Transcript
Unknown Speaker 10:11
Thanks so much for joining us. appreciate that. In the United States it's into your evening time and into Europe. So, if you are joining from Europe not sure if anyone is, it's quite early in the morning there will wait maybe another 30 seconds if people are joining across, I know there's a number of people coming in from Australia and other parts of Southeast Asia, but nice to meet you, Max and Courtney from DC and Michigan. We will be using the chat box throughout so if there's anything that comes up as Liana and I are presenting please drop the drop questions or comments in there. We framed our session to be about 30 minutes and then hopefully about 10 to 12 minutes of Tylenol and conversation afters. Excellent. All right, we'll make a start, and as other people join in, obviously be able to see the recording as well, but 10 Metatag data core network level demona core Draken Akello to our core autobody the owner Copeland Delta Walker, calm to happy or not defeated, ie we get a no. Whoa, okay, if I'm going to be a terra cotta Modi on talk winner. Nora Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa. Just in translating that little bit of rail there I'm just acknowledging my mountain, my river trip Niccolo and network level which are both from my father's Island in Canada, or Fiji, my family and tribe. So a Fiji, where I am from the New Year Tada, which is Wellington. And my name is Tim Kong. Also just want to acknowledge to try it. The we who are holders of the land holders and stewards of the land in which Wellington is aware and where which sorry, and where I'm based, today. Chiara and nice to meet you. Leone, you want to introduce.
Unknown Speaker 12:26
Well Emily my Malia so my Lolly so for Mama Mililani mama. My name is Leone. So today, I am currently based in some key, Makoto. The afternoon here.
Unknown Speaker 12:49
A little bit of a definitely a privilege to be here speaking to you all today. In I can't see all of you, but just to just to acknowledge the Manaphy Noah, on which the land or or museum stands it's not at all like you're rocking it Paula and it's finally coming to you from Oakland, and very privileged to be here.
Unknown Speaker 13:22
Thank you, Leone, I'll just share my screen, and we'll get the slides up and running here. Go. Sorry. Let's resize my windows here so I know where I am. So thank you for joining us today. Our topic today is digital Pacific org which is a project that Liana and I have been working on since about January of 2020. The. This project is funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Australia. It's technically known as the Pacific virtual museum pilot, which is I think in part why I got invited to come and speak. But as we walk through, you see it's quite a different concept and construct from a traditional museum. The project is funded a set by the Australian Government. That would be my dog, policies, and it's funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Australia, and is implemented, or being delivered by the National Library of New Zealand where I'm based in partnership with the National Library of Australia. When we say Pacific, we define it as broadly speaking, the areas of Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia. So it excludes for example, the Philippines, Japan, and the Western coastlines of North and South and Central America. I suppose one of the things to set right at the start because it is funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This is a foreign aid funded package, and if you understand or aware of any of the great geopolitics of foreign aid funding that comes with a number of constraints and boundaries I suppose so we just set that in play had the main aim with this project was to make visible and accessible. The digitized cultural heritage of the people in the Pacific, and of the Pacific. And to do this, we've we're sort of lumped into a number of things, and the first one is that we use a metaphor, and the metaphor being of a bridge. A bridge between worlds, and in doing so in a digital way. We want our site to serve as a bridge, and it's a bridge between the worlds of museums, galleries, libraries, and archives our content partners and the worlds of Pacific peoples, the glam sector in particular, those are based in the former and existing colonial powers, hold 10s of 1000s of items objects and records from specific locations, and most specific people are unaware that your institutions these institutions hold these items and records. So as a bridge. We become a, an access point, a starting point, with quick, which quickly allows Pacific people either based in the Pacific or living around the world. To access your content, the content of the content from our partners and to explore it on their sites. I think one of the things in terms of being a metaphor that helps people understand what we do is, as a bridge, we can't be sticky. We don't want people to stay on our site. We want people to come to our site and use it but we want people to quickly get to your site and I think that's a really interesting challenge from a digital design point of view because most of your design is predicated on keeping users on your site, you want them to come to your site and stay there, and we don't want that we want them to use your site as quickly as possible, so we want you to, we want the site, and our project to be digital, but we also want to be a bridge between these two worlds. We also built this thing, and this project digitally, for the realities of the Pacific. And we designed with digital constraints in mind, and right up front of mind actually, we designed for a number of things. Firstly, low bandwidth and high cost, mobile networks. As you can see in this tweak. There's a lot of challenges to getting connected in in the Pacific. We've designed the site to function as well as possible on 2g and 3g environments, and also in places where data is expensive, and to do this we actually one of the constraints we put on ourselves is that no page, we aim for no page on the site to be any bigger than 800 kilobytes in size. And that includes images as of this morning the homepage has about 170 and the default view for all search results is about 425 So we work really hard at that blog posts are my responsibility and so I'm constantly aware of how I can scale and resize images to keep that page weight down. Secondly, we were designed for mobile first, and what that means is we didn't designed for desktop browsers, in fact as the product owner I actually backlog and stopped, bug fixes for desktop browsers. In the interests of maximizing our developer time and spend.
Unknown Speaker 18:24
Also in that mobile first design we focus on design elements that function to make the key parts of Metadata visible and accessible, and that means we don't embed anything, there's no audio or video playback on our site. We always land you on where you hold the content or where our content partners hold the audio video content. There are multiple languages, across the Pacific, obviously so that meant designing a interface that needed to be icon first and quite uncluttered, with a focus on less reading one of our user testers said to us, I really like that because my grandma, she can speak English, but she can't read it. And so, you know, this site actually works for her in terms of navigation. Visually, from the site. We wanted the site to reflect something of the Pacific back to users, and to help center a specific narrative or a specific framing of all of this, all of these records and cultural heritage items. In my early conversations with a designer, I said, you know, whilst we think of it as a search engine because it was a starting point I said let's not make it a blank white page that you land on. Unlike another search engine that some of you might be aware of. Let's make it look like something of the Pacific and so the color palette, and the design SVGs are all part of that. There are so many languages across the Pacific, Papua New Guinea alone has 800. So we couldn't Capture and use all of them, but we use Contentful as our back end to allow us to quickly edit the header. Header components and specific pages to reflect languages, for example this week in altaira It's Fiji Language Week, and so the header text on our site is in PGn. Lastly, our homepage design was to make it easy to find stuff as a Pacific person. Often our mental models of this blue continent is it's just all ocean. But if you're from chalk or from the Marcus's or from Vanuatu or Knowmia these islands. These really unique islands, and these coastlines are your home. And so, the location page that we've built on the front page, or the location section, sorry, the designs and the silhouettes are designed to enable a person from each of these islands to recognize, or possibly discover that shape that place, which is their home to select it and then see records in some way labeled or tagged with that location. It was actually Liana who's presenting with me today that captured this, this approach really early on with the line, I'm someone show me the Samoan stuff, as we're looking across these 10s of 1000s of records. It was digital using agile and I think this is a really interesting one because in the tech space Agile is you know default in a way of thinking and there's a language and a rhythm around it. But I had a pretty rough knowledge of agile, and it's fair to say it's still pretty rough. But we've been wonderfully supported by our vendors and developing this. And I think also Agile is not to default for large parts of public service within which we sit as the National Library, and it's also not a default for Pacific way of engaging and thinking through processes, and so we had a challenge of melding, these, these again these two different worlds. This was never a tech project for us, it was a people project, and we had to work really deliberately, again, online, because of the pandemic, to build relationships to help people understand the language that we were using, and to be aware of those conversations and the specific language to help us work together in an agile way. The foundations of the site, as you look at it, which is subject which is our main backend, the schema the API and all that was established in March, April of 2020. And our first initial build period and the majority of what you see on the site now was developed over about 20 weeks of build time, we were ready to launch in about August September of last year. We didn't build an MVP, a minimum viable product to test ideas, we just traded the whole thing as an MVP and continue to iterate with it as we went through. We're not constantly building in Sprint's in terms of our budget we pause work to work with a co Design Group which I mentioned our next point. And so it's not constant, but it reflects what what we're able to do at a point in time, we explored some ideas that didn't go any further, some natural language processing and some other aspects like that. But, this work was all time boxed and held really tight so that was never a risk to the budget or to our time constraints, we have budgeted for ongoing monthly maintenance in between sort of funded development sprints, but that and that has been a really reliable process that allows us to keep the site, well maintained and to fix anything as it comes through a co design group also met during that period with us, once a week in that first initial phase and now mates with us fortnightly.
Unknown Speaker 23:17
And that CO Design Group and I appreciate co designers often use Word. And as a concept that means many things to many people. So my reflections here in this piece to reflect what we've done as a project. Our aim with this project and the Pacific way was to include as many voices of those in the Pacific, to understand how our pilot project could or should be of use to them. And of course in January 2020 As I said, we started and we were hoping to travel to a large number of these islands to build relationships and understand how to build a thing. But, as you will all know, a global pandemic rolled in, and we had to shift everything as everyone did. To fully online and fully remote. So the tools which many of you will have used over the last 18 months Zoom email Slack recordings, we were working across eight or nine different time zones as well. All of this working in conversation, included our developers who we only met once before we went into our level four lockdown here in in New Zealand in March of last year, our ongoing process for the pilot is to stay open to bringing onboard people and conversations and honor people who speak to specific cultural heritage. And, you know, having those individuals and community groups or institutions be part of our conversation is very much an ongoing part of this project. I have to say and Liana will touch on this a wee bit, I don't think we've been as successful as we could have been in this CO design approach. It has been informed by our CO design group, but by definition. Those people, the only people that could attend via online methods were privileging those that had stable network connections that had jobs or roles to allow them to join us in our conversations, so we need to continue to seek out and foster these relationships, right across the Pacific. The, this point is around digital as Metadata. We're not a repository. We don't curate our records that we're a very small team of three people. And I suppose like, like DPLA, or like Europeana or trove, we leverage Metadata from our content partners as I've described. We rely on the authority and due diligence of the content partners, and we all know that we always aim to work equitably to share and show that Metadata, we only ever show publicly accessible digitized records, and also share the respective copyright conditions that is on that Metadata. Our harvests are recurring, so that when Metadata on our content partners site is updated. We reflect those changes on our next harvest. We're not into translation of Metadata for the sake of it, or for an English speaking audience. We obviously only need to match the fields in our schema. So, to ensure that the front end functions properly. But we do welcome Metadata in any language. If contents written in chamado or Metadata is in top person, we will present that and highlight that and I think as part of this. We have traditional knowledge label fields built into the schema. Currently, none of our content partners are utilizing those fields, but they're there for if and when anyone does, and I just like to acknowledge the work of Jane Anderson and Maui Hudson, from the TK levels group, and, and their support, as we've worked through this. I think importantly and quite philosophically for me we never take Metadata. In the event of a pilot project being closed down content partners lose nothing because they always hold their own Metadata, and in terms of the Pacific wide experience with colonial colonialism and the legacy of taking of items. This was really crucial to me. Digital colonization is already taking place, and we couldn't be a space that enabled that. I'd like to finish my points with a little bit of a description of the island of Tuvalu, which is one of our locations. So you may not be aware of develo to value the nation, or its people, but you've probably you if you've used Twitch for or Ustream, you've used their domain name, which is of course.tv. The land area of the, of the nine islands which you can see on the screen here. Totals 26 square kilometers, which is about 10 square miles, and the average height above sea level of these nine Islands is one meter. I think the highest point of land in Tuvalu is about four meters. Whilst it's only 24 square kilometers, the economic exclusive economic zone of Tuvalu covers an oceanic area of approximately 900,000 square kilometers. And for reference the land area of Texas is about 695,000 kilometers squared so in this case you can technically say to value is bigger than Texas
Unknown Speaker 27:59
to value has a population of approximately 11,000 people. And just to give you some reference here to value. And this is using the website true size. This is to value against the eastern seaboard, it's quite hard to see Funafuti which I've pointed out on the previous slide, which is the capital is here, proximately just south of Philadelphia, Baltimore is the most southernmost island I apologize I don't know the names of the islands, but it stretches as a nation, all the way to Boston. So a couple more little tiny pink dots just underneath the Oh of Connecticut, which are also all of these parts of value. And I think it's, as you consider that scale as we overlay these this section United States and also to value. I'd like to consider that the digital connectivity for these 11,000 people is all via satellite currently current network speeds are about 1.5 megabytes down and 500 kilobytes up. Whilst there are plans to bring submarine cable and fiber, access to the country, that hasn't occurred yet. This photo on the right is the to Allah National Library and Archives and we've had the privilege of meeting and chatting with their staff and presenting a webinar with them. It's about 10 to 10 days ago which was a really fantastic experience in terms of making their work visible and accessible. They actually hold in that building there which, as we saw in our webinar is leaking and has holes in the side of it, They hold paper records dating back to the 1800s. And I think there's something really powerful about just that little piece of narrative, because actually each of these institutions that are on the screens now hold records objects and images have to value. And I've found those by literally doing a manual search for these institutions, going to their websites and typing into value, there's nothing sophisticated about their presence there. But if our site can leverage those digitized records on those and probably dozens of other institutions, that's a really powerful thing. I'd like to just finish with this comment and then hand to Lionni the Pacific Ocean and this view here covers shows that the Pacific ocean covers 33% of the surface area of this planet, but most of our default mental models of users and designing digitally, are based on land based experiences, and therefore the Pacific Island locations their cultures and people are mostly invisible to us, or alternatively they're seen as singular remote exotic idyllic locations, but they are neither invisible, nor should they be romanticized each of these locations and the people that are from these cultures are unique, vibrant living and enduring and in the face of overwhelming legacies and hugely complex challenges in the next coming few decades, they were and are as my colleague Dr threesies When a dealer said to me yesterday. Pre contact with the West, astronomers food scientists, mathematicians, sailors, artists and navigators, all in our own right, all in our own ways, and it's very easy to forget that I think another good friend of ours, former head of the National Archives of Fiji opens earlier file. He spoke at the site and said, it's one thing for Pacific people to know that they had their culture taken from them. It's another thing entirely to not know that the artifacts and records of their culture still exist. If our project isn't a small thing to start to bridge that gap of knowledge and awareness. Then I think we've done a very worthy thing cannot go back to that. Thank you for listening. I will now hand over to Lionni.
Unknown Speaker 31:35
Okay, hello everybody. Greetings from the biggest continent in the world. The focus question that I set for myself for this part of the presentation was where and what am I coming from that informs my participation in digital Pacific. So from a, from a personal position. I am a millennial, I'm a New Zealand born salmon woman with Maori heritage, and sort of in this is my key strength and cultural capital that I draw on in my working life at local museum, and for me my starting point and everything is my extended family my idea, and the cultural framework that I've been brought up in. So it's important for me to know who I come from, no ways to show my respect to know how I am, observed cultural protocols, and how I apply these appropriately when new situations arise. So I've grown up in a worldview of being aware of relational space, and feeling love for my family and connection to my genealogy through activating that that cultural that relational space, And more and more of that practice of maintaining those relationships is being done online, and of late in the global pandemic, it's basically all being online. Next slide please. Okay, so my engagement with digital Pacific is shaped by seminal writings of the last few decades about Oceania as a region. So going back to this picture that Tim had. It's long been in other people's interests to see this part of the world as a big blue blank space, there's been imperialistic advantages to riding off the islands as tiny as and remote, so as to better exploit, resources, and narrow frames of mind. It was a celebrated writer and academic building alpha, back in the 90s who argued for rejecting deficit narratives like this, and for us as specific people to instead see this whole Oceania region as a connected a sea of islands, diversity of islands. This is because there's always been movement, there's always been trade and cultural relationships, pre contacts. Post, and even now in the digital sphere peoples of Oceania, the widely dispersed, Physically and even more so diaspora communities and settler states like the US, Australia and New Zealand. Those relational ties between those people and the homelands are still nurtured on a daily basis. This practice of maintaining relationships and practicing culture and embarking on forming new cultural identities on the daily is made easier by the Internet and in the digital environments those physical distances collapse, new connections can be made and LAN RPC is one writer who's written about the potential of the internet to fast track Pacific peoples from across these expenses. And from these colonial legacies to find and connect with each other again. Slide three please. So here is a, is a visioning of the Pacific, that I like in comparison to the other. This is a map by a cartographer, named David Garcia, revealing the connections of the landscape. So underneath the water. The landforms of the Pacific are still connected to each other, run deep and run, just across this is, it's intentionally this orientation. And yeah, I just, I love it because it says everything to what they believe, offer and and others have talked about when we, when we re envision the Pacific. Next slide please.
Unknown Speaker 35:27
Okay, so as for the museum work related aspect of participating in digital Pacific, I'm representing Tamaki buying a heater open war memorial museum. And that's located in central Auckland and I'll try New Zealand. Open Museum is a primary content partner and digital Pacific. Having aka museums, Pacific related content in the digital Pacific platform reflects our Museum's strategic content to open up greater access digitally to collections for communities that we serve. Auckland is informally or is known as the world's biggest Polynesian city. There are several strongholds of Pacific communities who have settled settled here from the islands and several waves from the 1950s onwards it's what is what is most known Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Cook Islands, new way to allow to value and more recently cannabis, the ties between these communities here in my city of Oakland, and the island homelands, still very strong, although in recent years, there's been concerns around how to foster cultural identity and well being among the young people who, who are born in New Zealand and how they can maintain links to their culture, language and identity with those homelands. Over recent years there's been significant investments in digitization and digital access in natural sciences, social history. The Maori collections documentary heritage. And it's this project specific collection access project that was sort of part of that big work to get more contents, more collections online. What, what differentiates this particular line of work from the other projects that happened at Oak museum was the priority on community engagement that that happens with this particular project here. This community led engagement was the first on the scale for a museum to commit to, with some really beautiful outcomes but also some very, very steep learnings for the institution, as well as some failures to, it has to be said. It was a formative experience personally and I learned a lot about what it really meant and what it really took to attempt to foster relationships at both the personal and institutional level. What you see in the picture here are various community events that happens all the way through that three year period, as well as with this slide, which I'll go into knowledge on decisions. So open museums ethnographic Pacific collections is world class, it's numbered at about 30,000 treasures, this number would increase by several 1000, more if you took into account the Pacific documentary heritage collections photographs archives that I care for now in my area throughout the three year period of peak activity there are about 6000 specific treasured objects that passed through the rehousing conservation cataloging and photography process, the Metadata, Fitz that's hosted on the digital Pacific platform is a legacy from p cap. I was a cataloger on that project on the Pico project, So a crucial part of the project was holding these sessions with respected elders, and recognized knowledge holders to help us with our documentation. Like many museums where indigenous collections have skilled skeletal records, our documentation was spotty and clinical before the sessions with knowledge holders, before they if the terms concepts identifications and advice on storage and care, especially very sacred items that we had the nature of P caps Metadata, and how it was gathered makes, makes me cringe to say the word Metadata because the word itself is so impersonal and clinical indigenous knowledge was imparted to us catalogers with the intention of better digital access to collections, making indigenous terms searchable and making it easier for those who are experiencing this physical distance from these treasures to still have digital access. We had it out. We had our own internal processes around carrying and transmission of knowledge,
Unknown Speaker 40:01
and definitely times where we didn't record sessions or when we're asked to pause and just hear something off the record, yep, fine, that's fine. But I still think of these enriched records this Metadata now add extensions on those relationships in that trust. I am accountable to those who shared with me. I'm accountable to treat that knowledge with respect to honor their contributions and not causing regret at any point before sharing with us. Our next slide. So I'm coming from a need to indigenized concepts related to digital practice so that a sense of that accountability and honoring get carried over into the digital space so it's not. So the digital space is not like a wild wild west for those old colonial attitudes to then get a foothold in Tim talked about the agile methodology that went into making digital Pacific. And I would also say that an indigenous methodology, we're pursuing, we've been pursuing it okay Museum and museum practice. In recent years, has also been activated in this project. I couldn't work any other way. So that's always been my. The source of any questions I had for Tim, or the other people on the, on the team, shaping and forming this project, the indigenous salmon concept that I keep at the center of my own practice, is this notion of to Lima. In English, that's a maxim to nurture and tend to relationships relation relationality is so integral to Pacific ways of being and doing and knowing I was excited a couple of weeks ago to come across this model, presented by Native American academics, you see on the right hand of the screen. I found it on tick tock, of all places, but it sets up the logic, perfectly so in my mind that this concept of that, that's indigenous to the Pacific, it's right there in the middle that relationality. Polygon section of that, that model. So I opened museum to provide museum practice during peak it was expressed in things like hosting communities properly with food open access to connect with the collections proper welcoming ceremony. Probably admiration for our knowledge holders on par with consultants who work at the museum permissions will digitize images of collections and proper protocols, especially for sacred objects, recognizing that knowledge is embodied in the treasures of the collections and I'm committing to making sure that communities continue to have that access to what is essentially there's in the first place. That's that's what's currently driving our practice, even now, two years after the project finished our museum is changing, and it's, it's a good change because of what we went through in that project, And so this is. Next slide please. This all these things, I bring with me into participating and being active in this digital Pacific project really great part of a really key part of thinking relationally or in terms of relationships relationships can be nurtured, or they can also be sullied or broken or, or need mending. And a key part of of relationship building is this talent nor aspect of speaking critically and speaking with care and discussing these bigger open these bigger issues at play. And that's the, there are bigger issues at play in this digital Pacific project that was me coming into it was just like okay this is, these are things that need more thinking more thinking through and understanding the realities of I think so, what Tim said at the beginning that this is a project that's funded by a government agency, and not even New Zealand's it's Australia's foreign affairs department that funding has its own strings attached as I soon realized, and a lot of it is to do. There's a lot of geopolitics in there as well. So for an example, I'm understanding that with this defect funding comes. This is where I think I need you to him as well. Understanding that there are places in the Pacific, that a still politically contested at the moment. That's
Unknown Speaker 44:40
seep into how we frame our website that makes sense. So for instance, Australia, the island, Northern Ireland is considered at a territory that Australia administers therefore is not at the surface of our digital Pacific platform. Another example. Similar is the Torres Strait Islands are considered a territory that Australia takes care of. So, again, they're, they're not at the front of our, you can still search for those items on this website platform, but they're not listed at the front, as these other island places. There's no New Zealand on the website, even though you know, Maori are Polynesian, and that's another political thing in terms of the Fed is intending for this project to reach Pacific people under this under, under, you know, aid, this idea of a
Unknown Speaker 45:41
developing nations
Unknown Speaker 45:42
aid in developing nations. Okay. And if you were to look up. West Papua, which is a politically contested space in the Pacific, you would find items from collections, but again, that is not on the front of them. There's not front of our page, and on this platform. Again, these, these, these geopolitics, that come with the funding has been an interesting reality to understand and deal with the second point, we're in a global pandemic. Trying to co design or make a platform for Pacific people when you can't get to those islands everyone is in lockdown and for people's on safety, we, we can't get and connect with people in person. It's been another reality as well. One thing that's unheard of mentioned really quickly and I don't know what my time is now.
Unknown Speaker 46:48
But 10 minutes.
Unknown Speaker 46:51
Tim hadn't mentioned that there's a user contribution feature on this platform. And I thought those are really special and interesting to be used as a way for Pacific people from wherever they are, to respond to add content partners content with their own knowledge, or their own corrections. So someone can search the site. And before they.
Unknown Speaker 47:20
Sorry. The only I'll drop into the chat. I'll drop the two blogs that explain it, so might give you some of the context as well as.
Unknown Speaker 47:28
And, yeah, I thought that was one interesting way of being able to have specific people speak back or speak to, with knowledge that runs complimentary parallel to what the institution has because again, skeletal Metadata has been, it's been a really interesting other reality of this project. I want to stop there because I'd like to get into Tylenol and maybe talk a little bit more about them. But despite these realities and these things to consider. I did it again, my default is going back to, relationship building and relationality there are workarounds, I believe, and this my optimism, and my hope in these workarounds, is how, how I believe that. Yeah, just that weekend was a tough love. But I think when it comes down to that, I think that's, that's why I still participate in forming and feeding back into this project because there's just so much potential for this platform to connect people together. I think that's where I want to end it.
Unknown Speaker 48:48
Thank you Lionni. Yeah, I think, what, to sum up what Liana said in the last but it is a fascinating path we've had to lead in terms of threading this needle between all the different factors that balance around it in terms of the great game of geopolitics and the great game of, of who owns what and who calls what what, given that the cultural heritage and the archival institutions we have hold records that well predate our current layers of geopolitics and culture, arguably as Leone has pointed out in terms of connecting people across the blue continent predate any of our politics and the great labels that we use now, and not just the labels but how we fund this sort of work. I'm happy in the way of telling not to jump forward. I'll leave that up there for review but does anyone have any appreciate. Thank you Carolyn we've got five minutes left. Did anyone want to ask a question or either in the text or just verbally, we can unmute you might even stop try stop the screenshare. And we'll bring people in, so if you wanted to ask us anything or just general commentary. Sure, Max. Do I have time your your your
Unknown Speaker 50:15
amazing state, and thank you for just talking about, for presenting this I mean, It's, I can, I can see how there's there's no trying, trying to do this with, in the context of the gold pandemic trying to do this in the context of all these political things is, that's, that's still being there for it is. I commend you for that. It's, it's pretty amazing work.
Unknown Speaker 50:44
So, thank you. Thank you. And I did mention in the chat DPLA, we're currently working through harvesting Chrome, their content which is all CC zero so we're really excited by that. Even just bluntly searching for Oceania Polynesia, Micronesia Melanesia we're estimating gets us about 50,000 records out of that corpus, and that's an amazing thing for people at the Pacific who don't know that what probably don't know that DPLA exists in the first instance but don't know that all the many content partners behind it exist as well so yeah we're excited about doing that. Yeah. Any other thoughts, I suppose my ask is if any of your museums institutions that hold Pacific records, we'd love to chat, one on one and and be able to share and share your, your work and happy to meet you know, outside this or in Slack and go forward because we'd love to highlight more work that you're doing and that you hold as well.
Unknown Speaker 51:48
Yeah. Thank you, Marie. Yeah, the philosophy behind it's been an evolving thing. We met yesterday with our defect sponsors and, actually, I mean, he's been really fantastic support, there's a really interesting piece around what the fact probably set out and thought this would be, and what it now is and I think he's definitely in this space where he's seeing the process by which we've, which we've walked in how we've walked it and there's absolutely backing it for further funding, as I said at the start it's a pilot, and at this point our funding runs out in February, March, or finishes in February March as a contract. And so we're currently in the process of going through what what that looks like to apply for another potentially while we're pitching for three years of funding to continue to develop it and have it work. And at that point, hopefully post pandemic a bit more in a bit more travel we can finally get to some of these islands and meet some of these people and have those conversations, too. Good. Thank you. Carolyn's in behind the screen there, I think we're kind of all wrapped up. That was everything we had to say and thank you for your comments and questions. Again, really appreciate. Thank you for joining us late in your evenings or early in your evenings. And, yeah, I look forward to the rest of the conference. Both of us are in the Slack channel so if you want to ask us any questions after. I think details are on the profile in the, in the shed site and also. Yeah, thank you for joining us, and take care.