Digital New Zealand homepage

Introduction Digital content that complies with open standards and formats improves its interoperability and usability. In the mid-2000s New Zealand’s growing digital content space was being populated with a growing number of proprietary and bespoke digital standards and formats characteristic of the ‘digital dark age’ risk.

New Zealand Digital Content Strategy (2007) In 2007 the New Zealand Digital Content Strategy

(2007), identified the need to promote open standards formats and interoperability as a means of maintaining knowledge and heritage over time. A five element digital content framework was identified to aid understanding and analysis of digital content issues.

DigitalNZ ā-tihi o Aotearoa: a nationwide initiative DigitalNZ ā-tihi o Aotearoa is a nationwide initiative and implemented as

an outcome of the government’s New Zealand Digital Content Strategy (2007).

Intended as a long-term programme of work DigitalNZ aims to find ways to make New Zealand’s rapidly growing digital content more visible, discoverable and accessible in an ever-changing digital environment. DigitalNZ aims to connect New Zealand’s digital content from collections of significance and find ways for New Zealanders to engage in, use and reuse digital content.

DigitalNZ Wave 1 (2008) The first DigitalNZ initiative was launched in 2008 as DigitalNZ Wave 1 and was tasked with building the foundation and infrastructure for DigitalNZ ā-tihi o Aotearoa. Wave 1 began exploring and testing ways in which New Zealand’s digital content could be harvested from content providers and exposed for use and reuse. The mantra of DigitalNZ Wave 1 was Find, Share, Use, New Zealand digital content.

1. Introducing DigitalNZ ā-tihi o Aotearoa

Digital Content Strategy Five element digital content framework Element Digital Content Framework

Digital Content Strategy five element digital content framework Creating and protecting content:

Born-digital content needs new skills for its creation and use. It provides unique opportunities for innovation and creativity, and requires the means to protect it from theft and misuse. Accessing and discovering content:

Digital Content with mechanisms to enhance access and discovery is vital. Sharing and using content:

The ability for users to be able to find relevant content that they can readily use, re-use, share, repurpose and add their own dimension to, is a key feature of the digital age. Managing and preserving content:

Digital content is capable of being stored in large volumes and groupings and as different formats and devices become obsolete, it risks being lost. Managing and preserving content for continued use is essential. Understanding and awareness of content:

Digital content is altering our commonly held notions of information, knowledge, and material value. As we transition through the digital age, we need to understand and be aware of the digital content environment, opportunities and challenges, in order to make more informed decisions, choices and investments.

Digital New Zealand: advice, standards and interoperability Karen Rollitt

National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matāuranga o Aotearoa

DigitalNZ develops good practice guidance In 2008 DigitalNZ was established and tasked with, amongst other things, providing good practice advice and guidance on digital standards and digital content creation.

DigitalNZ Digital Content Life Cycle

2. About developing good practice guides

Developing DigitalNZ good practice guidance

The complex world of standards needed to be developed into good practical guidance. To do this DigitalNZ analysed frameworks such as the NISO’s Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections (2007), models such the OAIS functional model (2002), and researched online services already providing good digital advice for example, JISC Digital Media (2009).

Drawing on the Digital Content Strategy five element digital content framework and Hodge’s (Hodge 2000) information life cycle DigitalNZ developed the digital content lifecycle framework to drive the development . of digital good practice and open standards promotion in ……… New Zealand.

Presenting digital content standards

The information life cycle diagram contains seven high level functions for selecting, creating, describing, managing, discovery, use and reuse, and preservation of digital content. Although there is some overlap of activities across the seven functions is an easy concept to follow for those starting out on the digital content journey.

The DigitalNZ initiative aims to make New Zealand digital content easy to find, share and use and therefore its focus is on five core elements of the digital content life cycle to create, describe, manage. discover and use and reuse digital content.

Researching digital content standards To develop DigitalNZ’s framework for good practice guidance an analysis was made of

information standards for digital content. Many types of standards were explored including international and national standards; best practice, protocols and profiles.

Different types of standards for different purpose were also explored to cover the full range of requirements for creating, describing and managing digital content, for example, file format types, resource description and transport protocols. To be included in the analysis standards needed to meet some or all of the following criteria: • published by a trusted and not for profit organisations • been through some due process to reach consensus • have uptake by trusted organisations. • be in mainstream use • easily available The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1 meet all the criteria.

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Make it Digital homepage

Poster presentation: at DC2009, Semantic Interoperability of Linked Data, Seoul, Korea, October 12-16, 2009

References 1. A framework for good digitisation (2009). Version 2.0.

http://makeit.digitalnz.org/guidelines/selectingfor- digitisation/selection-resources/

2. DigitalNZ ā-tihi o Aotearoa (2009) DigitalNZ. 22 July 2009. http://www.digitalnz.org/ 3. Digital Strategy. (2007) New Zealand digital content Strategy.

http://www.digitalstrategy.govt.nz/Resources/New- Zealand-Digital-Content-Strategy/

4. NISO (2007). A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections. (3rd ed.) http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/framework3.pdf

5. Hodge. Gail (2000). Best Practices for Digital Archiving: An information life cycle approach. D-Lib Magazine, 6 (1) Retrieved May 2009 from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january00/01hodge.html

6. Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems. (2002) Reference model for an open archival information system

7. (OAIS) : recommendation for space data system standards. Washington CCSDS Secretariat, Program Integration Division (Code M-3), National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

8. JISC Digital Media (2009). JISC Advisory Service. 22 July 2009. http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/

9. Digital Dark l age http://liswiki.org/wiki/Digital_Dark_Age Acknowledgements

Lewis Brown and Andy Neale of DigitalNZ

Welcome to Make it Digital The digital content life cycle is now used on DigitalNZ’s Make it Digital

website as a tool to present guidance for good practice with digital content. Guides for selecting, creating, description, and use and reuse of digital

content are now available on the website (2009). The guides have open standards and interoperability at their core and

information about Dublin Core metadata is referenced in the guide “Describing digital content”. This has already been a focus of discussion in the Questions Section in discussing interoperability and long-term usability of metadata embedded in digital photos.

More about structured open metadata standards like Dublin Core will be incorporated into the other elements of the digital content life cycle for example, the management element for the topics harvesting, syntax, and repositories, and the discovery element for searching.

The guides are primarily aimed at audience of small and medium organisations.

3. Digital Content life cycle and Make it Digital