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Topic: Kete Community Day Notes - Tuesday 25th November 2008

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A summary of topics discussed at the Kete Community Day on 25th November 2008

Present

• Gigi Kent, Mark Caunter, Rae McCormick and Smita Biswas from Hamilton Public Library
• Katrina Baillie and Sam Minchin from Auckland Public
• Andy Robertson, Margaret Garland, John Truesdale from APN
• 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)
• Virginia Gow and Gordon Paynter (Digital NZ)

Andy Robertson from Aotearoa People's Network

Andy Robertson from APN gave a rundown of APN and how Kete fits into APN:

Gave some quick info of APN roll-out progress:

• 86 (?) of 160 target libraries now have APN access
• Positive feedback from libraries and library users
• Offering Kete to all recipient libraries
• Planned locations include Stewart Island and the Chathams
• Tools provided including A3 flatbed scanners, NAS (network attached storage), audio recorders, etc

Kete installations

• Four local authorities now have Kete installations: Hamilton, Waimakariri, Kawerau and New Plymouth (Puke Ariki)
• A number of other Kete's installed by APN, including: Digital NZ Kete, CCL's Kete, LIANZA Kete, etc
• The tools (scanner, etc) and instructions provided make collecting and uploading material to Kete easy for users of recipient groups
• 30 Kete funded, plus enhancement funding available (can fund enhancements based on concerns of recipient organisations)

Andy also brought up the need for communities receiving Kete installations to become active in the Kete - someone needs to drive community involvement. Jo Ransom mentioned the need the market Kete and 'embed' it in different sectors of the community in order to make it spread.

Andy then gave an overview of the technical infrastructure behind the APN Kete installations - namely a couple of Sun Solaris based systems (one production and one development), backup systems, 650 Gb disk space shared among installations, etc

A couple of points then came up during the discussion:

• Whether these is a need to give direction/UI hints to control data structure when users are adding data to Kete
• What file size/resolution is suitable for uploading - depends of context and different goals for different Kete installations
• Walter brought up the use of bulk upload techniques to get around slow file upload/browser upload limitations
• Paul Sutherland and Andy Robertson both mentioned their organisations have an interest in bulk upload and may do some individual work on this

Pronounciation of Kete

Maatakiri Te Ruki brought up the pronounciation of Kete - this could be improved by all of us - click here for a pronounciation guide

Virginia Gow from Digital New Zealand

Virginia Gow from Digital New Zealand then spoke about DNZ and how DNZ are using Kete:

DNZ is funded by the NZ Digital Strategy and aims to make more NZ digital content accessible. Virginia covered the basics of the DNZ (see here for associated information).

Highlights were:

• DNZ collects meta-data from content partners and makes this available via search and API
• DNZ allows users to build custom searches across content - links back to source
• Coming Home as "content exemplar"
• Memory Maker - facilitating remixing of digital content

She then explained how Kete fits into the DNZ picture:

• Kete users act as Digital New Zealand content partners - content from Kete installations can be harvested by DNZ
• DNZ has unique requirements when setting up Kete installations:
  • Meta-data needs to be configured correctly for discovery
  • Many more licenses made available
  • Added "No known copyright" public domain statement following the flickr commons model
  • Extended fields to ensure standard entry of data
    • Ensures consistent browsing experience
    • Kete also allows users to work with tags, unstructured data, etc

Gordon Paynter from Digital New Zealand

Gordon Paynter then talked about OAI-PMH - the protocol used by DNZ to harvest meta-data from content partners (i.e. Kete). OAI-PMH is a standards based protocol from the Open Archives Initiative. It was used by New Zealand universities for the NZ Research Project.

Te Papa and NZETC (NZ Electronic Text Centre) at Victoria University will be providing OAI-PMH compliant sources.

Kete now supports OAI-PMH which allows DNZ to harvest meta-data when it has been turned on and DNZ have been informed. Horowhenua Library Trust's Kete has OAI-PMH enabled and has been harvested as part of DNZ's Coming Home exemplar.

Gordon mentioned the need to improve support for OAI-PMH in Kete (fixing some minor record issues). Walter said this should be straight forward. Gordon also mentioned there is a need for a national standard for meta-data.

DNZ's OAI-PMH Harvester is from the Public Knowledge Project, which has subsequently been enhanced by DNZ. Gordon then gave a demonstration of how sources are added to the harvester.

Other things noted were:

• Only public records from Kete instances are harvested
• DNZ would like all Kete instances to participate by allowing DNZ to harvest their meta-data
• Issues for DNZ include needing more sources of information, and making it easier to establish the rights/licensing of information
• Benefits from the DNZ include improved 'findability' via their meta-data harvester and search mechanisms, assistance available from the DNZ advisory service and a free meta-data checkup when allowing DNZ to harvest your meta-data via OAI-PHM.

How to get DNZ to harvest your Kete's meta-data:

1. Get your Kete content licensing organised
2. Turn on OAI-PHM
3. Tell DNZ

Virginia and Gordon's slides can be seen in full here.

Here is a link to more information about rights and permissions used in the DigitalNZ Kete.

Walter McGinnis from Katipo Communications

Walter McGinnis talked about features coming in Kete versions 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4:

1.2 will include mainly features funded by Auckland City Libraries as part of their Chinese Digital Community project in association with the New Zealand Chinese Association (Auckland). A run down of features that will be become available in this releases is available here.

1.3 will likely include translation functionality (both UI and topic translation) - funded by Te Reo O Taranaki

1.4 will likely include contextual search functionality - funded by ACL

Walter also mentioned that the order of 1.3 and 1.4 is flexible.

Paul Sutherland from Christchurch City Libraries

Paul Sutherland then discussed his vision for 'Kete 2.0'. A summary is below.

Big questions about Kete:

• How Kete is different
• Usability
• Is Kete a repository?
• Is it part of a toolkit?

Interface

• Usability vs other common big name products, flickr et al
• Bulk editing
• Templates - should be easy to use like blogger/wordpress
• Widgets - Coming home for i.e. embedding code - Walter says already in place
• Image display/details - order of contents - display of images, etc
• Embedding between Ketes - embedding content from other sources, esp. Kete
• Embedding in and out in general
• Storage of large images and thumbnails
• Convert to standard formats FLV, MP3 always

Reuse

• Sitemap for search engines
• Matapihi/DNZ
• OAI-PHM in both directions
• Simple tools for importing - too hard
• Internal file metadata access aggregation - and making available for reuse - metadata in and out of files, digital cameras, etc

Searching & finding

• Hierarchical relationships - are they part of Kete?
• Controlled vocabulary
• Maori subject headings
• Field validation - enhanced
• Browse not search - I.e. sitemap - should be full hierarchical map, not search results with pagination
• It's hard to find stuff if you don't know what you're looking for

Paul's slides can be seen in full here.

Discussion about future enhancements

This lead to a series of discussions about future enhancements:

Walter mentioned that themes are available - and that some enhancements are more a matter of content than of functionality (e.g. more themes could be available if the community made them available or work was spent on creating more themes).

Mark Caunter from Hamilton asked if controlled vocabulary was a good idea given community usage of the software - Paul suggested controlled vocabulary functionality should be available as an option

Margaret Garland from APN asked about searching and mentioned that the current search functionality sometimes returns results that are not as the user expects - Walter explained that the search functionality is 'fuzzy' - e.g. it matches words with single character differences. Margaret asked whether the 'fuzzy' search functionality should be configurable via a setting

Jo Ransom from Horowhenua Library Trust asked if there needed to be two 'branches' of the Kete software - a community version and a controlled version for example. She also mentioned that Kete is very new software and more iterations/versions are needed.

Honiana Love from Te Reo O Taranaki said that Paul's vision for Kete 2.0 was in line with their concerns for future versions

Auckland City Libraries suggested the need for a high level of user customisation in future versions

John Truesdale from The National Library suggested that many questions being asked about Kete were philosophical in nature and that Kete is part of a larger thing.

Out of the conversation a couple of issues were raised:

• There is a need to consider philosophical questions about Kete - for instance: is it a repository?
• That formal and informal knowledge/information are not the same and Kete's role in these worlds should be considered
• That Kete "can't be all things to everybody"
• That libraries are responsible for storing content [added to Kete] and that the community treat Kete as a repository and therefore it is a repository
• That Kete exists in an 'ecosystem' of other software - what are companion pieces of software that compliment Kete?

Governance Structure

After lunch the meeting discussed the need for a governance structure of the Kete software.

After various discussions, a plan of action was agreed upon. Below is a summary.

1. An interim project team consisting of Jo Ransom, Paul Sutherland, Andy Robertson, Smita Biswas, a delegate from Te Reo O Taranaki and Sam Minchin will be formed.
2. The interim project team will be lead by a chairperson decided on at the first meeting. Until this time it will be chaired by Sam Minchin.
3. The interim project team will:
   1. Define a vision for a governance and legal structure
   2. Define the purpose of the governance board
   3. Consider the stewardship of the code (copyright, etc)
   4. Consider a funding model
   5. Develop a proposal with regard to structure for feedback prior to the next community meeting with an eye to ratification at the next community meeting
4. The next community meeting will be in around 6 months time
5. Walter will assist the governance group in setting up a mailing-list
6. Kete Community meetings will be every 6 months ideally and if possibly tie into another event/conference (e.g. NDF)
7. Governance group structure should be "lean and nimble"

Discussion of future features

Next the attendees took part in a discussion of features that they would like to be present in future versions.

A summary of the possible features discussed was provided by Jo Ransom and is included below: (person on the right is the one / agency who will lead the discussion and thinking, or will work on it in some other way.)

James Stradling

was the last to edit Kete Community Day Notes - Tuesday 25th November 2008

on Dec 5th, 2008 at 1:48 PM

James Stradling

created Kete Community Day Notes - Tuesday 25th November 2008

on Dec 1st, 2008 at 5:26 PM

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