Center for white house history and have this really long title. Im also the Senior Vice President of Educational Resources at the White House Historical association. We are really delighted just i know youve been thanked over and over and over again but were really delighted to welcome you to the 2018 president ial site summit. This is, as youre finding in talking to each other, education specialists, subjects, and its a hub, a convening opportunity for all of us moving forward. So thank you for supporting us be i being here. Were looking forward to talking with you all more and encouraging you talking among yourselves. Above and beyond, stephanie tuszylnski is over here. We all should be talking to each other. The idea we do things together in the future. Now, our current session, the reason were in this room, im very pleased to open this, is entitled digitization and technology technology, its extremely important to underscore. Youll know. This is your bailiwick. Every Cultural Heritage organization faces to one degree or another similar problems when it comes to digitizing materials and these projects require time, money, theyre labor intensivnt technology, scaleable, up and down and sideways. There really isnt one, you know, one size fits all solution. I mean, there are myriad solutions. So in this session representatives from different types of institutions with unique missions and collections will share their ideas and this is really crucial because it promotes networking, its fruit for thought far all of us and brings all of us closer together in our respect ifr effo efforts in this important evolving technology. So to begin the session, i have the distinct pleasure of introducing our speakers and panelists. This is a twopart experience. Theres a half an hour part coming up as soon as i step off this away from this microphone, followed by an hour and a quarter. The first part were going it hear from teresa carlson, Vice President of worldwide Public Sector at amazon. Shes going to discuss Amazon Web Services work with stewart mcluaurin, the president of our association. And with Daniel Fisher whos special assistant to the president and director of the white house visitors office, and what this is as i said is food for thought. Its a really useful way and seeing about collaborations across sectors, common goals together, and then also for this first part, Educational Initiatives overall through digitization. Then following this conversation, well hear from a panel which is comprised of Digitization Technology experts from different institutions. Ill come back up very briefly to introduce them because there are a ton of them. So for right now, please join me in welcoming our first group. Thank you very much, and welcome them. Hello, everyone. How are you . Are you having fun . Its so amazing, right . I know, myself, this is actually a lot of fun for me and my team to really be participating in this program. I think its so meaningful to bring everyone together to convene and just pretty commit i exciting. Welcome to our panel. Were going to talk to you about what were doing for digitization and what were doing to bring what we already have as great assets at the White House Historical association into the Digital World and digital age and what these individuals are doing to help drive that. To help us set the stage, stuart, maybe, i know they introduced you, maybe youll say a little more about what you do, then can describe kind of the partnership that weve had between aws and the White House Historical association . Sure. I think most people by now know who i am, what we do as the White House Historical association, what we want to do here is unpack for you a little bit about a very Successful Partnership and collaboration we have that started with teresa then evolved to Amazon Web Services. Teresa actually chairs our National Council on white house history which in the philanthropy is a Wonderful Group of 28 individuals to support the work we do including this program here. So, thank you, teresa, for that leadership that you give in that regard. In terms of what were talking about today, i often say are we an organization that is content rich but reach challenged . We have had this treasuretrove of images and data and relationships and stories, but how do we deploy that nationally through Education Networks and digitally in ways that can really reach the people beyond our Little Office on Lafayette Square . And so we do that through a number of partnerships. Weve done it with the nationals baseball team, boys and girls clubs of america, but the most impactful and growing is our partnership with Amazon Web Services. And we started with an idea for an app, and thats led to several other things, but its working together to take our content and the technology resources, and then really in some ways our client, the white house, and the Visitor Experience, and those 500,000 or 600,000 visitors to the white house offer year which is pretty remarkable when you think about this is the place where the president and his family live, the president and the staff works, ceremonial stage for the most important events. And yet this number of people get to go through there, but how can we educate and inform them to make that experience better . And thats the heart of this relationship. And its so true, in fact, we started this partnership in july of 2017 and its grown so much, and members of my team in the audience today that id really like to thank that are very passionate and stewarts family whos really passionate about this. We created this council, our goal, ill actually solicit your help, our goal is to have someone from every state in the United States participate on our council because the big goal is to get this out into the schools, to the educators, the individuals, we really want everyone to experience the white house, the peoples house, that experience. I want to ask daniel if he can kind of tell us about the white house tour experience today maybe what it looked like and how its changed and how many people do you have visiting the white house every year . So overall, its kind of a moves target because, you know, our schedule kind on changes but on a given day we can bring in between 2,000 and 3,000 people. Which is fairly substantial given parameters between security, other event schedules and, you know, the first family lives and the president works there very nearby. So because of that unique challenge and kind of limitation, the Visitor Experience is always mor evphin and migrating so they have a limited amount of time in the home, you know, as they walk through. And because of the numbers that we try to get in every day, i mean, we want to have an impactful experience while theyre there. And so, you know, the app, you know, is another way especially with a newer generation of people, you know, to really, like, enrich their walkthrough of the home. And so, you know, the tours right now are selfguided so you walk through. Obviously, there are people around, secret service is around to answer anything, but sometimes youre at the mercy of, you know, kind of what youve had in terms of education pre, during and post your vist so thats where this app comes in which is perfect for us because its a because not only do they get historical information, you get context in realtime as you walk through. The tour experience overall into the modern age, i know is not my personal or our its kind of been a vision for a long time. So its good that its come to fruition. Well, you have great staff. I will tell you. I can attest to daniel has a great staff and ill tell a really quick personal story, then i want to ask stewart to kind of tell us a little bit more about the white house experience app. The reason i wanted to share it, im from a really small town in kentucky. As a little girl, my parents were always participating in the electoral process. I dont ever remember a time that we didnt participate. But i thought about the white house. I never dreamed id actually get to go to the white house. And now identive been so bless go to the white house numerous times. Every child should have the opportunity to go through the white house, one way, shape, form or other. Now what were doing is really the whole point of this, we have three uses for the app which stewart can go into more detail, but the goal is really to make sure that every student can experience the white house. Every adult, but, you know, if you think about really bringing that into the school and starting that conversation, theres really so much you can do with that today. It will continue to evolve as well. So stewart kind of from your perspective, talk about this project. How its grounded. This is grounded and goes back to mrs. Kennedy in 19 6r62. She founded our organization in 6r 61. Shed been to the white house with her nmom and concerned thee was no guidebook to take you through the white house. First order of business after finding the association was you must do a guidebook. In 1962, the very first printed book was published. And we have continued that and last october, we published the 24th edition of that. And well continue to do so. Thats the definitive guidebook. But its also the 21st century and so we need to put into the tools that people actually use that same content and that information. As daniel mentioned, as you go through the white house, unless you know what youre looking at, you dont know what youre looking at. We want people to experience it and understand it in the real time that theyre there and the guidebook isnt practical for that, but the app is. So soon, i hope, daniel, not to put you on the spot, the boarding pass that goes out to visitors to the white house will encourage them to download this new app that we created, wh experience, available on the app store, or google play, and its envisioned to do three things. If youre having the privilege, if you have the privilege of going through the white house, you can download it beforehand and take it through each individual room, unpack those rooms and see each piece of furniture, the paintings, and interpret the room and the space for you. If youre in the city of washington, but not going to the white house, theres a Vantage Point from president s park and around the white house. You can look into the white house from around the parks as well as the park, as well as the buildings and the surrounding community. If youre in topeka or tokyo, not in washington, it allows you to virtually tour the white house in that way as well. So it captures all perspectives so as teresa said, no matter where you are, what age, you can tour the white house. And i sure i know all of you have already downloaded the app, itself. Absolutely. Thats just a start. The content is really great. We downloaded into this incredible images. Theres a fun feature which im sure youve all already done, if not, youll do shortly. You can take a selfie on this app and the selfie the picture is analyzed against all the kpifexists president ial and first lady port ras raraits in invenn story and tell you what percentage of a president or first lady your image looks most like. Fun way to capture childrens interests and adults. I keep taking mine. Ive even told my Technical Team that that algorithm has to be set up for me uniquely that i always look like jackie. Get your head a little down. Thats great. My mom, its funny, i took my mom to the whouite house for th first time. 89 young. The team did a great job. We downloaded the app on her app l phone and did with the test with her. She made me promise i wouldnt say who she looked like. She really enjoyed it. What we thought we would do, we have a little video to show you, its a short video that will give you a little taste of what the app kind of looks like. I get [ applause ] thank you. You know, i get a little giddy looking at this because if you think, i do have to give the teams so much just thankful, stewart and his team has done a phenomenal job, and daniel, you and your team, because this takes a lot of effort to bring that together. The parks service. The secret service. Working with the white house. Tour group. The first lady. The president. Everyone kind of has to get on board with this. And i think we really are just getting started. And this just gives you an example, even like donate now, there is no way, if you like it, you want to help, and you have it in your heart that you want to do something for this, there is never an opportunity just to do this. Were really trying to bring this digital effort to everyone inside or outside the white house. And around the world, too. Were seeing a lot of effort around the world. This is just the first step. We want to evolve this to, perhaps, Jennifer Pickens did a wonderful book on christmas at the white house. We want to take fresh images of christmas, when the house is decorated and populate the images on the app so that people going through the house at christmastime can understand the themes and the concepts and the decorations that are in the house that year or in the springtime at the garden tour. Gorgeous. Or perhaps when we get really sophisticated and grown up, id like to look at some of the president ial sites represented here and look at the white house through the lens of what it was like at the time of that presiden presidency. Yes. And maybe let them virtually let that president kind of, that hologram walk through it. Who knows. Theres all kinds of possibilities we have available. So, daniel, kind of for you, as you see the visitors come through the white house, are you seeing them use the app yet or do you think theyre just kind of getting into the groove that theres something new they can take advantage of . So, definitely getting into the groove. However, last week i was actually on the tour. If we have to go anywhere, i have to meander through the tour line, which is the best part of my day sometimes. There was a tour group, early high school, late middle school. They had the app, looking through, you could tell their teacher kind of gaive them a little task to download before they came in and you could tell that, you know, by in large, the experience was much different versus another tour group that could have come in the next day because, you know, especially kids around that age are, someone else is taking photos or goofing off, you know, kind of really structures it when they walk in to really appreciate the space. You know, that theyre walking through. And so its, you know, for them, theyre still on their phones. Yeah. Whether or not, you know, theyre distracted by their phone, theyre using the app so we love it. Theyre walking through and see all these spaces and, you know, even for me, i can walk into room now and i still, oh, i noticed that painting for the first time, you know, i can yeah. Its so nthorough using the app. I really applaud stephanie and the team at the White House Historical association and our to Curator Office for aggregating this information. Yeah, people are starting to use it. You can tell that when they walk through and, you know, again for visitors, we from all 50 states, from across the world that come in and so especially for individuals that travel from far and wide, maybe theyre only operating off wifi sometimes, so you can tell at the beginning of the app, they can do a hard download and have all the information when they walk. Which is really cool. I sort of tasked the team siay, hey, i want all this on alexa. I want every question you can ask, ask alexa, and let her tell you all the answers. I know we already had 20,000 downloads of the app and working to get more. Well go ahead and publish it and do some kind of marketing with you all to make sure we can get it out there. Stewart, one of the areas we talked about a lot is really the curriculum we can build around this and you already have a pretty fantastic program for teachers. Can you talk a little bit about your vision of how these things can come together . Sure. We, our Education Team is terrific and our historians and stephanie, the Digital Library, her team, have all worked clab tifrly. We have wonderful lesson plans that existed on our website but are now available through this app as well. And so education is very important to us to teach and tell the stories of white house history. We do it through partnerships like we mentioned but in other ways, everywhere were going now, were talking about the app, integrating it in everything we do. Matt costello, our historian, is actually starting tomorrow, hes teaching a class on white house history in american university. It will run all semester. First order of business, students, download the app. Yeah. Everything wie do in an educational setting, our Teacher Institute, we do a wonderful Teacher Institute as many of you do. With we had that this summer and they all downloaded the app and experienced that, convey that to their students as well. So anything that we do, whether its our publications, our online presence, our Teacher Institute, our presence in schools like american university, were always pushing that. Its in our talking points. You just had a program was it last month for teachers, i think . We did. Annually. Thats why we had our annual Teacher Institute. We doubled the number this year that we did last year and really want to grow that. Believing that if we can teach an impact and provide resources to the teachers, then that will multiply the impact among the students. I mean, getting this history out into the schools, i thing it think its a great idea. Think about what youre talking about, daniel, how they walk around with their phone. Dif Digital Natives are so used to the technology today. If you provide them a robust method by which they absorb the information, theyre going to remember it more and go back and rapidly pull it up, share with their parents, share with their friends. Stewart, you touched on a moment ago about how you think we could take the app and change it up for the holidays. What do you whats kind of the vision of you and your team on this, how we can do some more things it s our vision and whats possible may be two Different Things. The white house is such a magical place at christmas. Many people get the opportunity to go through it. We would love to be able to share that through the portal of the app so when those decorations are up, those images could be populate the app, itself, so the tour that youre taking during the Holiday Season is the house dem racorated for holidays. Not its traditional self. You can still see the furniture in the blueroom and Jacob Lawrence painting in the green room but also inspired by the first ladys vision for the decorations that year. We hope. Daniel, let me ask you, what would you like to see kind of well, two questions. One is, do you get areas from visitors that they said theyd like to have more, see more of and kind of you and your team, do you have some visions of things youd like to see added or updated with the app . Well, so, to add to christmas or kind of any, you know, like, themed occurrence that would happen in the space, you know, its, again, hard for us to convey that so thats the beauty of the app we can incorporate photos or really put out into the world because, you know, during christmas, its truly a finite number of people that are able to come through and, you know, witness it firsthand. So the app would just, you know, again, augment that. Separately, just kind of nature of the space is that im sure some of your sites are completely different in this, is that we cant do any temporary exhibits or we cant really highlight, you know, what occurred in the white house 100 years ago this year. You know yeah. Because if we put up anything, we have to take it down if we hold an event or Something Like that. So i think the app can really highlight some occurrence that happened this day 50 years ago. Or, you know, some president , if its his birthday, some family that was impactful during a certain time of year. I think all these things can be incorporated in a smart way. I agree. In fact, well switch a minute because i want to talk about. What were doing with the digitization. Before we jump into it, i dont know if you all really know what Cloud Computing is, but what Amazon Web Services represents is a Cloud Computing platform. And the reason this is important for what were trying to do is we want to move fast. We want to be able to update things quickly. We want to be able to try and experiment without spending a lot of money. We want to be able to do this inexpensively but beautifully. We want the Customer Experience to be excellent. So the reason the Cloud Computing plat form is important for us here is so we can try things, be agile, update this application and program, and get it out very rapidly, scale it globally as needed. But one of the first things that stewart actually brought to me in the beginning is he said, teresa, we have all these images and we really are concerned that were not digitizing the images we have in the white house. Were just sitting there. I was like, what . Theres no way. In the white house, we have images that are not digitized . Im going to let stewart go into the details. This is really where the partnership started, back to your point, getting more of the information out there. Well, we knew we had all these images. It used to drive me crazy when id see our facebook posts or some social media post and the image would come from the library of congress or National Archives. Both great places. We love you. I knew we had images, too. Why arent we using our image . How do we find our image . We wanted to digitize and create a Digital Library and stephanie can speak more intelligently to this. We had home freezers of slides, First Published in the 1960s. Were finding images there u the digitation process nobodys seen before of the Johnson Family at the white house, Kennedy Family at the white house, and so these images through this Digital Library will now be a resource not only to populate our app, but for scholars, students, journalists, we have a wonderful relationship with the White House Press corps. We briefed the newly posted correspondence to the press corps about our resources, digitally, image wise as well as our historians so thats going to become increasingly a treasuretrove of goto assets. On our website, youll already see a significant number, its growing every day. I dont want to quote an exact number. Youll see the metadata around it which interprets the photo, directs you to other resources regarding the image. We do a wonderful licensing business with Television Studios and movies that use our images for research, for example, Steven Spielberg in the Lincoln Movie used images from us to design what is now the lincoln bedroom, which was lincolns office at the time. So its a wonderful resource for that. You mentioned evolution, the chat box. Yes. Youre familiar with in ku T Customer Service terms, go to an airline site, bank, drops down a little box where you can ask it a question. We started that in a test phase on our website, the box will drop down. Think its on our education page. Youre able to ask it a question like, what is the state dining room, what are the roles of the president of the United States . It will tell you, you can talk to it and were hoping to evolve that through amazon lex to be on alex za. Thats right. So you can then ask alexa a question and alexa can converse with you about white house history. Were definitely going to do that. That were doing that. Yes. We want everyone to have that experience. I think, stephanie can tell you more about it, i think we have over 11,000 images and growing and the goal will be, you want to open up these images so researchers, educators, and individual students can really research and go explore these. I mean, theyre really hidden from everyone until you get them out there. And, again, a great thing about Cloud Computing and being able to get a platform that individuals can take advantage of. Teresa, if i could say about that, this is a wonderful way to work with each other and collabora collaborate. Weve been doing work with the lincoln library, connecting with him, sharing their images and vice versa, we can be a hub to spread more widely the images you have and be a partner and collaborator in that as well. I already met some individuals, jfk library is here, see, wave. Yes. So we want to make those connections. Thi think its really important. So we dont we only have five more minutes, but i want to thank my panelists, but i thought wed open it up for a couple questions. If anyone has any questions, wed love to we always have more to talk about, but wed love to hear from you in terms of what questions you, if you have any ideas youd like to share. Hi. Im Lindsay Richardson from the 64 museum at dealy plaza. I wonder if youre thinking of turning this experience of the app into a template youd use with other cultural organizations. We used to say i wanted to find a way for the White House Historical association to be a first mover in the history space in some way. You dont know you invented something until you invented it. History people think of as a dusty stodgy thing. We think we can make it relevant and excitie ining in a digital what hamilton has done in a musical way. The app is a start for that i think. Wed love to think of more, better and different ways to do that. The wonderful thing, i think we share this with many of the organizations in this room, is were nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, were also a Small Organization so were nimble. So our board and our staff, we can make decisions and pivot a little bit and partner quickly and we dont have to go through a laborious lengthy process. We can take advantage of resources and friends like we have with Amazon Web Services i can attest to that, stewart came and said, we need help. Youre going to help us. I said, absolutely. Its not exactly how a little bit. Just what i would like to say, we would love to support and do that together. I think it would be phenomenal. We talked about as a team, how do we take this as a model and template and get it out to other libraries, other groups, other organizations interested in doing the same kind of model . We could evolve this to other homes of heads of state around the country. Were publishing a book this fall of 50 homes of heads of state around the world. Of course, our white house, unique, wonderful, special place to our country will be the cornerstone to that. Were going to unpack the stories of 50 other homes of heads of state. We would love to maybe use this tool as a resource for these other homes of heads of state around the world as well. Hi, my names amber. Im from the Mckinley Memorial Museum in ohio. Prior to coming here, ive been working on our internet presence and social media and trying to put together some sort of plan for our facility because were horrendously antiquated in everything that we do. So this morning, we were listening to the first panel and everyone was talking about how people are so buried in their smartphones. And as i was researching what i was finding, there seems to be two schools of thought on this. One is lets really push digitization apps, websites, things of that nature. Museums are ditching the no photo signs, no cell phone signs, and setting up selfie stations and making areas more accessible to people who are less interested in traditional history. But this morning, we what i was hearing was we want to get people to stop looking at their phones. So then i hear you guys get up and youre like, lets get their phones out, its cool. So how do we balance that . Like, while still maintaining that focus . I know other organizations are facing the same battles right now. I mean, at least for me, my personal take is, very personal take on this is, you know, i dont think thats going to change any time soon. People are going to have their phones. I have two right now. Its like take advantage, look at it, also look up. You know, so if you have the app, you know, youre scrolling through, where is this photo . Where is this portrait . They look up, look around, they see something else. Think its walking a fine line, but taking add vvantage of havia resource for them that makes them want to kind of live in the present and walk around and experience, you know, the space theyre in, whether its the white house, if its another site. So and i would say, i agree with that. What we tried to do here is just that. Where you have sort of a dual experience of looking at the phone, but also looking up because theres things if you are actually going through the white house, you tend to see these very delicate elements in a painting or something you never even noticed before. But if you are in a classroom, think about the way you can use it, you can go through the app and look at it then the teacher or students, there needs to be a discussion facilitated. And thats because you got to use your right brain and your left brain. How you use the app and social media because its really the new norm and were not going to be able to fight the new norm of digital and technology. We also dont want to have the app just be a oneway street. We dont want it to be something that tells you information and talks to you. If. You noticed on the video, you have the opportunity to send feedback and share your story through facebook and other social channels. Its only been recently the white house has been open to photography in the white house. Scaredmy to death the first week that was available. I was walking through the hall, someone had their arm around the bust of George Washington taking a selfie. People lose their inhibitions a little bit with a camera. They become teachers and tellers of white house history, not just us. So its not just the device on the phone, but its the people that use that to educate themselves and then to share that story and to educate others. So true. Quick question. Im Eric Montgomery from the wilson home in augusta, georgia. We have kind of two schools of thought. Id be interested in your take on that. One is dont give them so much that they wont want to come and actually see the real thing, and the other is give them everything and then theyll want to come and see the real thing. So what is it . Which is the correct approach . I mean, sort of the same thing. If youre using the app, theres only so much you can read and actually view versus see while youre there. I think the app does a good job of restricting immediately what you can see, versus the full breakdown of that room or that floor, you know, what have you. Thats kind of, like, in the the mome moment. I think separately, you know, the white house is swish you want to go no matter if you know every detail of where the mortar and brick and sandstone came from. Youve seen it before, you havent seen it there. I think thats consistent among all sites, especially ours. No matter how much information you have, if you want to go, youll find way. The app does a great job of taking you through the staterooms of the white house. State dining room. East room. But you can actually go to places virtually that you cant go in reality. The oval office. The roosevelt exactly. The lincoln bedroom. Nonpublic historic rooms. The avp wipp will take you. What i love is the app is getting into places you cant see, but theres actually fwh nothing like being there, right . There theres no words that describe it. Think its a combination of both. Hi, im carlos with the National Trust for historic preservation. I was just curious whether you explored the use of augmented reality at all at the white house. We have. Weve done one episode with augmented reality prior to the Amazon Web Services. I think we will evolve to that. Right now, our focus is on three prongs, app, evolution, development of that, the chat bot and the amazon lex feature to go to alexa and really this robust Digital Library resource. I think vinrtually reality and augmented reality are places we may evolve to eventually. Right now, were on this threeprong approach. Ill just say from a technology perspective, of course, all of that is possible. The other thing were trying to be is a little bit frugal, too, in terms of we want to do the very best that we can, but we also dont want it to be cost prohibitive for people and the platfo platforms. Were trying to really stick to kind of well continue to evolve everything were doing. I dont think theres obviously, everything has to be approved were doing. Theres nothing out of the question. We want to be cautious about making it so expensive that individuals really cant access it as well. Great. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you, all, so much for joining us. Thank you, my panel. [ applause ] hello, again. Well, as i mentioned earlier before the panel with teresa and stewart and daniel, you know, the idea when we were envisioning all of this is you and us and bringing together represent ifrs from lots of places. Ill give you a quick laundry list of the different places, different people and then the moderator will elaborate from there. So part two is a very robust panel which is moderated by mike davis. Mike is the Business Development manager at Amazon Web Services. And joining mike will be joan bacharach, senior curator at the National Parks service. We have dr. Stephanie tuszylaski mentioned a few times before when the first panel was up whos our Amazon Web Services director of the White House Historical associations Digital Library. We have diane zorich and diane is director of the digitization program, office, at the smithsonian institution. Andrew wilson, as well, who is director of Digital Engagement at the National Archives and records administration. Carrie villar, is over here, we worked closely with her and her group. Shes associate director of Museum Collections at the National Trust for historic preservati preservation. And abby potter, abigail potter, senior innovations specialist at the library of congress. And please enjoy this. This is an opportunity to hear more about their different and sometimes similar approaches to digitization. How these can transform outreach efforts, result in farreaching engagement, ultimately support all of our goals and making white house and president ial history accessible far and wide. So please join me in welcoming everybody out. [ applause ] all right. Great. Thanks, everyone, for coming. Maybe i will just take the chair. That might actually be a little nicer. Well all be at the same level. All right. Thank you very much. Were here to talk about digitization. And digitization can take a sort of a lot of directions. Certainly, we can do a deep dooidive of technology and talk about all the cool things that can be done in the Digital World but i think one of the themes of this panel is that were not necessarily trying to solve Technology Problems here. That there are a lot more issues around budgets and priorities and other resources that are limitations in your businesses that we have to consider. So well try to talk about those elements. What people are doing today. Some best practices. First, i thought id relay a little story. So i installed the white house experience app and i said, okay, click the button. Who do i look like . It said john tyler. John tyler . So im i had to look it up. Im no steward of john tyler history. So president number ten. The first president not elected. He assumed the office when the president passed away. President harrison. He was elected under the whig party and as soon as he took office, he started vetoing all the whig initiatives in office and they called him his accidentsy. You know, not to draw any parallels with anything else going on, but i was sort of you know, john tyler, huh . Okay. But then i said, the catharsis of this was i went back and pushed the other button and Jacque Kennedy came up. So ill take that. But the point is, and this exercise that this was enabled through digitization, right . The image of john tyler that trained the Machine Learning model was not the aseat se. You still have Beautiful Oil paintings. It enabled a new Digital Engagement model with the audience. Now i know more about john tyler than i ever have in my entire life, so proof that it is working. In fact, i want to ask stephanie just your impression of how its engaged with the audience, has it sort of surprised the team, has it, you know, led to new discoveries . I want to stress one of the things we want to add is biographies in the results. We didnt have time in the launch of the app and the window. Wed like when you get your result to say, okay, john tyler, for someone who doesnt know john tyler was a president , some sort of biography, we might not mention his accidentness thing in our bio but want to add that at some point. That was one of those things that kind of came out, theres this technology that will let this happen and facial recognition technology, i would not have thought of that. That came out of discussions with the team and stewart and all the lovely folks at amazon who are here. Said, no, no, wait, we have this really cool tool that lets you do this. Its not precise because youre comparing peoples paintings, paintings of people which are obviously, you know, more interpretive to a photograph, but people are way more entertained by it than i thought they were going to be. I was like, okay, thats kind of cute. I didnt realize it was going to be this popular. One thing we did have happen while we were developing it, the company, qseum, that built the platform it runs on, they were trying to save time so they took out the button where you could choose president or first lady. I was like, no, no, no, no. If i choose president and i get howard taft, its funny, but if it just tells me i look like howard taft without me choosing it, thats a whole different thing. Put that back, please. I appreciate saving us some time and trying to keep things efficient, but no. So, yeah, thats been a little bit of a learning experience of thinking about how people were going to react to this tool. So, excellent. Thanks. I wanted to ask sort of at a high level, theres digital levels of digitization, what it means to your business. It could be as simple as making a richer catalog with thumbnails and browseability and improving your websites or could lead to new engagement models and Business Models and so forth. So thats one question. What does it mean to you . Where are those priorities for you . But also, what are the challenges of Going Digital . Is it with the obama proposal that all records be digital by 2019 . Thats sort of changed expectations in the business. So where do you sit in this idea that everything should be digital . And is that really feasible . And maybe ill just start with you, joan, and we can work our way across. Well, thank you for the question. I think that records certainly can be born digital. We in the National Parks service alternate the records, themselves, but doesnt necessarily mean all the objects and the archives are, themselves, digital. So we would be making so i think theres a difference between automating and digitizing and making having an expectation that everything is going to be digitized or everything is going to be automated. We certainly have a lot of sites, we have 387 parks in the system that have collections. We actually have 23 president ial homes and 9 president ial monuments in system. And some things are going to be digitized. I dont think well ever have 1 1 i dont think well ever have 1 1 1 i dont think well ever have 1 1 100 dijation. There has to be a price and what you have the resources to do. Let me skip to the other end of the spectrum, though. A very large scale where theres more of a mandate to go digital. Andrew, maybe you can reflect on the National Archives and how this is influencing what you guys are doing and how you answer that question. Sure. I mean, the question that came up in the last panel, i think its incredibly relevant to this discussion here. We have a strategic goal of the National Archives, having 500 million pages online in our National Archives catalog by 2024. H thats a huge number. Behind that is this question of scale. How do we make sure our systems, processes we have, underlying i. T. Systems and Cloud Infrastructure that was also discussed in the last panel, how does that scale . So scale impacts probably everybody here, whether its just you have a few thousand images, 1100,0 1100,000 images what we have, hundreds of millions. Youre always going have this question of scale. Thinking about how you address that. Its critically important when youre talking to the folks that are involved with this. Whether its the folks on staff that are i. T. Or its the folks youre going to have working with a vendor on this, asking the very, very hard questions of what scaling means. People will come back, say, yes, we can scale. Its easy to do. We use Cloud Infrastructure. Thats not always the case. The reality is the systems dont always scale. Scaling might mean Different Things to different people. For example, if you put hundreds of millions of images into the system and it takes several days in order for hat to bthat to be ingested, its tine. If it takes two weeks in order to get that done, that might not be acceptable for your organization. So really its important to ask really tough questions of your i. T. Folks when youre talking about scale. And youre sort of describing the problems in the context of technical limitations and scale limitations. I think for some of you, very Small Organizations with resource challenges, you know, maybe carrie at the end, maybe you could reflect on that since youre thinking about just how to start and some of these basic issues. What are the limitations you see on adopting digitization . I think its challenge. In the National Trust were a Large National organization but with Historic Sites we have 21 sites where we own the collection and 21 small Historic Sites that often the curator is the educator and also the janitor occasionally. And so you have to think about digitization and where it lies on our priority list and it is a real it is a real challenge. So im kind of pushing the idea of strategic digitization so when you touch an object for research or scan a photo for a book, that content becomes an asset that we upload into our system so its its not just a oneoff, it has to serve the larger purpose. Anyone else want to comment on opticals and priorities for digitization . I could. At the library of congress its we always think about scale because we have a lot of things and we do a lot of digitization, it is selective digitization. But in our collection we have i wrote the numbers down so i wouldnt forget. 146 million items, items could be a diary or a book or a letter. So its a lot of things. And i work in and a lot of that is digital and a lot of it is not also. The team i work on is in this called the library of congress labs and we were created to make a space where you could experiment with the new Digital Technology that are here now and use our digital collections to do new things that wouldnt necessarily have to be a project at scale. So we can do a small project, talking about Machine Learning earlier, so we did say small project about speech to text where we were looking at how the how that worked and how is the accuracy and twrieing trying to compare it to other tools and we can do that in the lab. Were a small team. Only three people, four people, and so we sort of connect with our i. T. Folks and our collection folks and try to figure out if this is something that could work at scale. So we try to protect the sort of production of our Digital Library and our website and sort of make a barrier around that for experimentation in our lab that where we can do things that wouldnt be able to be done sort of at scale or it would take too long to sort of decide to do that or do it and then do the work and have an analysis piece to then share with the rest of the library and other organizations of well this tool worked great for speech to text and this tool for people talking in southern accent doesnt work as well. That is the kind of thing were interested in testing and then sharing results on which could make it less expensive for us hopefully and for other organizations, too. Diane. At the smithsonian scale is really an issue. You may see the smithsonian as one institution but it is 19 museums and 9 Research Centers and a zoo. So strategy is really important as carrie mentioned. And we ask each of the museums and Research Center and the zoo to do a Digital Strategy that makes sense for them because some of the are small, like the anacostia and others are huge, the Natural History museum has close to 130 million specimens and objects. So it is a distinctly different way to digitize those institutions so we ask them to tell us their priorities and put resources toward them accordingly. And you have a similar problem, how do you balance that . It is a decentralized in terms of the Museum Collections and i know there are several curators from park service here today. The parks have autonomy to decide what theyre going to be digitizing and a lot of it is driven by perhaps going on exhibit and putting things on exhibit. That is the opportunity to take photographs and then par lay that into a Virtual Exhibit and put that on a web catalog on to another gallery, we have something called mp gallery and we have small park units with small collections, we have collections like the frederick law um stead collection that have huge blue prints that take a lot of brand width and there is strategy in terms of scale. So we have the four gamuts and we are trying to move toward it but we realize that it is labor intensive and that you have to have good data on the collections before you can put them out. It is all very well to have a good photograph, and digitize that, but you have to have good catalogue information to make it useful and that takes labor to do that and maintain that. Want to shift gears and talk about how we balance investment between physical facilities and the smithsonian is probably a great example so ill start with you, so bounce between the physical facilities in the digital presence. Were all putting on our marketing hats. Everybody in the room is a marketeting and thinking about promoting awareness and truth of the history around the subjects that you manage and the facilities that you manage. And its totally legitimate to create an International Footprint through the internet, for example. And we heard folk this is morning talk about how folks in every country in the world have come to see their facility. Well that is something that digital can give rise to so how do we balance those investments for having this super deep individual onpremises experience versus the more outbound, the push experience to the Broader Community and the world. So how does the smithsonian deal with that . I think you have to carefully analyze each situation. The physical experience of being in an institution and seeing an exhibit for example is very different than a virtual experience, a Virtual Reality experience. They both have pros and cons. I dont think it should be one or the other. We should be looking at what the benefits of each are and the smithsonian is a little different than the other institutions here in that we get 35 million visitors a year. We have huge outreach on our social media and websites and other online properties. It would be a disaster if everybody came to visit us in a way. 35 million a year is already taxing our physical infrastructure. So were looking at these things that is complementary and we want you to come to the smithsonian and see what you want to see here and we think we can deliver unique experiences that you cant get from physically visiting the museums that are more enriching like what your app is developing for example. There is a host of other unique experiences. You should be able to ride the apollo lunar module in a Virtual Reality and if you come near the air and space museum, you wont get near it let alone in it. But we have 3d digitized it now so you could virtually get in it and that is a very different thing. I assume that youre investments in Digitization Technology and physical facilities and interactive exhibits are not fungible budgets. Those budget allocations are separate from each other. We dont do anything without partnerships with technology companies. We have a small digitization budget and we are quasifederal and the rest is raised with funding just like the rest so for a smaller organization where it is all coming from the same place, it may be a different set of decisionmaking factors. Does anyone else want to weigh in on that. And i want to piggy back on what diane said. These are not competing priorities, whether digital or in person but theyre added and complementary and they do a great job of awareness and people see the reputation of the people they know that visited the facilities and that encourages them to come in person. And another example of how the technologies could be used together to talk about is an app we did about a year ago, a digitization around world war i still pictures and never before seen footage and we made the digitization work and created an app and worked with audience groups to figure out how they could implement and use that work. One of the groups was a museum and there was a museum in georgia and what they actually did was take the app, cure ate the material around the world war i and both the images and Motion Pictures and then they would go around the individual facility and show a given item or an object, and could pull up other relevant images in this happ in this app coming from the archives so the people that are visiting could see the one or two or three examples of that small museum might have had or see examples in this case a mess kit for example, see example of the kits in world war i. These are added properties. I dont think it has to be either or. Could i Say Something about that. The library of congress is a beautiful extraordinary building and if you havent visited you really should. Its gorgeous. And we have 1. 8 1. 8 million visits a year and they see the beautiful building and exhibits but they only see a small percentage of what our collection is and we have 92 Million People visiting our website a year. So the impact online is just a lot larger. And there is a lot more that we could do there. Another thing were trying to do is sort of convert the visitors who may just be coming to look at a picture or even visit our building to look at its architecture, were trying to think about ways to convert those people to users and because we only have one site in the United States, but were supposed to serve the whole nation, most of those users will be online. So we have to think about where to meet them where they are and how to give them access to what we get to have access to every day, which is our wonderful collections and try to think about how we can put those collections in their hands and let them use it in the way they want to use it. Which is easier said than done. I had it wasnt at the trust but it was an interesting twist on this question is not access, in person access or digitization, but digitization or preservation of the original and it was an internal battle to fight with the board, which you would never hope to have to do that. We had a grant to digitize a large negative collection and i made the case for why are we holding on to the negative and investing reserves in preserving negatives when you have the digital copy. So that is fortunately i won that battle. But it could come up again and again in different ways. Especially as we get into 3d scanning of objects, why keep the original if it is so expensive to maintain. It is a question were grappling with. I think it is extremely important to remember that the digital image is there to create access to those materials. But that the collections themselves, that we need to make sure that they are preserved, the 3d and the two dimensional pieces. I just wanted to say one thing in terms of park service visitation, we have a lot of sites that are very remote and Virtual Exhibits and virtual digitization gets people to death valley or to leisure in places that they would very unlikely to visit so it creates a whole other set of visitors and it has taken a lot of our managers sometime to understand that these are equally visitors as are local people. Im curious, have you measured that gain and is that something where you could say, hey, there is a positive roi for having gone through this exercise and increased our finger print in the market place. It is very hard to measure that. Weve had a hard time. We try to do that. We look at some of the counts and demographics but it is difficult to measure. Have you been able to do that at the smithsonian . Metrics are difficult. You could get metrics but that doesnt translate into impact. So i would say, yes, you can see who is checked on your website or using your different technologies and your apps, but that doesnt necessarily mean you can measure the impact. So that is part of the project planning in Something Like this, making sure you have a mechanism for metrics. So andrew, use the fateful word social media. And i think that is a topic that has been visited this morning and needs to continually be revisited. And there is a couple of interesting kind of observations recently that are that make me pause and think about how we should treat social media as archivists, as these are assets related to the topics that we focus on. One would be for example the obama birth certificate situation or the russian collusion situation, whether or not these news feeds well call them news feeds, but whether or not these topics are based in all fact or not, they are generally rendered through social media channels. And that is the place where youre going to capture context that is directly relevant to the various presidencies going on at the time. So they are relevant and they do add context and narrative to what is happening in the executive office. And so the question is what is our what should our policy be in regards to capturing social media and this is classically a born digital feed, where there is no physical artifact. And how do we deal with the balance of authenticity versus this idea that it brings important context to the presidencies . I can start. The National Archives is a big user of social media as well. So we both have a responsibility to consume the record and preserve the records born on social media. But at the same time we also produce a lot of social media. We find it a very effective way to get our message out. We started with one blog many 2009 and now we have over 130 different accounts on 14 different platforms and over 200 individuals have to participate in social media. So it is an important and effective way for us. In terms of preserving the record, it is certainly the case that if an account is used to create conduct government business then we are responsible for making sure we preserve that information. So if you go back to the obama administration, we did that two different ways. One, there was the official transfer of the electronic records over into the National Archives following standard process for electronic records and the second way which is is unique and important, we work with a social media platforms themselves and with twitter and facebook and youtube and the white house at the same time to make sure that we could freeze the existing accounts so the potus account turned into potus 44, so people could go and still get access to that information in a way that theyre used to doing that. So many people want to get that information on the platform and go somewhere else to find that information. They want to be able to continue to interact with that in realtime on those platforms. So we work with Different Social Media companies to make sure that people could maintain access over time so that information is still publicly available. As you know, the library of congress collected the first 12 years of twitter, the whole thing. Which i do not recommend really. And you dont have to do because we already did it. And now were collecting selectively and it reflects what our archives policy is, we have curators who are subject area experts and collect in all formats, so it could be a book, it could be photographs, it could be social media, if it is about the subject they are responsible for, then we collect it. So for example, we collect all for all elections, all candidate websites and social media and any registered candidate for congressional and president ial elections, we collect that material. And that sort of just reflects what the we have a lot of president ial papers. It is a topic that we sort of americana that we collect on. So it is not really we dont look at it as any different than collecting in other formats. And you have a curation process and a catalogue that helps you track and search and everything else, treat it as a traditional asset . Yeah. And do you want to diane did you want to weigh in . Well the president ial things that we collect will be objects. And mostly at our american History Museum and the curators have the Selection Process through that. So youre not collecting any social media related to museums . The social media that is collected is done within each museum and they there is a broad policy but there is also some leeway within each museum to make decisions. Itious would you say theyre still figuring it out . Oh, yeah. Sure. This question was fascinating. When we were doing prep for the session because i had not considered that for the National Trust if we should be archiving any social media. But i think in a way for us it would be even it would be the easiest thing to collect because it would easily go into an institutional archive or Research File and not enter our formal collections which are pretty much closed and we dont actively collect in a lot of areas. But it is a good information. Thinking of Woodrow Wilson and the house and the scandals and the protests that have arisen in the past few years, it is good information to gather but whether i dont think it would enter our permanent collection. There is a project all about focusing on sort of ethics around collecting social media. It is called documenting the now and it arose from the black lives matter for historic purposes and used in other ways. So this group has come up with a tool and some sort of ethical best practices around collecting social media, which, if you are interested in, clerking it out and documenting the now is what it is called. One of the questions i have is related to economies at scale and the ability for a Large Organization to project a big footprint in the market and have a high mine share versus much smaller institutions many of which are represented in the room here today and im wondering what the best practices are for the smaller institutions for being a small fish in a big pond or projecting a footprint in the market that is larger than what we actually are and there is a tradition of sharing collections and things like that. But does digital enable an easier path to associations or coordination during Large National events or other ways to amplify the presence of the smaller institutions . What are your ideas . Can i sure, go ahead. We were very fortunate obviously the White House Historical association is small and with 15 employees, maybe less than that full time. One of the things when i was hired and they said, we want you to build this Digital Library and i said okay, that is great but i dont have an onsite i. T. Person. We dont have any i. T. Staff. And that ended up having to guide my decisionmaking because there is not a person in the building that said something is wrong with the system, i need you to come fix it. And that obviously presented serious problem for a lot of small institutions and especially in an era when technology is changing literally week by week. Every time guy to an Amazon Web Services conference they have five new things they are launching and im still catching up on the last conference. I still dont know what that means. So that could be a real issue. It is taken a lot of time on my part and on my teams part to keep up with the Technology Changes and if i didnt know what Digital Asset management was. Someone told me you need to get a dam and what . Excuse me. Okay. I didnt know what lex was and i didnt i think i had to look up a. R. I wasnt sure what a. R. Stood for. So that is just the learning challenge. It is not even the resources challenge or getting into the issue of the financing. It is just, okay, well everyone knows what digitization is but now digitization is changing and digitization used to mean you bought an expensive flatbed scanner and now we have mounted cameras then learn about the mounted cameras. And i think that is to me that is one of the things and people talk about there is cost issues and other issues, i dont think we talk enough about the self education that we have to do to understand this and especially at smaller institutions. Were it. My team is it. Were the people in charge of all of this so we had to learn it. Because if we didnt it wasnt going to get done and i think obviously there are more obvious issues keeping up with technology but that to me i think is one of the things we havent talked about is the education issue. If i could bring something up, the smithsonian has a program called Smithsonian Associates and there are 200 museums and educational associations across the country that we partner with and some of the partnership is along traditional lines. We loan collections and exhibits but also transfer skillsets. So some of those partners will come to us to learn things and or spend time with us and i think that is a great way to do it at a low cost plus you make new colleagues and network and have some kind of longterm partner in place that way. So if i may jump in, the institute of the museum and Library Services has been awarding funds, grants to organizations like museums and libraries and educational institutions to Work Together on projects and i think that is a very rich avenue to pursue, where there are smaller organizations, colorado or wherever they are, but a joints project so that is very so it sounds like an important thing, the larger institution helping the smaller. I came across a site, history. Gov and i believe andrew is connected to this initiative. We are. Can you give us an overview of what you are trying to do there and the results. Sure. The idea behind is to have a Central Location where people could go in and ask a question about history and get an answer. Is no more complicated than that. And the url is history. Gov and if you are interested in joining from an institutional perspective, reach out to me and ill be happy to set that up. History. Gov, they go in there and ask a question and then you have people responding to that and there is staff that respond from the stand point of thinking as a digital reference model, or people that have crowd sources experts that are participating so we have the public participating in this as well. So it is another way to engage and think about the idea behind the government and the participatory government and having expertise and information to help answer the questions and also partnering with other Cultural Heritage organizations around answering these questions as well. Weve done some preliminary work with the library of congress and were looking to extend that. Last week we did work with the state archivists that were here visiting in a local meeting and also certainly if there are other institutions or organizations at the local level, we absolutely have to do that as well. Somebody goes in and asks a question and they might get a response from the National Archives or an expert or somebody from the library of congress. But the bottom line is they dont have to know about the organizational bureaucracy where a certain set of the records might reside, go to one location and get that answer. Moreover it is filled by google and people look for questions in the larger perspective and know to go to history. Gov and they go to google and it gets indexed and find that information there as well. So the question, how do you define a citizen archivist and how does that complement what you are trying to do in archives. It is been around for us for quite a while. The archivist david farrio wrote a blog about this in 2011 about open government and participatory government and weve been having that extended from the first post in 2011 to today where we have a strategic goal of having 1 million records in our National Archives catalogue and improved by citizen arcivist contributions by the year 2025 and that is an enormous number if you think about and those participations could be comments, tagging and transcription, transcription being an important part of that. So people come to the National Archives catalogue and find our records and the citizen archivist groups transcribes to make it available. Every time somebody transcribes a document that goes back into the index and makes it more findable for somebody doing a search on the site so it is not just benefiting the person that did that work but everybody that comes to the site benefits from that at well. Is there anybody else in the panel using crowd sourcing today . Well the library of congress is about to very soon, in october publicly launch a new crowd sourcing platform. So this is a good example of what i was talking about before, about how labs will incubate a project and then help if decided sort of help the institution to pursue it at scale we help that along. So were going to have a transcription and tagging platform. The name were still working on but i think it is Something Like make your mark. But the software were building is called concordia and it will be open source and it is open now so you could go to our get hub, which is a Software Development depository and see the progress that were in. I think were in sprint nine of 11 so were getting there. But october 24th is when it will sort of launch to the public. And it will be it will be featuring some mark is collections and letters written to lincoln and rosa parks correspondent and the founder of the red cross i cant remember her name. Clair barton. Clair barton. Youre asking the right crowd. Clair bartons diaries and a couple of others that we hope and the whole goal of the project is to engage diverse audiences so we have a new library of congress who is really interested in engaging the public in ways that we havent done before. So we are asking the public to transcribe documents that most likely would never have been transcribed before by our staff or by anyone else. So this will but were designing it in a way to prioritize user pengagement so e want people to feel they are trusted to work with us and to contribute to the organization and that were approachable. Sometimes we the library of congress, we are very good at being author tative but not being approachable so were trying to make this project an exemplar of the whole sort of user centered approach that the new librarian is trying to take with new programming. So were excited about the project and we we are hard at work now sort of putting the final touches on it. And then well as it cycles there, there will be more materials and mainly manuscript materials because that is our most conducive to transcribing. But our hope is that it will go into audio visual materials and then again all of that information that the public contributes will be used to make the content more searchable for the researchers and for everyone else on our website. And if i could, the smithsonian also has a Transcription Center in place for a couple of years now. It has over 10,000 people who regular participate. We call them volenpeers because we take their work very seriously and they our number one volunteer is from new zealand. So theyre worldwide and they contribute an enormous amount and do things like abby said we would probably never be able to do ourselves with transcribing materials. And everything from field notebooks which are really important for our Natural History collection to labels, handwritten labels over a couple of hundred years still need to be transcribed. And andrew did you just a couple of things about crowd sourcing i didnt mention, we do the transcription on our own National Archives catalogue platform which we built ourselves but there are other platforms. I good example is universe, so there are several projects where people have taken National Archive records an put them on universe and put them on transcription and then bring that back from the platform into our own system. You dont have to build your own system to do crowd sourcing. And this is relevant to digitization. Our strategy had five different approaches to it. One of the approaches is crowd sourcing and here in washington, d. C. We have another hub, the Innovation Hub part of the National Archives museum here in d. C. And there is a space where people could come onsite and we have scanners set up and monitors set up to make sure the materials are handled appropriately but they do a crowd source digitization and that gets digitized and go through a qc process and then clean up the metadata and then goes into the National Archives catalogue and the unique part about that is people get credit for that. So go to the National Archives catalogue and see people accredited for doing the digitization work. Were starting to get low on time. I want to make sure i reserve time for some questions from the audience. One of the last questions i want to ask is about more leadingedge technology, especially automation. So if you use the facial recognition app, white house app, you are now a practitioner of Machine Learning. And that is a little bit of an exaggeration, but the point is technology is like Machine Learning or being able to take the transcriptions and automatically translate them into 23 languages automatically and create a wider market footprint, the ability to extract more context from images like object recognition and so forth, these are all things that become automated and become easier and easier to use very, very rapidly. So the question is who on the panel is starting to adopt tease technologies like Machine Learning and can you afford not to automate . In other words with the flood of new potential assets and born digital sources, et cetera, is it becoming an imperative to create automation in your content work . We are using Machine Learning. Weve started experimenting with it with our Natural History collection. Were moving toward our history, art and cultural collections. We use it for identifying things and as well as metadata enrichment because that will be really important when you have 155 million objects you may not be able to get an image of them all but you would like a record of them all for control of the collection if nothing else. But often you lack metadata and well never have cataloguers that could do all of that but there are many ways to be able to grab metadata from other places with a reasonable level of reliability and incorporate that into our collection. So we are looking at Machine Learning for that as well. And i think that will probably be very important for us. And joan, you focus on process and automation. What is your philosophy toward automation in the work flow . Well were moving toward automating all of the collections. That would be 100 of the museum records. And the digital images that go with them. But i think we have such a large backlog that theyre trying to get control of, thats the strategy that weve put in place and were moving to another platform in a while down and we have several drafts of white paper to digitize so we are looking to move towards this and abby, i think youre running experiments in this area. Yeah, we are doing speech to text experiments where were interested in experimenting with our digital photographs and do image recognition. And i think largely were about to also release a new Digital Strategy and part of it is is trying to help guide how the library invests in the future in these kind of tools and with our scale and with the expectations of users and even the crowd sourcing project that were doing, that requires sort of item level rights metadata that requires item level metadata. It doesnt necessarily mean full catalogue records but for to do the sort of projects and to take advantage of some of the newer sort of presentation and access technologies, you really need to know a lot about the Digital Asset that you have and what its right situation is and where the location and the title and the date just those very simple things that we dont have even if we have it digitized, we dont necessarily have all of that information and that is what users are expecting when they do a search, theyll be able to be able to find what they are looking for. But without that data, it is not possible. So the sort of machine processing is we hope will help with that. Because there is no way we could hire enough cataloguers to get there. If i could say one more. Sure. Stephanie. We dont use crowd sourcing, im not fond of it and the history of the white house is odd and requires special information about specific rooms and what they have been but we are using Machine Learning so i trust machines more than i trust people which is why i became a librarian and i want to assure if you did download the app and took a selfie and youre worried that amazon has it in the cloud, we dont. And your selfies are staying in possession of the association so please dont worry if you take pictures of your kids or of themselves, they are not getting into some giant surveillance machine, at least not through us. But one of the things were prototyping is a backlog of about 300,000 files and i dont know what is in them because theyre haphazardly labelled so were working with bob harper sitting over there to set up the Recognition Software to do training to tell us if any of the pictures have a present or first lady in them so i could say that folder, we need to process and sort through that and make it faster. In the end my team still does all of the metadata and the metadata work but the machines will help us figure out, okay, we need to worry about this folder and not the other folders. I would like to ask one last question and this is like a speed dating thing here where we go through one by one. I would like to know in the next 12 months or so what the coolest and most interesting thing that youll be involved in the near future and if you want to pass because it is confidential that is fine. But tell us what you are working on and what we can expect to see and then turn it over to questions from the audience. Were working on redeveloping our entire 3d pipeline so that we could collect 3d data and create 3d models in an automated fashion, from capture through processing and putting it on a stateoftheart 3d viewer but more importantly through creating a bunch of apis so you could get the models much more easily than you can now. Joan. So we tried to do more Virtual Exhibits for parks and having some of the collections digitized so they get up online and expanding that base to increase the number of exhibits, park exhibits. The mobile application needs some additional work for accessibility. We werent able to do a lot of accessibility on the app when it launched so that is one of our priorities, adding material to the app. The chappa that stewart mentioned, that is from asw open source project so if you have curiosity, there are several people from amazon here and come ask me. We would like to evolve that to be on alexa. Tts great somebody could go and talk to our website but we want people if they are in their house going, alexa how many bathrooms are in the white house and get the answer, which is our most asked question. That is the question we have the most often. How many bathrooms are if the white house. So it is involving the app and how many 35. That is in the whole house. And then in terms of the library we Just Launched a portal website and we have a busy june, launched the chappa and the app in the new portal and i need a vacation. I still need a vacation. Is alan lowe in the room . In springfield we did a mini trial collaboration with them, on the emancipation proclamation and hoping to expand that and work with as many different president ial sites and libraries on that portal to make it a way for everybody to link to each other and not just us, but links back out to the other libraries so that is my priority over the next 12 months, to start expanding that partnership and talk to the other president ial sites and broaden that network of material. We could work with you on lincoln. Yes, we would i will work with whoever wants to work with us. All right. There it is. Call to action. Andrew . Im going to sub vert the question. I think we have things planned around Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning which are important and which folks talked about but i want to talk something about that we didnt talk about so far and were getting to the end is the idea of thinking about who your customer is and what their needs are. And we talked about technology and Cloud Infrastructure and all of the Different Things but if you dont know what your users need or design or you dont use User Experience design to meet the need of your customers you wont be successful so dont think of the technology as the solution, it has to be about the users what they need and want. That is a reorientation of thinking about our own process and important to us and how do we turn our focus back out to the users and make sure they are successful. And i second that. But i already talked about crowd sourcing and the Digital Strategy coming out so ill mention the thing i havent mentioned yet which we have an innovator in Residence Program and we are working with a data artist whose name is jared thorp and hes made a lot of really interesting things based on our mark catalog records that you should check out on our web page, labs at lock. Gov and the next round of work is looking at trying to put randomness back into searching library collections. So he is sort of reminiscing about going through book stacks and finding this and you are interested in that and how that that is really lost when you type in a box and then get a list of results. So hes sort of taking the kind of whimsical look at how can we look at how can we browse and find things in a library digitally that sort of recreate that serendipity. So hes the serendipity engine. So that may not is that the brand . Is it serendipity . That is what hes calling it. That is a experiment that may not go anywhere and just be that. But im looking forward to see what he comes up with. Great. And carrie . Im super excited ill take it to two years, not 12 months, but in the next few months were launching an online web portal where the National Trust collection will be online in one place for the public to access for the first time in our history and starting on tuesday im going to be joined by a fellow funded by the american counsel of Learned Society in melon who is joining us for two years as the manager of curator innovation and her drive for two years is building up our digital brand for the collection and making beginning to make the connections between our sites, so physically limited in our interpretations and now taking it online to draw connections between our plantation sites or our urban site. Just all of the different stories that we could tell with our collection, we can do them online rather than in person because were biphysical so excited for the next two years. Super cool stuff. Thanks, guys. So lets open it up. We have three or four minutes for questions. We would love to have you ask anything you want about technology and digitization or the progress folks have made here. Yes, sir. It seems like there is an obligation to digit ize our 2d collection and looking at 3d there is a great opportunity and how we can leverage that utilizing it as a means to an end rather than an end to itself. I would be curious about the way you are using the 3d scanning and printing to advance that idea. We spent a lot of time developing use cases for 3d. We first wanted to learn how to use the technology and what they were useful on because not everything is amenable to 3d digitization. But we found that educational use cases are huge. There is just i gave the example of the apollo lunar module to be able to get inside of that is an amazing feat. And to be able to understand that for children today, there is nothing digital in there. It is all analog. So to learn about the history of technology, to be inside of it, is something that you just cant do with the original object because its for preservation reasons. Even the curator would never allow himself to go in it. So that is one use case. There is conservation use cases. Weve digitized modern works of art that needed to be shipped out and loaned and we were able to do deviation analysis by 3d scanning it before it went and 3d scanning after and seeing if there was any damage in between. Weve also another conservation case was trying to get a contemporary work of art that had mixed media, light bulbs, corkscrews and things like that. The light bulb had to be changed because it was a delicate material and we created a 3d scan and then created a cradle an opposite to lay it into so the conservator could lay it in there and not worry about damaging the work of art while changing the components in the back. Those are conservation cases. And there are also research cases. Natural history researchers and biologists routinely ct scan specimens in their collection and ct scans are a type of 3d scanning to learn about the insides of specimens and things like that. So those are just the three big ones that we see but im sure there are many, many more. So weve used them for specimens and that is also now an increasing mind of coming in and doing 3d scans and printing of objects in the collections and also using as diane said, for education. One thing i should add for research, when you 3d scan something, it is much more accurate than if you need to measure it. So if you are a researcher measuring it, traditional ways for paleontologists to measure is with calipers but with a 3d scan you could go point to point and as more accurate. And it also protected the specimen, whereas other means do not. Interesting. Next question. Hi. So we talked a lot about crowd sourcing in relation to transcription across the various institutions represented. So i was wondering if there is any kind of community that was being fostered whether through chat boards or leaderboards within the transcribers, the citizen archivists if you will themselves as i know i think they did that in the transcribe bethham out of ucl, i could be misciting that or is there anything like that represented in any of your projects . For the National Archives, one of the ways well maybe two ways to talk b. We have a news letter that goes off to the National Archives catalogue and has about 45,000 subscribers and many of those people have signed up as part of the transcription efforts and that is a way to communicate with them on a fairly regularly basis. And the second way is with history hub, we have a user support community and we have two Community Managers that are responsible for a lot of the archivist efforts and theyll answer questions and post answers to history hub. So both our own Community Managers participate in that forum and the transcribers themselves have that platform to have discussions. Thank you for the question. I also have a question about crowd sourcing. And i wondered what you were doing for Quality Control . I worked on a project related to crowd sourcing where i was editing the transcripts of people that people had turned in. They were uniformly awful. And what was discouraging to me was the people i was working with werent concerned. And so i just wondered what what kind of procedures you have and how you control for quality . Sure. For the National Archives we use our own most of it happens through our platform and we do have some moderation that happens on the platform but it is largely for inappropriate use rather than Quality Control. What we do how Quality Control largely happens and this is a philosophical approach from the very beginning of the use of the platform was the idea of youre going to have other individuals come in there and do sort of post posting review of the material themselves and we actually have found and have good evidence even some people going too far in the direction of correcting other peoples material. We have a small group of individuals and that is their main role or job, theyre not assigned to that but that is what they find the most satisfaction from is going back and reviewing other peoples materials and making those corrections. So they are volunteers, too. Volunteers, too. Yeah. And i get to see aid lot of Different Industries with similar use cases and one of the common crowd sourcing cases is in genealogy and ancestry and census and immigration records and the Mormon Church is at the center of a lot of that and their system is to use a layers of volunteers that are individually transcribing things, and every asset will be transcribed by two separate volunteers and then the higher level is an arbitrator, also volunteer role but has to pass a screen. If the two separate transcriptions disagree, then it goes to the arbitrator. So they built a kind of a natural checks and balances to capture errors and now their q a mechanisms may not be as strict as yours and you have to think about that and there are ways to use krouz crowd sourcing to provide those checks and balances. Last question. Hi there. I really appreciate this conversation on digitization of these collections because i think it is really important for not only the American People to have access to these collections, but as a whole, but also subsets of our communities that arent able to reach these assets for one reason or another. Could you please describe some of the programs or utilizations of digitization to be able to bring accessibility to these collections so whether its 2d collection such as written forms or photographs that are then described in voice so that people can again experience these that wouldnt normally be able to experience them and that includes 3d objects as well. Speaking for the smithsonian, accessibility is important and we havent been very good at it. We know that and were working on it. There are a number of things were trying to start to do. Mostly with videos starting to get transcriptions and that is the low hanging fruit, if you want to put it that way. But there are some things that are more difficult trying to make a 3d viewer accessible to the visually impaired is a very difficult thing to do. Resources are important and theyve been in short supply to do that. So of course these kinds of things then get pushed in the background. But i definitely appreciate the question and urge more people to ask that question because that will push more resources to that area. The National Trust has a relationship with the Google Cultural Institute and were looking for their tours to help us with the physical accessibility at our Historic Sites so people could experience the historic spaces who physically couldnt access it. So were looking into that. We started a sign language interpretation tour in the building and we have to follow comply with accessibility rules for anything on our website so all videos have to be transcribed. Were thinking of doing a crowd sourcing experiment around improving alt tag descriptions for our collections across our whole site that would hopefully improve sort of the description of what those what are in those images so people who are blind can know what they are and what they are looking at or not looking at but what they are using. So its something we think about. We have the National Library for the blind and physically handicap as part of the library of congress so we its part of our sort of culture to sort of think about that. If i could give you one story, this is kind of an anecdote but an interesting one. We have a big newsmattics collection and in one of the exhibits they 3d printed some coins and put them up on the graphics, it is a stylistic thing but they got in some kind of feedback from some visitors who are visually impaired thanking them for 3d printing the coins because for the first time they could feel the impressions of what was on there and that was not their intent at all in footing it but now they do it whenever they can because they realize the value of that. Nice. But were sometimes just not even thinking about those and we need to regroup and start from scratch. We have a lot on the images we have alt tags an putting information there but were going back into the publications and making them come compliant so they are easier to read. And one of the obstacles is making it accessible to people that visually impaired with an audio stream. We were facing the possibility of somebody having to record the audio which is expensive and if one record rechanges we have to redo it and were using amazon policy which is a text to speech tool available in the cloud allowing us to generate a mp3 file that could be updated. But going back to the education, there is this thing called ssml which is the tagging language for voice which i didnt know existed until a few months ago so we have to learn that. But compared to trying to hire a voice actor to do the recording, and then i have the secret service because i dont they we can let people walk around the white house with headphones on. And we recently did the museum site here in washington, d. C. And put accessibility there with feedback from users, which i said before, was that often people want to know what the experience is like when they get there and what kind of facilities will look like and how to navigate around and we added that material. Thank you for the question. That is it for the questions. I appreciate your [ applause ] the United States senate, a uniquely american institution, lentil slating and carrying out constitutional duties since 1789. On wednesday, january 2nd, cspan takes you inside of the senate. Learning about the legislative body its informal workings. Were look at history of conflict and compromise with original interviews arguing about things and kicking them around and having great debates is thoroughly american thing. Key moments in history. And unprecedented access. Allowing us to bring cameras into the Senate Chamber during a session. We have a script for the ppt follow the evolution of the senate into the modern era from advice and consent to their role in impeachment proceedings and investigations. The senate, conflict and compromise, a cspan original production exploring the history, traditions and role of this uniquely american institution. Premieres wednesday january 2nd on cspan. And be sure to go online at cspan. Org senate to learn more about the program and watch original fulllength interviews with senators, view farewell speeches from longserving members and take a tour inside of the Senate Chamber, the old Senate Chamber and other exclusive locations. When the new Congress Takes office in january, it will have the youngest, most diverse freshman class in recent history. New congress, new leaders. Watch it live on cspan starting january 3rd. The cspan bus recently traveled to tennessee asking folks, what does it mean to be american . What it means to be american, looking at that for my students, studying the history or the past and sometimes they say, well why did that replicate and looking at the specifics and questioning things that go on now to really push the idea of democratic citizenship, voting and seeing what you could do and how you could impact your community on the local level. To me to be an american means to be free to think, to speak, to express my thoughts. Im free to relate to other people, no matter who they are. Im free to have the oxygen around me and express everything that i want to be and im free to be everything i want to be. Its so important to appreciate being an american. What does it mean to be an american . In america, you are part of the greatest experiment in Self Government that the history has ever known. And part of being an american is understanding that we believe at our core that each individual is created equally and they have the same godgiven rights as every other individual. To be an american means that you are an active citizen, that you are involved in your city, your state, and your local government so that you could really learn about problemsolving and look at areas in your local governments and your surrounding community and see how you could use your voice, your back ground, your area of expertise to improve and make it better, to be an american means you are aware of the things that are going on in your local community and youre Larger Community at large across the nation and that you are actively looking for ways to improve and to make it better for the next generation. It is a great pleasure to be here and tuck about what it is to be an american. That is one of the multifaceted questions that really, what can you do to better your Community Local and then statewise and then that trickles up to your national opportunity. What are you doing to make your community better, by helping our younger generation, which is the future, and to help the older generation which we expect, and we need to be able to help as they finish out their years. Voices from the road on c span. American history tv continues now with a discussion on the importance of Civic Engagement in america. We will hear about Research Public programs and online tools aimed at increasing civic learning for children and adults. Held by the White House Historical association, this is an hour and half. Good afternoon, and welcome to the National Archives. I am the archivist of the United States, we are honored to have you with us this afternoon. When stuart and anita came to my office to talk about how we might participate we quickly came to an idea of doing a public panel on civic literacy. Two of my favorite days the National Archives are constitution and bill of rights day, when we host Naturalization Services in the rotunda in front of the charters of freedom. 5200 individuata