In 2018
www.digitalnz.org turns ten years old. DigitalNZ’s first search site was
Coming Home, an aggregated search engine of 30,000 items relating to WWI, which was presented alongside a specially designed video remix editor. Today, DigitalNZ points to millions of digital items—a corpus that grows every month—and the open API is called nearly 1 million times a day. But the internet of ten years ago is not the same as today, and DigitalNZ’s tenth birthday prompts some questions: Is DigitalNZ complementary, antagonistic, or agnostic towards Google? Have people’s expectations of digital heritage collections changed over this time and have people become savvier at searching? Much was made in the early days of NDF, and of DigitalNZ’s inception, about the ‘democratisation of knowledge’, and the internet’s promise to expand audiences and open up institutions, but has this promise been fulfilled? And does the ubiquitous word ‘engagement’ mean the same thing now that it did ten years ago? This talk will use DigitalNZ’s ten year history as a way to map some changes in the digital cultural heritage sector, attempt some answers to the questions above, and speculate about the next ten years.
