“Rising Dragons, Soaring Bananas” International Conference

Henry Liu from Mt Roskill Community Library attended Going Bananas, a yearly international conference organised by New Zealand Chinese Association (NZCA), which was set up in 1935. This year, the conference title was Rising Dragons, Soaring Bananas, and was held by NZCA in association with ISSCO (the International Society for the Studies of Chinese Overseas).

Differing from the three previous conferences, Rising Dragons, Soaring Bananas had a Community Session and an ISSCO Breakout Session running at the same time.

About 350 representatives from different places around New Zealand, China, Singapore, Australia, Fiji, Canada and United States attended the meeting. Auckland City Libraries sent her eight staff to attend.

Sam Minchin, Service Delivery Manager – online, gave a presentation at the Community session on the first afternoon to launch the Chinese Digital Community, which enormously raised audience interest. The Chinese Digital Community contains topics (i.e. articles, stories), photos, documents, videos, audios and web links, and is expected to grow and evolve over time as people add to it.

It was designed to preserve the heritage of the Chinese living in New Zealand, and is for anyone and everyone who's interested in sharing information about what it means to be Chinese.

"We hope the site will provide future generations with better, faster and easier access to information that houses the memories of those who have contributed deeply to the building of this nation," says Kai Luey, Chairman, NZ Chinese Association.

On the second morning’s seminar, “Using Chinese Communities Online”, Yan Wang and Kah-Bee Chow demonstrated in groups how to use the site and helped attendees to upload their photos, family history documents, etc.. According to the observation on the Chinese Digital Community website, the number of documents, topics and images added after Sam’s presentation doubled, tripled and even quadrupled. The number is still going up steadily.

The conference lasted for two days from 18-19 July in Owen G Glenn Building, Business School, The University of Auckland. You can view the conference papers and presentation by speakers, online.