Kete at My Language 2010

Editor's Notes

• #2: Thanks * intro * context * conference paper Thank you for such a warm introduction. What I would like to do is give a quick introduction to Kete plus a bit of context to help explain why Kete strikes a cord with the communities who are using it. I have written a fairly comprehensive conference paper and my approach here is to flick through a quick intro to Kete so that my colleague Claire Hall can take the mic and show you a Kete being used in the community indigenous language revitalisation work she is involved in.
• #3: Kete was developed in small town NZ … real small … see the race track.
• #4: But small is not a bad thing. Horowhenua Library Trust is a charitable trust providing library services to a District of 30,000 from 3 libraries. 85% of our funding comes from the local Council through rates. Our children leave for further education and employment. Our district is generally poorer, older and younger than NZ as whole. Its a popular destination for Wellington folk looking for a lifestyle retirement after busy careers in the big smoke. We had a large pool of willing and able volunteers who contributed thousands of hours to make Kete a really sucessful community project.
• #5: About a quarter of us identify as Maori, with Asians and Pacific Islanders about 3% each. This is different to NZ as a whole and way different to Auckland where 1/3 rd of our population lives. Auckland is roughly 20% Asian, 15% PI and 10% Maori with Europeans making up about 55%. 23% of our population were born overseas, this is about the same as Australia. More people identify as Maori with each census, increasingly multi-cultural society likely to continue growing, The renaissance of Maori culture, Acknowledge and celebrate other cultures Makes NZ richer and more interesting for us all
• #6: Kete Horowhenua is a digital library of images, documents, audio and video files which are about, collected and catalogued by the Horowhenua community, and is developed by Horowhenua Library Trust. Links can be made to web resources and the community are encouraged to write or add to written articles or topics, or to participate in discussion threads. Kete.net is an Open Source Project whereby other communities, throughout NZ and the world, are encouraged to download the code and fill their own Kete.
• #7: Kete is the Maori word for basket. We like that they are ‘honest’, practical items, woven from found materials, and that anyone can learn to weave one. We like that they are made from flax, which springs forth from Papatuanuku, the earth mother. We like the link between the flax and the weaver – the person who caressed and shaped the flax into a beautiful or useful object. We like that kete are usually given from 1 person to another, so linking people together, and that they are usually given to mark an occasion so there are stories that surround a kete. When a kete is used and taken from one occasion to another, the stories are being told and the history preserved. The Kete is an appropriate metaphor for our digital library, and the various types of material it contains. We dreamed of our country covered with local kete, so that users could search locally or extend their search to their neighbours, or even all kete. We wanted to build something which we could give away.
• #8: Kete is entirely web based – administrators and users Its 2.0 – so about active participation rather than being a passive observer. Wide range of features Kete Horowhenua aims to collect arts, cultural and historical material about the Horowhenua District, so ours is a geographical Kete But other Kete are built around a theme or subject, and other around a specific cultural group .. more about that later!like the Taranaki Reo project Claire will demonstrate shortly. Kete is Community built digital library - by the people and for the people The community of users decide the content – and upload material in any common file format
• #9: Kete contains a range of different records, including ITEMs and TOPICs. ITEMs are files uploaded and ‘catalogued’ in common language by Kete users. They may be in any common file format: images documents audio video web-links discussion comments Items may be stand alone, or LINKED together into meaningful clusters with a TOPIC. A Topic is like an encyclopedia entry about any subject, person, place, event or thing that someone wants to write about. Kete is an amalgam of Wikipedia, and Flickr, and YouTube and discussion lists – plus some other stuff
• #10: Lets take a look at a featured topic which illustrates how Kete works. This is Hector McDonald who was the first white man in the Horowhenua District. He came from Tasmania in the 1830s, was whaling for a bit, then a trader for the new settlement of Wellington in the 1840s, then starting an accommodation house and Cobb and Co coach station at Hokio – beach highway for the West Cost of North Island. His children were the first Europeans born in the District.
• #11: A wide variety of resources can be found in Kete for Hector from a range of different places. The main topic page is his official biography from the Dictionary of NZ Biography, Supplemented with information from primary resources: a photo from local historical society, genealogical information sourced from back of photo and the front of the family bible. .
• #12: Then one morning we found a discussion comment disputing the origins of the family
• #13: so the story of that research has been added from a rootsweb page – including a full family tree – and that contradicts the primary source material we were working from.
• #14: This screen snippet shows the use of hotlinks and tables to arrange the many Floras and Hectors and Rodericks in this family, and leads onto other resources:
• #15: like the electronic text centre which has digitised “My First 80 years”, the memoirs of a woman and her teenage daughter who were the first settlers in the new town of Levin. The book contains a section describing the McDonald’s and their “ handsome six-foot, sons who developed tuberculosis and died one by one.” In Kete, we are able to add links to excerpts from Maori Land court minutebooks and other documents, newspaper clippings, audio clips – all of which provide a richer picture.
• #16: The McDonald family has beautiful photographs of local Maori in the early decades of contact.
• #18: Kete has been really successful in our community, and we are proud of how many people are using Kete; this chart is counting each ip number as a unique visitor to the site for the month – getting about 6000 a month now – not bad for a District of 30,000 people!
• #19: The database has grown too – about 20,000 items now : comprising 13,400 images, 860 documents, 1,500 topics plus 100 web links, 100 audio files and a handful of video clips. Library staff create very little content now – almost entirely done by site users and volunteers. There is a thing called the 90 : 9 : 1 rule for interactive websites. For every 100 people using the site 90 will just look, 9 will do something minor – like add a tag, and 1 will actually bother to register and create content. In many ways I think Kete has been sucessful because its “ours” its local . Also, people find it easy to find stuff about people and places that they know – its strikes a personal cord and when they don’t find something they set out to be helpful by hunting around for stuff they might have around the place. This concept of 'people like us' is a key factor in getting 'buy in' from your community – the stuff has to be relevant.
• #20: Web 2.0 is NOT a silver bullet : launching a web 2.0 application like Kete is not a guaranteed way to engage with your target community. We learnt that we had to step back in order to avoid provider capture. There was a realisation that we were dominating this ‘community’ space with librarian-created content which, while generally of a high quality and gorgeous to look at, was actually quite intimidating to the average user who didn’t want to spoil it by editing or adding to it. This was exactly the opposite of what we were trying to achieve. We shifted into marketing mode instead : devising campaigns for specific sectors within the community and thinking hard about the “what’s in it for me” question for each group. Quality in a community repository is a tricky issue too – and you just have to let go. If you make it too hard to ‘play’ by imposing standards or barriers that restrict people they won’t participate. And not everything added to the site is worth keeping so who decides and how do you remove inoffensive but essentially unwanted content ? Your audience changes too with Web 2.0 and a large proportion of our audience is international. Is it still a service you can claim to be providing to your local community and does it matter? What is your local community in a borderless world?
• #21: Kete operates within a big picture - WSIS: World summit on Information society in 2001 : iinternational commitment to the info society for all, bridging digital divide, NZ National Digital Strategy: connections, confidence and content, NZ Digital Content Strategy : led by National library (wheel) Community Partnership fund _ seed funding for a bunch of new initiatives implementing the digital strategy – funded Kete Aotearoa Peoples Network Kaharoa – free internet in public libraries throughout NZ, Digital NZ – National Library again – unlocking NZs digital content and making it available
• #22: Kete is very relevant in the picture. APNK, funded from CPF, has funding for 30 community Kete, but non- APNK libraries are setting up Kete too. Penny Carnaby, New Zealand’s National Librarian , describes a country covered in Kete of 'deeply local' content (to quote your Kathryn Greenhill) , and all sitting within a National Digital Library of both formal and informal content.
• #23: This slide shows the 'work' that Digital NZ do – see the Kete sitting on the left there – informal, citizen content sitting alongside formal content. Digital NZ 'havests' or gathers together digital content from any number of repositories – including Kete – which means Kete searchers can get search results from throughout NZ – over 100 digital collections – about 20 of these are Kete sitting alongside big national collections.
• #24: Kete isn't our first open source project – back in 2000 HLT developed Koha, and open source integrated library management system. Kete was designed from the ground up on open standards and with a requirement that the content can be 'shared'. This shot is of our library catalogue and you can see the 'real' search results in the middle, sitting alongside digital content from kete Horowhenua on the top right and content from the 100 or so collections pulled together by Digital NZ – that is pretty cool :)
• #25: It works both ways – here Kete search results show print resources available in our library catalogue - and Digital NZ content again.
• #26: The first principle of the World Summit Information Society declaration is a desire for people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented information society for all. For digital technologies to become pervasive in our societies, breaking through the digital divide, they need to be relevant to people at a personal and local level. Its the old 'people like us' chestnut. Searchers need to find relevant content that resonates with them, providing real value to their lives and sense of being. Community and belonging are really, really important. This concept of community is especially relevant today, in an age where families, cultures and societies are torn apart everyday for a wide variety of reasons. Kete can be a gathering point for sharing traditional knowledge and history and experiences and memories. Refugees may have nothing of their culture except what they carry in their hearts and heads. I view history as being a cluster of points of view, a nebulous collection of differing truths. Imagine having a whole range of personal perspectives to sit beside the official authored version of Tiananmen Square, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan or the experiences ravaging Africa now. By the people for the people – not official or constructed memory;
• #27: Kete can be about any related subject matter, online virtual community – of any sort, recording and sharing traditional knowledge and history and events and memories, historical and contemporary too. Indigenous knowledge is crucially important: part and parcel of the culture and history of any local community. Globally, about 80% of the world's population rely on indigenous knowledge for medicinal needs, and 50% for food supply.
• #28: Libraries are well placed to lead development in this area: Stable in Government and bureacracy, Authoratative – we know what we are doing,
• #29: Kete was developed through grants in subsequent funding rounds from the National Digital Strategy : Community Partnership Fund. The last round funded 3 Kete projects and we all worked together with our developers Katipo Communications to maximise our development dollars.
• #30: Kete Horowhenua is totally open – everything can be seen and edited by everyone. At the other end of the spectrum is the Taranaki Reo project which is very private. And this example, Cuba Street Memory takes a mid point, where anyone can see but not edit, and moderation of comments is turned on.
• #31: Kete Hamilton is really strong on celebrating its ethnic diversity. Private baskets are used – 1 for each organsiation – essentially baskets within a Kete
• #32: Another basket within Kete Hamilton
• #33: The Auckland project created an online Chinese Community, including 'baskets' or sub-collections for specific families. This Kete features historical and contemporary material. Auckland co-funded Katipo to work on federated searching over a number of designated databases, and also the interface translation work.
• #34: The built in mechanism for creating new translations and the ability to choose right to left layouts, rather than left to right ,means that providing Kete in many languages is now possible. This is very important for the Arabic translations under development for the King Saud University in Saudi Arabia and the Dimmyatt public libraries in Egypt. The translation work that has been carried out already, the work curently being tested and the yet to be funded work to better support non-Latin search results are all signifiacnt achievements. Kete is on the cusp of becoming a truly useful tool for international and multi cultural use.
• #35: Te Reo o Taranaki Trust have addressed functions of particular interest to Maori. These include addressing the issue of various levels of access depending on Iwi affiliations etc, making Kete bi-lingual reflecting our 2 official languages, and building a Taranaki word list’ of words specific to the Taranaki region. I am absolutely delighted that aspects of Kete that are of particular concern to Maori are being developed by Maori.
• #36: This proverb was spoken by Tinirau of Wanganui. It is a plead to hold fast to our culture, for without language, without Mana (spirit), and without land, the essence of being a Maori would no longer exist, but be a skeleton which would not give justice to the full body of maoritanga (Maoridom).