Reminder: Consultation on 2010 web harvest

A reminder that the closing date for submissions on the 2010 Web Harvest Options Paper is 9am Monday 8 February 2010.

You can read our original blog post here, or full announcement on the National Library website.

Thank you to those who have already sent in your feedback. We've also received some questions since releasing the paper:

How/where is the data being stored, and how securely?

Data collected in selective and whole of domain websites is stored on-site at the National Library of New Zealand, and backed up in several off-site (New Zealand) locations.

Can larger sites submit their sitemaps to the crawler to make the harvesting less intensive?

At the time of the 2008 harvest the Heritrix software used by the Internet Archive for the harvest had difficulty understanding sitemaps. We're looking into whether this has improved.

Will you harvest password-protected websites?

No. We will only archive the publicly available pages of a website.

Was all the data harvested in 2008 from computers located in New Zealand?

No. Just because a website has a .nz URL it does not mean that the computer is physically in New Zealand. Our current estimates of where the data was harvested from in the 2008 harvest (based on bytes downloaded) are as follows:

Hosted in New Zealand: 73%
Hosted in the USA: 17%
Hosted in Australia: 4%
Hosted in an unknown location: 1%

Four more countries (Germany, Fiji, Bulgaria, United Kingdom) hosted 1% of the data each, and no other country hosted more than 0.5% of the total.

If you have any questions, fire them through to web-harvest-2010 AT natlib.govt.nz

Thanks heaps,

Courtney and Gordon

Gordon Paynter (Programme Manager Digitisation) and Courtney Johnston (Web Manager) are the New Zealand Web Harvest 2010 team. You can contact us via web-harvest-2010 AT natlib.govt.nz

Conversations about the Commons

So, Flickr has stated that The Commons on Flickr is not bringing on any new members in 2010.

Since launching with the Library of Congress over two years ago, Flickr has been inundated with requests from photography-collecting organisations to join up; I know we considered ourselves lucky to be the 16th organisation on board.

The decision not to take on more partners has prompted people to ask: why the rampant interest in Flickr Commons, and not in Wikimedia Commons?

Mia Ridge wrote the question up first on her Open Objects blog, recording a little flurry of tweets on the topic. [Interestingly, these tweets showed one of the common, ongoing confusions about The Commons and Creative Commons licences; photographs added to The Commons on Flickr are not loaded up with a CC licence but with a ‘No known copyright restrictions’ statement; you can’t CC-licence material that’s out of copyright.]

Liam Wyatt, Vice President of Wikimedia Australia also wrote about this yesterday. Liam’s put significant effort into trying to bring the Wikipedia community and the GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) world together, including attending and presenting at last year’s National Digital Forum.

Liam gave a list of reasons why institutions interested in joining The Commons and those already in there) should consider Wikimedia Commons, including:

• increased disk space
• a project to improve the user interface for uploading content
• Wikimedia Commons’ ‘no ads, no corporations, no commercial motivation’ ethos
• contextualisation
  
• usage checking.

Seb Chan at the Powerhouse Museum has also added to the discussion, reiterating why the Powerhouse joined The Commons (as the second member, this was still a leap of faith) and the differences he sees between Flickr Commons and Wikimedia Commons, including:

• context
• user experience & community
• community management
• a sense of content control
• useful statistics.

Seb notes two things that really resonate with me as the National Library person responsible for our account on The Commons on Flickr. Firstly:

the overall community effect of Flickr and the deep engagement by a small but passionate group of Flickr users, has been the most positive result for us.

And secondly, the vastly important role former Flickr staffer George Oates played as the original passionate force behind creating The Commons. It’s fair to say the experience hasn’t been quite the same since she left, but the growth of a community around The Commons has been a joy to see and a pleasure to be a tiny part of.

Seb also notes that images added by the Powerhouse to Flickr Commons have seeped over to Wikimedia Commons. That’s certainly the experience we’ve had: for example, this image of the Government Tourist Courta thte 1925 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition was added from Flickr to Wikimedia. But many of the images from the Library’s collection appearing in Wikimedia Commons have been added by Wikipedians directly from our digitised collections.

Our motivation for joining The Commons on Flickr was three-fold.

Firstly, we believe in the idea of putting our digital content where the audience is. We had tried this with some success with a ‘normal’ Flickr account, but it was immensely frustrating that we couldn’t release the images we uploaded for any kind of re-use using the CC licences available on Flickr.

So (secondly), the creation of The Commons with its ‘No known copyright restrictions’ was immensely appealing. It gave us a chance to test what would happen if we released content for any use whatsoever – in a place where people would notice, and with loads of context (both about the individual images, about the Library, and about the overall project) attached.

Finally, and frankly – The Commons was an awesome community of people and organisations that we wanted to be part of. The relationships developed here have spilled over into all sorts of other places, such as Shelley Bernstein’s visit to New Zealand last year (and the workshop she and Seb Chan are running at Webstock next month).

None of this is to say that we’re not interested in playing better with Wikipedia/media. It’s more about finding the time to take this on, to form relationships, and to learn how to work with another community.

Consultation on the New Zealand Web Harvest 2010

In October 2008 the National Library conducted its first whole of domain web harvest, collecting 4 terabytes of data from over 100 million URLs.

While the Library was pleased with the final outcome of the harvest, some readers will remember that the harvest didn’t necessarily go that smoothly but that we tried hard to make amends.

This year we’re working hard to improve our communications, and hope to work with site owners, administrators and other stakeholders to lessen the impact of our harvesting activity.

Our proposed timeline for the 2010 web harvest is:

• January – Consultation with stakeholder groups.
• February – Technical planning.
• March – Communications and notifications about the upcoming harvest.
• April – The harvest.

We are beginning by seeking feedback on options we’ve identified to address concerns raised during the 2008 harvest, particularly:

• Notification: The harvest was initiated without prior notification to affected parties.
• Robots policy: The harvester was configured to ignore the robots.txt convention unless the website owner contacted the Library to request that it be honoured.
• Location of the harvester: The harvest was operated by the Internet Archive from the United States, and some website owners are charged more for international traffic.

You can read the full announcement or download the Options Paper on the National Library website.

Feedback should be sent by email to web-harvest-2010 AT natlib.govt.nz by 9am Monday 8 February.

Questions can also be sent to that address. We can answer your question individually and privately, but we're also planning to publish a weekly update of answers to questions we've received on the National Library website & here.

If you're at the NZNOG 2010 conference later this month, Gordon is giving a short presentation about the plans and taking feedback.

We really encourage your comments on the options we've prepared, and it would be great if you could help us spread the word about this consultation.

The outcome of the consultation will be published on this page on the National Library website, and we'll republish the information here.

Gordon Paynter (Programme Manager Digitisation) and Courtney Johnston (Web Manager) are the New Zealand Web Harvest 2010 team. You can contact us via web-harvest-2010 AT natlib.govt.nz

Opening my eyes: open data, open government

Open data was without a doubt one of the biggest trends 2009 for people like us who work in the happy Venn diagram sweet spot of government and culture/heritage.

There was the State Services Commission release of the draft NZ Government Open Access and Licensing (NZGOAL) framework (which the Library gave feedback to during the consultation process).

The Open Government Data barcamp and hackfest (held here at the Library), emerged from an impromptu meet-up at the mid year GOVIS conference ; you can read the genesis tale (and more) in Julie Starr’s ‘Data hound’ article in Idealog #24.

There was the launch of the Open New Zealand network by Nat Torkington and Glen Barnes, along with the Open Data Catalogue of government and local body datasets. This was closely followed by the launch of data.govt.nz, a directory of New Zealand government datasets. The National Library’s Publications New Zealand database is one of the sources listed here.

The demand side for data is shown by the well-established They Work For You (a volunteer-run site giving insight into the New Zealand Parliament's activities), new-comer Consultations.org.nz which aggregates information about consultations currently being held by local government bodies, and the nascent New Zealand version of Fix My Street.

Over in Australia there was all the activity around the Government 2.0 Taskforce . The final report from the Taskforce is presented today (22 December 2009). When Senator Kate Lundy spoke in Wellington about open government earlier this year it was great to hear her using the Australian National Archive's Mapping Our Anzacs work as one of her examples, and fantastic to see the National Library of Australia’s user-corrected OCR singled out by Taskforce chair Nicholas Gruen last week in the Sydney Morning Herald (although where was the link to the NLA newspapers site, huh?! If I could have one small wish for 2010, it would be that when the MSM writes about websites and online stuff, they include the bloody links).

Various small workshops on open data have been being held round Wellington’s government departments over the last few months; I attended one at the Department of Internal Affairs last week, which I’ll return to later. And coming up early next year is an Open Government miniconf at the Australasian Linux Conference .

So naturally I was interested in Mark Drapeau’s predictions for Government 2.0 on the O’Reilly Radar blog . Drapeau gave five predictions for 2010-12:

1. Local governments as experiments
2. The rise of Citizen 2.0
3. Mobile devices as primary devices
4. Ubiquitous crude video content
5. Always on-the-record

In the first category, Drapeau linked to a project I hadn’t previously seen – Manor Labs. Manor, Texas, has a population of about 5,800. Manor Labs is the city's research and development division, which works to identify new technologies to benefit Manor’s residents. The site lists R&D projects, like a tourism project using RFID reader to send information about points of interest around the town to people’s phones, and a similar QR-code project.

The main feature of the site though is the ability for people to submit ideas and solutions to help Manor. Ideas currently displayed on the site include improving the Emergency Responder system by dedicating different channels to different uses; encouraging more people to respond to the census count to make the Manor City Limits sign’s population count more accurate; and opening a public library.

Various tactics are used to encourage people to participate (besides, of course, the hope your idea may be acted on). Once ideas have been added to the site, they can be voted up or down, and commented on. Good suggestions are rewarded with ‘innobucks’, which can be spent in the online store. The site also has a leader board. The thing that intrigues me about these incentives is that they relate back to the community. The person who votes or comments on your idea is likely to be a fellow resident. The leader board is also published every week in the Manor Messenger. Items in the store include Have Your Own Week (a proclamation declaring a week in your honour) and a Manor Police t-shirt. Love it.

Now. I said earlier on that I’d return to the workshop held at DIA. At the session, Andy Neale from Digital New Zealand talked about domain specific data (the data that different kinds of departments produce, likely reports from Statistics New Zealand on employment figures) and operational data (data about government departments, like average salaries, electricity usage, headcounts).

As an example of transparency in an organisation, Andy brought up my much-loved Dashboard from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (I often rant about the IMA’s work in this area on my non-work blog).



The Dashboard is a very pretty visualisation of all sorts of metrics from the IMA; from the value of its endowment to the number of artworks it has out on loan. The prettiness almost camouflages how rich the data is; you can drill down to months and months worth of information on dozens and dozens of things.

The Dashboard of course didn’t just emerge miraculously. The IMA’s Chief Information Officer Rob Stein has recently written a five-part series on the IMA blog on the topic of ‘Museums and Transparency’, which describes how the IMA has adopted transparency as a policy across the organisation, and shows how the Dashboard fits in, and what the outcomes have been.

Fittingly, the IMA has released the Dashboard under an open source licence. The final post in Rob’s series gives advice on implementing these kinds of tools. So my prediction – or hope – for organisations like mine, and ours, for 2010-12, is that this is the time when the radical trust we’ve been talking about for a while meets with the radical transparency we’re just beginning to see.

Engage Your Community - Social Media Workshop

On Friday 13 November I'm giving a workshop on social media at the Engage Your Community conference.

Workshop Format

As I'm not sure what the level of experience is across the people in the workshop, I've broken it into five sections. Each of these sections can be expanded or contracted, depending on the level of detail we need to go into. I'm hoping for loads of experience-sharing from the people in the workshop.

Introductions
How do we all use the web? How many of us are running personal social media accounts? How many are running accounts on behalf of their organisation? What happens when personal and professional use start to overlap?

This section is designed to get people talking, and to give me a chance to assess how familiar people are with social media tools. That will help me pitch the following sections at the right level.

Observations from Day 1
A few quick points from the presentations given by Colin Jackson, Nathalie Hofsteede and Chris Brown.

A tour of the social web
What's out there that people could be using?

- Listening in (RSS feeds, Google Alerts)
- Joining in (Twitter, Flickr, blogging)
- Community & collaboration (Facebook, wikis, Ning)
[All with examples from the not-for-profit sector]

The golden rules of social media
Things to ask yourself before embarking on any social media adventure (and certainly before picking a social media tool):

- Why do you want to do this?
- What are you offering?
- Who is this for?
- Who will be doing this?

And (numerous) steps for a successful launch.

Planning exercises
Depending on how much time we have, I've prepared an activity for people to break into small groups and plan a social media 'campaign' for a specific scenario.

Hopefully all this gives a bit more context for my slides

Social Media Workshop - Engage Your Community conference 2009

View more presentations from NationalLibraryNZ.

Resources & examples

I've also prepared a rather lengthy handout which I'm now going to reproduce here for ease of use.

Introductions to different kinds of social media

It’s hard to beat the team at Common Craft http://www.commoncraft.com, who make short, straightforward videos about all matter of web (and non-web) things.

These are all available on the Commoncraft YouTube channel

Listening in

Twitter search | http://search.twitter.com

Google Alerts | www.google.com/alerts

Google blog search:

• Google your search terms
• From options at top left of results page, choose Blogs from the ‘More’ drop-down menu
• Scroll to the bottom of the search results

Useful reading
- Social media monitoring (State Services Commission)

Joining in

Blogger | http://www.blogger.com

Wordpress
http://wordpress.com (basic account)
http://wordpress.org (to do your own hosting)

Twitter | http://twitter.com

Flickr | http://www.flickr.com

Examples used:
- Whangarei SPCA blog
- Get in on! Twitter
- Rainbow Youth Flickr

Useful reading
- Twitter case study (National Library)
- Mashable’s Twitter Guidebook
- Twitter for non-profits (Mashable)
- Fundraising potential for Twitter (TechCrunch)
- Darren Rowse’s blogging lessons

Community & collaboration

Ning | http://www.ning.com

Wikis
http://www.wetpaint.com
http://pbworks.com
http://www.mediawiki.org

Facebook | http://www.facebook.com

Examples used
- Mt Cook Mobilised wiki
- Museums 3.0 Ning group
- Cancer Society’s Daffodil Day campaign

Useful reading:
- Case study on Daffodil Day campaign (Ideashop)
- Managing Facebook groups (Mashable)
- Wikis when and why (Nina Simon)

Community management

If you’re going to start spending time with your community online, you’re effectively becoming a community manager. This elderly post from Jeremy Owyang is still relevant if you’re trying to figure out if this is your new line of work.

Like any job, there are some personal qualities you’ll need to bring out in yourself, and some tactics you might find useful.

- A case study from the Brooklyn Museum
- A case study from (the early days of) Flickr
- My notes from Heather Champ and Derek Powazek’s 2009 ‘Designing and sustaining creative communities’ workshop

Planning

One of the most important things you need to ask yourself is – how much time do I (or my team of people) have available? How much time does Web 2 take (Nina Simon)

You’re likely to need some simple policies around how you/your team use social media sites in a professional capacity or on behalf of your organisation. I’m a big fan of the very simple guidelines from the State Services Commission, which were written for government, but which translate over well

The Guardian’s community standards are also helpful if you’re thinking about things like comment moderation

And this page aggregates links to social media policies

One piece of advice: these are your policies. Don’t try to second-guess everything that might go wrong & plan against them, or you’ll become paralysed. Read some of the material above, write some useful & sensible guidelines (aimed at helping the people doing your social media outreach to understand what’s okay and what’s not so okay, both in terms of their own behaviour and that of others) and then update as time goes by and circumstances change.

Generally useful, sometimes even inspiring, reading

Beth Kanter’s blog ‘How nonprofits can use social media’ (the title pretty much explains it)
- http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog

Nina Simon’s Museums 2.0 (Nina is interested in people’s participation in museums & galleries, and frequently writes about social media projects)
blog
- http://museumtwo.blogspot.com

The Community section on A List Apart (but don’t stop there, please, this site is full of delicious reading)
- http://www.alistapart.com/topics/content/community

The Pew Internet & American Life Project regularly issues reports on people’s online activities and behaviour
- http://pewinternet.org/Data-Tools.aspx

DigitalNZ get-together, Sunday 22 November

The Digital New Zealand team is holding a Wellington get-together on Sunday 22 November, the day before the National Digital Forum conference.

From the DigitalNZ blog:

It will be a mix of info sharing and mini working sessions focused on how we might take DigitalNZ to the next level, with a bit of socialising thrown in afterward for good measure. The idea is that we want to really start ramping things up here at DigitalNZ, but we're only five people. We need your input, your ideas and your critique.

Let the team (Andy, Lewis, Dan, Virginia, Fiona and Jo) know that you're interested in going along by emailing info@digitalnz.org and they'll contact you closer to the day with more details.

If you want to check out what DigitalNZ's been up to lately, have a look at:

• The code samples from the Hackfests
• The apps built on the DigitalNZ API
• The Make it Digital site (with guides & advice and the Make it Digital Voting Tool)

Finding new ways to browse

A group of rather loosely connected thoughts about browsing and sharing digital images, serendipity and metadata ....


Earlier this month George Oates, the original force behind The Commons on Flickr, gave a presentation in Bristol on her past work on The Commons and her current role at the Open Library.

George noted that her presentation had three themes:

• It's all about increasing access
• Learn to love (and exploit) networks
• Institutional knowledge as substrate

I found one of George's observation about Flickr really interesting. Talking about the metadata that a particular photo entered Flickr with (date taken, type of camera) and the metadata that has been added to it (tags, placement in groups and sets that give it context through association) George noted that

"It's almost as if all this metadata provides some sort of surface tension that prevents the photo from sinking into the depths of obscurity amongst these billions of photos."

I thought again of that comment when reading Nate Solas's post on the Walker's New Media Initiatives blog, about the Art Finder collection browse/search functionality on the ArtsConnectEd site.




Writing about The Big Idea for the interface, Nate said:

What if we could start with everything and narrow it down from there? Offer the user the entire collection and let them whittle away at it until they found what they wanted?

It's all browse. Keyword is just another filter.

I found it interesting how long I spent fiddling round with the filters on the site before I went looking for a box to type search terms into.

This experience - where browse = happy serendipity - leads me to the new Galleries feature on Flickr (and and a rather overdue update about our Commons work on Flickr). The new tool lets you gather together up to 18 photos by other people (none of your own) into a named and annotated set, which is then shared with all site visitors. It's a way of curating what you think is good or interesting work on Flickr, and then presenting that to other people. It's a serendipitous experience for Flickr browsers - and has been exploited for yesterday's dust storm in Sydney - and adds yet another aspect of surface tension to all the metadata options Flickr already makes available.

It seems that the page where you can see which of your photos is included in which galleries is private (like stats) but we've had a nice little start with 13 photos in 11 galleries, including Netweb's Gallipoli gallery, Brenda Anderson's Glaciers on a human scale gallery, and zyrcster's Night photography across The Commons gallery. As the Indicommons crew have pointed out, this make the cross-Commons curating group members were already doing much easier.




I've just noticed that in the FAQ Galleries are described as 'favourites on steroids'. I've been thinking about favourites a bit over the last couple of weeks, since this Election Night photo was used in a post on the Flickr blog.




The coverage added significantly to the image's 'surface tension' (see the jump in visits below) and the photo has been favourited 268 times since.



Watching this happen confused me a little - I don't (personally) really see what people get out of favouriting (I'm not alone in this!). But galleries make more sense to me - favouriting for the intent of sharing. It's also another fantastic example of how Flickr encourages community within the enormous site - people are leaping onto this new feature, even though they can't promote their own work through it. And of course, all this activity adds more and more contextual information - surface tension - to the individual images.

My own first gallery - of photographs of photographers across The Commons - is here.

A snapshot of the GLAMs sector

Yesterday I filled in for Nat Torkington and Colin Jackson on the 'New Technology' slot with Kathryn Ryan on National Radio.

The segment ended up being almost entirely ad libbed, but here are some notes I prepared, mostly as a reminder to self, some of which got covered and some of which didn't ...

***

The GLAMS sector is gearing up towards the annual National Digital Forum in November, so it's a good time to look at the work they're doing. I've picked topics to do loosely with access, innovation and using social media to reach out to communities and audiences.

NZETC releases e-publications
http://www.nzetc.org/

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre at Victoria University is a free online archive of digitised New Zealand and Pacific books, manuscripts and journals. They have stuff like Jean Batten's autobiography, Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party', and a big set of 19th century New Zealand novels.

In the last month they've released most of the texts in the archive as ePub eBooks, which means you can now download them to your Sony Reader or iPhone or iPod Touch. I think the interesting thing about this is that while the NZETC site is an amazing research tool, it doesn't feel to me like something you want to settle in front of and read a whole novel. It's really well done, and the search functionality is great, both on the site as well as for grabbing search engines' attention, but that's a little bit like reading a book using the index as your way in. Turning the digitised texts into e-publications restores some of that original bookiness.

Archives New Zealand on Ziln
http://www.ziln.co.nz/channel_detail.php?program_id=6&channel_id=60

Ziln describes itself as "New Zealand's internet television network". People who have video content can work with Ziln to create their own channels. Archives New Zealand have done this; you can watch things like the 1955 open rollerskating champion doing her thing, and a clip of 4 tuatara being sent to zoos in London, New York, Chicago and San Diego. It's a smart example of an organisation saying "why should we try to make people come to our website to see our stuff - if we have video, why not put it in a place where people are going to watch videos?".

Aotearoa People's Network Kaharoa
http://www.aotearoapeoplesnetwork.org/

Based in Christchurch. I think this is one of the most important projects going on in terms of access. The APNK works to put computer equipment, like PCs and scanner and webcams, and broadband internet access and wifi into public libraries throughout the country. They've started with small and rural libraries, and I think they're up to somewhere between 130 and 160 libraries now. They don't just provide the equipment and the access, they also train staff in the libraries and provide ongoing support, so there's someone to call if the wireless goes down or the software is behaving funny.

These new facilities in libraries that couldn't previously support them are bringing new audiences into the buildings - like teenagers and migrant workers. People are going into libraries to skype home, and one of the funniest things people are seeing are all these new Facebook and Bebo accounts getting set up, full of photos of kids standing in front of bookshelves, because they're using the APNK equipment to take the photos and get onto their accounts.

GLAMS on Twitter

GLAMS organisations in New Zealand have taken to Twitter with a vengeance. They're talking to people about their shows, events and collections, and all sorts of random stuff. At the National Library we use Twitter to share strange, moving or funny items from our collections: yesterday I tweeted out a 1912 ad from a nursing journal we recently added to the Papers Past website, advertising cough lollies with ingredients including cocaine, formaldehyde and potash.

One of the nice things about the Twitter accounts is that they're often being run by people who don't normally get to talk to the public (web managers, collection managers, writers) but who are filled with enthusiasm and passion.

National Library http://twitter.com/NLNZ
Te Papa http://twitter.com/TePapaColOnline
City Gallery Wellington http://twitter.com/CityGalleryWgtn
Christchurch Art Gallery http://twitter.com/ChchArtGallery
Te Ara http://twitter.com/te_ara
NZ on Screen http://twitter.com/nzonscreen

Blogging

Blogs are another of the Web 2.0 technologies that the GLAMs have leapt on, and especially the libraries.

Christchurch City Libraries' blog is outstanding - they've even sent people to live-blog the Auckland Readers and Writers festival http://cclblog.wordpress.com/

It's not just the big libraries though. For example, Rodney Libraries blog everyday and it's just two people with piles of enthusiasm driving it. http://www.rodneylibraries.blogspot.com/

Te Papa also has a really active blog, that covers all kinds of topics, from ferns to framing to the giant squid. It's interesting to see how these blogs create a sense of community, even with a huge audience like that of Te Papa. For instance, when the artist Julian Dashper died earlier this year, and one of the Te Papa curators wrote a post about him, people from all over the world left their comments and thoughts on the blog. http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/

Tell the GLAMs what you want
http://makeit.digitalnz.org/voting

Collecting organisations all over the country are busily digitising their collections so that they can make them easier for people to access. Digital New Zealand has the Make it Digital website where people can suggest and vote for and comment on things that they'd like to see available online. There's all sorts of requests up there - from aerial photography to the Māori Land Courts Minute Books, and it's really interesting to see the discussion around why people want stuff.

One of the unexpected benefits is that people in organisations are watching the site, and when they see people asking for stuff that's already online, they're jumping in to help them find it. The discussion around the Stones directories is fascinating - a company is digitising the directories and using the Make It Digital site to do a bit of customer research.

Openness

There's been a lot of talk in New Zealand lately about open data and open government, centred around Open New Zealand and spinning off into events and products like the open data barcamp and the Open Data Catalogue. GLAMs organisations are all about people getting access to New Zealand's culture and heritage, on site or online. Copyright is a huge headache for these institutions as they try to get their collections online, and even when copyright has expired, there are moral rights, and cultural considerations, and concerns about donors.

More and more organisations in this area are releasing items or information under Creative Commons licences, including NZETC and NZ on Screen. The National Library is The Commons on Flickr, where collecting institutions all over the world are taking a collective deep breath and releasing photographs from their collections under a "No known copyright restrictions" licence, that lets people do whatever they want with them.

And a big move in the last year is organisations in the GLAMS and beyond making their metadata available through an API built by Digital New Zealand. This API means that other developers, not inside institutions, can access this data and make their own mash-ups from it, like Paul Hagon from Australia who's made a mash-ups with Google Maps so you can search for photographs of a place by clicking around a map instead of typing in key words.

Image
Not me, but another New Zealand radio legend, Aunt Daisy.
Maud Ruby Basham, 1959. Reference Number: 1/2-046733-F. Alexander Turnbull Library. Image from the Manuscripts and Pictorial website

Let's get physical ....

I've always disliked the word 'virtual' in relation to the web - virtual tours, virtual lives. The word either creates a false similarity, or a false distinction.

One of the things that's interested me over the last year or so is the blurring distinction between 'online' and 'physical'. You see it in Flickr meet-ups; Derek Powazek and Heather Champ talked about it in their Webstock workshop earlier this year; Brooklyn Museum's 1st Fans membership is designed for people who fit into the Venn diagram of attending Target First Saturdays at the Museum and following the Museum online. I have a dream inside my head where in a few years volunteers can come into the redeveloped National Library in Wellington and hang out in the volunteer lounge, cleaning up our metadata and OCRd newspapers and drinking our (hopefully improved by them) staff coffee.*

Recently, the Library's Twitter account has made the jump into the physical world - namely print publication. One of the good people at Unlimited saw our @nlnz stream and got in touch to see if some of the digitised items we were posting could be featured in the magazine. Chelsea and I did a sweep of Manuscripts and Pictorial, looking for images Unlimited might find interesting - pictures relating to advertising, the economy, finance, business.

The first tweet-related image appeared in the latest issue: Mr E.D. Vallence burning excess sterling banknotes after the introduction of decimalisation rendered them redundant. We provide the image, and this time it's Unlimited that scribes the caption.


There will be an image per issue over the coming year - 6 images in all. Chelsea and I are pretty stoked about this new way of spreading our enjoyment in the collections; it's a nice change to have 'the media' come to you, instead of hunting journalists down and trying to interest them in your wares. It feels like a really good fit, and we're pleased that it came out of someone seeing and enjoying what we were doing online. If by any chance you're interested in doing something similar, get in touch!

You can see the photo reproduced in Unlimited on Manuscripts + Pictorial, and read more about how we run our Twitter account in this blog post.

*It should be noted that this is just one of my nutbar ideas, and not part of existing plans for the Library redevelopment.

NDF conference: subsidy for small organisations

The annual National Digital Forum conference is taking place in Wellington on November 23-24 at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

As it happens, I'm on the organising committee, so you can trust me when I say it's gonna be a goodie. We have some exciting international speakers lined up (including experience designer Nina Simon, and Daniel Incandela of Art Babble fame) but just as - if not more - importantly, we've got lots of interesting and passionate people from New Zealand GLAMS (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) coming along to talk about the work they're doing and the big issues we face as a sector.

This year the NDF is offering up to 10 grants to subsidise registration fees to help people who are employed by or associated with small community organisations and who would otherwise not be able to afford to attend the conference. The subsidised registration fee is $200 for the two-day conference.

This grant is only open to New Zealand residents or citizens. You need to complete the application form, and find someone to act as a referee for your application (to confirm your organisation requires financial assistance). Your referee can be someone you work with, but shouldn't be a family member.

NDF subsidy grant application form (PDF)

Applications close on 28 August, so please help spread the word if you know people who may be interested, or get a wriggle on if you're thinking of applying yourself.

Problems with external emails

Update 3pm 28 July: Life as normal is restored at the Library. If you're not receiving a reply to your emails, it's no longer the technology's fault.

Update, 1pm 28 July: We are now able to send and receive external emails. The backlog of delayed emails is still being processed.

The National Library is currently experiencing delays sending emails to and receiving emails from external addresses.

The problem started on Saturday 26 July and we hope to have it fixed later today (28 July). Any emails sent or received will not be lost but there will be a significant backlog to process, resulting in delays.

This impacts several services, including:

-- forms on www.natlib.govt.nz such as the ISBN form, the CIS form, and the Ask a Librarian form and registratiosn for professional development

-- Te Puna reports which are normally delivered via email.

If you need help or to get in touch with a National Library staff member, please call our Helpdesk 0508 837 862 or our main switchboard (04) 474 3000.

I'll update this message as soon as we know the problem. is fixed

This is how we do it: @nlnz on Twitter

Oprah's there. Ashton's there. Cats do it, dogs do it, even transportation infrastructure does it. And so do we; tweet away on Twitter.

It's safe to assume that the LibraryTechNZ readership is au fait with Twitter, but just in case; Twitter http://twitter.com is a microblogging service that lets you post 140-character updates to the web. If you want to know why that's useful, even addicitive, check out Tim O'Reilly's post.

Twitter seems to satisfy two strong human needs: our desire to tell people about ourselves, and our desire to know what's going on with the people around us (physically or virtually). When we’re explaining Twitter, we often point to these Personal Items columns in early 20th century newspapers, where small goings-on in the community were printed for all to read.



Libraries and other cultural institutions have taken to Twitter with huge enthusiasm; some do it incredibly well, others are still finding their feet.

We're pretty happy with how our Twitter works. Sure, we're not rockstars; currently, we're verging on 700 followers. But we get some great feedback







And awesome interaction








So, this is how we do it

Chelsea set up the Twitter account last September, to talk to attendees at the LIANZA 2008 conference. However when the conference was over we were left with a communications channel and not enough to communicate. The Library doesn't run enough events or release enough news to sustain a daily Twitter feed. So we had a bit of a think about it, invoking what have become our three favourite "so, you want to start a [insert social media site name here] account?" questions, and this is what we came up with.

What content do you have to share?

Twitter lends itself so well to a pithy comment and a hyperlink that it rapidly became obvious that posting links to items in digital collections such as Papers Past and Manuscripts & Pictorial was a natural use for the @nlnz account.

An advantage of this approach is that there's no need for any clearances – we're taking people through to collection items in their natural habitat, not reproducing the items elsewhere.

Who's going to run this thing?

Answer: Chelsea and Courtney.

We sit next to each other, which makes it really easy to coordinate. We both twitter ourselves, so we've got a grasp of the mechanism. And we're both really interested in the collections; partly, this activity grew out of the fact we've being passing links and comments between us via IM for ages. Occasionally people send us a recommendation for the stream, but so far no-one has wanted to join in as a regular poster.

It was really important to both of us that we had our names on the account, drawing inspiration from Shelley Bernstein at Brooklyn Museum and from this post & discussion on Nina Simon's Museums 2 blog.

To make it easier for ourselves, we made up some rules:

• We post twice a day (that's why they're called #tbreaktweets: we try to time our posts with the Library's traditional morning and afternoon tea times)
• We restrict the tweeting to the #tbreaktweets; we don't do events or systems outages or media releases. Hopefully this means we're predictable, in a good way.
• We try to make sure we're at our desks for 30 minutes after the tweet goes out, in case anyone writes back. If we're not open to conversation, what's the point of being there?
• We follow anyone who follows us (unless they're a bot selling stuff)
  

Who is your audience community?

We knew that the kind of people we already hung out with on Twitter were happy to be momentarily distracted with a worthwhile link. We're those kinds of people ourselves. But honestly, we couldn't have predicted the kind of audience we attracted. Our followers include cultural institutions, friends and acquaintances, art lovers, history lovers, library lovers, information lovers, New Zealand lovers, humour lovers. It's an eclectic mix.

What has evolved over the past 4 months is nothing short of awesome. It was a pleasant surprise to see that our interest in the National Library's digital collections was shared among so many other people. And our sense of humour wasn't lost on them either!

What's great about Twitter, among other social networking sites, is that what appears on the surface to be a cacophony of disparate voices is sometimes just a simple conversation among friends.

Sharing the love

For us, #tbreaktweets is about sharing the love. In that spirit, here are some of our fav NZ culture tweeters:

http://twitter.com/auckland_museum

http://twitter.com/TePapaColOnline

http://twitter.com/nzlive

http://twitter.com/NZHistorydotnet

http://twitter.com/ChchArtGallery

http://twitter.com/te_ara




A joint post by Chelsea Hughes & Courtney Johnston, tbreaktweeters

All together now! Anzac collaboration on The Commons

On 25 April New Zealanders and Australians mark Anzac Day, the anniversary of the 1915 landing of Allied troops at Gallipoli / Gelibolu Yarımadası in Turkey, and the beginning of the 9-month Gallipoli campaign of World War I.

This year Australian and New Zealand members of The Commons have worked together to share photographs of the campaign in Gallipoli and later Anzac Day events on Flickr. Sets have been loaded by

• Us (National Library of NZ)
• Australian War Memorial
• State Library of New South Wales
• State Library of Queensland

The idea was sparked by Ellen at the State Library of New South Wales and warmly supported by the Flickr Commons group. The Indicommons crew also got behind the idea, and zyrcster wrote a fabulous post pulling all the upload together.

For me, it's been really interesting watching how making this extra effort to coordinate a joint upload and work with the community to promote it has resulted in a much higher level of tagging than usual on the images we've shared. The four collaborators tried to use AnzacDay as a shared tag, and I'm already seeing 1915, Gallipoli, destroyer and anzac appearing in our top 150 tags:




Not to mention some great info about periscope rifles




If I could ask for one thing, it'd be to see people making connections between the images, either with tags or comments - I've dipped my toe in the water by connecting these two views of Anzac Cove.





That for me would really exploit the true power of The Commons to join up all this like content held in unlike institutions.

Designing & Sustaining Creative Communities - notes from the Webstock workshop

So, I meant to get this out during Webstock week, but late is hopefully better than never. Here are some notes & thoughts from Heather Champ and Derek Powazek's workshop 'Designing and Sustaining Creative Communities' (with thanks to Douglas, who has shared his notes with me).

[Any misinterpretations or muck-ups are my own].

Right now, the National Library is more involved in what I'd call communities-within-communities, like our @NLNZ twitter account and taking part in The Commons on Flickr, than occupied in setting up communities ourselves. However, I think it's safe to say that the immediate future will see our involvement in community sites growing.

Before we kick off though, here are two of my favourite articles about community wrangling:

Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow, by George Oates

Building an online community at Brooklyn Museum: A timeline, by Nicole J. Caruth and Shelley Bernstein

A definition

Web communities happen when people are given tools to use their voice in a public and immediate way, forming intimate relationships over time.

The essential questions to ask yourself

• Who is the site for?
• What can they do?
• Why will they want to do it? Without offering benefits for the people who join, why would a vibrant, long-term community grow?

The building blocks of community sites

Aside from the contributions from the workshop attendees (an unusually vocal bunch for a Kiwi crowd; I think we're getting braver) this was the most valuable part of the session for me, so I'm going to focus on it here.

The workshop gave me a real appreciation for the hard thinking you need to do before you unleash your site on the world. These are the foundation garments of your community: not sexy, perhaps, but underpinning and holding up everything that's layered on top of them.

1. Privacy policies and Terms of Use/Service

The Twitter privacy policy was recommended as a thorough policy with a good human interface.

Heather and Derek noted that as people are getting more experienced online, they're reading privacy polices and terms of service statements much more closely and out-cry can follow if people are unhappy with what they see (or, I guess, think they see).

Creating these policies means finding a balance between protecting your assets and respecting the people who are choosing to contribute to your site. You will need to get lawyers involved, you will need to advocate for your users, and you will need to keep revisiting these over time.

You must also make these policies easily available to people who are visiting your site but who are not (yet!) members. People should never have to log in before seeing this kind of information.

In her presentation at the conference Heather expanded on these points - check out this article for some of the detail.

2. Copyright and ownership

10 years ago, people thought that everything that was on the web was "free". Now, people are much more savvy and will read ToS closely to see what you're doing with their content (and remember - this is from photos they upload to comments that they leave) and what others are allowed to do with it.

An ongoing issue is that people will share material that they don't own the copyright to. Have clear take-down policies that make it easy for people to make a complaint and enhance trust on the site. Part of the trust is vetting the requests for take-downs, as this system can be abused.

Another part of the trust is understanding that there can be a difference between what's 'legal' and what's 'right': what you can do and what you should do. Which leads nicely into ...

3. Community Guidelines

When a site is small, it's relatively easy to model behaviour. As it gets bigger, this gets harder - and that's where community guidelines can set the tone of the site and act as the human face of Terms of Service and Terms of Use statements.

I've long admired Flickr's community guidelines, especially the immortal "Don't be creepy". It's pointedly more of a "do" list than a "don't do" list, and it has won the community over, to the point where Flickr members enforce the guidelines themselves. Heather and Derek emphasised that you can't make guidelines that will foresee every possible permutation of behaviour, and that's why it's important to treat these as evolving documents.

4. Abuse Grid

This gem by itself made attending the workshop worthwhile for me. Before you launch, sit down and think of all the things you will not tolerate on the site. Now draw these up in a spreadsheet.

-> The first column is the "bad thing".

-> The next column is a detailed description of said "bad thing" that people can use to identify whether the thing they suspect is bad is, indeed, that same bad thing.

-> The final column sets out exactly what site administrators should do when they spot a bad thing. This includes whether warnings are given, what happens to the content, what happens to the account, what changes if it's a repeat violation, whether any external agencies need to be notified of this behaviour.

-> Bear in mind you may need to run this past a lawyer.

An abuse grid has two major benefits. Firstly, it means that if a site has a number of administrators, they're all following the same system of identifying and reacting to badness. Secondly, it prevents you from being forced to make policy on the fly during a crisis.

Design and structure

Design can set the tone and use of the site (it's true! Derek cited all sorts of studies - check his site for links) so you need set your design to the tasks you're trying to encourage and support. You've got to keep reminding yourself that you're designing a tool, not just web pages.

Barriers to entry

Derek noted that there's a strong drive in web design towards inclusiveness, but that communities by their very nature are exclusive (I guess maybe that's the difference between "population" and "community") . The boundaries can be set using design.

We need to think carefully about where we set barriers to entry in all elements of the design, from demanding certain versions of certain browsers be used to the amount of information you ask for during site registration. There's a temptation to set the barrier very low, for the sake of user-friendliness and also to get stuff happening on a site; however, this risks inviting a pretty crappy level of interaction. Set the barrier higher and you're likely to get higher quality contributions, but you might put people off along the way (I had an experience this year where I was asked to hand over my full name, email address and date of birth in order to even see the homepage of a site that I was being encouraged to join.) There's also the fact that community sites evolve: you may set the barrier lower when the site is new and your community managers have more scope to individually interact with new members, setting the tone through human contact; as the site grows and the ability to be this hands-on decreases, the barrier may go higher.

The wisdom of crowd - with a nod to James Surowiecki

Surowiecki suggests 4 elements that define wise crowds ...

• Diversity (of people, opinion and input: homogeneous groups often fail)
• Independence (you offer up your own thoughts, and don't feel compelled to agree with the group)
• Decentralisation (there isn't a top-down authority that drives the group)
• Aggregation (where community sites often fail - not enough is done to find commonalities).

... and interface is everything when it comes to encouraging these elements on your community site.

To help yourself out:

Give people small, discrete tasks to make crowd-sourcing work

Derek gave the example of the Assignment Zero project that tried to crowd-source articles for an "experiment in pro-am journalism" (read a full recap here). After a disappointing result, the site's managers realised they had asked too much of the community, and tried a new tack, asking for suggestions for a list of people to interview for the project, and then asking people to carry out the interviews - a task that was more enthusiastically picked up.

Avoiding groupthink

When site members put the groups needs and opinions ahead of their own, they stop speaking in their own voices and definitely stop saying or doing anything that might rock the boat. This can cause a site to stultify (and, if you work at NASA, might lead to a shuttle disaster).

Online communities are self-selecting: like tends to attract like. To prevent a site from getting too homogeneous you need to design for a diversity of members; to bring in new members and to support minority opinions.

Design for selfishness

Derek noted that people tend to participate for selfish reasons, but that this can be good in a wisdom of the crowds fashion. For example, people don't create hyperlinks for altruistic reasons, but when aggregated the links support Google's pagerank algorithm. Likewise, people tag in Flickr for 'selfish' reasons, but when aggregated these tags become a powerful tool.

For this reason, asking yourself "what is the selfish reason for participating in this site" is a key early question in the creation of your site.

Scores create games

Once you assign a score to an action or a judgement, you create a game; and once you create a game people will want to play to win, in ways that may be detrimental to the overall health and enjoyability of the site. Design decisions can encourage or discourage gaming behaviour.

Derek used the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as a metaphor for the challenge of surfacing interesting things happening within the community without unduly influencing behaviour, and suggested design solutions that can be used to prevent this.

Favrd has a very fast decay, which stops the leaderboard from being hijacked.

Online polls reveal tallies only after you've voted; Threadless witholds voting tallies until the voting period is finished.

Introduce some randomness (Flickr's 'interestingness' algorithm) to prevent gaming.

Allow yourself some curatorial control, and bring back the human element to presenting content (think of the Flickr blog; or conversely, the often disappointing nature of 'most viewed' and 'most shared' lists of articles on newspaper sites).

The Brooklyn Museum's Click! exhibition (an experiment on crowd-sourcing and crowd-selecting photographs for a show, which both Derek and James Surowiecki consulted on) is a fascinating experiment in attempting to minimise influence. I really recommend this series of posts on the project (kicking off wth Surowiecki himself).

If you do use an algorithm, Derek advised testing thoroughly before release and then tweaking as necessary.

Community Managers

As Heather said in her opening to this section of the workshop: being a community manager is like being a piñata: people will beat you with sticks and you still need to give them candy.

Finding and supporting community managers

Community manager roles should be separate from customer care. These are the people who set the tone for the site, not the people who help solve problems with uploading or browsers.

Community managers need to have good judgement, to be diplomatic, to have a sense of humour and thick skin. They also need to be active users of your site, meaning that recruiting community managers from existing users is often a sensible move.

When you have more than one community manager, there needs to be consistency in their behaviour. Flickr describes the tone of its community managers as "human, friendly, inclusive, authoritative, transparent, honest, witty, funny and clear". Give your community managers guidelines for behaviour in situations which often crop up (e.g. outages, or changes to the site) so they have something to fall back on.

Taking it offline

Private communication is one of the most valuable (and often forgotten) tools at a community manager's disposal. Think about it: if one of your friends was being a dick at a party, you probably wouldn't get him thrown out - you're more likely to have a quiet word with him. Use back-channels to thank people who are helping you out, or to check in with people who are being jerks.

Offer members tools to self-moderate

Tools for flagging inappropriate or suspect content are common on community sites; tools for reporting problems can help site administrators notice when something is broken (without everyone running to tell the community manager about it).

Tools for managing your interactions with others on a site can also help people define their own experience, and add finer levels of control so that your community guidelines can stay at a more general level. Tools for members to block other members are a good example of this: they allow people to stop other members who they don't like from interacting with them, whilst relieving you from having to negotiate on an individual-by-individual level. You don't need to notify people when they've been blocked (and admittedly, this would be like sending someone an email reading "Hey, guess what? Bob thinks you're a freak and has banned you from contacting him") but do make an explanation available (couched in "it's not you, it's them" terms) if people want to follow up on what's happened.

Reporting problems

Make it easy to report problems and things such as copyright violation. Have consistent footer links throughout the site, and let non-members use these as well.

Heather recommended controlled lists of options for complaints/problems forms, and that you ensure forms are robots nofollow. Include a service level agreement so people have an idea of when their complaint is likely to be acted on.

Bubble up the good

Example content sets a tone far more effectively that terms and conditions statements or community guidelines ever could. Bring good and interesting content to the fore; shine the spotlight on community members (if they're willing!) through mechanisms like the member interviews on the Flickr blog.

Help forums

Member forums can reduce the workload of answering individual requests, but can also run the risk of getting out of hand as members use these forums as a place to express anger with the site. Make sure it's also the job of someone on the tem to get into the forums regulalrly and help things along (without being all pushy about it).

You can also consider outsourcing this using a site like Get Satisfaction.

Owning up to your mistakes

There is an expectation of openness and transparency on community sites today. Things will occasionally go wrong on your site, and when they do, it's best to own up, explain, and apologise. If it's a problem that's hanging around for a while, post clear and timely updates.

Managing change

If you need to make a significant change:

• Announce
• Be clear
• Allow 6-8 weeks for people to get prepared
• Offer an out-option if possible
• Make the change.

Have a strategy for the change: get together and plan out worst-case scenarios and how you'll deal with them (being cognisant that no-one can always second-guess humanity's great inventiveness).

Immediate feedback on changes is likely to be knee-jerk and negative(or perhaps just par for the course); over the next few weeks more considered responses are likely to filter in. You can give yourself a hand here by identifying influential community members and getting them to trial soon-to-be-released features: this can generate good-will and excellent feedback.

Wrapping up

Phew. Writing all this up reminds me how packed the session was with great advice, insight, and awesome contributions from the floor (we were an unusually talky bunch). I haven't even covered off the last two chunks of the day: managing trolls, and the fascinating, difficult-to-describe phenomena that is the merging of the digital and the physical world (think papercamps, Arduino, Flickr meet-ups, online mags that are moving into print-on demand, bridges and toasters that Twitter ...)

So my apologies that I'm not going to get this all down. I really recommend these other reviews of the workshop, which contain material I'm likely to have missed or glossed over, and different points of view.

Dean Stringer, Waikato University Centre for eLearning

Julie Starr, Evolving Newsroom

Sarah Jones, Lunchbox: software and digital media for learning

February Flickr Commons update

The temperature on The Commons has been set at a rolling boil this month, and so this update is mainly to point you to some of the awesome things that have been going on.

Flickr has reached 100 million geo-tagged images. I feel I have made a (very!) modest contribution, with 140 of the 149 images we've so far added to The Commons having location info. You can enjoy these even more with the new "nearby" feature.

The Indicommons team has been busy: for starters, there's a new bibliography of papers, presentations and articles about The Commons.

Indicommons member clickykbd has not only written a Greasemonkey script that lets you stay inside The Commons photos while searching Flickr, but done some awesome stuff with RSS feeds. For example, here's the feed of geo-tagged Commons images on a Google map.

Commons founder George Oates presented at a British Library conference recently - via Second Life - and as ever had wise words to impart on the topic of institutions and long-term relationships with online service providers.

Showing that it's not just me that's enthused about all this, The Commons on Flickr has been nominated for a Museums and the Web 2009 Best of the Web award in the Best Community | Service site category. Deservedly, the Indicommons team has been nominated in the same category, and Paul Hagon's up for the gong in the Best Innovative site category for his Then & Now mashup.

January update on The Commons on Flickr

The Commons goes on ... and new champions emerge

As many know, George Oates, the driving force behind The Commons on Flickr, was laid off by Yahoo last December (Seb Chan's blog post spoke for many of us in cultural institutions who have been inspired by George's enthusiasm and generosity).

Other Flickr staffers have stepped into the gap, and The Commons seems to be moving forward, with the New York Public Library joining the ranks.

The news of George's departure also triggered the creation of a new Flickr Commons group (see Shelley Bernstein's blog post on the topic). Led by some long-time and extremely active Flickr members, the group really demonstrates the passion of the community for The Commons, with its research, then and now, and theme (parades; delivering the mail) strands.

I've been following and contributing to the group with great interest, and am really excited that they've just launched a blog: http://www.indicommons.org. I think the group, and now the blog, have already done so much to move The Commons along; it now feels like even more of a shared activity and community.

National Library keeps going on too

After the very positive early response to our debut on The Commons (and buoyed by the report released by the Library of Congress), the decision has been made to keep adding more photos to our Commons stream. We'll be adding a new batch of images (about a dozen at a time) every week or two.

The first batches off the block were these photos taken in Samoa in the 1880s-1890s (including Robert Louis Stevenson's birthday party in 1893, shown below) and a selection of Samuel Heath Head's photographs of automotive trade shows (plus this very appealing shot of a motorcycle rally on New Brighton beach).



New mash-up from Paul Hagon

After Paul Hagon released his before and after mash-up of our Commons photos with Google street maps, I've been very conscientiously geo-tagging as many images as possible with precise coordinates. One of the next batches I'll be loading will increase the number of photos of urban locations in the panorama set.

Paul's just released another mash-up, using the NYPL's photos. As he explains in his post about the mash-up:

The process for this has been a little bit different to the previous then and now demonstrations. The images that have been posted don’t have any geo-location metadata (a latitude or longitude) so they can’t be placed directly on a map in the same manner as other Commons photographs. What they do have instead, is very good street addresses in their titles.

The google maps API has geocoding API call that translates a human readable address into a latitude and longitude. So if we pass the title of a photo into the API - let’s say "Willow Street, No. 113, Brooklyn", it returns the latitude and longitude of "40.6978614, -73.9955804".

Google maps mashup with Commons images

In a moment of serendipity, while I was placing our Commons images on the Flickr map yesterday, I got a note from Paul Hagon, telling me he had made a Flickr /Google Street View mash-up with our Flickr Commons images.

Using the mash-up, you can see 'then and now' views of the locations recorded in the photos:

Paul gave me a very helpful tip to use GetLatLon.com to get the exact coordinates for locations (the resolution on the Flickr map for New Zealand is not great, so pasting this panorama of the intersection of High St, Lichfield St and Manchester St in Christchurch into exactly the right spot to work properly in the mashup was nigh-on impossible). While some of the images that are appearing on the mashup aren't producing good matches (ummm... gannets at Cape Kidnappers? inside the Botanical Gardens in Dunedin? not great for street views ...) some are working rather beautifully. Don't forget to check out the different page views when you're using the mashup - the images are distributed over a number of maps.

Paul has also made similar mashups for the State Library of NSW and Powerhouse Museum's Commons images. You can read about the genesis of the mashup on his blog.

96 hours on The Commons on Flickr

So, we went live on The Commons on Flickr at about 5pm on 27 November 2008, and it's been a very busy and very fun four days.

Stats (as of 3.40pm today) say we've had just under 20,000 views all up. There's been 64 comments, 248 favs, over 200 contacts made, and this is what our tag cloud currently looks like:

This panoramic photograph of Mitre Peak is far and away the most popular image we've uploaded:



It has 2844 views, 110 favourites, 10 tags and 18 comments (including my own) as of 5pm today. The panoramas have been really popular, but we've had a number of requests for higher-res versions to be made available - as people very validly point out, 700 x 152 is not a great viewing size for these images.

I'm working on getting bigger images up, and have rewritten the links in all the descriptions to point to the new zoomable versions on Timeframes. Also on my to-do list: dropping all the images that have good location descriptions onto the map, it's my bad, as I ran out of time to get them there before launch.

One of the nicest things to see is that the NZ Flickr community has been hard at working tagging, commenting, and sharing back. My two favourite bits of feedback so far are from Br3nda, who posted a contemporary image of Cuba Street to a photo of the 'Old Shebang' and G.I. Folk who mixed the set of WWI parade photos into this vid:

National Library NZ on The Commons

As soon as we heard about The Commons on Flickr in January this year, we were keen to be involved. And now we're super happy to announce that the National Library of New Zealand is the newest member of The Commons!

The announcement was made by Flickr's George Oates during her keynote address at the National Digital Forum conference this morning. George is the guiding force behind The Commons, and we're very happy to be working with her on this.

We've started with 120 images. We're looking forward to seeing what happens. We'll post a progress report in about a week. But for now - go check us out!

As a sign of my complete commitment to my job, I was videoed by George talking about the launch today - check out her sweet suxteen blog post (thanks Seb)

First Digital New Zealand products go live

On 11 November Digital New Zealand pushed out its first two products – the Coming Home Memory Maker http://remix.digitalnz.org and the Coming Home search and search widget (swivel your eyes right to see the widget, find the full search experience here http://search.digitalnz.org/cominghome).

A bit of Digital NZ background

Digital New Zealand is a programme of work, funded through the Digital Content Strategy and led by a team in the National Library in collaboration with digital content providers.

In a short sentence, Digital NZ aims to help make New Zealand digital content easy to find, use and share. There’s some introductory info here; the full site goes live in early December.

About the Memory Maker

The Memory Maker is an interactive online video remix tool, that lets people mix historical film footage, digitised photographs and objects, and music/audio clips into a 60 second video that can then be saved, shared, and embedded on other sites. Here's a sample from the site:



The Memory Maker uses Ideum’s EditorOne video editor. The focus for Digital NZ was not on building the technology, but on working with content contributors to identify out of copyright material that could be released for re-use and sharing.

Members of the National Digital Forum worked with us to identify and solve problems around this (for example, the difference between copyright and moral rights, or whether/how content that has been released under a BY-NC-ND licence could be used in the tool).

About the Coming Home search and search widget

First up: the Coming Home search is a slice of a bigger pie. It's been built using a tool that we'll be releasing in early December. The tool will let anyone build and style a customised search using the Digital NZ API. The search will be hosted on the Digital NZ website and people will also be able to style a widget (just like the Coming Home one here) and grab the code to drop wherever they want.

We tackled search to test problems and solutions around finding NZ content online. A lot of content is buried in databases and the deep web, and not exposed to search engines. Over the past 15 weeks we've been frantically harvesting contributors' metadata, some through OAI-PMH, most by creating and scraping site maps. This has the positive side-effect of exposing more content to search engines.

If you go to the hosted search, you’ll see that we've built a faceted search interface. This demonstrates the power of great metadata and, we hope, will encourage content creators to focus on enhancing their own metadata. Closing the Digital NZ circle, the frameworks and advice we'll be providing are intended to help them to do this.

Here's the list of sites hosting the widget. If you'd like to use the Coming Home search widget, you can get the code here http://digitalnz.org

And for a consideration of the two tools from an education perspective, check out Sarah Jones' write-up on the MOE's Lunchbox blog.

Coming in December 2008

The Digital NZ site will be rolled out in its entirety next month. It will have sections for people wanting to contribute their metadata to the Digital NZ APIs, or wanting advice and guidance on digitisation and content creation. It will have a widget and application gallery, where people can customise, save and share their own search tools, and have a play with another application we're working on. There will also be a section for developers to learn about and access the Digital NZ APIs, and we’re very hopeful they'll build cool things and then share them through the site.

Keep an eye on this blog for updates – once Digital NZ is live we'll move the conversation over there.

And

We haven't done this development all by ourselves. We've been working with 3Months for the front end development, Boost for the design, and Codec for the backend development using agile development processes (scrum). They've been awesome. Once we've caught our breaths, we'll blog about this some more.