Taking a look at a modern library service in the age of Facebook

Kete is getting an upgrade. Founded in 2007 as an open-source project, well over 40 installations of Kete run throughout New Zealand. Since those early days, discussion of the relevance of digital heritage and digital preservation has become more prominent. Many library sector discussions consider involving the community in digital heritage – Kete’s strength is in community-contributed collections.

We recently announced an update to the technical upgrade project and are seeking expressions of interest via the Horowhenua Library Trust for NZ libraries to maintain their Kete instances, and prepare to increase activity in their collections.

Using Kete to realise community value

How might you go about planning a digital heritage campaign in your community and who would be involved? While the open nature of Kete attracts the general public, history indicates local community groups value the project most as it enables cooperation, collaboration and documentation of activities that can be informal and difficult to otherwise record. This might be a local heritage interest group such as the Otago Memory Bank ; it might be an ethnic group of tangata whenua or migrant communities; or it might allow the documenting of Cuba Street history, leveraging multilingual capabilities to consider all perspectives. With a clear project purpose, it’s very compelling to share images, records, and notes, building stories together. In the context of creating diverse digital heritage, these collections can easily be set to be indexed within Digital NZ and can be found by anyone searching for these stories.

Kete also has easy API access to display items around the web, such as within a content management system, social media or in a museum display. This can make local displays and presentations far less technically demanding, when Kete serves as an enduring repository of collection records and assets.

A great example of Kete being used to meet community needs came in the advent of the Rena disaster. Smita Biswas in Tauranga coordinated interested community members to take records of the emerging history of the event. In the context of social media telling the story in real-time, Kete enabled an element of scrapbooking, as a chronicle of perspectives as they occurred. The case study was presented at the LIANZA conference and you can read more here.

Technology Considerations

The project very easily extends to be searchable with Digital NZ. It also can be customised to reference other database results. This flexible sharing of data works well to allow a holistic merging of various databases for use online.

The current generation of the codebase is now outdated and very challenging to manage. The major upgrade underway is a critical step to ensure the software foundations of Kete are improved and stable.

There has not been any dedicated maintenance budget of the software for some time, making this phase the most technically challenging. Rabid have a roadmap of user-focused improvements and features and it makes sense to improve the experience to be easy-to-use and accessible to meet users’ expectations of a web service.

Modernising the software and releasing this as opensource will give complete control over the solution to libraries, but we’re working hard on support packages. There are other considerations to keep the software modern, and we’ve developed a plan to build sustainability into New Zealand’s efforts.

Kete projects do require resource to support and encourage uptake in NZ communities. We would be happy to provide guidance and examples of successful projects to assist your planning.

So, please consider the potential of your library or district using Kete.

A round of notable Kete people were in Wellington for the 2013 National Digital Forum.  It was great to connect.

• Irma of Calyx in Australia, Leith Haarhoff of Palmerston City Libraries, Harley Couper of Tauranga Library were all in attendance
• Penny Carnaby’s keynote referenced Kete as a point of success in NZ’s digital heritage
• The Kete dinner gave us a moment to connect on the project
• Discussion at the NDF AGM focused on Kete project including some statements of real support for Kete and its principles.

A theme of NDF was the acknowledgement of what Kete has achieved but also some concern from users who hear that the software is in a very vulnerable position and requires support to get to a point of sustainability. Joann Ransom raised a matter at the AGM to highlight the risks of the software project.  We want to recap the situation and keep dialogue happening.

Rabid remain committed to the technical upgrade and discussion has included possible options that would bring the technology through to sustainability.  Kete should be a strong candidate for financial commitment, as the current state of the application is unacceptable and installations are vulnerable as they run Ruby on Rails 2 and no longer receive security coverage.

We remain convinced that Kete has potential to grow in a new stage of community users and stakeholders beyond New Zealand.  The uses are diverse, compelling and there is strong value in sourcing, identifying and safeguarding digital records of our community heritage.

Need a refresher? Take a look at the development proposal here.

We have many organisations who might consider the digital community heritage elements of Kete in new sites through New Zealand and throughout Australia.   But new entrants have modern expectations of software and the existing Kete instances themselves suffer from poor usability that make it harder for everyday people to participate where they are installed.

We need to achieve a commercial balance/sustainability and activate the existing user groups to demonstrate that this project is worth supporting and can grow and help more communities.

Wondering what this means?   Here’s an overview of what needs to be put in place

• a governance group mandating improvements to the project.  The fundamentals of this group are being set up during this first phase of redevelopment
• installs of Kete to be participating in a support agreement that will include allowance for improvements to the core project on an ongoing basis
• there may be a model where supported hosting for vanilla Kete installs would make the software more accessible to very small community organisations  (e.g. Pukekura Park) and provide assurance that data is archived, backed up and so on
• a commercial partner with a commitment to the core software project for the medium term

In the longer-term, Kete should be developing out features for better telling stories in our communities, and linking content within items.  Rabid have many ideas about this and hope to see this discussion pull together a roadmap that we can engage in.

Josh Forde of Rabid talking about the Cuba St Project, which is running in Wellington as part of the New Zealand Fringe, and how Kete could contribute to similar local history projects.

Josh Forde on the Cuba Street Project and Kete from Rabid Technologies on Vimeo.

Does anyone else out there think there would be any place for a workshop around the idea of getting the most out of your Kete?

A ‘share whats working’ theme as well as:

• Using Storify with Kete
• Using Historypin with Kete
• Creating an animated gif for small slideshows using Photoshop or Gimp
• Embedding twitter feeds
• Embedding Youtube Videos
• Using audacity to clean up your audio contributions
• Good practise (linking content within kete and too own catalogue to create journey, pointing to other reliable resources, separating Library content from public content by using baskets and index pages).
• Others?

If you think there is a demand for this kind of workshop I would happy to run it from the perspective of a happy tinkerer with an ear to learning other’s ideas…(rather than a programmer). A sort of ‘bring a laptop and be prepared to play with you own kete’ couple of hours?

Harley Couper