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opening �up the collections

Image credit: Hajo Topzand. 1950s. [TEAL Short Solent Coral Route crew and passengers in launch with lei departing from Tahiti], PHO-2004-3510.7. Walsh Memorial Library, The Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT).

www.motat.org.nz

URLS�https://collection.motat.org.nz/objects/59

Tēnā koutou katoa.

Ko mangawhau te maunga, ko Waitematā te moana. Nō Tāmaki ahau. Ko Elmer tōku whanau. Ko Freya tōku ingoa.

Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

Kia ora I am Freya, I am the assistant librarian - pictorial at the Walsh Memorial Library, a special library with heritage collections at the Museum of Transport and Technology or MOTAT.

The Walsh Memorial Library opened in 1964, as a reference only aviation library space open to the public, engaging with research requests and providing access to an extensive collection of historical records, archives, and materials.

The library collections have since expanded to reflect MOTAT’s full collection which includes registry items and showcases stories of New Zealand’s unique history of innovation and technology.

In July of this year MOTAT launched a new collection online

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- a customisable and user-friendly digital platform powered through Vernon Browser – a site which syncs with our collection’s management software, Vernon CMS. This choice was made as MOTAT’s collections continue to grow, and with large increases in digitisation, our previous platform no longer met our needs.

I came into my current role in the Walsh Memorial Library near the end of this project, therefore though not directly involved in its setup, the implementation of Vernon Browser has changed the way I engage with the public day to day and highlighted to me how digital platform can open heritage institutions.

In this session I want to share with you the amazing work completed on this project by wider MOTAT staff, but especially the previous library and archives manager Philippa Robinson as well as both previous and current library staff.

Before I begin discussing this project, I wanted to share with you a story of a recent research request we received through Vernon Browser – because who doesn’t love a great library story.

I engaged with this request on a Sunday, when a researcher came into the library asking to listen to an oral history of his passed grandfathers. While setting up the recording, the researcher shared that he was a kiwi, who lived in London, and had only come back to NZ for a short trip for his grandmother’s funeral and was leaving the next day.

While here, his niece had been Googling his grandparents and up came a result of a record on MOTAT’s collection online of his grandfather’s Oral History. So, during his short trip the researcher found time to come in and have a listen.

Four hours later he had listened to his grandfather’s whole oral history, he had also cancelled his lunch plans with his mother and told her to make her to way to MOTAT, and she had also listened to the oral history.

What really stood out to me about this research request was what the researcher said as he was leaving - that though it was interesting listening to stories of his grandfathers’ childhood and life - the best part was just being able to hear his grandfather’s voice after 20 years.

I fully acknowledge I am a soppy person, but for me this story really highlights how having collections digitally viewable provides opportunities for whanau and communities to connect to their heritage that may not be otherwise accessible – or in the case of this story, they even know existed.

But, how did we get here? Today I’m going to break down the journey reporting on the update of our collections online into three areas.

First, challenges both with our existing platform eHive and the challenges of preparing our backend CMS for the online environment.

Second, needs – what we wanted for the look and feel of this platform with respect to user needs.

Thirdly, what have been the outcomes for increased community engagement in selecting Vernon Browser.

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challenges

Image credit: Municipality of Mascot. 07 Nov 1930. [Hand-painted scroll presented by the Municipality of Mascot on Oscar Garden's arrival in Sydney], MSS-2018-21.7. Walsh Memorial Library, The Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT).

www.motat.org.nz

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As I mentioned earlier with a growing collection and increase in digitisation – including large-scale library digitisation projects, eHives functionality began to restrict the way MOTAT staff and members of the public could access our collections. Key restrictions included:

The interface’s lack of advanced searchability

Though able to explore by jumping of points such as collection types; or keywords – Ehive had no advanced searchability, and no facet or filter functions. This reduced the ability for detailed searching.

Another aspect was the back-end restrictions to maintain eHive.

For MOTAT staff to update or add records to ehive it required manual import of records metadata onto the site.

This upload could occur every 6 weeks – At the time of the upgrade to Vernon Browser, due to the time, cost and effort of manual uploads, ehive was being updated only once every 6 months.

This resulted in out of date records on ehive and making us seem as an institution unresponsive to publics informs and new acquisitions.

As mentioned previously only 7% of MOTATs records were accessible meaning that ehive was not truly representative of MOTATs collections and restricted the publics ability to engage with unique taonga and heritage of Aotearoa’s innovation past.

These restrictions are some aspects why in 2017 the decision was made to update MOTAT’s collections online – to create a digital space which better reflected our collection; was user friendly to encourage engagement, and crucially – had efficient back end ability, including live real time updates.

BREATH BREAK

A few different collection online platforms were considered, with Vernon Browser taking the cake. As a system administered by Vernon, it syncs easily with our CMS and met MOTAT’s needs as a collection online for both registry and library items.

After two years of hard work in July this year Vernon Browser was live, with almost a third of our collections viewable online and growing day by day.

With the implementation of this new site came more challenges – especially around how to make 55 years of legacy collection records up to a standard that is accessible for the public.

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challenges: �data

Image credit: Makyla Curtis. 2017. Ihowā, ART-2017-10.5. Walsh Memorial Library, The Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT).

www.motat.org.nz

This challenge entailed a large amount of back of house data clean-up for library staff – from cleaning up set terms, moving sensitive information out of inappropriate fields, and ensuring certain types of data were stored in consistently.

A project led by the Manuscript and ephemera assistant librarian, Chelsea Renshaw was tackling clean up of library metadata within our CMS to ensure it was consistent and meet library needs of discovery and retrieval.

This project consisted of Chelsea removing inconsistencies within location aids; updating classifications of unclassified objects; and merging existing departments - which previously broke material into unnecessarily specific components. Such as the department of framed photos which referred to pictorial framed works at our offsite storage; and was separated from the prints department –material in our temperature-controlled store room in the library.

These two departments were merged into the newly created pictorial department - one of six new broader collection areas that better reflect the Walsh Memorial Libraries collections. And improve discovery both for library staff and the public through Vernon browser.

BREATHE BREAK

In terms of data clean-up, a big concern was the oral history collection. A large oral history project led by previous library staff Nina Whittaker and MOTAT’s oral historian, Megan Hutching, aimed to ensure private information of interviewees were not publicly viewable. This consisted of removing the oral history transcripts from public fields to private, but still searchable fields within our CMS and creating publicly viewable abstracts.

With the completion of this project it meant that for the first time our extensive oral history collection is searchable online.

And since the upgrade to Vernon Bowser – the oral history collection has seen the largest increase in engagement from diverse communities – ranging from whanau, such as the story I told you at the beginning, to a researcher who came into the library after finding a record through google of an oral history held at MOTAT of a World War Two navigator. With the research listening to this Oral History to try to trace the location of a crashed American fighter plane in the Solomon Islands, so that his friend who lived there could find the crashed aircraft and use the site to run tourist’s scuba dives on.

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needs

https://collection.motat.org.nz/explore

Image credit: Leo Hobbis et al. 1948 - 1953. Particle Accelerator [Cockcroft-Walton], 1989.21. The Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT).

www.motat.org.nz

Vernon Browser is still a work in progress, with large amounts of data still to be cleaned-up to make records fully accessible to the public.

As a customisable platform, since the beginning of this journey, library staff were able to consider what the needs of Vernon Browser would be going forward, in order to create a site which encouraged community interaction.

Within this section I will illustrate some of the needs considered, and demonstrate on Vernon Browser itself, how these have been met

First off, the interface itself

With the look and feel of Vernon Browser, it was important for this site to connect with MOTAT’s other digital platforms like our website or social media.

By including MOTAT branding and colours, Vernon Browser ties MOTAT’s digital spaces together and provide an easy to read and visually pleasing space – including for tamariki or people who are less digitally fluent.

Unique access pathways [STAY ON MAIN PAGE]

To assist in diversifying our audience, Vernon Browser also needed to be easily findable, and include engaging ways of accessing information.

With auto tagging– records on Vernon browser are searchable through search engines. Allowing for google to pull directly to Vernon Browser records – for example JEAN BATTENS LOG BOOK, [SEARCH JEAN BATTENS LOG BOOK] with the second record coming up linking direct to Vernon Browser.

Vernon Browser itself is also equipped with unique access points including: [SCROLL TO HIGHLGHTS]

Highlight pages - visual and easy to access highlights of collections, that provide an opportunity to showcase material the public may not be aware of – such as the HirstLens NZ collection [click on hirst] - the archive relating to Hirstlens NZ, an innovative contact lens company begun in Auckland in the 1940s by refugee Eugene Hirst.

Another unique access point is searching by colour [SCROLL TO COLOUR] which can easily lead you down a rabbit hole of weird, wonderful and brightly coloured aspects in MOTAT’s collections

Such as clicking on the colour seagreen

[CLICK ON SEAGREEN - THREE FROM LEFT]

which pulls records of seagreen Air New Zealand hobbit sleep masks;

[SCROLL TO sugar packets]

barley sugar packets and

[SCROLL TO PICS]

aerial photographs of Auckland

[CLICK BACK BUTTON – STAY ON SEARCH PAGE]

BREATHE BREAK

Advanced search ability

As mentioned earlier, one of the key restrictions of ehive was the lack of searchability, therefore on Vernon Browser there is ability to Boolean search [CLICK ON SEARCH BAR – mid screen]

As well as advanced search functions: [CLICK ON ADVANCED SEARCH]

Allowing for narrowing of searches using aspects such as collection type, maker or date.

Within the library through our cataloguing we create a lot of authority-controlled data, and this data is utilised on Vernon Browser to create more links between objects

For example, searching for library items [COLLECTION-top] which are

Books [COLLECTION TYPE]

Published between 1960 – 1990 [DATE]

With digitised images [SEARCH FOR BOOK]

With the advanced searching there are also options for faceted or filter searching – allowing for further refining

Creating the ability to only looking at books published in Auckland [CLICK ON AUCKLAND PLACE OF PUBLISH]

Or back to the colours, able to see only green books [CLICK ON GREEN BOOK]

Related objects

Vernon Browser also can connect related or member items –allowing the public to explore whole stories between registry and library collections

As demonstrated by records such as the Beechcraft Kansan aircraft [SEARCH FOR BEECH KANSAN and digi] used by New Zealand Aerial Mapping

Which connects to related photograph albums taken by NZ Aerial mapping [SCROLL TO ALBUM – bottom]

Or the Beech Kansan’s journey log [CLICK ON LOG BOOK]

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outcomes

Image credit: D. C. Gillanders. 1928. Break-in: the official journal of the New Zealand association of radio transmitters, 03-2555. Walsh Memorial Library, The Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT).

www.motat.org.nz

I’m now going to step you through some of the outcomes relating to community engagement from the upgrade of our collections online, which have been able to enhance our collection management practices, and how we as kaitiaki share our collections.

I’ve already introduced some of the types of material we hold. The fragile and unique nature of our collections have meant that we have been able to make digital surrogates available.

Thereby assisting in preservation by reducing the amount objects are handled, and keeping them in a stable, temperature-controlled environment.

I look after the Pictorial collections, and this has been a great way to care for some of the collections with the nasty vinegar syndrome – when acetate bases on negatives begin to deteriorate.

It’s good to add in here though that the originals are still fully accessible to the public.

The increasing ease with which we’ve been making digital surrogates available has also meant new audiences have been accessing our collections. We can expose our holding to increasingly national and international audiences.

We’ve even had a request all the way from Switzerland for inclusion of an image in an exhibition.

By opening our collections up through this digital platform no longer is access to our collections narrowed to Auckland based people with the time and availability to come into the library space.

Instead the updated collections online have provided more agency to diverse communities to participate in their own heritage.

With abilities to create favourite lists or leave comments - conversations are opened between library staff and the public, providing opportunity for communities to curate their own heritage.

An aspect also reflected with MOTAT as a recent content partner of Digital NZ.

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outcomes

Image credit: D. C. Gillanders. 1928. Break-in: the official journal of the New Zealand association of radio transmitters, 03-2555. Walsh Memorial Library, The Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT).

www.motat.org.nz

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conclusion

Image credit: 1970s. Live Days : general view, 03-2685. Walsh Memorial Library, The Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT).

www.motat.org.nz