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Project Completion report on Kete Horowhenua to DIA.

This report was submitted to DIA as required in terms of our Community Partnership Funding Agreement, and covers the term of the project: 01/07/06 - 30/06/07.

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Kete Horowhenua

Project Completion Report

1^st July 2007 – 30^th June 2007

prepared by Jo Ransom 31st July 2007.

Kete Horowhenua

Horowhenua Basket of Knowledge

Natasha Mackie

Local Government & Community Branch

Department of Internal Affairs

P.O Box 805

Wellington.

31^st July 2007.

Dear Natasha,

Horowhenua Library Trust is pleased to submit our Project Completion Report for the Kete Horowhenua project.

This leaves only the Evaluation Report to be submitted, which is due on 30^th November 2007.

Yours faithfully,

Joann Ransom.

Kete Project manager

Contents

13. Appendices

Screenshot evidence of database existence and extent.

Invoices for period April – June 2007

Minutes of Kete Governance Subcommittee meetings April – June.

1. Income and Expenditure Report.

Income and Expenditure 1^st July 2006 – 30^th June 2007

INCOME		whole dollars shown
DIA and HDC income	DIA	$90,833
	HDC	$10,000
	Creative Communities	$177	$101,010

Donations	Growers Association	$3000
	Rotary	$1500
	Stephen Hillars Trust	$6,700
	Speirs donation	$4,509	$15,709
Total Income	$116,719


EXPENDITURE
Software Development			$81,286
Digitising Material			$764
IT Equipment			$9,344
Stationery & Sundry			$1,101
Travel			$386
Web Server			$4,092
Web Hosting (not yet billed		$0.00
Salaries Admin			$6,213
Salaries Perm Staff			$32,938
Total Expenses	$136,127

Excess expenditure over Income	$19,407

Software development ran well over budget from an early stage, but prudent management of other budgets, delaying work that was not part of our contract with DIA and fundraising by the Kete Governance subcommittee limited the total overrun for the project to under $20,000, which the Library Trust have covered.

Invoices for the first 3 quarters have been supplied with previous quarterly reports; invoices for the last quarter (April 07 – June 07) are attached.

2. Project Deliverables.

Steady progress was made throughout the year on project deliverables; we over delivered on some and scraped through a bit late on others, but all were met.

Deliverable 1	Completed scoping document for open source available.	Due: 31/08/06 Delivered: 31/08/06
Deliverable 2	Software has been written and tested: Beta version released at software launch on 05/03/07. Launch of database: May 07.	Due: 31/12/06 Delivered: 5/03/07
Deliverable 3	Hardware and Network are set up.	Due: 31/12/06 Delivered: 31/12/06
Deliverable 4	Software is installed on webserver and ready for training.	Due: 30/01/07 Delivered: 20/02/07
Deliverable 5	5 people have been trained and are able to train volunteers.	Due: 28/02/07 Delivered: 05/03/07
Deliverable 6	20 volunteers are available to create digital content	Due: 28/02/07 Delivered: 28/02/07
Deliverable 7	15 volunteers are fully competent in creating digital content online	Due: 30/03/07 Delivered: 30/03/07
Deliverable 8	1000 photos, 10 biographies, 1 oral history, 2 local artists, 1 exhibition, 5 archive documents, 1 film recording and 1 sound recording have been loaded into the database.	Due: 30/03/07 Delivered: 05/03/07
Deliverable 9	30 contributor, 5 digital equipment and 3 staff manuals are written.	Due: 30/03/07 Delivered: 05/03/07
Deliverable 10	A further 10 collections have been digitised	Due: 31/05/07 Delivered: 31/05/07.
Deliverable 11	Database now has at least: 5000 photos 30 biographies 3 oral history 4 local artists 3 exhibitions 20 archive documents 5 film recordings 5 sound recordings loaded into the database.	Due: 30/06/07 Delivered 30/06/07: 10,488 photos 30 biographies ? oral histories* 51 local artists 3 exhibitions 630 archive docs 8 video 62 audio *Oral histories are included in the audio clips
Deliverable 12	Evaluation report is produced.	Due: 30/09/07

3. Community Benefit.

7pm One Thursday night in Levin library:

Librarian: Sir ……. The library is closed sorry

Elderly gentleman: I’ve come to give yer a hand.

Librarian: Oh great, on our Kete project?

Elderly gentleman: Yep – thought I should.

(Move to a computer)

Elderly gentleman: So whats this then?

Librarian: It’s a computer”

Elderly gentleman: And this thing – how does that work?

Librarian: It’s called a mouse. It helps you use the computer; it controls this cursor thing; see the arrow? When it changes to a hand you can click on something.

(After a few more minutes of tuition Librarian leaves elderly gentleman to get acquainted with computer).

Some minutes later:

Elderly gentleman: I want to make videos of the vintage farm machinery working and stick them on Kete. Its all learning, aye … can’t be that hard …. I’m a builder.

An hour and a half after entering the library that Thursday night, Charlie was ‘cataloguing’ photographs taken at the 2007 API show, of vintage farm machinery, supplying names of people and equipment, explaining the significance of the tests and demonstrations ….. on the live Kete site.

Charlie is the human face of Kete Horowhenua, and demonstrates in a nutshell what we have achieved in our community, in terms of making connections, building IT confidence and creating digital content. In turn, this also directly fulfils the goals of the National Digital Strategy : Community Partnership Fund.

There are many Kete success stories besides Charlie. We have nearly blind, 80 year old Roz who, though sadly unable to type anymore, still contributes so much by sharing who lived where and what was there and who to ring whenever we show her a photo.

There is the retired engineer, Leo, who is a whizz at photographing oversized photos and lace camisoles; Gus with the bedridden wife who indexes 50 year old newspapers into Kete night after night and pops in for ‘fresh news’ once a fortnight; the lovely modest quilting ladies who reluctantly allowed us to photograph their quilts which cause people to gasp when they find them on Kete; camera-mad Phil who seems to spend every weekend photographing Levin’s old buildings, street scenes and public art; 9 year old Connor who photographed every house in one of the town's oldest streets of ex-railway houses – including the pregnant cat sunning herself on the footpath; and Ernie with his fabulous sepia coloured photographs taken with a Brownie camera depicting ‘farming the hard way’ in the 30s and 40s.

It is this informal content and the dedication of a community that can only ever be harnessed at a local level, yet adds so much to the national store of content.

Identifying which people, and how many people, and how they have benefited from Kete is very difficult:

I can tell you about 30 people who have been working from home typing up minute books for Kete,

I can tell you that 10 people have regularly worked at the library every Thursday night for 10 months digitising photographs,

I can tell you that another 10 individuals and organisations work from home adding large amounts of material directly into Kete,

I can tell you about the Kuia whose korowai is on Kete, and whose mokopuna can see photos of her weaving it,

and about the taaniko panel with its beautiful story of what each portion represents,

I can tell you that Seniornet members feel so proud to have been a part of this wonderful, exciting innovative project: testing processes and screens, teaching others, creating digital content… (heard second hand from a conference attendee in Wellington),

I can tell you about the 70 year old who is desperate to learn how to use Vista because she wants to add her photos to Kete but her old PC was too slow,

and the elderly Foxtonian who paid for a whiz bang computer and scanner to house at Foxton Library rather than volunteers having to drive down to Levin,

I can tell you about the primary school that will have every senior student research and publish a local history topic in Kete in term 3,

And the College kids who sourced primary material from Kete for their year 12 research projects,

I can tell you about a family photo collection which is being reconstituted online from throughout New Zealand, after 40 years of fragmentation,

I can tell you that the Kete website had 224,000 hits in June,

From 1005 unique visitors,

From 43 different countries around the world.

but I can’t make a meaningful table showing how many of which people benefited in what way.

Levin is a retirement community. Retirement does not mean they have nothing of value left to contribute to society. Kete has attracted so much community support and labour because people know they are helping making something wonderful to leave behind, oftentimes with knowledge that only they have. Kete has contributed to developing a sense of self worth in individuals and pride in the town as news of Kete successes appear in the local paper.

Looking wider than our local community, Kete will benefit the nation in the context of the National Content Strategy; a sub-strategy of the National Digital Strategy. It is the government’s five-year vision for unlocking New Zealand’s stock of content and providing all New Zealanders with seamless, easy access to digital information. The Content Strategy has 3 goals with objectives and proposed actions for each; Kete slots directly into 2 of these:

Goal 1: Building digital foundations

Content important to New Zealand is easy to access, is protected, and kept safe for use by future generations.

Kete

Objectives

New Zealand’s digital content is visible, searchable and easily accessed.

Digital content significant to New Zealanders is preserved and protected.

Actions

International standards for content creation,digitisation and management of rights.

Content visible and easily accessible by storing it in interoperable, standards-based “digital warehouses”.

NZ content visible to the world

Across-sector strategy for the preservation of formal digital Federated content.

Review the institutional form of organisations involved in the preservation of, and public access to, film, video and sound content.

Support Creative Commons licence

Promote protection of intellectual and cultural property rights.

Open standards

Federated searching

Online

Creative Commons licence

Locked baskets

Goal 2. Unlocking Content

New Zealanders and New Zealand organisations are at the forefront of creating and sharing digital content.

Kete

Objectives

A content rich society where the creation, use and sharing of digital content reflects our cultures, languages, histories and identities.

A digitally literate and connected society, where all NZers are able to engage in creating, sharing and preserving digital content.

Actions

Nationwide digitisation programme.

Provide support and advice to communities on the standards and tools that enable creation and sharing of content.

Support the creation, sharing and preservation of digital content through a peoples’ network.

Kete code freely available to all.

Online community of Kete developers and users.

Content made by the people for the people.

Federated searching.

4. How we met the identified need.

In our application for this grant we explained how we knew there was a need for this project. The most evidence came from an Arts, Culture and Heritage audit carried out in 2005 which assessed the long term ‘safety’ of these resources for future generations.

The chief findings of that audit were:

There is a large amount of material in private hands.

About half may be given to public collections – but half never will.

Most of it is available for loan or copying.

Lots of information is in people’s heads.

Everyone knew someone else with more material and knowledge.

People really do care about arts, cultural and heritage resources.

Physical space is a real issue.

The Library Trust then undertook consultation with a number of focus groups to clarify and confirm the problems we had identified and to envisage ideal solutions for each sector: historians, genealogists, artists, students, researchers, librarians and council staff. We knew we could not solve all the problems but felt sure we could solve some. We needed to work out which problems to address and come up with an achievable solution.

We defined our objectives:

To get public collections accessible by getting them online.

To get private collections online too.

To get the stories out of people’s heads.

To include both historical and contemporary material.

To create a ‘virtual’ exhibition space for artists and craftspeople.

To inspire a workforce of volunteers.

Additionally, we knew the Historical Societies of the District were overwhelmed with the backlog of work to be done on their collections, with little money, expertise or money.

Well, we did it. We can put a tick by every single one of our objectives. We also managed to digitise the entire photograph collections of both the Horowhenua and Foxton Historical Societies.

5. Key learnings.

Community support for this project has been very high, as has interest from other communities both in New Zealand and offshore.

We have learnt that Kete is at the forefront of Web 2.0 initiatives in Libraries, and that Kete is very timely. Kete is a perfect fit in the National Digital Content Strategy, and we are excited at how this will pan out at a local level and the role Kete may have to play.

I am still adopting a wait and see attitude in some respects as to how the quality of the Kete content will develop. The content we have created and have guided the creation of is good, but it will be interesting to see whether ‘knowledge by the masses’ is as potentially useless and ‘dumbed down’ as social critics of Wikipedia warn it may be, once contribution rates pick up to a point where we can not personally advise and edit everything that gets contributed to Kete.

6. Evaluation.

The evaluation report is due on 30/09/07 and it will be submitted on or before that date.

7. Sustainability.

The Kete Governance Committee spent considerable time over a number of months on the issue of sustainability of the Kete project. We were concerned about ongoing funding for staffing and enhancements, in addition to the development budget overrun.

We have received numerous inquiries throughout the year about the Kete source code and when it will be ready for download. We have had to concentrate on finishing Kete Horowhenua; releasing the code was not one of our contract deliverables and therefore it had to be dropped.

We met with a business mentor with management experience developing, supporting and marketing software in Silicon Valley, USA. With his guidance we affirmed our original decision that the future of Kete is best served by releasing the code as an open source project.

An application was successfully made for a grant from the second round of Community partnership Funding to ‘package’ the code for release. The entire application was based on ensuring the sustainability of the Kete Project.

This funding will allow us to do the necessary work to release Kete 1.0 under the GNU General Public License (GPL) complete with:

A Configuration interface for easy download and installation.

A Skin module so each Kete installation can have a distinctive look – Kete Kapiti will look different from Kete Horowhenua.

An Import wizard to populate a new Kete with records drawn from a Past Perfect museum collection management system.

A old.kete.net.nz community for users and developers.

Horowhenua Library Trust is committed to supporting the spread and development of Kete and will be an active participant in the old.kete.net.nz forums along with offering advanced training programmes.

The Kete developers, Katipo Communications, have been commissioned to install 2 new Ketes so far: 1 in Taranaki and 1 in USA. Both of these groups have paid for work to be done developing enhancements to the core Kete code or towards the configuration interface. This is the beauty of Open Source; sharing the cost of development.

Kete will be presented at the LIANZA conference in Rotorua in September, at the National Digital Forum in Wellington in December and the VALA conference in Melbourne Feb 2008. It has been nominated for a NZ Open Source Award and is a finalist in the 3M Awards for Innovation in libraries, up against National Library of New Zealand and Auckland University Library. It was selected by invitation to be New Zealand’s entry in the e-inclusion section of the World Summit Awards which will be announced in Venice, Italy in November 2007. All of these increase the visibility of Kete and should ensure a good uptake and a committed community.

8. Other achievements.

The Kete database has rapidly grown to a respectable and useful size.

	Registered Members	Topics	Images	Web links	Documents
5/03/2007	21	88	182	20	46
2/04/2007	37	253	2,132	51	146
01/05/07	51	709	6,824	69	512
01/06/07	60	857	9,018	71	528
29/06/07	68	1078	10,488	76	631
31/07/07	85	1204	10,984	88	683

The site also has 94 audio clips and 8 video clips.

9. Risk monitoring and management.

The Sub Committee held monthly meetings throughout the term of the project keeping a close eye on progress against deliverables and budget.

We were aware very early on that the programming budget was going to be overspent; we anticipated the final $20,000 budget overrun halfway through the project. While this was unfortunate, it was manageable. We focussed our attention on building a quality product that met all the deliverables. Staff chose to work unpaid, equipment was not purchased, all programming not directly related to building Kete Horowhenua was sacrificed and donations and grants were sought elsewhere to minimize the loss.

Once the decision was made to forego work on making the code available for download, we set about devising a way forward to ensure the longevity of the Kete project; this involved raising more finance. Several large grant applications were made; one of which was successful. Work will commence shortly.

10. Final Summary.

The Kete Horowhenua database was officially launched at Levin Library by Penny Carnaby, National Librarian, and Darren Hughes MP for Otaki.

The database has in excess of 10,500 digital images, 600 scanned documents and 1000 articles. The site can be found at http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz and for information about the project itself http://blog.kete.net.nz .

Kete Horowhenua is a finalist in the 2007 3M Award for innovation in Libraries and has been selected as New Zealand’s entry in the World Summit Awards.

Funding has been secured to release Kete 1.0 under the GNU General Public License (GPL) complete with:

A Configuration interface for easy download and installation.

A Skin module so each Kete installation can have a distinctive look

An Import wizard to populate a new Kete with records drawn from a Past Perfect museum collection management system.

A old.kete.net.nz community for users and developers.

It is anticipated that these items will be available late 2007, but inquiries are welcome to Katipo Communications in the interim.

11. Collaboration.

We have made regular updates to the blog over the past year, sharing progress reports and excellent examples of user contributed content. As a direct result of promoting Kete via the blog and presenting at last years National Digital Forum 2 new Ketes have been commissioned from our developers: 1 in Orange County, Florida, USA, and another in Taranaki. This funded much of the enhancement work we could not afford to develop; we were heavily involved in bug testing the new work and sharing our policy and manual documents.

We will be presenting Kete at the LIANZA conference in September 07, at the National Digital Forum in Wellington in December 07 and the VALA conference in Melbourne Feb 2008. We hope to generate more interest in Kete projects.

We are committed to generating and supporting an active Kete community of users and developers, in line with best practice to ensure a successful open source project.

12. Resources.

The Legal Stakes of Web 2.0 Regarding the Kete Project by Pascal Krajewski.
A research report on the risks and opportunities Web 2.0 technologies make available to the Kete project. It looks at how the internet is being used in different ways and how other libraries and digital projects are incorporating these new technologies and what mitigation measures we must take to protect the integrity and longevity of the Kete project.

A complete user manual has been written and is available online: http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/help/

The following policy documents are available for other organisations to use:

http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/about/

http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/about/topics/show/1342-house-rules

http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/about/topics/show/1344-terms-and-conditions

http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/about/topics/show/1345-privacy-policy

3) The code will be available late 2007, complete with

A Configuration interface for easy download and installation.

A Skin module so each Kete installation can have a distinctive look – Kete Kapiti will look different from Kete Horowhenua.

An Import wizard to populate a new Kete with records drawn from a Past Perfect museum collection management system.

A old.kete.net.nz community for users and developers.