Cade Diehm, founder of New Design Congress, presents at NDF25.

Abstract:
As institutions place their final bets on digital governance—AI oversight, cloud platforms for cultural memory, SaaS as the new civic infrastructure—the world itself is burning. Climate collapse and data weaponisation is now, and yet the dominant response is more data, more systems, more promises that software can solve material crisis.

In this keynote, Cade Diehm presents an argument that collapse the institutional myths of digital preservation and data sovereignty. While providing an urgent and deeply real alternative—a call to rethink cultural memory, not as something we store in perpetuity, but as something we actively steward under conditions of crisis, collapse, and coercion. Through a deeply personal exploration of climate grief, digital failure, and the 'para-real' worlds being built in response, Diehm lays a case for abandoning the hopium of digital redemption, and details how to find the future in unexpected places; through a deep exploration of DIY archiving communities, local-first knowledge networks, and alternative data stewardship models, a type of archive where cultural memory is not passively stored, but actively protected, shared, and stewarded under conditions of collapse.

About Cade:
Cade Diehm is the founder of the New Design Congress, an international research organisation forging a nuanced understanding of technology's role as a social, political and environmental accelerant. He studies, writes, consults and speaks regularly on topics such as digital power structures, privacy, information warfare, resilience, internet economies and the digitisation of cities.

With a background in information security, interface politics and digital systems, Cade and his team at New Design Congress work tirelessly to tease out and weave threads that can be pulled together to build a truly hopeful future.

Cade has collaborated with organisations across the world, including Signal, Google, Mozilla, Bauhaus Earth, Webrecorder, Open Archive, Superbloom Design, Furtherfield, C/ O Berlin, Art Sonje Center, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the International Institute for the Environment and Development, the European Commission, the World Health Organization, the London College of Communication, Protocol Labs, the Deutschland Bundestag Prototype Fund, the Center for Digital Resilience, the Algorithmic Transparency Institute and many others.

Cade resides in Berlin with his partner and two Shiba Inus, Ripley and Kodak.

Paula Bray presents her keynote address at NDF25: Creating the future digital library - embedding innovation and experimentation at State Library Victoria

Abstract:

Libraries are essential civic spaces, offering free and open access to all. As audiences needs evolve through challenging times, such as the rapid adoption of advanced technologies and societal issues like the cost-of-living crisis—libraries have never been more critical to the communities they serve. How can libraries position themselves as dynamic physical hubs while embracing a future increasingly defined by digital innovation?

At State Library Victoria, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in both online and onsite engagement, with the majority of our audience now under 35- they expect a certain level of user-experience. To meet the expectations of our increasingly tech-savvy demographic, we are embedding digital at the core of our services, ensuring a seamless and responsive user experience that provides reliable access to information and knowledge anytime, anywhere.

This presentation will introduce the newly formed Digital Directorate at State Library Victoria and share insights into the ambitious strategy and Digital Experience Plan. You’ll get a sneak peek into key initiatives and learn how innovation, experimentation, processes, empowered teams, and publishing practices are driving the success for digital transformation, while staying true to the mission of accessibility and community connection.

About Paula

Paula Bray has over twenty years' experience working in cultural heritage institutions, including the State Library of NSW, Powerhouse Museum, Art Gallery of NSW, and the Australian National Maritime Museum. She is currently the Chief Digital Officer at State Library Victoria where she is leading the Library’s digital future through compelling digital experiences that place the visitor at the heart.

Innovation and experimentation have been at the core of Paula’s work. She set up Australia’s first dedicated innovation lab in a cultural heritage organisation, the DX Lab at the State Library of NSW. She developed an award-winning team that experimented with technology to build new ways to get access to the collection and its data, both online and onsite. She co-published ‘Open A GLAM Lab’ with 16 peers from the International GLAM, (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) Labs community, highlighting the benefits of working in an experimental practice.

Tui Te Hau presents her keynote address at NDF25.

Abstract:

There’s a reason the military world-wide is good at innovation – they’re playing in the space of really big problems that need to be solved really soon (and the stakes are high). Innovation (doing things differently and taking a few risks), is often considered a luxury, not something we need to worry too much about. Until you do need to worry about it and you're being smacked in the face with your lack of innovation or foresight.

There is a big difference between innovation in peacetime and innovation in crisis. But how do we know what time we’re in? Especially with the increasing complexity and speed at which things are changing globally. In the digital age, museums, libraries, and galleries are not just repositories of knowledge—they are platforms for reinvention. They are also the safe and trusted entities that our communities look to for guidance when life feels edgy.

Innovation isn’t just for the usual suspects—it belongs to the cool and interesting people who see the world differently and dare to shape it.

This keynote is a call to arms for fearless innovation. We’ll explore what it takes to cultivate an innovation mindset—one that thrives on uncertainty, embraces experimentation, and redefines what’s possible for the GLAM sector. From radical creativity to digital disruption, from unlocking hidden opportunities to building ecosystems of innovation, this session aims to equip you with the tools to think bigger, act bolder, and lead with vision.

Expect sharp insights, unexpected provocations, and real-world lessons from Māori innovation ecosystems, global disruptors, and the intersection of culture and cutting-edge tech. Whether you're leading a transformation, wrestling with digital strategy, or just looking for a creative jolt—this is the session that will challenge you to see innovation not as an outcome, but as a way of being.

The future isn’t waiting. It’s ours to create.

About Tui:

Tui Te Hau (Rongomaiwahine, Te Arawa, Ngāti Tuwharetoa) is a senior executive and innovation strategist, and founder of Bird Island, a boutique consultancy focused on innovation for global good.

She has designed national programmes in the innovation and entrepreneurial space. This included the Lightning Lab, the blueprint for business acceleration in New Zealand and Mahuki, the world’s first accelerator for the culture and heritage sector.

Formerly, the lead of the Māori enterprise team for New Zealand’s international trade agency she supported the export aspirations of major indigenous entities and provided in-market support to NZ exporters as Trade Commissioner Melbourne. She has extensive experience in the culture and heritage sector supporting efforts to tell our nation’s rich stories and is an international speaker on innovation in the culture and heritage sector.

In her most recent role with the National Library, she led a team that developed educational experiences around our nation’s founding documents; He Whakaputanga, the Declaration of Independence, ti Tiriti o Waitangi and the Women’s Suffrage Petition. This included the journey to pay equity e-learning module, the ‘are we there yet’ speaker series and other resources for student and adult learners.

Get a brief introduction to the core concepts and vocabulary of digital preservation. If you’re new to the practice, or simply need a refresher, this is a great overview of this crucial field.

Your presenters are two digital preservation pros from the National Library of New Zealand: Valerie Love and Martin Gengenbach. Val is Kaipupuri Pūranga Matihiko Matua Senior Digital Archivist and Marty is the Digital Preservation Policy and Outreach Specialist.

Scroll down for video chapters, useful comments left in the chat, and a list of resources.

00:00 Introductions
03:10 Overview of presentation
03:40 What do we mean by digital preservation?
05:35 What is NOT digital preservation?
07:03 What do we actually mean by "digital"?
08:28 Technical challenges
10:50 Danger! Obsolescence and degration of media
11:46 Danger! Loss of context and knowledge about digital files
12:45 Practical application of digital preservation - the main considerations
15:02 Getting started: Understanding the types of digital files you have
17:25 File format identification tools
19:22 Preserving digital audio and video
20:17 Fixity and checksums
21:21 Common uses for Fixity and checksums
22:46 Digital Preservation Strategies
23:23 Is it possible to use old computer hardware for digital preservation? (answer to audience question)
25:27 Bitstream preservation
27:13 Active preservation
28:41 Digital Preservation Environment
29:41 Digital Preservation resources and community
31:11 Audience Question: Has there been any investigation into emulation as a service here in Aotearoa as they have in Australia? (this question refers to https://auseaasi.org/)
32:39 Audience Question: Do you have any recommendations for checksum software? One audience answer shared in the chat: Terracopy
33:50 Audience Question: We have seen that people have seen microfiche, then floppy disks, then CD's as digital storage solutions for the long-term, but have been proven wrong. Do you foresee a future problem brewing with current physical/digital formats? How can these be mitigated?
37:05 Audience Question: Can you recommend strategies for evaluating digital preservation software systems?
39:20 Audience Question: When items get older, and knowledge is lost as to how to use it. Do you have to create accompanying documents to describe how to interact?
40:36 Audience Question: I once spent 6 months trying to track down a Zip drive reader. Are there any resources for tracking down hardware to read some of these older formats?
42:05 Audience Question: How is digital rot managed? What measures are in place to prevent it? Is it something that is actively looked for? And what can be done once it is found?
43:37 Audience Question: What sort of meta data standards might New Zealand have, particularly around large media files?* *Joshua Ng from Archives New Zealand helped with last question, noting in the chat: Archives New Zealand is working on a standard transfer metadata format (STMF). It's for all media, not only large media. It's a work in progress.


Useful resources:
Australian metadata standards: https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/research_pub/PBC%20resources%20-%20Metadata%20and%20digital%20media%20files.pdf Australasian Preserves learning resources

Cybersecurity can be intimidating to keep up with, yet risky to ignore. So what should organisations in the culture sector be aware of?

Thanks to our partners at REANNZ, we invited cybersecurity experts James Fitzsimons and Dean Pemberton from Bastion Security Group / Cassini and Aaron Murrihy from REANNZ to give us the lowdown on the current state of cybersecurity.

Jump to:
00:00 Introductions and housekeeping
06:17 Explanation of a core security concept: The CIA Triad (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability)
06:37 What is Confidentiality?
08:18 What is Integrity? Including an explanation of a Hacktivist
10:37 What is Availability?
11:33 The New Zealand Threat Landscape: What types of malware do we see in New Zealand?
13:25 Recent trends in cyberthreats in New Zealand
15:35 Types of threat actors are targeting NZ organisations, threat actors naming conventions explained
17:02 Threat actors targeting the GLAM sector
20:01 Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) explained
21:18 Case study: The British Library Cyber Attack
25:39 What should you start doing to protect your organisation from Cyber attacks?
28:37 Proactive defensive measures to put in place
32:30 Network protection capability from Cassini and REANNZ
35:33 How to secure your global routing information
35:40 What is Route Hijacking and how does it work? What are the consequences?
37:39 What is Spoofed Source Addressing and how does it work? What are the consequences?
39:23 What can we do to secure our routing information? Introduction to MANRS.
41:04 Using RPKI to add crypto to global routing
42:45 What are the targets for DDOS / Denial of Service Attacks?
45:40 What can you do to protect your organisation form DDOS attacks?
48:00 Thank you messages
49:28 Answer to audience question: How do you propose managing sync of offline backups and ensuring when you do sync them, you're not copying over tools to compromise that backup?
54:08 Recommended resources for cybersecurity information

Resource links:
CERT NZ: https://www.cert.govt.nz/business/
The National Cyber Security Centre: https://www.ncsc.govt.nz/ British Library case study (pdf): https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

Learn more:
https://www.reannz.co.nz/
https://bastionsecurity.co.nz/
https://www.cassini.nz/home/
https://www.ndf.org.nz/

Watch an insightful and exciting conversation between Adam Moriarty and Nick Poole, OBE, as they explore the past, present, and future state of digital in cultural heritage, libraries, museums, and the video game industry.

Topics covered include the differences and learnings between the cultural heritage and video games, evolution of knowledge sharing, interactivity, storytelling, and the importance of digital innovation.

It’s not the first time we’ve welcomed Nick to speak at NDF: he was an inspiring international keynote back at NDF 2010. At the time, he was CEO of the Collections Trust in the UK. He joins us now as Chief Executive of Ukie, the trade body for the UK video game and interactive entertainment industry. His experience includes culture sector heavyweights like Wikimedia and Europeana, as well as the Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals in the UK.

This conversation was recorded for and shown at the NDF AGM 2024.

Te Wainui Witika-Park from Catalyst IT presents at NDF23.

Abstract

I will be speaking about the importance of accessibility, in particular digital accessibility. I have low vision and struggle to access information and data in the same way that sighted people can. I believe that small changes can make a huge impact on the way everyone can access information. I have made some changes to Koha that are a great example of easy changes with a noticeable positive impact. I would love to share these ideas which include things like heading tags, alt text, etc.

Rebecca Coronel, Head of Collection Preservation, and Dr Keir Winesmith, Chief Digital Officer, from the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) present at NDF23.

Abstract:

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI) presents a significant opportunity to increase accessibility and discoverability of audiovisual collections. Until now, the ability to find content has depended on the quality and extent of data held in the collection catalogue. But each audiovisual item contains a wealth of additional information outside of the scope of its catalogue entry. AI and ML allows us to use tools such as facial recognition, optical character recognition and voice to text transcription to search the collection. AI will revolutionise our ability to discover AV collections and allow us to uncover content that previously was invisible. In the past content creators, researchers and the public needed the help of NFSA staff to identify relevant collection items, but an AI search tool opens up enormous opportunities for everyone to be able to find what they are looking for using simple search terms, images or location information.

This presentation will explore the NFSA’s early experiences in developing an AI search tool for the Australian national audiovisual collection. The presentation will look at lessons learned, challenges presented by machine learning and the future potential for this tool in assisting the NFSA to unlock content in the collection.

Transcript:

Session 3A: AI, Machine Learning, and Audiovisual Collections at NFSA

Moderator:

Welcome to the session AI, Machine Learning, and Audiovisual Collections at NFSA—the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. We have:

• Rebecca Coronel – Head of Collection Preservation, NFSA

• Kier Winesmith – Chief Digital Officer, NFSA

Over to you.

Presentation by Rebecca Coronel

Rebecca Coronel:
Thanks very much, everyone, and thank you for such a warm welcome. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Wellington, and it’s been great to be here.

We’re going to do a bit of a double act today. I’m going to be talking a little bit about the NFSA, the National Film and Sound Archive’s collection, our digitisation work, and a machine learning pilot that we undertook. Then, I’m going to hand over to Kia, and he’s going to be talking about the exciting work we’re just launching into right now.

Just for those who maybe haven’t been to the NFSA or haven’t had a chance to go to Canberra—this is our building in the national capital on Ngunnawal land. We are the Australian National Audiovisual Collection, so we hold anything that can be played on a screen and audio—all kinds of collection items.

This paper is about our journey to improve the discoverability of our collection. We’re just at the very beginning of that journey, so this is really about a trial, a proof of concept, and working towards more specific collection discovery tools—and what we’re calling the Conversational Archive, which is our next step.

You might wonder why the non-tech person is speaking, and I am very much the non-tech person! That’s because I am the Head of Collection Preservation, so I look after the analogue collection at the National Film and Sound Archive, which numbers close to probably a million items. And, of course, it’s very hard to apply AI and ML unless that collection is digitised—and that’s the other part of my responsibility.

What We Collect

As I said, we’re a wide-ranging film and sound archive, so this is just an example to give you a sense of the variety—Mad Max: Fury Road. But we collect all components of audiovisual material:

• Film

• Magnetic tape

• All kinds of audio

• All kinds of recordings, recorded sound, music, oral histories—all kinds of things

To give you an idea of our classic institutional backlog—for instance, in the case of Mad Max, we have seven pallets of outtakes from the original Mad Max film, none of which are digitised. So, there’s a lot of content that we have that is available, and a lot that is not yet available.

Who Do We Serve?

We are a national collecting institution, so we are an Australian government organisation. We have:

• Public visitors coming into our building in Canberra

• Researchers, documentary filmmakers, and other clients accessing our collection

• Educational activities, with a particular focus on media literacy

One of the key things for us is that for every one visitor who comes into our Canberra building physically, we have something in the order of 4,000 visits online.

So, for us, being online and making sure our collection is discoverable, useful, and accessible is the way we connect with the maximum number of people.

Some interesting stats—while we’re an Australian government organisation, our audience definitely extends internationally. When we look at the statistics for people accessing our collection online, for some areas of the collection, it’s more international than it is Australian.

Expanding the Collection

Our current mission is to tell the national story by collecting, preserving, and sharing audiovisual media—and also the cultural experience platforms of our time.

That last part is important in terms of where we’re heading. We’ve just started collecting:

• Video games

• AR (augmented reality) experiences

• VR (virtual reality) experiences

• Social media content

These are the cultural experience platforms we’re all using now. But collecting them is a challenge—so that’s also part of where we’re heading.

The Urgency of Digitisation

Some of you who work in archive land might know us from Deadline 2025, which talks about the risk to magnetic media tape.

We did a lot of work in the last few years to promote and advocate for the preservation of tape, which we understand largely will not be accessible if it’s not digitised in the next couple of years.

2025 is a bit of an arbitrary date, but it’s a good indication of the urgency and the priorities we need to apply to magnetic media preservation.

We’re lucky—we were recently the recipients of $41.9 million specifically to help us in that task. So, we’re currently digitising not just our own collection but also the collections of other Australian institutions.

However, our curators keep collecting. In the last year or so, we digitised around 27,000 magnetic tape items, but our curators collected another 16,000 in that same year—so it’s a never-ending exercise.

Digitisation & Infrastructure Upgrades

Before I hand over to Kia, here’s an example of our magnetic media digitisation setup.

• We’ve upscaled to be able to run 29 video streams simultaneously—which is fantastic.

• We run one preservation scanner and one small-gauge scanner.

• Our new funding has allowed us to purchase another scanner and additional film equipment.

• We have around 150,000 film items that are not yet digitised.

Kia’s team has been working very hard on our new offsite data storage centre in Canberra. It’s in a secure Australian government-approved facility.

This is a huge step forward for our:

• Digitisation strategy

• IT infrastructure

• Security and disaster recovery

Previously, we had to juggle LTO tapes between different buildings to ensure we always had a secure backup. Now, we have a dedicated offsite centre, which makes a massive difference.

For those who love the machines, this is our new tape library—LTO-8 is our next step forward. This library will hold about 27 petabytes of data.

Our current collection sits at around 7 petabytes and grows all the time.

That’s the technology and digitisation end. Now, I just want to briefly talk about the machine learning pilot we ran before I hand over to Kier.

Presentation by Kier Winesmith:

Kia ora, everyone.

Trigger warning: I talk really fast, I swear, and I make jokes. So if you feel like you should laugh, you should laugh. If you feel like, is he?—he is.

The Conversational Archive

So, we started thinking about the premise of a conversational archive, and we have to go back a little bit to understand what we mean by that.

The beginning of writing in Australia was lists—way before writing, when we were keeping cultural content and passing it through generations, it was stories and dance, it was movement and song.

After that came lists.
After lists came lists with lines that looked like spreadsheets but on paper—hundreds of years before spreadsheets.
Then we took the spreadsheets and made those into cards and put them in little boxes.
Then we took the cards, made them into dots—ones and zeros—and put them in computers 55 years ago.

So, this metaphor for finding cultural content has not changed—not for your institutions, and not for mine.

It’s still strings of characters in lists in the right order, the way the cataloguer put it in—not the way you, as a punter, think about it.

The computational archive is a new idea—maybe the last decade.

We think that after the computational archive comes the conversational archive.

And because we’re an institution that likes to build things as well as think about things, we thought—we can’t just say that, we just have to do it.

The Idea Behind "Ask AA"

We also want to acknowledge that these ideas of passing cultural content through time are not new.

Foucault was writing about the idea of an archive not being a bunch of books, but a bunch of ideas joined up by humans—and we totally, totally agree.

So, we got a whole bunch of money that was called Audiovisual Australia—or AA for short.

• "Is that AA-funded?"

• "Is our trip AA-funded?"

• "Is the scanner AA-funded?"

• "Are the servers AA-funded?"

AA just became a stand-in for all of it.

And so we thought—what happens if you ask AA?

What if you take all those entities that are inside the institution, and all of those partners that Rebecca talked about that are outside the institution, and you create a conversational archive so that people can engage with the collection in a way that feels really natural?

Because once it’s four million things, you can’t know all the things.

You need a way into the things.

Where Does Machine Learning Fit?

This is actually a scrubbed and differentiated version of our ecosystem.

We have a lot of technology. We are a technology hub—hundreds and hundreds of machines.

So we asked ourselves:

• If we were going to put machine learning inside the NFSA, where would we put it?

• What would make sense?

• What’s logical?

And so we stepped back, and we thought:

The three things we exist to do are:

1. Collect

2. Preserve (the objects, metadata, and digital copies)

3. Share (online and in person)

We value both in-person and digital access, but we know 4,000 people online engage for every 1 in person.

So, where does machine learning fit in that?

It doesn’t replace what we do—it’s an enabler, not a replacement.

And so we thought—it goes there, and it generates that, and it goes there too.

And actually, this is the photo to take a picture of—because this is what Ask AA is.

It’s not just an LLM instead of an archive.

It’s a whole bunch of very targeted, intentional decisions to place machines in specific spots.

From Dreaming AI to Primary Source AI

When you finish that work, you get to ask questions.

So, the first question I was interested in was:

• "Write me an essay on the history of Australian film."

And this is what came out—this is PowerPoint, but these are the actual words copy-pasted from our tool:

"The Arrival of Sound and Decline (1930–1940)"

What even is that? I would watch it—but it doesn’t exist.

Nothing in there exists.

Muriel’s Wedding exists, but the date’s wrong.

Everything is bollocks.

Even the IDs are made up.

So we were like, "Yeah, let’s not do that."

Instead, we programmed it to say no—"Write your own essay. Maybe I can find you some films to watch or listen to, and you can write your own essay."

Lazy students.

A Smarter Search: Finding Ben Mendelsohn

I’m a massive fan of Ben Mendelsohn—I think he’s a genius actor, one of Australia’s finest.

I was convinced in my head that his career blew up due to Animal Kingdom.

So I asked:

• "When did Ben Mendelsohn’s career take off?"

And it said:

• "It actually took off when he acted in the film The Year My Voice Broke."

And we know that because he said that—and the link exists—and that ID is real.

You click the link, and you hear Ben Mendelsohn talking about his own career.

That’s the difference between a large language model and what we’re calling a primary source model.

Our model doesn’t invent things.

It gets you to the bit of the collection that is relevant to you.

Building an Australian AI Model

Here’s the problem—everything we use speaks American.

You put Australian faces on TV in America? Does okay.
You put non-white Australian faces, especially First Nations faces? Does not find them.

For example:

• "Chook roll" (Australian for chicken roll)? Nope.

• "Servo" (Australian for service station)? Nope.

• "Queanbeyan" (First Nations place name)? Nope.

The American models get "David", but they don’t get anything else.

So we’re calling our new model "Bowerbird".

Bowerbird is an Australian speech engine.

• It understands Australian entities.

• It knows Kylie Minogue is a person.

• It knows Queanbeyan is a place.

• It does better transcription than the American models.

Because we speak Australian, and they don’t.

Final Thoughts

Spotify does this. Shopify does this. Everyone is doing this.

We are only using the national collection to train our AI.
We are not sucking from the internet.

Because if you use Whisper—when it dreams, it dreams in "Like and Subscribe."

Have a guess what it’s trained on.

Wrapping Up

So what did we learn?

Experimentation leads to good infrastructure—but only with proper governance.

We’re hosting a conference on AI in libraries, archives, and museums in Canberra in October 2024. You should come. Thanks.

William Minty, Digital Designer for Indigenous Design & Innovation Aotearoa (IDIA), presents at NDF23.

Abstract

To support the goal of having one million reo Māori speakers by 2040, Archives NZ, National Library and Te Papa are continuing to deepen their commitment to increasing visibility of te reo Māori across their websites.

The institutions wanted to learn how best to approach the usage and presentation of te reo Māori on their websites to create an experience that is both welcoming and mana enhancing.

Indigenous Design and Innovation Aotearoa (IDIA) was engaged to help better understand what a great te reo Māori experience could look like, based on the expectations of reo Māori speakers with varying levels of confidence, experience and proficiency when engaging with reo Māori content.

This research approach acknowledged, that like much of Aotearoa, the organisations were on a te reo journey, and will likely take some time to fulfil the outcomes of the research conclusions. We need a practical approach that could be phased over a number of years, but the goal was to align real audience needs with organisational goals regarding te reo Māori.

Hear about the surprising, but clear findings, which could inform GLAM and government best practice regarding bilingual text on our websites.