This year, you’re going to see a fair bit from us recapping what we’ve done to get to where we are over the last 20 years, and we thought we’d start this off in January with a bit of a look back to the start of things.

Back in 2004, I had left working in a biodiversity survey company to finish my Masters in Business Administration, and then started the current iteration of Gaia Resources (technically, I used the name back in 1997 and 1998 when I was doing some short term contracts for various organisations).

Gaia Resources started from my home – technically, from a small table in a side area off our lounge room – and look how we’ve come full circle – now, post COVID, we are mainly working from home these days once more.  

The story of Gaia Resources – right back from that table – is one that I look back and think about regularly – seeing some of the challenges we’ve faced and overcome really does help you to have the strength to take on new challenges and to solve other problems that arise.  So I thought I’d just write a little about the areas we’ve worked in over the twenty years as a starting point, and how far we’ve come.

When I started the company we were providing a range of spatial data services to the biological survey part of the environmental industry.  We were busy digitising the maps and tables from a range of different biological survey reports, creating digital datasets from paper sources.  Oh, how far we’ve come since then – like the projects we’ve done like using Artificial Intelligence to capture biodiversity data (such as our work with the Northern Territory).  One constant though – it has also been important to interacting with biodiversity data standards when doing this data collection (like the TDWG standards and the new Australian Biodiversity Information Standard), as we have done that throughout our history.

This pic was from The Stagg cafe in Hobart during the TDWG 2023 conference

In 2005 we saw the arrival of Google Maps, and that started to change the landscape of spatial data quite quickly – all of a sudden it was much more desirable to present spatial data through the browser.  Google Maps started to get traction over the next few years and we realised that digitising and producing paper maps was on the way out, so we started to hire software engineers into the company to build systems to manage spatial data.  To this day we are continuing to develop these biological data systems, such as our work on the Western Australian Biodiversity Information Office (both design and build) and the federal government’s Biodiversity Data Repository.

During those early days, we also found ourselves working with the Western Australian Museum, where we were supporting their collections databases – registers of all the vouchered specimens that they have in their collections.  This led to a chance meeting and discussion around Archives, and then we were providing services to a whole new sector, which has become one of the areas I’m very proud of.  

We have delivered a range of open source collections databases to the Archives sector in Australia, across Western Australia, Victoria and most notably Queensland, where – on the back of our work with the Queensland State Archives – we set up our second office in Brisbane.  All of a sudden, we were an Australian company – not just a Western Australian one.  So, from our origins around that little table, now we have offices and staff right around Australia – that’s been a big change!

As an aside – the Archives bug had bitten me in particular, and how!  Being at the most recent national Archives conference in Melbourne just reaffirmed how important this sector is – and how much we enjoy being part of it.  Going from our simple first steps of implementing collections databases to now implementing complete archival systems, including comprehensive digital preservation systems – all of this has been a big shift from our origins, but in the right direction!

Luke, Sarah and I went to the ASA conference in Melbourne in 2023 – our sixth one. Dennis Lillee was there already

The Environment and Collections areas have become pillars of what we do at Gaia Resources; there are other areas we also work in, but these two have come to be our mainstays.  We’ve even now designed the company to have these as our “units” – so that we are focused on our clients in these areas, and delivering high quality services to them.

There are a lot of people that have helped Gaia Resources get to the 20 year mark; clients, colleagues, friends and family.  But throughout the whole thing we could not have done what we have, as well as we have, without our team – our staff, our family away from home.  These people – past and present – have all contributed in some way to the organisation and without them we would not be here.  So to talk about the history of Gaia Resources without the people that came on the journey – so thank you to everyone who has, still does, (or will) work here at Gaia Resources – the place wouldn’t be what it is without your input along the way.  Thank you.

The team at team week in 2022 in Perth – one of the fondest memories from the last couple of years (which will be repeated this year – hopefully without COVID!)

I’m forever grateful to lead this team on our mission of making the world a better place, through the delivery of sustainable technology solutions in a responsible manner.  This year is going to be one where we get to celebrate that just a little bit, and that’s going to make for some fun times ahead.

Stay tuned for more about our history over the year, and for some bright new initiatives that we’re heading into.  Meanwhile, if you want to know more about us, why not drop me a line on email, or through our social media channels – Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter and now Instagram!

Piers

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Earlier this month Piers Higgs, Sarah Aldrich and I took a trip to Melbourne to attend the Australian Society of Archivists (ASA) 2023 conference at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). With a sense of enthusiasm on the flight over I was keen to get down into the details about archives and solve some challenges with my fellow conference participants.

My trip started Monday at Perth airport grabbing a coffee with Piers before our flight to the great city of Melbourne. Upon arrival in Melbourne we met up with Sarah, one of Gaia Resources’ Collection Analysts based in Canberra, and headed to our hotel located near the MCG. After a social dinner we cracked down on what our plan for ASA 2023 was, who is attending each session and what we wanted to learn. A screenshot of the event agenda can be seen below.

DAY 1:

An early morning run was the start of the day for Sarah, Piers and I decided to keep it a bit more relaxed… We met Sarah for coffees and breakfast at a local cafe then got ready to attend ASA 2023 – Rising to our Challenges. Upon arrival I was amazed to see the variety of archivists from all over Australia and even from Singapore, archivists representing the state archives around Australia but also archivists from local historical societies and schools. Day one had a focus on first nations archives and living history, as well as discussions on the use of AI in archives and the challenge for institutions in archiving big data. 

Day 1 Pre-conference selfie L-R Piers Higgs, Luke Connelly and Sarah Aldrich

Day one went by in a flash, there was a flurry of activities, plenty of notes and a new perspective on the challenges that archives are facing. After wrapping up the day the Gaia Resources fly-in team caught up with some of our Melbourne based team members. An interesting dinner in Federation Square was followed up by some ‘team-building’ at a few bars in the Melbourne CBD. Although Gaia Resources is an online based company it is great to meet co-workers in person and learn more about their lived experiences.

L-R, Sally O’Callaghan (Past Gaia Resources Employee, now working for the NAA), Drew Robinson, Sarah Aldrich, Luke Connelly, Piers Higgs

Day 2:

After a relaxed morning and breakfast, day two of the conference began with a panel discussion from the Queer Archives of Victoria. Then we began our sessions for the day covering digital preservation and digital transformation, with sessions hosted by the National Archives of Australia and the Public Records Office Victoria. It was great to see how archives benefit from technology like the ones developed by Gaia Resources. At the conclusion of the conference we heard from two industry experts, Pia Andrews and Barbara Reed, discussing governance in record keeping and how to personally stand out in archives. The launch of the 2024 ASA Conference wrapped up the final day and Gaia Resources may be heading off to Auckland next year…

Each of us also tried to put together a short summary of our conference highlights, including:

“It’s been 8 years since my first archives conference, and as an IT professional I find that I’m still learning more about how archives undertake their practice – but I’m glad to keep learning from them and trying to make sure we can deliver even better solutions for their problems.”

• Piers Higgs

“Having worked as an archivist prior to pivoting into tech, attending the ASA conference gives me the chance to act like a kid in a candy shop. It’s always a pleasure to connect with archivists, hear about their wins over the past year, talk shop, and discuss how tech can work to their advantage. I enjoy learning and keeping up with the current practices.”

• Sarah Aldrich

“The ASA Conference gave me insight into the challenges that archives are facing and how Gaia Resources can help these organisations grow through custom technological solutions.”

• Luke Connelly

In wrapping up my brief conference breakdown here are some key learnings highlighted by the Gaia Resources team from the 2023 ASA Conference:

1. Archives are essential to preserving our history both personally and on a government level: each record has at least one person attached to it, we must remember the importance of each record and the personal value attributed to it.
2. Conversations around digital preservation and technology such as AI are progressing. 
3. There’s still work to do around bridging the gap between Collecting organisations and technology solution providers. 
4. Gaia’s work and with our clients has demonstrated innovative solutions in the forefront of the field, notably our implementation of the archival management and digital preservation system for QSA and our work on Clio.

If you would like to know more about our digital preservation services and archival storage solutions please don’t hesitate to contact me or start a conversation with us on one of our social media platforms Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook

Luke

The post Rising to the challenge: Recap of the 2023 Australian Society of Archivists Conference appeared first on Gaia Resources.

That story begins in Brisbane, where I was helping with some workshops with our client, the Queensland State Archives.  Our team are heading into the first milestone for the new Digital Preservation System there, and so we were planning the next stage of the project to deliver the final touches on the system.  After a good collaborative day of workshops, I climbed aboard a flight back to Perth, and found our flight firstly diverted to Kalgoorlie with a fuel issue, and then unable to finish the final leg of the journey due to a maintenance issue.  And so, there we were, 130-odd passengers, trying to find a way to sleep on the Kalgoorlie airport floor.

When we did arrive back in Perth, I realised that there really was no time to rush home to get changed into something more formal for my presentation, and instead headed to the RIMPA event wearing my plane clothes to present on the topic of “Preparing for the Future; Skills and Technologies”.

When I’m asked to present at an event, I like to do my homework into the people that are there and to try to come up with something that is useful for them to take away and use themselves.  I think it’s beholden on a presenter to make sure that their presentation is useful (and bonus if it’s also entertaining, which I do strive for).

In this case, I set up my presentation to look at where we are at today (including an explanation of my attire), where “here” really is, how you assess your baseline in terms of the skills and technologies you have before launching into a crystal ball gazing session about what Records Management professionals might need into the future.  To do this, I introduced them to a model we’ve worked with many times in our environment area; our model we use for assessing the health of an organisation across some key areas; people, process, data, hardware and software.  We started using this model across spatial health check projects, but we find that it works for other industries as well.

This model opens the door for an evaluation of some of the trends that are out there in each of those areas, and I highlighted the following in my talk

• People – it’s about “soft skills”, mental health strategies and resilience 
• Data – looking at the full data lifecycle means you have to consider the volumes being created, the environmental cost of storing all this data, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and security considerations, 
• Hardware – it’s about location – is your hardware in the cloud (i.e. someone else’s data centre, or your own on premise approach), 
• Software – thinking about the life cycle of software and the 7-10 year lifespan of software, as well as the increasing opportunities that AI is bringing to the field, and
• Process – it’s about making sure you are developing the best practice processes that work on the digital side, not ones that are just converted from analysis projects.

When you put all this together, you end up creating a plan to evaluate your organisation – one that takes this strategic review as the first step, before moving into process creation, staff development and training, and potentially system implementation for the next generation of system for your organisation. By following that plan you can go on a journey from where you are to somewhere in the future you really want to be (and hopefully you don’t get diverted to Kalgoorlie along the way – but make the most of it if you do!).

It’s important in any organisation considering any sort of approach to really look at where you have come from, and what you have before you embark into the future.  I feel like this is something in particular that I’ve been learning about Gaia Resources over the 20-odd years and multiple evolutions that we have been through, and I hope that it was of use to the RIMPA attendees on the day.

While I can’t promise that I will never turn up to a presentation wearing a Goodies t-shirt in the future, I can promise that I’d be back to another RIMPA event like this in a flash – the audience were very well engaged and it was a real privilege to be there.

Thanks to Jo Kane (L) and Frank Flintoff (M) for the support on the day – and this photo

If you’d like to know more about how these sorts of plans work for organisations, get a copy of the presentation, or just want to follow up on something I’ve said on the day, then drop me a line at piers.higgs@gaiaresources.com.au.  You can also always start a conversation with us on our social media feeds Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, and it’ll get to me that way, too!

Piers

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Our latest proof-of-concept activity with our valued clients at Queensland State Archives (QSA)  has seen us helping to tap into the information stored in the archives. To do this, we used Clio to transcribe handwritten letters and historical documents that tell the story of the turbulent early contact between Australia’s First Nations people and European settlers in Queensland. 

This work with QSA’s First Nations Access and Engagement Team is part of their Frontier Wars project that includes a significant collection of digitised 150 year old handwritten documents and letters, a community transcription initiative, an exhibition and a three-part SBS documentary series called Australian Wars. The documentary series premiered on Wednesday, 21 September, and it tells the story of Australia’s frontier conflicts that swept the country over a 100-year period.

When David and his team approached us with the challenge of transcribing 250 scanned handwritten letters and documents, we quickly jumped on the opportunity to be involved in such an interesting project. David was considering his options, including:

• Open community transcription, where volunteers manually transcribe documents through FromThePage software,
• Confidential online transcription, where the transcriptions are done manually by a small number of trained and certified professionals, and
• Automated transcription using Gaia Resources Clio prototype.

Using Clio for this project was an attractive option for transcribing sensitive handwritten documents quickly and efficiently; however, the varying cursive styles, condition of documents, formats and orientations of text presented several challenges. The benefit of Clio is that it is very fast to turn handwriting into a text document, so it can be easily scaled to hundreds and thousands of input documents.

The results from Clio can vary between getting just about every word correct with a few typos here and there, to only getting about half the content correct; and there are several factors that control that. As shown in the samples below, there are several variables to contend with, including blurred and crossed-out words, damaged pages, angled writing, newspaper formats and scans of books. Some of these require image pre-processing to get the best possible result.

Examples of the various types and conditions of the Frontier Wars documents

David opted for a combination of automated and open community transcription, and worked with us to take the results from Clio as a starting point for more efficient community transcription in FromThePage software. We all knew that automation alone would not solve the problem, but Clio could help speed up the process. The idea of going forward with that combined approach was that if someone was to start from nothing, it might take them an average of 20 minutes to do a transcription; but with the Clio result as a starting point, they might only take 5-6 minutes to correct errors and move onto the next document.  

What the QSA team found was that the Clio results – although variable – were better than they had expected, and were a great help in saving many hours of manually intensive work. Not only that, but enthusiastic members of the public enjoyed having a look at how the ‘machine’ had interpreted certain bits of text. In some cases, they could raise an eyebrow over something that is quite obvious to the human eye; but the efficiency gain becomes undeniable when scaled to a whole collection of documents. 

Delving into our process and results a little, we were able to use a Clio-derived (e.g. computer) confidence in prediction value to categorise each document’s predicted transcription accuracy. Each term, word or text component in a document is assigned a confidence in prediction value based on how confident Clio is of its transcription for that component. The Average Confidence Level can then be calculated across the entire document.t. 

Below are the Confidence Level categories used and their corresponding average confidence in prediction ranges:

• Very Good (between 90% and 100%)
• Good (between 80% and 89%)
• Above Average (between 70% and 79%)
• Average (between 60% and 69%)
• Poor (between 40% and 59%)
• Very Poor (between 0% and 39%)

Before we started, the QSA team suspected they might only get about 40% of the content accurately transcribed using Clio. The graph shows the percentage of documents that fell into each Confidence Level category.

Predicted Transcription Quality

We had no documents in the Very Poor category. So 100% of documents had an average confidence level exceeding 40%. Although it is only a computer derived measure, it hinted at how well Clio was coping with these historical documents. 

This combination of automated and manual process saves time and enables people to get on with the important stuff that AI can’t do, and it follows that there are consistency and security benefits to go with a more efficient workflow. 

Some other improvements we were able to implement in pre-processing the scanned documents included splitting ‘double page spread’ formats into separate pages. Below is an example of the inputs and outputs before and after splitting the pages:

An example of a double-page spread transcription that was rated as Good

While the statistical results of these may not have changed, the correctness and readability of the output is certainly better and important for the downstream review process. 

As mentioned above, the condition of the original documents varied for a number of reasons. When it comes to documents with multiple orientations of text, Clio will only read one orientation per document n a single page, or it may merge text from adjacent blocks that are meant to be read separately – such as margin text or dates. 

Future improvements could be gained with additional pre-processing by segmenting multiple text orientations, as illustrated below:

An example of multiple text orientations (left) and future approach of isolating blocks of text (right). (for illustration purposes only)

We also could do further post-processing as well as the pre-processing outlined above to improve results.  For example, we could implement a method using the Levenshtein distance algorithm which would assist in finding similar strings in other documents and replace it with a more likely string. In this way we could correct ‘Social socuriy gumber’ to ‘Social Security Number’.

Overall, we were really impressed with the accuracy of the Clio prototype in reading 19th Century handwritten letters and folios. Clio’s models have been well-trained and are very good – not perfect, but very impressive and they are continually improving as more information is passed through it and the corrections are fed back in. Often the model is better at reading old handwriting than I am!

From our point of view, this has been an exciting Proof of Concept as it shows that it is possible and viable to unlock the vast and valuable information stored in archives, making the content more accessible and searchable to the general public. 

If you’ve got data in a soft or hard copy format that you need transcribed, then reach out to us and let’s see how we can help you solve your problems.  In the meantime, if you’d like to know more, start a conversation on our social media platforms – Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook or send us an email.

Gail

The post Harnessing the power of AI to unlock the archives appeared first on Gaia Resources.

One of the things that I find most transcendent about experiencing and engaging with art is its ability to create a connection between viewers and participants. And one of the very reasons why I would like to talk about it, is because it shouldn’t need to be an exclusive right, available only to those whom the luxury is accessible. Some of our team member’s favourite projects are those which provide them with an opportunity to bring their area of passion into the public’s eye, for all to engage with it.

As part of our ongoing involvement with the gallery, I was recently able to attend a panel discussion and exhibition held at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), in Stanley place. The panel topic was ‘A New Frontier for AI and the Arts’, which, given my interest in technology and the Arts, was an amazing opportunity. I also had the chance to view the current Exhibition ‘Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles’ in the evening light, and was blown away at both the technical challenge in such a complex exhibition and the intense and overwhelming experience that was the installation in the very first room.

The panel itself was chaired by QAGOMA Digital Transformation Manager Morgan Strong, and featured Professor Marek Kowalkiewicz (QUT Chair in Digital Economy); Thomas Stenning (Product Owner for Machine Learning at SplashHQ); and Larene Le Gassick (Independent Software Engineer and Accessibility Consultant). The panellists all brought together different perspectives and considerations for the discussions on ‘merging of AI with cultural practice’.

Panellists at QAGOMA’s ‘A New Frontier for AI and the Arts’ discussion.

Discussions touched on a range of areas in the brief time available, including the question of if we consider the outputs of AI art generators such as DALL-E 2 to be truly creative in their own right? And if so, is the artist the person providing the prompt for creation, or does it include the writers of the algorithms behind the system? Perhaps AI will be considered as instead another tool that allows artists to visualise, discover and explore across mediums and domains without requiring the years of practise to develop each of the associated technical skills. If that is the case, does that allow a new type of artist to find their place? Technology is one tool that can bring years of training and education and instead provide a more accessible outlet for creative thought that can be shared and used by a new type of artist. Bringing access to existing cultural assets is one thing, providing both that and the resources to allow those who may typically struggle to create art using traditional methods is another. Whether it be marginalised groups to whom the years of typically unpaid labour perfecting a specific technique may be a barrier, or someone to whom the application of physical brush to canvas is a challenge, technology provides new means to create and engage with art.

While each panellist had their own perspective, the discussion provided insights into the potential (and potential challenges) that may be found through the use of AI in the Arts.

The panel was followed by a short presentation from QAGOMA’s Digital Resident, Kate Thompson (Associate Professor of Digital Pedagogies, QUT), presenting some highlights from her recent research into the utilisation of technology by audiences at the Gallery. It was fascinating to see how that gallery is using technology to allow visitors more varied and informed engagement with exhibitions.

Collections online allows for high quality digital images, with functionality from a simple zoom to sliders displaying the before and after images from restorations.

It was marvellous to hear about further work being done at QAGOMA as part of their Digital Transformation program. We wrote late last year about our work on rebuilding their Collections Online platform. Since then monthly traffic to the site has increased fivefold. Given our passion for bringing the assets of our institutions into the public eye, this is an amazing motivation for us to continue this work. 

If you’re interested in how your organisation’s content can be brought to the public, please get in touch via email or get in touch on our socials: Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn

Sophie

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We were asked to present on the work that we do in the archival collections around Australia, so we gave a quick run through of a range of projects that we’re working on around Australia, and talked about some common and different functionality. We then talked through some of the technology and future things that might be of interest to archives we’ve been looking at. 

The talk was given in person (with a COVID safe setup) and also on Zoom – and the Zoom call was recorded as has been made available below.

https://vimeo.com/ausarchivists/review/686909468/047a43727d

It was nice to see a few of our clients and some new faces as well.  One thing that I really like about the way the ASA operates is that it welcomes in new organisations that are seeking to learn about archiving, and some of the people we met that night asked a whole bunch of interesting questions in the session and afterwards around the technology side of archiving.

Over the years, the ASA has facilitated ways for us to learn a lot as a team about archives, and it was good to be giving something back to them and their members!  If you have questions about archives, then feel free to get in touch and ask either Meg or myself questions via our enquiries@gaiaresources.com.au email address – or start a conversation with us on our social media via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

The post Archives now and forever! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Item ID: ITM1640266

Gaia Resources is a proponent of open-source solutions for cultural institutions, particularly for long-term sustainable information management. Without restrictive licensing conditions, you know that the underlying code of a system can be visible to you and within your control in the future. If a specific vendor is no longer available, the code itself can still be taken up by others without risking a loss of access to your digital assets.

In 2020, Gaia Resources along with our consortium partners Hudson Molonglo and Recordkeeping Innovation, built and implemented a new Archival Management System (AMS) using a customised version of the open-source software platform ArchivesSpace, as well as a portal for Agencies (ArchivesGateway) and a new public interface for searching the archives (ArchivesSearch). This project was delivered to the Queensland State Archives (QSA) with the support and assistance of the Digital Archiving Program (DAP).

Following the successful delivery of this trio of systems, the next important task in the digital transformation of Queensland’s archives was digital preservation. To ensure the successful delivery of a comprehensive digital preservation solution, our next step at Gaia Resources was the validation of key questions and assumptions via delivery of a Proof of Concept (PoC) to QSA.

One of the original implementation team project managers, Megan Edward, began working on the PoC for a new process to integrate the transfer of digital records from agencies with a digital preservation system. The groundwork of the PoC demonstrated that our combined Waterfall/Agile methodology could both deliver to the requirements set while allowing for a feedback loop during implementation stages which gives QSA the flexibility to make smaller decisions once the initial system is up and running in a test environment.

With our original consortium partners, Hudson Molonglo and Recordkeeping Innovation, in the POC, we were able to design, develop and implement an end-to-end digital transfer process. The workflow was built upon functionality delivered in the AMS and was subsequently integrated with Archivematica for long-term digital preservation. This allowed us to validate assumptions made before implementation, and identify areas requiring further investigation for a complete solution.

At Gaia Resources, we prefer to work closely and collaboratively with our clients; as well as call on the expertise of subject matter experts when required to ensure we can provide the best service and solution. In the current DPS project, we have also partnered with Artefactual. Artefactual is not only responsible for maintaining Archivematica but they also manage Access to Memory (AtoM), another open-source archival solution that Gaia Resources has delivered for clients. With this team of specialists, the project will implement digital preservation capabilities for QSA, enabling them to preserve and provide access to born-digital and digitised records of cultural and historical significance for Queensland. We are privileged to be part of this important work preserving Queensland’s heritage, delivered for QSA via DAP as part of the technology transformation program underway at QSA. It is wonderful to continue our partnership with Record Keeping Innovation and Hudson Molonglo and to welcome Artefactual to the team. 

The Queensland State Archive holds over 67 linear kilometres of records

More recently, I wrote about how lucky the Brisbane-based QSA team were in getting a tour around some of the amazing facilities there as we came closer to the next phase of our digital preservation work with QSA and DAP. Our continuing relationship with QSA themselves; our partners from the original consortium; and now Artefactual, brings together specialist knowledge in record-keeping best practice as well as the two open-source solutions underlying the future and current systems.

As our relationship with QSA continues, Gaia Resources is excited to see the outcomes of this stage of work and bring it into use for the benefit of future generations. 

If you are interested in discussing how Gaia Resources might assist your organisation in managing archives or collections solutions, please get in touch via email or our socials: Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Sophie

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QAGOMA’s Collections Online allows users to search specifically for items relating to Brisbane

The QAGOMA Collections Online website displays their digitised content from within the collection for the public. When our project with them began, they had an existing prototype that provided guidance for the desired outcomes. However, it didn’t necessarily provide the intended functionality and would not allow QAGOMA to reliably maintain and extend the solution. The prototype was also limited in that it was not able to automatically migrate changes from within QAGOMA to ensure that the Collections Online site was kept up to date without requiring manual intervention.

The Gaia Resources software engineering team include some individuals with extensive experience in delivering solutions utilising the Drupal content management platform, and so it was a relatively simple task for us to be able to deliver this based on the existing prototype. Our focus was to leverage Drupal’s framework and utilise best practice in the theming layer to deliver a Collections Online that effectively managed content delivery for the QAGOMA staff. One of the key outcomes we wanted to make sure of was that the site was as maintainable and extensible for QAGOMA into the future as possible.

Collections online allows for high quality digital images, with functionality from a simple zoom to sliders displaying the before and after images from restorations.

This project was not only an exceptional opportunity to deliver on our goals to bring collections online, but for the team it was an opportunity to work directly with a client in a collaboration to bring their prototype solution into its next phase. We have had the pleasure of working previously with the QAGOMA Digital Transformation Manager, Morgan Strong, and knew that this pre-existing relationship would make for a solid partnership. While it was a pleasure to have the opportunity to work with him again, it also gave us the unique opportunity to know how to work best together and to utilise the skills and expertise of both Gaia Resources and the team at QAGOMA. This meant that we knew we had both the resources to deliver what was required, but also could provide a light project management touch (in other words, they barely needed me).

Collections Online allows the public to access art both new and familiar.

To keep work as streamlined as possible, the core team was our Senior Software Engineer, Brianna Williams and Morgan Strong of QAGOMA. However, we did have a ‘supporting cast’ to ensure we could be flexible with our resourcing and provide thorough review processes. Our developers and QAGOMA utilised Pantheon as the hosting platform, taking advantage of their Multidev environments to allow QAGOMA and Gaia Resources staff to work in tandem effectively. This allowed us to quickly share updates and provide our combined team with ready visibility of progress, as well as providing a simple solution for the final deployment. Primarily, we wanted a platform that allowed for a simple and flexible way for our teams to work together on Collections Online and to deliver it to the public at the end of the project with price and quality in mind.

QAGOMA Collections online was delivered on time and with positive feedback from both the Gaia Resources team and QAGOMA staff. If you’re interested in how your organisation’s content can be brought to the public, please get in touch via email or get in touch on our socials: Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Sophie

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Gaia Resources first began working with the Queensland State Archives (QSA) in 2017. Our relationship started when we collaborated to launch the collection sharing site Q-Album (see the blog post about our involvement here). We were then engaged to implement and support their new Archival Management System (see blog post here). Currently, we are working with QSA on a new Digital Preservation System.

Few people realise the treasures tucked away for safekeeping in archives around the world, be they personal, community, or government records. In the case of QSA, they are the permanent repository for records owned and created by the Queensland state and local governments. Any item deemed to be of enduring value to documenting the operation and history of the State of Queensland finds its permanent home at QSA and is protected and carefully stored for perpetuity. Special precautions are taken to maintain a physical record’s longevity, including but not limited to temperature, humidity, and handling procedures. As hinted at previously, once the Digital Preservation System is in place, QSA will also collect digital records. QSA also generates digital facsimiles of their most popular and/or at-risk items. As with physical documents, digital items require steps to ensure they are accessible for generations to come (read about Digital Preservation here). To date, the archival material in QSA’s holdings date from as early as the 1820s and stretch over 67 linear kilometres.

The Queensland State Archive holds over 67 linear kilometres of records

On a recent site visit, QSA Archivist Elizabeth Hawkins kindly toured a handful of Brisbane staff through a few of their repositories. The objective was to introduce new Gaia Resources staff to the purpose and procedures of the archives, subsequently providing context for the tools we build and support for QSA. 

While we work on QSA’s Archival Management System, we rarely have time to look at the records that it catalogues. One favourite item that Elizabeth pulled for us was one of the Brisbane prison ledgers. These logs hold the personal and physical details of each prisoner and a rap sheet of all their crimes. Of particular interest were the photos, in remarkably good condition, taken using a mirror so that individuals’ faces and profiles were captured in a single shot, saving precious film. A record like this can illuminate what acts were considered criminal in the contemporary period. While many larceny and assault charges resulted in incarceration, one surprising penalty was several months in prison for “supplying liquor to a South Sea Islander” (Queensland State Archives, Item Representation ID PR654070).

Elizabeth then took us through the repository of maps and oversized paper items. This room is wall to wall flatbed filing cabinets (and is not included in their count of 67 linear km of records). She opened a drawer to show us one particular item. We were looking at a map of Northern Australia from the 1940s. Upon closer examination, all the notations, place names etc, were in a Japanese script. From here, it’s easy to jump to conclusions, but none of that is documented. Instead, what we do know is these maps were found amongst a group of records from a Queensland government agency. How the maps came into the possession of the agency we may never know.

Upon entering QSA, key items of historical relevance to Queensland are displayed

Elizabeth included the Conservation Lab on our tour. Kristy McCullough, QSA’s Conservator, generously took the time to demystify the work of a Conservator. She took us through the process of assessing, planning, and actioning a conservation strategy for a book that had been a tasty meal for some determined insects. It had come to QSA in such poor condition that its pages were in countless pieces and the text was virtually illegible. According to Kristy the best course of action for such an item is to piece together the pages and take a high-resolution photograph of each page. The digital record then becomes the point of truth. Kristy explained that a choice must be made about the time and resources poured into the one object balanced with the value gained and the backlog of other conservation needs. Kristy further educated us about the differences between preservation and conservation, two often confused concepts. Preservation activities mitigate risks to items and include tasks like maintaining a stable environment with appropriate climate control, monitoring an item’s condition, and ensuring proper handling. On the other hand, conservation is an act of intervention on the objects’ condition.  It might include piecing together tears (with special inert materials), adding support, or chemical cleanings to eliminate hazards.

Sally Mitchell and Sarah Aldrich use the Historical Image Library Discovery Assistant (HILDA) to learn more about the history of Queensland

Throughout the tour, there was one factor that remained a highlight for our team; seeing the system we implemented and customised in use for each role. We watched the Reading Room team process requests from the public. Being able to observe their process illuminated how they use the tool and why some enhancements were monumental in improving their workflow. In the Conservation Lab, we saw how an item was updated, the condition reported, proposed treatments lodged, and then the circle closed as an item is returned to the repository. 

We only saw a minuscule portion of the collection, but it is evident that the records within QSA tell a web of stories. The narratives range from the personal which bring families together or they may pertain to Queensland’s role in global events. Also evident is that the work of an archive is never finished. We at Gaia Resources are privileged to be able to support the great work done by QSA to protect our history. Thank you to Queensland State Archives and especially Elizabeth for taking the time to walk us through a portion of their 60 odd kilometres of records. It truly elucidates the importance of preserving records and the role of archives.

If you’re responsible for collections, get in touch to learn how we can help connect people to your treasures. Reach out via email or get in touch on our socials: Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Sophie

The post The Importance of Archives – handling our history appeared first on Gaia Resources.

So what is digital preservation? It’s about making sure that information that is kept in digital form can still be read in the future – changing software file formats and media storage being two of the more common issues that this area addresses, but backup file formats are a special subset of software formats that are often overlooked. It also ensures that the information maintains its provenance and evidentiary value, a key issue for much business information. 

Back in the 1990s, I worked in the helpdesk at a large university, and when Microsoft released Word version 6 for Macintosh, we suddenly had a big problem because most of the documents staff and students had created in the previous versions of Word, no longer opened in the new one. Several weeks of manual conversion of these documents were done by the helpdesk staff, and we had a fairly good success rate… however, this became my first lesson in the fragility of software formats and how information can be lost. 

In the same workplace, I also experienced the fragility of hardware for storing data, when “legacy-free PCs” started being sold that didn’t include floppy disc drives – starting with the iMac in 1999 – and suddenly again all of the staff and students needed assistance in moving their files from floppy discs to CDs or network-based storage. 

Many years later, I was fortunate to work at the State Records Office of Western Australia, and there I discovered just how big an issue these things were. One of my first experiences with Gaia Resources was bringing some floppy discs around to their office where they had a machine that had both 3 ½ and 5 ¼ inch floppy disc drives as well as a USB port to retrieve some digital information. 

Floppy discs in sizes 8”, 5 ¼”, and 3 ½”

Though still ostensibly a “collecting” organisation, the information that is held by the State Records Office of Western Australia is that which has been created across the Western Australian government since its establishment in 1828 as the Colonial Secretary’s Office. That includes information transferred from government agencies such as Landgate and the Department of Education, as well as local councils like the City of Joondalup, and of course the elected members of parliament such as former Western Australian premier, Colin Barnett – even company investigations into the Bond Corporation.  Much of this information began its life in digital form, and arguably now, most if not all information created by government, individuals, and commercial organisations is created digitally. So does that information cease to have value when CD drives to read discs are no longer easily available, or you no longer have WordPerfect installed on your latest laptop? 

The area of Digital Preservation specifically looks at these issues, to ensure that information can still be accessed into the future. We’ve worked with a number of different archive clients including Queensland State Archive, Public Records Office of Victoria, State Records Office of Western Australia, and Libraries Tasmania, and continue to work with these and others to introduce and expand their digital preservation activities. Whilst it’s primarily the collecting organisations that are taking these steps, it’s definitely something that all businesses should consider in planning their futures, and what their information is worth in their ongoing success. 

If you think your business information is worth looking after for the long term and would like to know more about how Gaia Resources can help you with digital preservation, then feel free to get in touch with me directly, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Meg

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PROV elected to use the open source software CollectiveAccess for their archival management system, and engaged us to customise it to support their new archival model, as well as integrate with other new systems they were implementing as part of this project. This included us integrating with a Persistent IDentifier (PID) minting system which assigns a persistent and unique ID to every record in PROV’s collection, and also integrating the AMS with their new warehouse management system, which manages the location of their physical records. 

This project has been an iterative process, with our team working collaboratively with PROV staff to refine and develop the functionality and integrations of the AMS as the other systems came online. We worked with vendors from around the world (leading to some unusual meeting times!) so that we could work through any issues with integrations in real time.

PROV’s new archives management system gives the public access to digital material as well as a host of integrations for staff

The last 18 months of the project were done while the world wrestled with the COVID-19 pandemic, and poor Melbourne spent a great deal of that time in lockdown – providing an unexpected opportunity for PROV to take extra time for testing before go-live. 

It was terrific to have PROV’s team so involved in this project. They had done an enormous amount of work prior to the project starting so they were very clear on how their metadata would fit into the new system, and how their business processes would work with so many new systems. 

If you would like to know more about how Gaia Resources can help you with your collection management system design and implementation, then feel free to get in touch with me directly, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Meg

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On Wednesday 9 December, Chris Roach and I attended a webinar hosted by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), celebrating its 10 years of existence and showcasing research into the role of Big Data and data science modelling techniques in managing Australian biodiversity. It was a chance for me to also reflect on my journey in parallel with the ALA in the early days when I was at the Western Australian Museum. I was involved there in aligning the Arachnology database fields with the TDWG Darwin Core standard, so the web team could mobilise our data; then later in environmental consulting; and now here at Gaia Resources where we share much of the ideals of the ALA in enabling open biodiversity data sharing and aligning to internationally recognised standards.

The following provides a summary of some of the important research that was described in this particular seminar series of three speakers.

With platforms such as the ALA, the amount of biodiversity data available has dramatically increased in the last 10 years and empowered biodiversity conservation with so much more confidence in actions undertaken; but many of the ecological challenges that we have faced in the past still remain. These challenges can be summed up in three main areas:

• Sampling bias,
• Incomplete coverage and,
• Data quality.

Professor Melodie McGeoch (La Trobe University) discussed the importance of not just focusing on documenting populations of threatened, vulnerable, and endangered species; but also the need to recognise the importance of occurrence data for “common” species. Whether a species is recognised as common depends on temporal trends, local abundance, and spatial range; and significant declines in any of these areas may go unnoticed when a species is thought to be common enough not to require frequent monitoring. In terms of identifying refuges for preventing diversity and biomass decline, Prof. McGeoch advocated for the modelling of ALA and other data of both rare and common species at a more localised level to understand geographic variation and abundance over time.

PhD candidate Tianxiao (August) Hao (University of Melbourne) used his research in fungal diversity in Australia to show the rapid increase in data availability. Some of this data, however, is unreliable, and so careful consideration must be taken prior to analysis as to whether the data is of a high enough standard to be useful. He acknowledged the new technology and rigorous screening that new data submitted to the ALA undergoes and the large clean up operation that is underway to increase the quality of legacy data.

Both August and Professor Jane Elith (University of Melbourne) demonstrated how the available data is still biased greatly by sampling effort due to environmental or logistical constraints. It makes sense that the easiest to reach places, such as areas near population centres, coastlines and, along roads are the most heavily sampled.

Professor Elith also highlighted the much forgotten bias introduced by a deficiency in absence data. Most ‘observation’ records are for presence data, but having knowledge of what areas have been sampled (and how) without finding occurrences, is possibly of equal significance to documenting the presence of species. Predictive modelling of species distributions are so much more powerful when they can account for bias and ideally this presence-absence type of data capture should be integrated into research and citizen science initiatives.

Professor Elith showcased the eBird initiative as a good example of where using citizen science can provide comprehensive coverage of occurrence data over time.

Gaia Resources is no stranger to considerations of presence-absence data and has developed several Citizen Science solutions over the years. We have also worked with conservation groups like the Great Victoria Desert Biodiversity Trust to plan habitat survey strategies (check out our blog here).

With the help of open-access biodiversity data such as that provided by the ALA, we can all play a part in overcoming the challenges faced in conservation. Here’s to the next 10 years!

If you’d like to know more about this topic or would like to discuss your own Big Data and biodiversity projects, please drop me a line at mieke.strong@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Mieke

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