I was asked to kick off a set of 7x7 talks for the National Library of New Zealand as they tried to figure out what the "National Digital Library" should be and do. I threw a few grenades in a provocative talk.

1. National Digital Library
Nat Torkington

2. (1) The context

3. 7. Purpose of National Library
The purpose of the National Library is to enrich the cultural and economic life
of New Zealand and its interchanges with other nations by, as appropriate,—
(a)collecting, preserving, and protecting documents, particularly those relating
to New Zealand, and making them accessible for all the people of New
Zealand, in a manner consistent with their status as documentary heritage
and taonga; and
(b)supplementing and furthering the work of other libraries in New Zealand;
and
(c)working collaboratively with other institutions having similar purposes,

4. 7. Purpose of National Library
The purpose of the National Library is to enrich the cultural and economic life
of New Zealand and its interchanges with other nations by, as appropriate,—
(a)collecting, preserving, and protecting documents, particularly those relating
to New Zealand, and making them accessible for all the people of New
Zealand, in a manner consistent with their status as documentary heritage
and taonga; and
(b)supplementing and furthering the work of other libraries in New Zealand;
and
(c)working collaboratively with other institutions having similar purposes,

5. 7. Purpose of National Library
The purpose of the National Library is to enrich the cultural and economic life
of New Zealand and its interchanges with other nations by, as appropriate,—
(a)collecting, preserving, and protecting documents, particularly those relating
to New Zealand, and making them accessible for all the people of New
Zealand, in a manner consistent with their status as documentary heritage
and taonga; and
(b)supplementing and furthering the work of other libraries in New Zealand;
and
(c)working collaboratively with other institutions having similar purposes,

6. 7. Purpose of National Library
The purpose of the National Library is to enrich the cultural and economic life
of New Zealand and its interchanges with other nations by, as appropriate,—
(a)collecting, preserving, and protecting documents, particularly those relating
to New Zealand, and making them accessible for all the people of New
Zealand, in a manner consistent with their status as documentary heritage
and taonga; and
(b)supplementing and furthering the work of other libraries in New Zealand;
and
(c)working collaboratively with other institutions having similar purposes,

7. 7. Purpose of National Library
The purpose of the National Library is to enrich the cultural and economic life
of New Zealand and its interchanges with other nations by, as appropriate,—
(a)collecting, preserving, and protecting documents, particularly those relating
to New Zealand, and making them accessible for all the people of New
Zealand, in a manner consistent with their status as documentary heritage
and taonga; and
(b)supplementing and furthering the work of other libraries in New Zealand;
and
(c)working collaboratively with other institutions having similar purposes,

8. NLNZ’s Digital
Activities
• Collect, preserve, protect, and share
cultural heritage ... ONLINE.
• Supplement other libraries ... ONLINE.
• Work collaboratively with other
institutions sharing purpose ... ONLINE.

9. (2) The Internet

10. The greatest machine
yet devised for making
copies

11. Two-way

12. Groups and
conversations

13. Connects people
across space and time:
open source,
crowdsourcing, ...

14. End-to-end principle:
innovate at the edges

15. Platforms (APIs,
widgets, gibberish)

16. The Cloud

17. Cloud = making
something someone’s
else’s problem over the
Internet

18. “we don’t have all the
smart people”

19. “create more value
than you capture”

20. (3) Fit

21. Lot we can do
• Digital acquisition (harvest)
• Digital preservation (scanning)
• Digital access (web, audiovideo, APIs, CC)
• Digital collaboration and support (groups,
cloud)

22. (4) Harsh reality

23. We gots no $

24. There’s more offline
work than we can do.

25. $ are rivalrous

26. Revenue is scarce and
speculative

27. Government
departments are
frightfully conservative

28. Sod it

29. (5) Let’s dream

30. Vision
All NZ’s literary+ heritage digitally findable,
usable, and preserved for generations to
come.

31. Google digitises everything
• Because you can’t afford to do it any other
way.
• Because other nations are doing it and we
don’t know what the benefits will be.
• What if it all goes horribly wrong? Stop
doing nothing because you’re afraid of
doing something. Just stop it.

32. Distributed Proofreaders
improves it
• Scans by anyone aren’t great.
• OCR is crud.
• Crowdsource corrections and updates.

33. Turnbull’s backlog
cleared by the crowd
• Boxes without descriptions for individual
items
• We can fix that!

34. Search and tagging
makes it findable
• 1.5 million books
• 1 million photos
• 60,000 maps
• Umpty maps, drawings, paintings, and
ephemera

35. A Useful Corpus Fuels
Research
• The country has a useful corpus of
meaningful text
• Universities and polytechnics build
programmes around it: computer vision,
natural language processing, search, user
interfaces
• New Zealand becomes world leader in
these disciplines

36. Free content spreads
NZ culture
• Out of (c) works go online
• Someone else profiting is a success
• Inefficient to charge for it
• Promote NZ culture to NZ and
• ... we get the world for free

37. NLNZ catalogue is built
for the web
http://natlib.govt.nz/photo/
http://natlib.govt.nz/photo/18236
http://natlib.govt.nz/book/
http://natlib.govt.nz/book/183745
• Survives software change
• Gives people something to talk to
• Lets you collect links

38. Platform Services
• Libraries: you don’t have to do it yourselves
• Scan your stuff too
• Hook into our proofreading
• Value proposition: We’ll host it for you, you
just worry about content.

39. (6) Some keys

40. Core competency of IT

41. Digital integrated, not
segregated

42. We can’t do it all
ourselves

43. Another competency
will be partnerships

44. You shouldn’t do it all
yourselves

45. This isn’t about you

46. It’s about all
New Zealand

47. Thank You