Community Contributed

About Kete Horowhenua

A description of the overall Kete Project and Kete Horowhenua.

About Kete Horowhenua

Kete Horowhenua is a community built digital library of arts, cultural and heritage resources for and about Horowhenua, New Zealand. Horowhenua Library Trust are responsible for the creation and ongoing development of the site.

Kete aims to get privately owned papers and photographs out from under beds and sitting alongside public archive and photograph collections. But we want so much more too. We want to capture the memories and stories that are our heritage, we want a place where our artists can showcase their work, and where our businesses and attractions can promote themselves, where we can celebrate who we are and how we live and what we do through photographs, video and audio footage and stories.

What we want is a vibrant and lively community of Kete Horowhenua users adding value to the site: joining together related photographs and clips and documents by writing and submitting an article or story; a story that others can add their own memories and knowledge to as well.

Kete Horowhenua was developed with Ruby on Rails, utilizes Zebra z39.50 full text indexing engine developed by IndexData, is fully compatible with Koha, and will be released under a GNU General Public License (GPL). The Kete software is available for download and we invite other communities to build their own Kete.

This Horowhenua Library Trust project is carried out in partnership with Horowhenua District Council and Levin SeniorNet, and was funded from the National Digital Strategy : Community Partnership Fund.

You can read more about Kete Horowhenua and what we're trying to do at http://blog.kete.net.nz

The future

Our aim is to bring Kete to the world! We are seeking funding to do the following:

1. Build a release of the code (minus all the Horowhenua customizations) that can be downloaded, installed and configured using a web based wizard to step newbies through the process, thus allowing a unique Kete installation.

2. Develop a prototype for skins or themes to allow a customized installation reflecting an organisations culture or style.

3. Establish a kete.net community site for developers and users.

If you interested in helping with further development (especially with cash!) then please contact us.

Who's involved in Kete Horowhenua?

Conception: Kete was the bright idea of Joann Ransom, Deputy head of Libraries, Horowhenua Library Trust and Kete Project Manager.

Partners: Horowhenua Library Trust have partnered with Horowhenua District Council and Levin SeniorNet for this project.

Funders: The National Digital Strategy : Community Partnerships Fund provided the bulk of the development funding, supplemented by Horowhenua Library Trust, Horowhenua District Growers Association and Horowhenua District Council. Ross McColl Cars have provided us with transport whenever we have needed it, and Horowhenua College with a computer suite

Developers: Walter McGinnis (Lead Developer), Russell Garlick (Information Architect) Robert Lyon (Web Programmer), and the rest of the crew at Katipo Communications.

Content Manager: Pippa Coard has worked full time for nine months coordinating the collection of content, and managing volunteers.

Workers: We asked for help and boy did we get! We have had thousands of hours of voluntary labour gifted to us by individuals in the community preparing digital content.

Community groups: Horowhenua and Foxton historical societies have provided the bulk of the seed collection, and Lorraine and Chris Wright from the Levin branch of NZ Society of Genealogists have created databases for bulk import.