Te Ara Hiko

Launch of ‘Earth, Sea and Sky’

The Earth shook, the Sea was stormy, and the Sky was black, but despite the appalling Wellington weather, ‘Earth, Sea and Sky’, the second theme of Te Ara, was successfully launched by Prime Minister Helen Clark in front of about 400 people at the Embassy Theatre in Wellington on 12 June 2006.

In her speech Helen Clark noted that the new theme brings to the site an additional half-million words, 3,000 new visual resources, and 171 new moving images. ‘As a nation we can be very proud that Te Ara is gaining recognition worldwide as a ground-breaking project’, she said.

She also paid tribute to all those who assisted in the new theme: ‘Te Ara is a New Zealand product through and through. It has thrived on the support and good will of New Zealanders nationwide, who have provided their knowledge, their expertise and their memories. People all over New Zealand can say, “I had a part in that”.’ Helen Clark was fully justified in making such a claim, and the Te Ara team would like to thank all those who helped us put this theme together.

They include:

• The external contributors who sent in their entries on schedule and checked the finished product on screen before it went live.
• All those who sent in community contributions which were published as ‘What’s my story?’, especially in the Beachcombing, Historic Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Weather, and Floods entries.
• The institutions which provided most of the moving-image footage: Archives New Zealand, Natural History New Zealand and Television New Zealand.
• The institutions which provided many of the photographs and other visual and audio material: Alexander Turnbull Library, Archives New Zealand, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland City Library, Auckland War Memorial Museum, Canterbury Museum, Christchurch City Library, the Department of Conservation, the Geological Museum of the University of Otago, the Hocken Library of the University of Otago, GNS Science, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of Wellington City and Sea, the New Zealand Herald, New Zealand Post Ltd, NIWA – National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, the Northern Advocate, the Otago Daily Times, Puke Ariki, and Radio New Zealand Sound Archives – Ngā Taonga Kōrero.
• The natural history photographers who generously offered their material: exploretheabyss.com (Peter Batson), Paddy Ryan, Steve Dawson, Kim Westerskov, The Roving Tortoise (Tui De Roy and Mark Jones).
• The many individuals who supplied images from their personal collections.
• Our technology partners: Shift, Optimation, OneSquared, and the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre.
• The Ministry for Culture and Heritage for being such a supportive home.

‘Places’

In December 2005 Te Ara launched the first two regions of a projected 22 which will appear in the ‘Places’ theme of Te Ara.

• Northland, written by Claudia Orange, was launched in Whāngārei and Kaikohe.
• The Bay of Plenty, written by Malcolm McKinnon, was launched in Tauranga and Whakatāne.

Each of the ‘Places’ features is in two parts. An overview covers the region’s geology, natural history, people, culture and history. A complete gazetteer of the area has short descriptions of all population centres of note plus major natural features, such as rivers and ranges. As in Te Ara’s other themes, the ‘Places’ entries provide a rich range of resources, including historical photographs, interactive maps, sound and video. Each entry begins with a slide show of images designed to evoke the characteristic flavour of the region.

In Palmerston North in July 2006 local MP Steve Maharey launched Te Ara’s Manawatū and Horowhenua coverage. This was written by Malcolm McKinnon.

We are especially grateful to museum and council staff for their assistance with these launch events.

In September we expect to launch Te Ara’s Canterbury feature, written by Christchurch historian John Wilson.

Over the next year we are aiming to add the Wairarapa, South Canterbury, Auckland and Wellington regions.

Site traffic

Since Te Ara went live in February 2005, the site has been used by an increasing number of people both within New Zealand and overseas.

Over that time Te Ara has been accessed by a million different users, with a total of over 1.4 million visitor sessions (which includes repeat visits).

For the first four months the site was attracting about 35,000 visitors each month. In June 2005, once the site had been fully indexed by Google, usage jumped to 85,000 visitors. From March 2006 this increased to over 100,000 visitors. On some weekdays more than 5,000 people were accessing Te Ara.

About 60% of users are from within New Zealand, with the United States, Australia and Great Britain being the next most common countries of access. Site traffic clearly dips during school holidays, which suggests that homework is a favourite reason for younger users to visit.

Public recognition

Over the past year Te Ara has received the following awards:

• BearingPoint Innovation Awards 2005
  Te Ara was the winner in the Public Service category, and also received a special award for innovation in services to Māori.
• TUANZ (e)-vision Awards 2005
  Te Ara and its designers, Shift, were finalists in the TUANZ (e)-vision Awards 2005, in the Education category.
• Best Design Award 2005
  Te Ara’s designers, Shift, were the winner of the Best Design Award 2005 for interactive media and website design.
• GOVIS Buzzie Awards 2005
  At the GOVIS Conference in Wellington in May 2005 Te Ara received an award for innovation in the Technology and Society category. The Buzzies are peer recognition awards by members of GOVIS (Government Information System Managers’ Forum) to their colleagues.

In addition, Te Ara has received some international recognition. General Editor Jock Phillips was invited to Sydney to assist the Dictionary of Sydney team develop their new website. Fiona Oliver, production editor, was invited to a meeting of the international Text Encoding Initiative group at Oxford University in the UK to workshop data markup in the light of the planned integration of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and Te Ara.

And in the Webby Awards 2006, dubbed by the New York Times ‘the Oscars of the Internet’, Te Ara was an ‘Official Honoree’, in the top 20% of the more than 5,500 entries.

‘The Bush’

The Te Ara team is now hard at work on the next major release, ‘The Bush’.

It deals with the landscape of New Zealand, its indigenous flora and fauna, and people’s responses to these. We expect to launch this theme in 2007.

The working list of contents is:

Te Ara in print

We are looking forward to the publication of two books drawn from Te Ara’s first theme, ‘New Zealanders’.

The first book, Māori peoples of New Zealand: ngā iwi o Aotearoa, includes the text of the six entries that contextualise the Māori migration and settlement of New Zealand, plus the 36 entries on the major iwi of the country. About a quarter of the images on the site are reproduced in the book.

The second book, Settler and migrant peoples of New Zealand, includes the nine entries that give an overview of the migration and settlement of different non-Māori peoples in New Zealand since 1800 and the 45 entries covering the specific migrant peoples. The book will include more than 300 images drawn from the site.

The two books, published by David Bateman Ltd, are expected to be available in October.

Te Ara staff

The Te Ara team has been strengthened.

Helene Coulson, who was previously the sole full-time member of the design team, has become lead designer. She will be assisted by Gareth Railton and Heath Sadlier.

Janette Hart, who was previously the administrative assistant, has become copyright administrator, with an additional responsibility for managing community contributions.

Ben Schrader has joined us to work on the ‘Places’ entries. He is the author of We call it home: a history of state housing in New Zealand, which was a finalist in the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Dictionary of New Zealand Biography

Plans are well under way for the integration of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography into Te Ara.

The DNZB is currently an independent website to which Te Ara provides links and contextual introductions to biographies. The more than 3,000 biographies (including over 500 with Māori-language versions) in the DNZB will be presented in full, with their accompanying illustrations and sound files, within Te Ara as a ‘Biographies’ theme. All existing links and URLs will be maintained so that users of the current site will be automatically redirected to the new locations of the biographies.

In order to provide all the features – including the Advanced Search – which currently exist on the DNZB website, a number of changes and enhancements will be made to Te Ara. We hope to have this project completed by the end of 2006. A number of new biographies have been commissioned, which will also be included in the Te Ara ‘Biographies’ theme.

Matapihi

In November 2005 Te Ara made its first contribution of searchable records to the Matapihi gateway website.

Matapihi enables users to search tens of thousands of items in the digital collections of (currently) eight different New Zealand organisations. As new content is added to Te Ara, the records on Matapihi will be updated to provide another point of entry to our website. Matapihi is a National Digital Forum project, hosted by the National Library of New Zealand.

Education Sector Federated Search

Te Ara is one of the foundation participants in a cross-agency initiative that provides searching across a number of content-rich websites from a single point.

This project uses a search protocol supported by our technology platform and developed for us by our technology partner, Optimation. The project involves the National Library, Tertiary Education Commission, NZQA, Career Services, Teachers' Council, Education Review Office and the Ministry of Education, and aims to enable education sector web users to locate relevant resources from multiple websites in New Zealand, Australia and the United States with a single search. The search interface can be found at www.esfs.govt.nz.

Contributor access

Te Ara’s outside contributors are now able to review the finished versions of their entries before they are released to the world by using a password to access a restricted section of our production website.

Public users see only the ‘published’ content of the site, while contributors who have been issued a URL to their specific contribution, and a password to unlock access, are able to view all the text and accompanying resources which make up the finished version of their entry before it officially ‘goes live’.

Many contributors have commented on the advantages of viewing an entry online rather than as a printout of text and images in paper form. As well as being a more efficient way to communicate the edited version to outside writers, live access exposes the dynamic relationships between text and images on the site and gives contributors a much fuller picture of the finished product. The differences between the requirements of writing for print and writing for the web are immediately apparent and writers are able to review their texts in context.