and secrets held within the library's vast collections and then revealing the gaps and strengths in our collections. We're also developing our tools for internal as well as external users so we're looking at projects and processes that show us ways of interpreting our collections and identifying the gaps and the strengths and then making decisions based on those processes. Our brief is about relationships and developing staff skills as well as our peers and to the public to connect and create using the fabulous content that is available in the library's vast collections. We believe that our role is to work with others to explore and stretch our boundaries in design and delivery of new interpretations of the collections to ensure that all our work is done in an open way as far as possible our code will be made from and in open source and most importantly will be surprising. On our hand over to Paula who will speak about the work we've been doing in the first six months of the DX lab. Thanks Kate. You can see why I took this job. It's amazing to be able to work with so much data that's being produced at the state library it's just it's a dream come true really and they pay me which is great. So we decided that we should probably kick off this you know thing this lab with some values because values are kind of good to work with and we came up with a few that we've started with and they are collaborate experiment create engage be open but also to surprise we're here to kind of find new ways into our collections into our data to experiment to learn to fail and to grow with our audiences in this space but also researchers and developers. We thought we should have some design principles and and these are ours at the moment. I think it's easy when you kind of start a lab to think about doing stuff just because it's kind of shiny new tech which is important but also I really feel that we're here to do stuff because it matters and because we have audiences we're here to design creatively and to design differently we've got all this data to work with and we've got people and collaborators to work with. We're not always going to finish things we're not going to take too long to make some stuff we're not always going to over bake we're kind of just in that kind of deep research and sometimes we may not even finish products. Obviously we're here to innovate but we're also here to iterate so if someone's built something that's pretty amazing we might use that code and apply it to our data and our services and maybe improve upon that and share that back and likewise people can do that with our stuff as well so everything we make we will put our code into our github account and I've heard a lot about this in the last couple of weeks here in another conference is this constant prototyping kind of space that we work in and I think it's really important in a lab space to to have this as a main aim and also perhaps leave room for others to finish things. So that's where we live all our stories on our site our little stories we're going to post as much as we can about our learnings our findings our tech what we found worked what we did what didn't so if you're looking for a little bit of the making of and the learnings from any kind of lab projects then please go here. So a bit about the team we're a very small team I have two developers and myself along with Kate the manager of our branch but we've managed to get a digital volunteer as well pretty quickly someone who knows the library and that's been really valuable but we're also a library wide team so all all the projects that we do involve a whole bunch of people across the organisation. We're just over six months old and we really wanted to make sure that we're bringing the library and the stuff with us on this kind of journey and I feel that that's really important from working in a bunch of different cultural organizations in in the digital space I know at times digital can be kind of like this shiny thing that happens on the side people can't penetrate always into the methodology the beginnings the findings of projects so we've spent a lot of time in our first six months engaging with staff who have great ideas who have deep research awesome spreadsheets and just really great stuff that they've been working on for years that they haven't had developers to kind of take to the next level so we've done a whole bunch of prototyping in the lab sessions we've done sneak peeks at products or tools actually in the interfaces that we're building to get their feedback on and we also do a whole bunch of brainstorming sessions so we've and it's an opt-in so we've had over 50 staff already attend brainstorming sessions and we kind of you know we value that and we we get our staff to give us values to give us ideas and we're mapping them against our new strategic plan which is collect connecting community and we're doing that in graph commons so it's a it's a living the internal gauging is a living kind of petri dish for us and it's really important also the importance of building relationships with other organizations and also our future researchers developers creatives so we we pretty quickly hosted a meet the data owners event with code for Australia a fabulous non-pro-profit organization who are doing great things in in really building up the capacity of developers and we hosted a very small event and we got our curators to come and talk about the deeper stories within the collections we got items out of the collection and we sat them down with a bunch of developers and we all kind of talked and ate pizza and it was pretty good fun sold out pretty quickly which was really interesting and really I guess the takeaway the takeaway for us was that they want face-to-face contact with us they want to talk to us about stories and about our data so they do interesting things people brought some VR stuff and was working with our collections and we invited them to speak so we found that really valuable we're also really interested in the services within the library and the kind of backer house stuff that you just don't get to see and you don't get to kind of hear about and you know this was just a quick kind of prototype of taking just the search results out of Google Analytics across many of our systems and kind of just saying you know you know it's strangely compelling we find we sit there on a Friday afternoon looking at this but you know can we turn this into something meaningful that's you know not personalized but just kind of gives gives our audiences perhaps on site the kind of that petri dish the living research that's happening in the library and project this in unusual places in our library and there's a lot of different services within the library that we're also looking at ways of visualizing within the six months we really wanted to kind of demo some projects that kind of would show when we launch where we were heading and this is our first data visualization actually it's called loom and we worked pretty rapidly to take an idea it was about six to seven weeks of from design to build and this is a I'm just going to run this it's we started off with 300 images from our collection around the city of Sydney so we had the Botanic Gardens Circular Key and Darling Harbour and what we wanted to do was take the data that is existing in our what we call our ACMS collection search online and just work with that and take it into a new tool a completely different non-search way of experiencing our collection and you do this through time it's in a WebGL environment the sort of 3D nature of it here you can see we've got I say this the library-ness I'm not allowed to say that back at the library that will kill me but we've got the nod to the library so you flip the library card and you kind of just you're searching we're not searching you're experiencing the collection via topics and tags you can jump out at any point to our ACMS you can favourite your stuff so you can come back to it later and really it's just basically taking that data and putting it into a new lens we thought oh that's kind of interesting you know this could be quite useful and we presented it to a room full of teachers who clapped like so loudly during the presentation we're like well it's that's interesting maybe we can make this better in some ways for teachers so yeah this is just you can see down the bottom we've got the topics and the tags there and you can certainly you can kind of get that sort of flow of content records via each relationship with the tags and topics so after kind of making this first lens we call it we decided that we wanted to demonstrate another lens with the same data so we've done this second phase which is an Atlas phase and it's obviously it's a map it's still in WebGL but what we tried to do was look at the same data but from a bird's eye view of the collection I'm just gonna see if we can do this which is never go live but instead of showing you a not so good screencast I'm going to actually go into the second phase of loom and we're working on a third phase as well okay so here we have just we call this the loosely phase the lens but up here on the second icon is actually the Atlas phase so again it's a WebGL environment but we think this is kind of cool because we we learn a whole bunch of stuff in making this about our collection and about data so really this is looking at again it's a timeline really from 1870 through to 2000 but what this is telling us and our audience is that it's location specific and time specific but it also is looking at what we have in data and in elevations so you can see that the elevations change over time according to what we have digitised and what is only available in the library so if I go to the rocks from 1950 these these are my results I've got 18 digitizer records out of a total of 24 so 75% digitised I can do all the same things that I can do in the first phase I can jump back out and go into the first phase of loom as well so really again you know for us I guess and what Ben was talking about yesterday is we weren't at we weren't anticipating finding the gaps or finding the spaces within our data but we have stumbled upon this kind of interesting birds-eye view and it looks at you know that whole of collection digitisation process so that's been a really interesting finding for us working with and producing this lens so I'm just going to go back so our third lens actually is looking at the metadata so the data that's associated with all these lenses and we're calling it index and I'm just going to quickly jump out here too so at the moment this is just a rough prototype that we've worked with Grumpy Sailor on all these projects great creative agency so these are all our subjects and topics for these decades in this prototype and you can actually see that we've linked every single subject and topic to Trove the awesome Trove so for each subject and topic we can jump out and go into Trove to all the related content that relates to our top subjects and topics so this is just a quick first pass for us at what how we introduce another data set into loom that has meaning that has value that's useful that takes our audience on a journey of research and then we kind of get into network just in the design phase of how we turn that into something meaningful so we're thinking about sort of this idea of particles so again you'll see at the top we'll have three lenses into the same data and then also we sort of got this capacity to blend with the onsite so we're looking at ways of actually turning loom into sort of a onsite physical experience particularly the loose leaf phase something that I'm really passionate about is working with people and collaborating with people who have really cool ideas and I think the labs in a position to really kind of support that in the sector being the only lab in a cultural heritage organization I feel we have a kind of duty to give back to our sector and to people working creatively in this field so we have a digital drop-in culture and we're kind of working that out as we go and we're really lucky that we had our first drop-in within the first six months with Erica Taylor from the Tweed Regional Museum she got a grant she came and spent two weeks in my lab with my developers we had this kind of crazy notion of a city regional comparison interface and this was just a rapid build we did make made some rough graphics at tip Chris McDowell that's our rough graphic literally and we wanted to use again the Trove API the E-Hive API and our API and just kind of see what we could do and so we made this Main Street it's very simple idea it's taking a slice of a hundred images out of E-Hive from the Tweed Regional Museum and displaying that next to the State Library's collection and in between that again we're pulling in the keywords from Trove newspapers that relate to Sydney and the Tweed and it's just a kind of a playful way of getting into the two data sets and it is literally just this comparison over time you can see the keywords pulling in each collection links out to the repository and there's some really lovely serendipitous things happening when you marry up the two collections and I guess what we learned from this was that yes we can build things quickly and we can smash things out and make them live and that's okay we can kind of change them work with them but also that we might be able to build this into a broader public library network Main Streets across New South Wales so maybe we can redesign this make it super easy for people to give us a hundred images of their collections so we've documented all of this and it's all on GitHub for people to use one really cool thing that happened out of this was very quickly after Main Street went live the mayor of the Tweed Shire Council in Wilhelmbar actually used Main Street because Erica had madly tagged all of the content from her museum in E Hive and they found this image which they used when they were building digging up the road in Wilhelmbar because they'd found an old bridge outside the police station so that was pretty cool and I guess I'm just going to close on this again giving back to the sector giving back to people is really important we're going to be we've just launched a fellowship and we really hope that we can do this yearly so that we can support people working in the digital humanities working creatively with data to come spend time in the lab next year so look out for that and that's us thank you