April 2014 - Director's update

In this update — the last Anzac Day before the centenary starts, finding images of the First World War, books about New Zealand’s First World War experience and progress on a corporate engagement strategy for the WW100 programme.

Anzac Day 2014
As interest in the WW100 programme continues to grow, it’s sometimes necessary to point out that Anzac Day this year is not part of the centenary.
Anzac Day in 2015 will certainly be one of the major commemorative dates for the WW100 programme, as we mark the centenary of the Gallipoli landings and hold the first ceremonies in the new National War Memorial Park. But in 2014 we will see the 100th anniversary of the last time 25 April was just a day like any other day in New Zealand, not a day imbued with remembrance for those who fell in conflicts to defend New Zealand and New Zealand’s values.
For the 25th of April this year the WW100 Programme Office’s messaging is to celebrate peacetime. Our Life 100 years ago project samples what some New Zealanders were doing and thinking about at the time, and in PapersPast you can read about what was taking place in New Zealand on this last, ordinary, 25 April.
Watch our website in the week before Anzac Day for more about this theme.

Use of the word Anzac
Also for Anzac Day this year, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage (which administers the relevant legislation), has new policy guidelines around the use of the protected terms Anzac and ANZAC.

DigitalNZ
We frequently get requests for images to be used in publications relating to the First World War centenary. Our most common response is to send people to Digital New Zealand to search for content.
Digital New Zealand has been around for six years. Its tagline is to “help make New Zealand digital content easy to find, share and use”. One of the ways it does this is by bringing together information about New Zealand digital material from libraries, museums, government departments, publicly-funded organisations, the private sector, and community groups into a single search. Through this you currently have access to more than 26 million digital items from 148 local and international content partners.
The content itself is retained by the partners on their websites and online collections. But the Digital New Zealand service means you can search across a large number of collections simultaneously to discover resources.
In addition to building its own search tools, Digital New Zealand makes all of the information it collects about New Zealand digital material available to other website developers to use and build on. The mechanism for this is — sorry to get a bit technical — an application programming interface or API. This essentially means that other services, such as WW100.govt.nz, can access all of the information Digital New Zealand holds, and build new search and discovery tools.
One of the tools we’re currently working on with a number of other agencies is a search just of war material in Digital New Zealand — including over 2,000 images that will have no known copyright restrictions and will be free for you to download and use right away. This will be part of the WW100 website, and will make it easier for students, publishers, and anyone wanting to use war images in projects to get material quickly.
We’re aiming for this feature to go live in June — the month of the centenary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, regarded as the spark that ignited the First World War.

New Zealand books about the First World War
We occasionally field queries about books related to New Zealand’s First World War experience, from posts, museums and other visitor attractions. Ministry for Culture and Heritage historians have compiled a list of general sources and a comprehensive bibliography.
You might also be interested in this recent New Zealand booksellers blog on some of the books now appearing in advance of the centenary and, with more of an international flavour, this article from the Economist.

Banners

One of the pull-up banners on stage with the Southern Sinfonia during their "We Will Remember Them" performance in Dunedin, March 2014
The programme office has developed three pull-up banners to promote the WW100 programme. We will make the image files for these available to organisations involved in the programme that want to produce copies for promotional purposes. Please contact us for further information.

Corporate engagement strategy
The programme office has contracted a specialist to develop a corporate engagement strategy for the WW100 programme.
She is doing this in close contact with members of the First World War Centenary Panel’s business engagement committee and other WW100 programme stakeholders.
By mid-April she will have:

• developed a recommended corporate engagement strategy;
• identified potential partnerships and properties to bring this strategy to life; and
• developed draft protocols for implementation of the strategy, having regard to sensitivity around commercial activity and leverage.

Education
The Ministry of Education has invited proposals for the development of curriculum material around the First World War. The successful contractor will develop and implement five bilingual, cross-curricular packages for teachers of Years 1 to 13 that align with both the English- and Māori-medium national curriculum.
The curriculum packages will explore five themes:

• Identity and heritage: the role of our military heritage in shaping New Zealand identity.
• Making connections between teachers and students in New Zealand and overseas who are learning about the First World War.
• Citizenship perspectives: explore different perspectives on the rights and responsibilities of New Zealand citizens in peacetime and during conflicts.
• New Zealand in the Pacific: engage students in critical thinking about how New Zealand’s relationship with Samoa (and other Pacific nations) has been shaped by the First World War and subsequent events.
• Peace and reconciliation: discover and explore how individuals, groups and nations can reconcile differences and build safe and healthy communities (local, national and global).

The packages will be released over the course of the centenary, with the first launched in August 2014.
On an education theme, here is some interesting reading: the latest issue of Principals Today has a WW100 article on page 36; and a good account of a conference in the UK on how schools might deal with the centenary.

WW100 Programme Office
Michael Pearson has finished his term in the programme office as the Senior Communications Adviser, following development a communications strategy for the wider WW100 programme. We are currently recruiting for a replacement.
- Andrew Matheson, Director, First World War Centenary Programme