Topic: Kete Community Meeting Minutes
Topic type:
Minutes of the Kete Community Meeting held in Christchurch, 26 June 2012.
Kete Community Meeting, 26 June 2012
APNK HQ, Cavendish Rd, Christchurch
In attendance: Paul Sutherland (Christchurch City Libraries), Pat Mock (Waimakariri District Libraries), Jan Watts (Waimakariri District Libraries), Jo Ransom (Horowhenua Library Trust), Andy Robertson (National Library of New Zealand – APNK), Moata Tamaira, (National Library of New Zealand – APNK), Christine Nana via teleconference (Puke Ariki)
Apologies: Pippa Coard (Horowhenua Library Trust), Chris McClement (National Library of New Zealand – APNK)
Despite videoconferencing working perfectly in a test the day before technical difficulties prevented Christine Nana from attending in this way. She was able to teleconference in at a later point.
Meeting started with those attending making a ‘braindump’ of issues/discussion points for the day.
· Aesthetics of Kete
· Broaden the vendor/developer base
· Glitches/issues
· Development ideas/features
· Interconnecting between Kete – people & installs
· Slow/speed
· APNK Kete community
· Embedding Kete into our organisations
· Co-funding development
· Kete training resources
Intention for the day is to work through as many of these as possible.
There was discussion amongst attendees around what the ‘purpose’ of a Kete might be.
· Is it for everything?
· Specific projects
· All local history
What have we been doing with our Kete?
As Christchurch City Libraries’ (CCL) representative Paul Sutherland discussed how they have sourced community content in the past with a ‘photo hunt’ tied to Heritage Week celebrations. Another photo hunt, with content being uploaded to Kete, is planned for later this year.
· Customers brought in the physical photos
· Staff scanned the photos then sent them back
· Initial number of images was modest (around 100)
· Helped identify collections that customers had (a couple of which led to further donations of material)
· Placed the library in the minds of people as a place to donate/share their taonga
· Started with a ‘seeding’ version amongst staff
Waimakariri might be able to do a tie-in photo hunt at the same time as CCL leveraging the photo hunt as a way of promoting both Kete. With Selwyn and Hurunui as the other Canterbury Kete sites with a similar focus on local history, is there a possibility that the tie-in could be region-wide? Would need to approach those Kete admins to see if they’re interested.
Jo Ransom mentioned that Kete Horowhenua had had mobile digital days taking scanners and digital cameras to the people. Older people have a lot of treasures but not necessarily the desire to learn the technology required to share them digitally.
Pat Mock discussed the material she has been collecting about her suburb in Christchurch, Brooklands, which is red-zoned and will eventually cease to exist. Similarly Paul has some earthquake images from Kaiapoi that could go onto Kete Waimakariri. It seems likely they’ll collaborate and exchange material for each other’s Kete.
Jan Watts mentioned that some Kete Waimakariri content doesn’t appear to be feeding into DigitalNZ as it should. After a bit of on the spot searching this proved to be the case.
Christine Nana shared what’s been going on at Kete New Plymouth
· Mostly staff contributions
· Increasing amounts of content
· Viewed mainly as an information source
· Reasonable amount of staff buy-in
· Are looking to weed/delete some of the staff-created content
APNK have been upgrading all hosted Kete from 1.2 to 1.3 with only a few left to do. The larger Kete are the last to be done. APNK have also been working on creating Kete training resources which will cover both user and admin roles. The curriculum was shared with attendees.
What happens if/when?
Jo suggested an exercise where we each think of positives and negatives associated with the following hypotheticals. All suggestions made by attendees are listed.
Walter stops working on Kete
Positives
· New perspectives
· Leaves a void that people might step into
· More openess to non-open source elements
Negatives
· No one else knows how it works
· No one else wants to work on it
· There is no further development
· Development costs could increase
No enhancements or development work happens for 2 years/forever
Positives
· Data will stay where it is – information on Kete is still findable
· No relearning required – no new training resources required
Negatives
· Will become a relic/dinosaur that no one wants to use and community interest will be lost
Development continues in an ad hoc dollar-driven, funder driven manner as at present
Positives
· Organisations that have invested in Kete will continue to do that
· Developers needs are met
Negatives
· It just doesn’t get developed
· Kete design is less coherent
What else could we use if Kete dies?
Depending on the purpose of the Kete in question:
· Omeka
Everyone is “too busy” to contribute to developing/supporting/improving Kete
Positives
· Site will keep going in a business as usual manner
Negatives
· Nothing will happen
· No future developments
Whose job is it to “look after” Kete?
· National Library of New Zealand via APNK?
· National Library of New Zealand via DigitalNZ?
· The Kete Community?
Who has the most to risk?
· Kete with most items?
· Kete with biggest community engagement
DigitalNZ sets
Moata has been playing with a newly released feature of DigitalNZ that allows the curation of sets. She thinks this may be a useful promotional tool to highlight content particularly if Kete admins are looking to work together in collecting content along similar themes. She has created several “pan-APNK Kete” sets that illustrate this.
Kiwi Kids http://digitalnz.org/user_sets/343e98eee0fbdc12
I want to ride my bicycle http://digitalnz.org/user_sets/d38e73ef30f702f8
Couples http://digitalnz.org/user_sets/d38e73ef30f702f8
Snow days http://digitalnz.org/user_sets/d38e73ef30f702f8
Kete Community
Given the small number of attendees, it seems meetings might not be the best way to generate interest and discussion within the community.
As a lot of the Kete are administered by libraries it was proposed that a group comprising public library Kete people might be a good avenue to pursue in terms of discussing development (and shared funding), and promotion within library organisations.
For instance, would a national Kete ‘campaign’ to encourage contribution of community content be worthwhile? With a focus on Waitangi Day, WWI, Summer holidays, or “a day in the life” theme. Would a single promotion across library Kete nationally for a specific event or theme have more impact than libraries working alone?
In the interests of getting more buy-in and interest within organisations Jo proposed that there be a concerted effort to gather Kete case studies or success stories as a way of demonstrating the ongoing value of Kete as a resource that should be contributed to and grown.
Future Developments / Issues
The meeting looked at feedback provided by other Kete users on desired Kete developments. These came via the Kete website http://old.kete.net.nz/en/site/topics/show/322-kete-20-what-do-we-want-it-to-be
A number of issues reported by Puke Ariki and West Coast admins are things that will be configurable with the upgrade to 1.3.
The following were identified as possible developments for which a detailed specifications document could be produced and funding sourced accordingly –
· More intuitive navigation
· Add slideshow widget
· Edit image after upload
· Replace image
· Global editing of tags (selecting multiple items when adding tags)
· Single list or single submit when adding related items
· Double uploads (bug fix)
· Ability to add images within a topic that aren’t already Kete items
More work will be needed on teasing out the exact needs of the community before any developers can be approached to work on the above issues.
Actions
The following actions have been agreed to on the basis of what was discussed during the meeting.
· Set up a Kete Library Community List-serv (Andy)
· Create a document about the changes afforded by upgrade to 1.3, outlining the implications / added functionality for Kete admins and share with community (Paul)
· Investigate why some Kete Waimakariri material is being missed by DigitalNZ (Andy)
· Create short video describing CCL approach to collecting community content (Moata and Paul)
· Build resource of Kete case studies and/or webcasts (community via list-serv?)
· Collaboration with CCL around shared photo hunt for Kete Content ( Jan and Pat)
· Approach other Canterbury Kete re: involvement in region-wide promotion (Paul)
