James Taylor & Ellen Pullar (Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision) - Adventures with Supplejack:
Channel: NDF - National Digital Forum
Date: 2016-12-07

Adventures with Supplejack: Aggregating Aotearoa New Zealand’s audiovisual heritage

2:15 - 2:45pm Wednesday 23 November, Main Stage (Soundings)

Earlier this year Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision launched a new website. As a newly integrated organisation (formed by the amalgamation of the New Zealand Film Archive, Sound Archives Ngā Taonga Kōrero and TVNZ Archives in August 2014), a new website that would reflect the new combined audiovisual archive and its varied collections was needed. The organisation's existing websites, built for the former Film Archive and former Sound Archives, were both 7 years old, and neither fully served the needs of the new organisation and its users. The major challenge for the build of the new website was how to bring the archive's various disparate collections catalogues – which were media-specific and had developed and grown under the auspices of different organisations, using different workflows, software and cataloguing conventions – together into single search experience that was seamless for the user.

Eventually an ideal solution was found in Supplejack, DigitalNZ's open source API for aggregating and sharing metadata records. This presentation will cover how the Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision team set Supplejack up to pull information together from a field map of comparable and unique metadata fields across the archive's various distinct collections databases. It will also discuss methods used for presenting video and audio items from the collection online, by using the Supplejack API to harvest disparate sets of video and audio material hosted on Vimeo and internal servers, and then present them via a common media player. Finally, the presentation will touch on some future developments and plans for feeding back into the Supplejack open source project.

James Taylor is Research Co-ordinator at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. He has a MA in history from Victoria University. Before joining what was then the New Zealand Film Archive in 2011, he worked for TVNZ and as a contract historian. He has worked closely on Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision WWI projects for the past few years, including curating the www.anzacsightsound.org website and the loan programme ‘For King & Country: New Zealand’s First World War on Film.’

Ellen is Digital Programme Developer (Website) at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. She has worked in various comms, digital, and research roles for Dunedin’s Blue Oyster Art Project Space, the University of Otago, Massey University, the New Zealand Film Archive, and Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, since completing a PhD in Film Studies from l’Université de Paris Ouest (Nanterre) and the University of Otago in 2010.