Digital Leadership, Innovation and Project Management
Kate Follington has managed a number of significant digital projects as part of the digital transformation program at the Victorian Archives Centre for Public Record Office Victoria. This has included managing the redesign and build of the organisation’s website using a Drupal CMS with multiple integrations, along with incubating a number of innovative digital tools to enable more intuitive access to the state’s archival collection. Her team is currently experimenting with generative AI and machine learning for large scale transcription. She has completed training on digital leadership via the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, including skills development in agile project management and design thinking methodologies. More details below…
Website Product Owner: Kate has been the product owner of Public Record Office Victoria's (state archives Victoria) website since 2016. She was charged with leading the website re-design process in 2016 from Wordpress to Drupal which took two years due to the complexity of archival search and display, from inception to build, solving problems for multiple internal and external stakeholders. The new website needed to offer a more intuitive search experience, simple guidance pages focused on critical search information alongside relevant search fields, and flexible back end templates to service a variety of content and government advisory needs. There is also a standalone photographic search page utilizing the public API, a bespoke search module to enable nuanced subject search, digital step by step functionality, an annually published academic journal, and a searchable document database.
Mapwarper Project Management: The Mapwarper project enables better access to Victoria's archival map and plan collection (12,000+ digitised maps) by using an open sourced mapping application. The project initially linked existing metadata (historic location names) with contemporary lat-longs and postal code data to offer a contemporary place name (friendly) search. The project then engaged the public to correctly position the historic maps over the application's digital map, the base layer, offering users an immediate time comparison between the past and the present, ideal for researchers and property owners. This project has seen 12,000 historic maps rectified by the public and is widely used by historians, family historians, property and government administrators.
Photo Search Project Management: The unique photo search page responded to an ongoing user need to more efficiently view tens of thousands of digitised historic photographs of Melbourne and Victoria from the 1850s onward with limited descriptive data by offering a visual scanning search experience. Working with a developer and design team the project drew on the public API to display a waterfall of photos based on keyword or series number, increasing the efficiency of searching images one by one. Each image links to the item catalogue page offering options at high resolution.
AI - Human workflow for photo discovery. Kate is working on a pilot project to utilise a multi-modal AI tool (Google Gemini) to help transcribe, describe and add keywords to large photographic collections. The project required careful consideration of Government policy on AI use, design of the best prompt to illicit accurate results, import and export workflows with human review, as well as collaboration with Tensormatic's developer team to modify their Labellerr interface to suit the collections industry. This project was discussed at the Fantastic Futures Conference and presented to the Vic Gov Community Of Practice AI network. In addition her team are piloting the use of a range of open source AI transcription tools to transcribe 19th Century cursive writing, and to work on a web interface upgrade for display.
Re-envisioning: In 2023 Kate collaborated with ArtBox to re-envision the entrance of the Victorian Archives Centre to become an interactive multi media projection and digital engagement space showcasing the important work of the public archive in people's day to day lives. Themes included history of place, development of Country, people's identity and accountable government. The project resulted in a series of redesigns, a slide pack of comparable examples and a budget estimate for the build. The project is still under exploration.