Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

New Zealand has more to offer than just the oval ball

Wednesday 9 September marks two years until the kick-off of the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. The event provides a huge opportunity for New Zealanders to impress on an overseas audience that while we may (or may not!) be good at playing with the oval ball, our country also has a rich history and culture.

Some 70,000 visitors are expected and rugby supporters from other parts of the world are generally well-educated well-heeled people. During the 44 days of the cup they will be looking for enjoyments beyond the games for themselves and their partners.

So the Ministry for Culture and Heritage is working with the New Zealand 2011 office to encourage a creative and multi-faceted festival alongside the World Cup. Our websites will also work together to present an exciting range of material for visiting rugby fans.

NZHistory.net.nz

NZHistory.net.nz will become the key resource for people who are interested in the story of rugby in New Zealand. The site already has three excellent web exhibitions on rugby:

• A fascinating account of the New Zealand Natives’ tour of 1888–89, in which the team’s 21 Māori and five Pākehā members played a staggering 107 matches in New Zealand, Australia and Britain, and won 78. They also played eight games of Australian rules and two of soccer. The essay includes images of perhaps the first rugby haka and the first rugby use of the silver fern.
• An account of the traumatic Springbok tour of 1981, with some excellent television clips.
• The story of the 1987 Rugby World Cup, featuring, of course, the famous image of David Kirk kissing the cup.

Rugby enthusiasts should also not miss a sound recording of Winston McCarthy (‘Listen, it’s a goal’) describing the 1956 All Black–Springbok match. Since his departure, rugby has never been quite the same.

NZLive.com

Visitors wanting interesting suggestions as to what to do between games will find NZLive.com the essential guide. For someone who is hoping to be in Nelson on 20 September 2011 to watch Italy play, the site already has 36 things to do, which range from Lillia’s Lace Museum to the World of Wearable Art Museum.

NZLive.com also has feature articles about matters of interest to rugby fans, including:

• a short history of Eden Park, once a lake called Cabbage Tree Swamp and now the site of the cup finals
• a preview of the Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, featuring 100 life-sized images of rugby players.

Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Te Ara will be offering visitors a number of resources:

• The Places entries will provide in-depth guides about the history, geography and culture of the different regions of New Zealand for anyone visiting the country.
• The entries about New Zealand Peoples will give interesting stories about some of the people who settled in New Zealand from the countries represented in the tournament. For example, when Scotland plays in Invercargill on the second match of the tournament, the visitors from the old country can find out in the Scots entry about their compatriots who settled the far south.
• Other entries will enrich people’s understanding of the places they visit. When on 18 September, the French play Canada at Napier, visitors can learn about the story of the French and the Canadians in New Zealand, and they can learn all about Napier and Hawke’s Bay. But they will also be encouraged to learn about the gannets they can see down at Cape Kidnappers, or the 1931 earthquake, which transformed the landscape around them.

Exactly how we pull all this together into one easy way for visitors is our challenge – a geo-portal is one obvious solution. But what is certain is that NZLive.com, NZHistory.net.nz and Te Ara believe that together they have much to offer in presenting New Zealand to the world. We look forward to the challenge.

This post is cross-posted on Lively.

Recently Te Ara made the biggest change since it launched. However, on the surface little has changed. This is part of a series of posts that will try to explain why it’s exciting for us and why we hope it’s exciting for you. We’ve broken the story into three parts: Te Ara past, present and future.

Te Ara past

Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand landed on the internet in February 2005. It contained 106 stories and 3,000 images. Over the past four years we’ve added over 300 stories and over 9,000 images, but few new web features. Why did we focus on richer content and not on the surrounding website?

I came to work at Te Ara a year after the launch, and heard the stories of late nights attempting to get the content ready for launch. But the Te Ara I got to know was the new Te Ara, a well-oiled, encyclopedic machine. Everything at this point was about Earth, Sea and Sky, a theme that included 117 more stories. The team worked feverishly on writing, checking, editing, researching images, clearing copyright, optimising images and designing maps, graphs and diagrams for the somewhat bare encyclopedia. Away from the busy production line, the team excitedly discussed new features and changes that they’d like on the site. However, few ideas could slip past the barrier that quickly blocked that exciting future.

The existing content management system (CMS) made changes to the site expensive, overly complicated, time-consuming and dependant on external developers. Compromises were made when adding new features so they were independent of the CMS. Important changes like improving our search engine became too hard. However, this blog, our Flickr group, @Te_Ara on Twitter, and the ability for users to submit their own stories were created almost overnight because they were managed outside the CMS.

So, when it was time to upgrade to the latest version of the existing CMS (at great expense), we leapt at the opportunity and began searching for a new one. I won’t bore you with process; it involves scoping, proofs of concepts, RFPs and lots of other phrases and acronyms. The short story is, we found Drupal. It’s nice, friendly, and free (i.e. open-source). Unfortunately our old CMS had one last trick up its sleeve: it was going to hold onto all the content as tight as possible and we didn’t have the key. (Sorry editors, if you let me write a blog post, I’m going to mix me some metaphors.)

A long, complicated project to migrate Te Ara’s 2 million elements came to an end several months ago. It was more complicated than anyone expected, and involved long stints of testing and the creation of a new authoring system. Also ,we took the opportunity to make a few changes … more about that in part two.

On 25 August 2009, the new Drupal-driven site started delivering web pages to you, the user. Then it stopped for a few hours. Then we got it going again. But that’s not important. What matters is that a huge barrier has now disappeared and Te Ara can start evolving.

Subscribe to Signposts to make sure you don’t miss Part two – Te Ara present, a look at the new features.