Posts by nzlemming
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to bmk,
True. I was meaning accessibility checkers.
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to Sacha,
Automated checkers are crap, and I say this with bitter experience. Also, stuff doesn't get fixed unless they know about it. Just saying.
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to Russell Brown,
oh, yeah, thoroughly agree. I only raised Te Ara because that seemed to me closest to what Simon was talking about, not because I wanted them to take it on. The technology is the easy bit ;-)
Also, because the Te Ara programme is heavily multi-disciplinary and that's what Simon's archive needs as well.
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to Sacha,
but it would be nice for the nation's formal memory to be available to all its citizens, not just the non-disabled ones.
Actually, I did consult with them in my official capacity up until 2005, while they were building and bedding down, and they weren't doing too bad a job. There seemed to be text-based alternatives for all the AV stuff and the nav was pretty good when last I went though it officially. I found them very receptive to issues, so send any problems in to them and see what their response is.
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Hard News: Bishop Brian: It's worse than…, in reply to bmk,
Religions start out as cults.
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to Sacha,
I thought it was pretty widely publicised. Surely media archives can help you verify? :)
To be fair, the bulk of the damage to that document occurred before it ever reached Archives New Zealand.
In my informed opinion, the main issue with Archives being part of DIA earlier was being a small cog inside a large wheel, and not a very squeaky one. Being a separate department meant being able to make appropriate professional and technical choices that did not have to intermesh with the rest of DIA, and was not subject to the internal political prioritization that large omnibus departments like DIA (and MED, to a large extent) are prone to. This has made Archives a very effective agency, over the last decade.
One should also remember that Archives New Zealand is the memory of government, not just a repository for anything old. National Library is the place for non-governmental archiving. There is still much concern in the library, archives and recordkeeping communities (another division most people don’t think about) about the impacts of the merger, especially around skilled staff leaving and some absurd technical decisions that I, for one, keep hearing about. Lotus Notes, FFS! And a old version to boot.
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Hard News: Introducing: The New Zealand…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
It has no exact parallel in New Zealand to date but has elements of NZ on Screen, Wikipedia, Facebook, the All Music Guide, the work of people like Chris Bourke, John Dix & Andrew Schmidt, and Rock’s Back Pages mixed in. I’m very uncomfortable using the word archive for this, as it’s not
Simon, Have you looked at the current version of the Encyclopedia of NZ? It's built in Drupal (IIRC) with lots of lovely Dublin Core metadata, heaps of AV and facsimile segments and all the text you can eat. As a model it seems to me to fulfil the requirements you mention for fulfilling the second prong, lacking only the people and the money to make that happen. I tend to agree with Tamsin, though - it's a political issue at heart, as in "who will pay for this?". I believe the reason most libraries (and NatLib especially) are not working in this space to the level you would like is that no-one paying the bills regards it as core business and therefore worth funding.
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Separately, does anyone else note the irony that the biopic of His Holiness President for Life Dr Tamariki could be called "The Life of Brian"?
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Hard News: Bishop Brian: It's worse than…, in reply to giovanni tiso,
How does a guy called "jesus" have any connection to the Christian Corporation?
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Jackie Clark,
So happy that I may just have to do my headbanging dance
Headbanging. To Wham.
Somehow, I think a few memos have been missed.