Year: 2008

DigitalNZ – API access to New Zealand collections launches

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date December 2, 2008
4 Comments on DigitalNZ – API access to New Zealand collections launches

One of the best things I saw at the National Digital Forum in Auckland last week was DigitalNZ. Being a Kiwi myself, I am immensely proud that New Zealand has leapt forward and produced a federated collection product that aggregates and then allows access through a web interface and an open API. That it has brought together very disparate partners is also very impressive.

I spoke to the team behind the very choice project who are based at the National Library of New Zealand – Virginia Gow ,Courtney Johnston, Gordon Paynter, Fiona Rigby, Lewis Brown, Andy Neale, Karen Rollitt – who all contributed the following interview.

Tell me about the genesis of DigitalNZ?

Digital New Zealand Ā-Tihi o Aotearoa is an ongoing programme that is in implementation project phase. It emerged as a response to the difficulties many New Zealand public and community organisations faced in making their content visible to New Zealanders amid the swell of international content available on the Web. In 2007 it received four years government funding as a flagship action of the New Zealand Digital Content Strategy, Creating a Digital New Zealand.

The Wave 1 implementation project has been led by National Library but is a very collaborative project. We’ve got representatives from education, culture and heritage, broadcasting, geospatial information, Te Puni Kokiri (Ministry of Māori Development) and the National Digital Forum on our Steering Committee. The project began earlier this year and then really ramped up in June 2009. The project aimed to set up the ongoing infrastructure for the programme and to deliver with exemplars that demonstrate what is possible when there is concerted work to improve access and discovery of New Zealand content.

We’ve taken a test lab approach – we’ve identified and worked on potential solutions to some of the many issues that prevent access, use and discovery of New Zealand digital content. Some of these areas have included licensing, metadata quality, improving access to advice around standards, formats and protocols and the development of a draft framework to help organisations prioritise content for digitisation.

It is important to us that DigitalNZ isn’t seen as ‘just another website’.

We are working with New Zealand organisations, communities and individuals to aggregate their metadata and help make hard to find content available for discovery, use and re-use in unique ways. We’ve developed three innovative tools that are ‘powered by Digital New Zealand’ and fuelled by the metadata and content from the many different content providers that we’re working with. 

DigitalNZ is made up of:

 1) A customisable search builder lets people design their own search widget to find the type of New Zealand content they are interested in – be it antique cars, pavlova or moustaches! People can flavour it and embed it on their own blogs and websites. We developed this to show new ways for people to discover and interact with New Zealand content and we especially wanted people to use the tools how and where they wanted.  
2) New Zealanders can craft their own commemoration of the 90th Anniversary of the Armistice using the Memory Maker – a tool that lets people remix film, photographs, objects and audio clips into a short video that can then be saved, shared, and embedded. This example is helping us show what is possible when you can free the licensing of publicly available content for reuse and remixing.  
3) We’re using ‘API Magic’. We’ve developed an open API that enables developers to connect the metadata that fuels DigitalNZ with other data sources, enabling new digital experiences, knowledge, and understanding.

How did you manage to get each of the content owners to buy in to the project?

By lots and lots of talking, visiting, sharing and blogging!

We started by identifying and contacting a wide range of New Zealand content providers, building also on our existing professional networks and contacts as far as possible because time wasn’t a luxury on this project.

It was hard work because DigitalNZ was a completely abstract concept for many content providers until a few weeks ago. We didn’t even have that snazzy diagram explaining how it all fits together until we had gone live!

[That’s a cool magic hat!]

So we basically just committed ourselves to communicating (and communicating and communicating), being open with our information and honest about what we did and didn’t know each step of the way, and helping people out so it was as easy as possible for them to participate.

Content providers took different amounts of time to reach an ‘ah ha’ moment with us and to realise what this could potentially mean for them – “OK, so you’re like a giant free referral engine to my content” or “So I could basically use your tools to make my own search box for my site”. At the end of the day we aren’t doing this for us!

Face-to-face meetings were the most effective, as it meant we could just chat with people about the issues and problems we are all trying to solve. It was a great way for us to learn about people’s content too.

But we also glued ourselves to our inboxes and set up a private DigitalNZ content blog so content providers could talk directly to each other. The discussion of issues around licensing, for example, was great because it meant we didn’t have to do all the thinking and talking!

The private blog also allowed us to share sneak previews of wireframes and functionality that helped us build a better picture of what we were doing.

In the end we actually got more content providers to take a leap of faith with us than we were able to process in time for launch. There is a real commitment out there to increasing access to and use of New Zealand content. We just convinced people to take it a step further and try something new.

What technologies are you using behind the scenes?

The DigitalNZ Harvesting model is best described by this diagram that our Technical Architect Gordon Paynter has whipped up.

We started out hoping that OAI-PMH would be the best way to harvest. However, very few organisations are set up to do this and it was clear that we had to work on something easier. So we then worked setting up harvesters using XML Sitemaps and also for RSS feeds. The majority of our content contributors are using the XML sitemaps option.

The DigitalNZ system is in 3 parts: a backend, a metadata store and a front end. The backend harvester is written in Java and some legacy PHP (based on the open-source PKP Harvester project). The metadata store is in MySQL, using Solr to power the search. The front end, including the API, the website, widgets and so on, are in Ruby on Rails. The also uses the open source Radiant CMS.

We’ve also set up a DigitalNZ Kete for organisations to upload any content that doesn’t have a home elsewhere on the web. Kete (basket in Māori) is an open source community repository system (built on Ruby on Rails) that we can harvest using OAI-PMH.

One of the great things about Kete is the built-in Creative Commons licensing structure – our ‘technology’ (in the sense of tools) for dealing with the issue of uncertainty around what people can and can’t do with content.

We extended this by adding in the “No known copyright restrictions” statement as well – taking a leaf out of the wonderful Flickr Commons book. A number of Aotearoa People’s Network Libraries are using Kete to gather community treasures and we are including that content in DigitalNZ as it comes online.

The Memory Maker uses the Ideum Editor One which we have sitting on our server in Christchurch, New Zealand.

We’ve worked with three vendors (Boost New Media, 3Months and Codec) and have taken an agile development approach using Scrum. This was very successful way of working and it enabled us to complete our development with in 16 weeks from go to whoa. It was fast, furious and an absolute blast!

 The search widget is really great – how are you expecting this to be used?

We think that it is going to be of really useful in education for teachers to use to define project resources or for kids to build into their own online projects. We also see application for libraries, museums and other organisations to use for setting up ‘find more’ options relating to specific exhibitions, topics or events. We’ve also had feedback from some content providers that they are considering it as their primary website search. We’re pretty delighted with that! We also really hope to see some unexpected uses as well.

 Tell me something about the Memory Maker?

We think that these guys can tell you about the Memory Maker much better than us!

We ran the ‘Coming Home’ Memory Maker campaign to demonstrate what is possible when content providers ‘free up’ selected public cultural content for people to remix with permission; and used the remix editor to deliver the content to users. We filled the Memory Maker with content relating to celebrations for the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day on 11 November 2008. A number of National Digital Forum partners provided the content and the Auckland War Memorial Museum has been the wonderful host.

We’ve been delighted to watch as schools and other web users make their own commemorative videos out of New Zealand digital content – not by stealing it, but because they know they are allowed to and we made it easy for them.

Our detailed case study of the Memory Maker project describes all of the details and issues we worked with.
We’re hoping to work with others on new remix campaigns in the future.

What sorts of mashups are you hoping other developers will build using the API?

We’ve got a couple already – check out the Widget Gallery for Yahoo Pipes mashups of the DigitalNZ search combined Flickr and also a headlines search of StuffNZ (NZ website of newspapers and online news) over the DigitalNZ metadata.

We don’t have any specific expectations – just excitement about what is possible. We want to be surprised by what people come up with. The whole point of putting the open API out there is to drive others to make new, exciting things with the content that we’ve made available. DigitalNZ wants to share the love!

Go ahead and make us and our content providers happy.

We’re hoping that when people develop new things they’ll let us know so that we can make it available to others through the widget gallery and share it with others.

What other kind of work is DigitalNZ doing?

Another very important aspect of DigitalNZ is that we want to work with NZ organisations to improve understanding and knowledge about how to make their content, easier to find, share and use. One of the issues that we’ve come up against was metadata quality. The search tool has shown that search results can only be as good as the quality of the metadata that goes in. Working with people to improve their metadata will make the API stronger and also the discovery experiences for people.

The Contributors’ section of the site provides guidance on how to participate in DigitalNZ as well as good practice advice on content creation and management. The good practices guide are being developed across all aspects of the digital content lifecycle: through selecting to creating, managing, discovering, using and reusing (including licensing) as well as preservation. We’re interested in hearing from people that might be able to share expertise and perhaps help build up the material on the site.

We’re also working on an advisory service that will provide support and guidance across the spectrum of content creation and management issues that organisations are facing. This will be developed further over 2009 and we hope to include information, training and development, peer support, discussion forums, as well as draw on the knowledge of collective experience and wisdom out there.

Go and take a look at DigitalNZ!

Young people & museums

NMC Horizon.au Technology Report for Aus/NZ is released

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date December 2, 2008

Earlier this year the Horizon New Media Consortium convened in Australia to develop up a Horizon report specifically for the local education space.

The report, detailing six technologies in the education sector to watch, has been released.

Here’s a snippet – but I encourage you to read and then send around. Remember these are technologies that are yet to ‘jump the chasm’ so there will be some contestation of the findings (there certainly was in the development meetings!).

We find ready examples of established use on campuses of the two technologies that appear on the nearest adoption horizon, virtual worlds & other immersive digital environments and cloud- based applications. Those in the mid-term horizon, geolocation and alternative input devices, are are already commonly in use in the consumer world, and educational examples are not difficult to find on campuses working on the leading edge of technology. As would be expected, the furthest horizon contains the two topics that have been least adopted: deep tagging and next-generation mobile. Even in this horizon, examples of campus use do exist, although they tend to be in the early stages of development.

Go and read the report (PDF)!

Collection databases Young people & museums

Light reading – two totally different audiences: researchers and young people

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date November 28, 2008

Two interesting pieces of reading for those of you who have to spend time on public transport.

First from the Research Information Network in the UK comes a report that looks at the need of academic researchers in discovering the content of museum collections using online databases. Not surprisingly “their most important wish is that online access to museum databases to be provided as quickly as possible, even if the records are imperfect or incomplete”. Read the report.

Second, and covering a totally different audience, is the long awaited report from the Macarthur Foundation on Digital Youth. This was a major piece of research involving a lot of different research teams and the final report is really quite excellent. If you are time poor then skip straight to the summary white paper (PDF).

Otherwise take the time and read the full report. I’d direct F&N readers immediately to the chapter entitled Media Ecologies. This chapter is particularly important because it reminds us that even the same young person can use different digital media in widely differing ways, and with different proficiencies. This chapter proposes that there is a distinct difference between use of digital media that are friendship-based versus those that are interest-based (in the minority). Often in the cultural sector we conflate these two groups or expect that the friendship-based users are actually interested in our interest-based content.

Interactive Media

Boxee – really social media

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date November 28, 2008

One of the projects I mentioned in one of my workshops at the NZ National Digital Forum was Boxee. I was alerted to Boxee by Shannon O’Neill only a night or two ago via his RSS.

Boxee is a good example of the important social side of media use and consumption. It is also a good example of connected media.

At the base level your media files are indexed and connected to their cover art, lyrics, reviews and other metadata from across the web. More importantly, though, the service enables the social element of synchronous watching/listening with your friends. You can alert you friends when you are watching or listening to something, and you can simultaneously watch/listen with your friends.

This ‘sociality’ gets to the core of what media is about – it is about content and the social relationships and meanings that form around that content.

Take a quick look at their promotional video –

open content

Crossing the 1000 in the Commons

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date November 25, 2008
7 Comments on Crossing the 1000 in the Commons

A little while back we crossed the 1000 image mark for our uploads of historic images to the Commons on Flickr.

We’ve just started adding a third distinct collection of images – the Phillips Collection (which joins the Tyrrell and Clyde collections). The Phillips Collection is another set of glass plate negatives taken between 1890 and 1920. We are uploading roughly 10 Phillips images a week and 25 Tyrrell images a week with Clyde images going up less regularly.

Paula Bray, our Image Services Manager writes

This collection of approximately 200 glass plate negatives appears to have be made by a photographic studio from around 1890 through to 1920. Some of the subjects in this collection include portraits, costumes, recreational activities, fencing, women boxing, the Blue Mountains and city scenes. The collection was donated by Raymond Phillips and, although not confirmed, it may be his father who was the photographer. There are some clues we have come across whilst scanning this collection that may prove this but we might let you discover these as we post more over the coming weeks. There are many people featured in these images that reappear in other scenes. Perhaps they were family members.

Paula will be delivering a paper at Museums and the Web 2009 looking specifically at the impact of the Commons on the Powerhouse as well as on image sales. Early evidence suggests that image sales are actually up on last year for the very same images that we have placed in the Commons.

Geotagging & mapping Mobile

ABC Innovation’s Sidetracks – a mobile heritage pilot featuring some Powerhouse content

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date November 11, 2008
3 Comments on ABC Innovation’s Sidetracks – a mobile heritage pilot featuring some Powerhouse content

ABC Innovation has launched their Sydney Sidetracks project.

This is a lovely experiment in developing a mobile heritage application which takes some of the archives of ABC TV and Radio and combines them with static imagery and research from the cultural heritage partners – Powerhouse Museum, State Library of NSW, National Film & Sound Archives, Museum of Contemporary Art, the City of Sydney Archives, and the Dictionary of Sydney.

ABC have sensibly hedged their bets so the diverse content is available as an interactive website with a simple map interface, and as a multi-platform mobile Java application.

Whilst the mobile application is not yet location-aware, it does provide a simulation of the potential experience that awaits in a future version. The phone version can be ‘sideloaded‘ to a huge range of different devices. Being out and about with the content changes your experience of it greatly but suffice to say, mobile is still in a very immature phase – with significant usability issues to be overcome. Partially to get around these, a whole lot of the ABC Archives content can be downloaded, separately, to your phone to be accessed as podcasts.

Importantly for the promotion of Sidetracks, ABC Radio 702 is engaged with the project and will be driving listeners to the website (and hopefully the mobile application) to explore.

I conducted a short interview with Sarah Barns, the producer and researcher behind the project, who worked with ABC innovation.

Q: Sidetracks (re)tells some great stories of our city. How did you choose which stories to tell?

Sarah Barns: I was pretty motivated in my selection by finding archival material that had been recorded on location. The original focus for my research was on ambient audio recordings, and embedding them in whatever ways possible (whether that’s mobile, ipod, hypertag, short-wave radio or whatever..!) to enable the listener to tune in to the sounds of another era while looking at a contemporary environment. Obviously there’s a lot of historical tours and commentary and podtours and the like coming out now, and my interest has been to try to decipher what can be made of actuality audio recordings for such purposes. While additional formats were later included in Sidetracks, I remained pretty focused on material that could be uncovered in a very site-specific way.

I also have quite an interest in ‘lost places’, whether demolished buildings or radically transformed environments, and using archives to excavate an area – an archeology of recorded action, rather than surviving artefact – which obviously becomes more potent the more a place has changed. So a lot of the stories are based on those two premises – ambience and disappearance.

I love this quote from Alec Morgan (Hunt Angels, et al) when he says

“It is all too easy to fall into the trap of believing that the cultural essence of Sydney lies embedded in its architecture. It’s structures, buildings and monuments. I find this method of interpreting the past, this reliance on concrete and real estate, a faulty and unsound foundation upon which to build an understanding of the forces that shape the distinctiveness of the city…I sense that there is another city lying undiscovered beneath these bloated, familiar carcasses and that cultural interpretation by architecture is too impoverished to satisfy a secret desire to connect to something of Sydney’s past that is more elusive, more sensual, than a pile of bricks and mortar.” Alec Morgan (2004)

It’s a quote that marks out the imaginative potentiality of the ‘invisible’ terrain.

Q: I like it that these stories traverse multiple content pools – the ABC, NFSA, SLNSW, PHM, DoS etc. How important is the cross-silo approach to the project? How has it been working with these partners? Have you been able to greatly enrich the stories as a result of these partnerships? And, are there any stories that could not have been told *without* additional content?

SB: The cross-silo, cross-institutional aspect has been very important as a background motivation – eventually I’d hope to see a more site-specific approach to the way archival collections can be accessed, enabling an interested user to navigate the range of resource available on a given location. All possible in the world of geo-tagging, etc. But it’s technology developments like geo-tagging that have motivated this interrogation of the archives: if geo-tagging is now possible, if mobile phones and ipods mean we can take material with us, have it beamed down to us depending on where we are etc – then what kinds of archival material is best suited for such purposes and what stories can be unearthed? This is a focus of my doctoral research called Jaywalking Sydney, and commenced with my research of the National Film and Sound Archives collection in March 2007.

Initially this project going to launch with ABC-only content, which could then be expanded to include other collections. Starting with the ABC’s collection influenced the selection of a number of the points of interest (POIs), which in turn led to questions about what else was a available on these very specific locations. If I’d started with the PHM collection, for example, there’d be a different set of stories, I think. Having said that I was really motivated by the PHM exhibition on Pyrmont and its wonderful anecdotes about the area as a “place of ferny gullies” and the working conditions of the quarries etc! But the Dictionary of Sydney, for example, they have a very different curatorial approach and so obviously the stories that feature there will be very different.

Q: Sidetracks is impressive for its depth – even in its very first iteration. The ABC Archives must hold many hidden gems. What were the difficulties faced in unearthing them? How have you dealt with IP issues?

SB:I’ll start by saying that the ABC Archives were an absolute pleasure to work in and with – in terms of the super-duper people, the systems they have in place, and of course the amazing content. Difficulties included some frustrations around loss of audio for early TV footage (as this stuff gets dubbed over, the original audio has been lost in some instances), some minor cataloguing anomalies and yes, some rights issues.

Working with rights issues for the web is one thing (and that’s big enough) but for mobile its still pretty prohibitive trying to tackle re-purposing existing ABC content on this platform, and as the cross-platform spread still being worked out at the research stage I obviously had to play it pretty safe. The Sydney Stadium for example – a whole slew of infamous gigs there, but I wasn’t able to include this footage. Documentaries were also difficult (due to production components for mobile) and so I mostly had to stay clear of these. For the moment . . .

Q: Sidetracks is also part of your PhD research. Tell me a little bit about the overall PhD.

SB:The overall PhD is basically looking at this intersection between the emergence of situated technologies like 3G mobile phones and geo-spatial technologies on the one hand, and the history of the city on the other. I’m keen to interrogate the claims of enthusiasts such as Adam Greenfield et al that mobile phones can ‘improve the public spaces of the city’ by exploring the layers of public participation, conflict and change that lie beneath the streets – to connect with a longer history of how ‘new’ media technologies have shaped the urban experience.

And so rather than pursuing the opportunities of mobile phones etc for the sake of the mobile phone industry (!) I guess I’m interested in what the added element of site-specificity might add to way people not only interact with each other, but also with places. I’m thinking here of mobile phones as homing devices to discover the history of a place – in this instance, Sydney. And with a title like ‘Jaywalking‘, well, that gives me a bit of licence to get a bit distracted with all kinds of other interesting topics as well . . .

Q: It seems that you’ve sensibly hedged your bets by offering multiplatform delivery. What are your expectations around the uptake of the mobile app over the web version?

SB:History is an unusual area for mobile content – it’s not so mass market or young. I guess there is an expectation that given the extra steps involved in actually getting the app to your phone, it will have lower uptake. The ideal scenario is that you are (probably a tourist) in a location or area and are offered the chance to access some of this material when you’re there. That’s ideal, but the ABC is not quite there yet in terms of distribution options.

The ABC has also deliberately stayed away from GPS at present due to some potential consumer issues around data charges, they are playing it safe there as they don’t want a user being told something is free and then being stung by a $100 data fee. Not good! But that extra precaution also means you can access the mobile content on your mobile phone anywhere – home or at some of the locations featured, for example – which I expect will also limit the experience a bit, in that fewer people may actually travel to the locations to listen or watch the material. It will be interesting to see what the reaction is from listeners.

Q: I’ve noticed that you are inviting UGC. How do you think that this is going to work? Are there any precursors to this sort of hyperlocal storytelling in Sydney?

SB:Not that I know of…But I’m sure they’re out there, perhaps not so focused specifically on archives. It would be great if this UGC component manages to unearth some gems – I’m struck at times at how little there is of some locations or events available in the public sphere, given their prominence. It would be nice to build more freely available collections based on the principles of ‘public authoring’.

—

Sarah’s blog contains a number of detailed highlights of Sidetracks to get you started.

Go and dive in and check out Sydney Sidetracks.

We’ve also popped a little landing page on the Powerhouse site in case you want to look at the Powerhouse contributions. Many of the images used are from the Tyrrell Collection which you can grab from our contributions to the Commons on Flickr. I’ve created a set on Flickr that features these.

Interactive Media Social media

DIY museums on Not Quite Art Series 2 (ABC TV)

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date October 25, 2008
1 Comment on DIY museums on Not Quite Art Series 2 (ABC TV)

If you happen to live in Australia (or know someone who does), then you might be interested in the final episode of series 2 of Marcus Westbury’s Not Quite Art. This final episode is on ‘DIY museums’ and how cultural institutions are adapting to the digital environment. It screens on ABC TV on Tuesday night (october 28) at 10pm, and then is available for free download with the rest of the series and series 1 on the show website.

Marcus and I have known each other for nearly a decade now and his career to date has been about supporting and developing emerging Australian cultural work. He established the This Is Not Art annual festival, was the director of Next Wave in Melbourne, and is now working hard to convert Newcastle, 2 hours north of Sydney, from a former industrial town into a thriving creative space with flexible spaces for emerging artists of all persuasions.

What Marcus has done in the DIY Museums episode is look at how ‘memory institutions’ are dealing with the reality that they are no longer the sole arbiters of collective memory; nor are they necessarily well placed to collect the burgeoning diversity of contemporary culture and cultural expression. As one interviewee says “everything now is a niche, just the size of the niche differs” – and this poses enormous problems for those who job it is to collect. Fortunately, the same digital tools of production that are, in part driving this diversity, are also providing the means for others to collect and present – again, another challenge for established institutions.

Mobile QR codes

Some QR code clarifications

Post author By Seb Chan
Post date October 23, 2008
2 Comments on Some QR code clarifications

I’ve had several emails, tweets and general interest in more information about our QR code experiment so here’s some more information.

Firstly, it has to be said that the experiment was sub-optimal. We made mistakes – but I think that making mistakes in order to learn from them is something Australians (and museums) need to get a lot more comfortable with doing. I’ve outlined several of them already – the QR code was printed too small for low resolution cameras, and the URL to visit wasn’t optimised for mobile web browsers, etc. But does this, alone, explain the usage rates? I think not.

Secondly, it also needs to be said the campaign had a total cost of zero. We did not engage an ‘interactive agency’ (which is where some of the interest in our experiment has come from). The QR code was self generated and the idea of the experiment was to see what the actual take up of QR codes might be if completely umprompted.

Thirdly, the ‘incentive’ for bothering to use the QR code – free passes etc – may not have been great enough, especially if scanning the code the first time didn’t work for you.

Remembering that the Sydney Design 08 programme which contained the QR code had a run of 40,000 copies and was distributed widely across Sydney the ‘conversion’ rate of the experiment needs to be calculated in light of that – not just counting those who visited the ‘secret’ website after scanning the code.

Now it isn’t that simple of course – even someone with a QR capable phone with Sydney Design 08 programme in the hand needs is not necessarily going to bother scanning a code.

We are certainly going to do more experiments with QR codes – there is a lot of potential in them – and we are hoping that others will also make available the results of their trials. The sort of work the Tate is doing with their mobile/handheld wiki for the museum community is the kind of openness and knowledge sharing that needs to be more widespread.

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