Digital Unification: Opportunities from a New Zealand Perspective Bill Macnaught National Librarian, New Zealand

Examples

Indigenous responsibilities

Reuniting collections

Exhibitions Opening of Va’aomanu. 2017 Opening of Boundless Love. 2017

Take time to take other people with you. Importantly, for Digital NZ, it took years of building up the idea and the service before it really took off as a critical component of the research process in NZ. It took years of trust to build up, starting with the easy relationships with friends and colleagues we know well, then cascading the evidence of the growing service to the more sceptical, the later adopters until we reached a critical mass. We didn't take that same approach we Asia Pacifica. We didn’t apply our own lesson learned. I think this kind of proposal still has a bright future. Of regional nodes of digital collections coming together to reflect shared experiences. From this point, a global digital cultural experience is natural and very achievable next step. In hindsight we should have taken more time to bring others along with us to ensure the offer was right. I still firmly believe that the people of our region would benefit from a digital content aggregation service, some I’m still interested in hearing from colleagues who are interested in progressing this further, at the right pace. One benefit we did get out of it was to develop the technology behind the search service, the API, into an open source offering, which can now be used by anyone wanting to aggregate collections, at any scale, for their customers. This technology, called Supplejack, has won the Library awards in the open source community, and we know it’s being used by libraries, archives, and businesses throughout the world. There was an innovation benefit we delivered to the world from our collaboration with the National Library of Singapore.

Unifying through web archives

Thoughts for discussion 1. Unifying documentary heritage requires compromise, persistence, and leadership. 2. Web archives provide a unique opportunity to unify documentary heritage of global diaspora communities.