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Guest Speakers
In order of appearance at the Forum
| Keynote: The story of Tūranga from inception to opening – the warts and all version! Carolyn Robertson Libraries and Information Manager As managers we all face times of great difficulty relative to our libraries and communities. For Carolyn, the rebuild of Christchurch’s Central Library was the biggest challenge of her career. It was not all bricks and mortar but a complete redesign of how the Library delivered services to its community. This keynote is a personal account of leadership, resilience and damn hard work! Carolyn Robertson is Head of Libraries and Information for Christchurch City Council, a position she has held since 2005. Carolyn leads the planning, development and delivery of public library services for the citizens of Christchurch and Banks Peninsula. Since the Canterbury earthquakes in 2010 and 2011, a major focus for Carolyn and the library team has been on the provision of temporary services, planning new library facilities and developing new service models. Five community libraries have been built in recent years and Tūranga, the new central city library, opened its doors in October 2018. Tūranga is both a flagship for the city’s library services and an important destination and activator for the transforming CBD. Carolyn is very proud of the library’s strong reputation for innovation and continuous service improvement to meet Christchurch’s increasing diversity and changing needs. Carolyn is a fellow of LIANZA (the Library and Information Association of New Zealand) and served as President in 2010/11. She has been a member of Public Libraries of New Zealand since its inception and is currently serving her second term on the Library and Information Commission. Carolyn is involved in several international library networks, including the Global Libraries Network INELI programme. |
| Keynote: You Matter To Us - Collective Impact Project Jan Dobson Collective Impact Project Lead, Ministry of Education Working together for collective impact is a focus of the Forum and we are delighted Jan Dobson can share her extensive knowledge with us. In the follow-on session with Jan and Pat Street, the Tūranga library staff - You Matter to Us Wellbeing Team, will also share their experiences of identifying vulnerable children to ensure they participate in early childhood education and have access to health and social services. Jan Dobson is the Collective Impact Project Lead for the Ministry of Education Regional Development team in Canterbury. She has a background in early childhood education, management and leading teams through change. For the past four years Jan has co-led You Matter to Us, a collective impact initiative in East Christchurch with NZ Police and many partner agencies and organisations in East Christchurch. You Matter to Us is ground breaking in relation to social wellbeing with a focus on equity, empowerment, safer communities and education. Jan is passionate about the power of authentic, child and whānau-centric collaboration and the potential of collective impact initiatives with community empowerment, equity of experience and self-determination at the heart of their kaupapa and their actions. |
 | National Data Collection Kate Macnaught Manager, Sector Improvement Kate is responsible for developing the Well-beings Indicator Project and overseeing the Vote 2019 project as well as other developments in Sector Improvement area for SOLGM. Kate’s previous roles have included Policy Manager at LGNZ where she worked on Better Local Government Reforms, the Productivity Review on Regulation, as well as other policy areas. Prior to that she was Strategy and Policy Manager at New Plymouth District Council. Kate came to New Zealand fourteen years ago where she was Regional Head of Business and Enterprise in the Regional Development Agency for the North East of England and Chief Executive of the Northern Business Forum. Kate has been a Director on several Boards in the UK and set up Excellence North East to run the Business Excellence Assessment Programme using the EFQM Excellence Model. In her spare time Kate enjoys music, reading and good food. |
| National Data Collection Mubashir Mukhtar Data Scientist, Sector Improvement Mubashir joined SOLGM in Sep 2018, previously working as a Research & Monitoring Advisor at Ashburton District Council. Mubashir’s role at SOLGM is to support the sector improvement team on the data side. Currently, his main focus is on developing local government community wellbeing indicators, along with a comprehensive data warehouse and reporting dashboards to be shared with the sector. Outside of work, Mubashir enjoys exploring Wellington with family, learning more on data science, and doing community work. |
| Breakfast with the Mayor Lianne Dalziel Mayor of Christchurch It is said, in order to get the best out of people Mayors must act as role models, set a good example, cascade skills, and join the dots between individual teams' and divisions' objectives. Successful leadership, whether in politics or in libraries, requires personal courage and the ability to take difficult decisions. Lianne Dalziel is serving her second term as Mayor, which follows 23 years in the New Zealand Parliament where she latterly served as a Cabinet Minister in the fifth Labour Government under the leadership of Prime Minister Rt. Hon. Helen Clark (1999–2008). During that time Lianne held a number of portfolios, including Immigration, Commerce, Food Safety, Women’s Affairs & Senior Citizens and associate roles in Education and Justice. She chaired the Commerce Select Committee from 2008–2011. In the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquakes, Lianne became intent on researching and better understanding what lay ahead for the city’s recovery. Following this, Lianne was invited to join the UNISDR’s Parliamentary Advisory Group on Disaster Risk Reduction in 2012. With this background, Lianne has become a champion of resilience, with Christchurch selected as one of the first tranche of cities to participate in the 100 Resilient Cities Network pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation. "Resilience is a journey, not a destination. My aspiration for resilience is based on the belief that governments – central or local – cannot do as well as can properly resourced and supported communities do for themselves in determining their own destiny. It is about being well-informed, adaptive and able to work collaboratively to co-create that future." "Christchurch is a city of opportunity – we are open to new ideas, new people and new ways of doing things – a place where anything is possible." |
| Keynote: The Fight For Truth Nicky Hager Investigative Journalist and Author In this brave new world of fake news and poisonous political environments, how do libraries maintain their commitment to uphold every New Zealanders’ democratic right to access trusted information? Celebrated author, Nicky Hager is renowned for asking the tough questions. A self-confessed lover of libraries and librarians, and the role they play in society, he can see no reason not to pursue the truth. Hager is arguably our foremost investigative journalist, known internationally for his investigative writing, authoring seven books about New Zealand politics, intelligence, public relations and military subjects. US intelligence expert Jeffrey Richelson described his 1996 book “Secret Power”, on global intelligence systems, a `masterpiece of investigative reporting’. That investigation won a US journalism award and led to a year-long European Parliament inquiry.Hager’s books, contributions to books and articles have been published in many countries. His most recent books are “Other People's Wars, New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the war of terror”; “Dirty Politics, how attack politics is poisoning New Zealand's political environment”; and “Hit & Run: The New Zealand SAS in Afghanistan and the meaning of honour”. The publication of "Dirty Politics" led to the resignation of the then Justice Minister Judith Collins, and has resulted in widespread calls from many quarters for an examination about how politics is undertaken in New Zealand. |
| Working Together To Make a Difference Jenny McDonald Senior Leader, National Library of New Zealand Jenny McDonald is a senior leader in the National Library of New Zealand and has had various leadership positions. In particular, Jenny is responsible for the EPIC and Te Puna Services as well as the collaborative digitisation programme. EPIC (Electronic Purchasing in Collaboration) is the national electronic licensing initiative that makes quality electronic resources available to New Zealanders through libraries who are consortium members Te Puna Services provides one place to search across all of New Zealand’s library holdings as well as national cataloguing and interlibrary loan tools. Jenny has been responsible for implementing a policy jointly brokered with New Zealand librarians to provide every New Zealand library with access to the OCLC metadata services, powered by WorldCat. Continuing with the strategy of supporting and seeking efficiencies for and with New Zealand libraries, her team implemented software platform changes, which has seen the national infrastructure move from a locally hosted to a managed service hosted in the cloud by OCLC. The environments that libraries operate in are unpredictable; users expectations continue to grow and change; and technical developments in the library space are rapid. I believe that working in partnership, where it makes sense, delivers more benefits to the participants than would otherwise be possible working on their own. |
| Working Together To Make a Difference Joan Simpson Business Development and Operations Manager, Kōtui and APNK Work environments that support life-long learning and the sharing of information and resources has been key to Joan’s employment history. Joan joined the National Library in July 2018 as the Business Development and Operations Manager for Kōtui and the Aotearoa People’s Network Kaharoa (APNK). Kōtui is a consortia of New Zealand public libraries that share a common library management system. Kōtui is funded by the members however the support team are employed by the National Library. The same team also manage and support APNK which enables public libraries to offer their customers free WiFi and equipment for their customers to use to connect to the internet. APNK is partially subsidised by the NZ Government. Joan was employed by the University of Canterbury in 2008 as the Central Library Manager and in 2012 she took on the role of Resource Discovery Manager. Much of her work during this time was related to the requirement to reduce the library footprint following the Canterbury quakes. Her work within public libraries was with the Christchurch City Council from 2002. Joan’s move into libraries followed 15 years of teaching within secondary and tertiary institutions. |
| National Summer Reading Dr Rachel Williamson BPHE (Hons), BA (Health/Psychology), BEd (Secondary), MPH, PhD Three years ago, Rachel started working at the Woolf Fisher Research Centre at The University of Auckland. She was hired to design a holiday blogging programme for students attending the English medium Manaiakalani Cluster schools in east Auckland. Since then she has created five versions of the Summer/Winter Learning Journey programme and learned a lot from these experiences, which she will share with us and look at how we might be able to combine our efforts to create impact. Rachel is a postdoctoral research fellow currently working in the field of literacy education. The Summer Learning Journey, is a multi-year national study focussing on primary school student literacy learning over the holiday period. Currently entering its sixth phase, this research project is part of a reciprocal relationship between the University of Auckland, the Woolf Fisher Research Centre and the Manaiakalani Community of Learning across New Zealand.Passionate about improving student health outcomes, over the past five years, Rachel has designed, implemented and evaluated the impact of participation in a number of school-based programmes on student health and achievement-related outcomes. Most of her work is underpinned by a systematic, design-based approach to educational research. |
| Final Words with Kat Cuttriss Rachel Esson Director of Content Services at the National Library of NZ Content Services is responsible for the acquisition, description and processing of items for the published collections; for collection delivery services; for preservation of the Library’s digital collections, for the Library’s full-text digitisation programme and services for libraries, EPIC, Te Puna, Kōtui and APNK Services. She is a professionally registered librarian who has held senior and strategic roles in academic and research libraries. She has a MLIS from Victoria University and also holds a Certificate in Tertiary Teaching from the University of Otago. She has researched and published in the area of evaluation of library services. She has held previous roles as Associate Chief Librarian Research Collections at the Turnbull Library, Associate Director, Library Academic Services at Victoria University and Medical Librarian (University of Otago, Wellington). She is actively involved with the Library and Information Association of NZ and is currently LIANZA President Elect, and will take up the role of LIANZA President on July 1, 2019. |
