NZCCM 2009 conference

David Ashman, our preservation manager attended the "NZCCM Annual Conference" at the St Columba Centre, Ponsonby, 22-23 October 2009.

David Reports:

As the current President of the NZCCM and a member of the organising committee, this years’ conference held more responsibility for me than in previous years. This proved to be both rewarding and time consuming.

From an organisers point of view the conference was an outstanding success. In my view, there were three elements that made this so:

1. a reliable, committed and enthusiastic organising committee that shared the load and took responsibility for getting tasks done;
2. a fabulous venue/location – the St Columba Centre on Vermont Street, with a wonderfully helpful and unflappable manager;
3. an eclectic range of speakers that included artists, curators, architects, managers and of course conservators.

The theme ‘Conservation In Public’ was inspired by the work of John Holden who released a publication last year called ‘It’s a material world: the importance of conservation and its place in the wider culture.’ You can also check out the video on you tube.

There were 14 presentations over one and half days, covering a wide variety of subject matter.

Catherine Smith, a conservator from Dunedin, was the first of our two keynote speakers. She gave us an overview of how conservation had grown up in New Zealand during the past 40 years. She challenged us to look forward by raising our profile and to demonstrate the value of conservation to a wider audience. This would require that we address some widely held misconceptions about our profession, low professional standing in some quarters and lack of representation at policy level. Whilst Catherine wasn’t offering solutions she was suggesting we look for opportunities to engage with the public and in particular supporting those in more remote areas who don’t have access to conservation services.

Dean Whiting talked abut the interconnectedness between communities, the past and conservators. He described how beneficial the development of community skills had been when working on conservation of marae. As with Catherine, he raised many questions and suggested we explore ways of working collaboratively alongside the communities that are concerned with the materials being cared for.

Phillipa Tocker, Executive Director of Museums Aotearoa, invited us (NZCCM) to work together to raise the profile of conservation as a core function.

Kate Roberts, whilst Manager of Service Delivery at Puke Ariki was involved in the design of three major exhibitions showcasing the history of Taranaki and displaying the collections of Puke Ariki. During this beautifully illustrated presentation she spoke of the challenges of engaging the local audience in their own troubled and complicated history.

Our other keynote speaker, John Holden, gave an hour long presentation that came to us via a video link from the UK. He made a call to action for us to engage with the public and politicians to tell them what we do, why we do it and why it is important. For too long conservation has been seen in narrow terms. Now is the time to make the case for conservation not just being about the objects and the past but also in its role of shaping values and creating the world of tomorrow.

In addition we had presentations that included, an art curator on the subject of “Arts knowing disintegration: Contemporary art and wilful decay”; an architect on “Issues of Authenticity in NZ Built Heritage Conservation”; an artist presenting from the front (without PowerPoint) in a very entertaining end to the first day on the subject of “B-Sides & Rarities; How to Look at the back of a Painting”. Conservators talked about their experiences in Antarctica; we heard about the treatment of a 19^th century paper globe, and about experiments using zinc alginate for the consolidation of dyed black phormium.

The message I took from this conference was that now is the time to forge ahead, building on the excellent work already begun, to tell the wider community what conservation is, why it is important and how we can work together to create a future shaped by our past.

So all in all an extremely full, interesting and inspiring conference augmented by an AGM, organised visits and the all important conference dinner.

I would like to say thank-you to Sue Cooper for her support and encouragement during the year of planning and organising and to the rest of the Lead Team and Jayne Gutry for supporting me and two members of my team to attend this conference.

Damen Joe, from the Preservation Unit, both attended the conference, here’s what Damen had to say:

I thought the variety of topics was great, and easy for me, as a relative new-comer, to understand what they were talking about. That was also balanced by some more technical talks and discussions, and John Reynolds' talk which was great to introduce a more lateral take on conservation practice.

Paper highlights were… Lizzie Meek's, Kate Robert's, Dean Whiting, Ute Larsen and Camilla Baskcomb, and John Reynolds… and more, I'm sure!

I really appreciated being able to see and hear from such a wide variety of speakers who had some interest in conserving cultural materials. Working in the library, primarily with paper means that my concept of conservation is somewhat limited. Hearing people talk about topics ranging from the Antarctic hut objects, to Museum practice, to the more technical piupiu talk, allowed me to see how the area of conservation is an extremely wide and continually innovative area to be in. This was evidenced by the questions after floor talks, which gave a sense of the community and willingness to share knowledge. While in some ways, (due to my inexperience), I was more of a spectator, I enjoyed participating in the conference, and look forward to continuing to learn more in the area.

Catherine Perry wrote

One of the highlights of the conference for me was the chance to go on a tour of the Auckland City Art Gallery building site with the architect and guilder foreman. It was interesting to hear the architect's ideas, and see the realities of how the old parts of the building are being married with the new. The tour was enhanced having heard a number of papers at the conference concerning architectural conservation. Whether you are conserving a book or a building, the concerns and challenges can be similar, just on a different scale. It was great to be able to get a glimpse into other areas of conservation, particularly architectural conservation.

National digital forum

Keziah Singleton, digital collections coordinator attended the National Digital Forum in Wellington on 23/24 November 2009

NDF stands for National Digital Forum - a coalition of museums, archives, art galleries, libraries and government departments working together to enhance electronic access to New Zealand’s culture and heritage.

The National Digital Forum runs an annual conference, bringing together people working with digital collections. The conference attendees primarily come from the GLAM sector (GLAM stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). This year’s NDF conference was held in Wellington, and had a record number of attendees.

I came away from the conference thinking about three key concepts: finding content; connecting content; and how technology could have a personality.

Finding Content

How we can make our digital content (like the photographs in Heritage Images Online) more easily found? One of the most important factors in finding information is content metadata. Content metadata is information like titles, creators, subjects and locations which in an ideal world would be attached to every digital object. Unfortunately there are plenty of objects out there with insufficient content metadata. One way to improve the metadata is to allow members of the wider community to add information about objects (a process similar to tagging). This is known as user-contributed metadata. Digital NZ presented a session about tools they are developing to allow user-contributed metadata to be added to their records. At the moment they are working on location data – providing a map where users can pinpoint locations associated with the object (and leave comments explaining why). If users add information to Digital NZ’s ACL-sourced records, we would have the option of importing that information back into our own databases.

Connecting Content

Another way to make our digital content more easily found is to improve the connections between our separate objects. This means finding ways to reduce the divisions and differences between all the databases, tools and portals we are producing. This concept generated a lot of discussion but no answers.

One suggestion was to improve the consistency of our policies and the way they are explained, especially around the ability to reuse content. At present most institutions lock their content down and publish a variety of statements restricting re-use – even though a lot of the content is actually in the public domain. Lewis Brown from Digital NZ called very passionately for a global change to all our policies on reuse, but other attendees disagreed (also passionately). There was however general agreement that we could all at least provide more plain English information about what exactly is permissable and what is not – and we could develop a consistent lexicon and iconography, so that users receive this information in a standard format.

Reflecting personality in technology

Daniel Incandela from the Indianapolis Museum of Art opened the conference with a call for us to allow our technology to “reflect a personality”. The museum’s website has a range of content produced by many of the museum staff – by engaging staff they give ‘personality’ to the site. They also aren’t afraid to try different ways of showing information about the museum and their collections – here’s one example. Daniel argued that institutions can be far too conservative and unwilling to take even small risks. He showed us some videos he made for the museum which at the time of filming seemed hugely risky, but now just seem like interesting videos!

Nina Simon from Museum 2.0 expanded on this theme, talking about the importance of creating a conversation with your audience – by all means ask questions, but it’s even more important to actually care about the answers! And we heard about the National Library of New Zealand’s experiments with Twitter. NLNZ use Twitter to send out ‘teaser’ tweets which link back to items in their digital collections. Another example of how taking a risk can engage audiences in new ways.

NDF 2009 was challenging but rewarding. Thanks ACL for sending me.