old.kete.net.nz

Topic: Kete Community Day Notes - Monday 24th November 2008

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Topic

A summary of topics discussed at the Kete Community Day on 24th November 2008

Present

Gigi Kent, Mark Caunter, Rae McCormick and Smita Biswas from Hamilton Public Library
Katrina Baillie and Sam Minchin from Auckland Public
Paul Sutherland (CCL)
Jo Ransom (Horowhenua Library Trust and Kete)
Walter McGinnis and James Stradling (Katipo Communications)
Honiana Love, Robin McLaughlin and Maatakiri Te Ruki (Te Reo O Taranaki)
Christine Chambers (Rodney Libraries)
Lesley Utting (Carey Baptist College)

Monday started with a run down of the individual Kete projects:

Hamilton City Library

Hamilton City Library talked about their local Kete project, provided by The APN. So far their Kete has around 59 topics and 289 images and will be launched on December 15th. Smita Biswas from Hamilton also talked about some innovative new uses of Kete such as live-blogging from Hamilton's Christmas Parade and about how Hamilton is working to engage with community leaders and groups.

Smita also talked about a number of things which Hamilton City Libraries would like to see improved in Kete, including improved display of different media types and support or tutorials for a wider range of video formats. Issues around embedding media from different sources and the easy of use of various video formats were discussed. Paul Sutherland mentioned his team will provide tutorials covering what they have learnt.

Pūte Routiriata - Taranaki Māori Digital Archive

Pūte Routiriata - Taranaki Māori Digital Archive gave a background to their Te Reo O Taranaki project, explaining how the project will work to make available otherwise hidden content.

Honiana Love talked about how Te Reo O Taranaki will make use of Kete features such as privacy controls and extended fields to ensure Kete performs to their project's needs. Honiana also discussed the need to educate users of Kete concepts (item types, etc) and provide direction in order to collect information structured in a way that is useful for the project.

A number of possible enhancements to Kete were suggested including a way to represent hierarchical relationships between items, controlled vocabulary features and improvements to the way different media types are displayed.

Aotearoa People's Network

Aotearoa People's Network (APN) gave a brief overview of the greater APN project and about how APN is offering Kete to libraries.

Highlights were:

Kete currently provided to four APN libraries, examples shown
The first four instances as a learning experience in terms of how libraries are using Kete
The need for standard components specific to the APN roll-out, i.e. creative commons licenses, standard content, etc
APN providing more documentation around Kete and digitisation to recipient libraries
The basket list column feature to be in Kete 1.2 is a welcome improvement

APN also brought up a number of issues:

'Findability' - the ability to 'drill down' into content
Topic and basket relationship not necessarily clear
The need to 'lose the Librarian's hat' when thinking about Kete
Search also an issue in terms of expected behaviour - would like to see more options
A possibly APN specific Google Search indexing issue
Front page content - more needed

Auckland City Libraries

Auckland City Libraries talked about their Kete based project with the NZ Chinese Association - "Chinese Digital Community". Katrina Baillie gave a brief run-down of the project's progress and Walter McGinnis gave a demonstration of the site so far as well as some of the new features that will be present in Kete 1.2.

Walter McGinnis - Katipo Communications

Walter McGinnis then talked about possible new features in Kete 1.3 and 1.4, further features funded by ACL and an overview of new Kete sites:

A number of topics were then discussed by the group, including:

Google Search optimisation - Paul Sutherland suggested that Sitemap.org XML should be generated automatically to aid search engine indexing. Walter mentioned Kete's current use of robots.txt to aid indexing.
Jo Ransom asked about OCR text importing from various sources

Jo Ransom - Horowhenua Library Trust

Jo Ransom talked about Horowhenua Library Trust's Kete and Kete in general. Highlights were:

Site statistics from the HLT Kete
Mention of educational content available on old.kete.net.nz provided by HLT from a professional educator
Attendees at conference Jo presented at in Singapore were 'blown away' by Kete
Interest in joining and linking Kete instances together
Smita Biswas brought up promotion and asked how to give direction to Kete users. Jo mentioned how promotion was important for building community involvement. Also mentioned was the need to be cautious when introducing new features so as to not confuse existing site users.
'i-Kete' - social networking features that could be added