Today 50 New Zealand educators have flocked to the new National Library building in Wellington for Digital Discovery Day. The National Library Services to Schools team are hosting our visitors for workshops, discussion and presentations on 21st century literacy and the use of digital resources in the classroom.
Our DigitalNZ session looked at the 'information age', 'digital literacy', and how DigitalNZ works. We also had a chance to play with DigitalNZ...
During the last weekend of March, Bruce Fraser and the good people at Bay of Plenty Regional Council joined partners and sponsors to hold their second successful data Mashup competition for secondary school students.
Mashup 2012 was a chance for local students to rise to the challenge and build new tools for real world scenarios, and all in just one weekend. Twelve teams of up to five pupils gathered at the Bay of Plenty Polytechnic’s Bongard Centre to create their entries. They were...
The UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquake Digital Archive launched its new search service this week. CEISMIC is working to avoid fragmentation of records and stories about the earthquakes from different people, and now behold their great new federated search function. It's powered by DigitalNZ, and pulls in amazing material from across various partners in more useful and meaningful ways.
The website helps partners share with each other, and you, for a better research and memory gathering...
This post details a small project I created over Waitangi Weekend using the DigitalNZ API . You can play with the end result here.
In late 2011, I attended the New Zealand National Digital Forum. It was a great conference full of inspirational people. I was particularly taken by Tim Sherratt's presentation on the Invisible Australians project and Mitchell Whitelaw's thoughtful discussion of generous interfaces.
These talks left me thinking about the relationships between serendipity,...
DigitalNZ indexes a lot of stuff. As I type this blog post, it's midday on Friday, November 4, 2011. If I visit the DigitalNZ website and search for every item we index, I get 25,661,157 results. That's a mind-boggling number.
In preparation for a talk I'm giving at the National Digital Forum in a few weeks, I am trying to understand what exactly are the 25 million pieces of New Zealand digital content we link to. I've been asking myself questions like "How are these things distributed over...
The video, “A Grand Mother” by Candy Elsmore, won this year’s Mix and Mash Supreme Creative Remix. We highly recommend that you check it out (you may need a box of tissues).
It’s a beautifully told story about the pride and delight Candy’s family felt after discovering their grand mother / great grandmother, Mary Edith Aberhart, had signed the 1893 Suffrage Petition.
New Zealand’s digital content put to good (re)use
The video remixes music from band Wet Wings, photographs from Candy...
To make hard-to-find New Zealand content easier to ‘find, share, and use’, you have to know that the content has been digitised. Herein lies the paradox of Digital New Zealand.
That’s why the following note from Roger Barclay made our day:
"I have read with interest your comments about making NZ content easier to find. I have recently launched a website that provides access to V.C. Browne & Son's aerial photograph collection and it sounds like this site fits well with what you are...
One of the best ways to explain the benefits of having an open API (Application Programming Interface) to data in the DigitalNZ discovery system is to show it in use.
What’s an API? In short, it’s a way for software applications to ‘talk to’ each other, and a way for developers to ‘talk to’ applications. We use an API to share data with other applications.
The Indicommons website summarises it like this:
"Open APIs allow services and collections to become interconnected, the experience of...
One of the questions we get asked most when working with New Zealand content creators is ‘what’s an API’?. Quickly followed by… ‘so, why would you do this?’
When a developer we’ve never met picks up on the DigitalNZ API to create a map-based interface for discovering New Zealand content, an answer starts to form.
In short, an API (Application Programming Interface) is a way for applications to talk to each other; and a way for developers to talk to applications.
As the Indicommons website...
We ran the 'Coming Home' Memory Maker campaign to demonstrate what is possible when content providers ‘free up’ selected public cultural content for people to remix with permission; and used the remix editor to deliver the content to users.
The remix editor (developed by Ideum) lets people mix together and recombine video, audio, text, music, and graphic content to create their own 60 second online video that can be saved and shared (by sending a link, or embedding a link to it on...
