Charles and I attended this year’s National Digital Forum conference in Wellington in November. The conference is focused on digital projects in the Culture and Heritage sector.
In no particular order, here are ten projects or tools that I discovered during the conference and recommend checking out:
Search Creative Commons
Need an image for a presentation to illustrate something? You can use the Search Creative Commons site to search for resources you can reuse, provided you cite the source for any that are not in the public domain. The website searches large repositories with Creative Commons licensed material, including Europeana, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons and Google Images.
http://search.creativecommons.org/
Open Access @ Te Papa
Earlier this year Te Papa released over 30,000 high resolution images using Creative Commons and Public Domain licences. Read about their project and the results in the Open Access @ Te Papa presentation from Philip Edgar and Adrian Kingston.
Online access to the Historic Software Collection
The Internet Archive is most known for the Wayback Machine – a site to view archived copies of websites. One of the other projects they manage is the Historic Software Collection. This provides free access to historically important software packages, including ground-breaking computer games.
https://archive.org/details/historicalsoftware
Open Library
The Open Library provides services to borrow, read and describe books. Each digital copy can be borrowed by one person at a time, much like a traditional physical book library. This approach has allowed the site to source books from many publishers who would not otherwise provide their content through a digital library.
Recreating Gallipoli in Minecraft
As part of Auckland Museum’s World War I centenary education programme, the Museum is making use of the popular Minecraft® game to engage students with the events that occurred at Gallipoli in 1915. A topographical map of the Gallipoli area was converted into a virtual Minecraft world and school groups have built astounding replicas of some of the buildings and ships of the time.
Nils Pokel’s National Digital Forum presentation: Recreating Gallipoli in Minecraft.
RIU Digitisation Project
Rip It Up is New Zealand’s free rock music monthly magazine. This project has been steadily scanning articles from old issues to make them available online for the first time.
The Wireless
Radio NZ have created a new digital channel aimed at people who have grown up in the digital age. In depth stories are shared using text, audio and video content.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/about/thewireless
Go!SCAN 3D
Go!SCAN 3D is a hand-held 3D scanner designed to make it easier to capture complex 3D shapes. Derek Kawiti talked at the conference about using this to scan an entire Māori building.
HVNGRY online magazine
HVNGRY is a new online magazine aimed at teenage girls. The publishers have built an online community of writers, artists and people through the power of open source and the Internet.
GIF IT UP
GIF IT UP is a competition jointly run by Digital NZ and the Digital Public Library of America. Anyone could contribute animated images based on open content provided by these organisations. The competition has closed but you can see the GIF IT UP winners and the GIF IT UP archive.
I hope you enjoy some of these projects as much as I have.
Paul
Vernon Systems develops innovative software for cultural organisations to manage and share their collections. We've been dedicated to the cultural sector since 1985.