Last year at the National Digital Forum, Horowhenua Library Trust demonstrated a new product called Kete. It’s since gone live on their website.
Kete is “a community built digital library” that enables people to upload and share their stories, memories and images. It’s designed for people with little or no computer experience, and it’s an open system, meaning that other users can edit the topics, add pictures, audio/visual material, tags, or links to other pages. Users can also comment on each story/topic. It looks (to me at least) rather like Wikipedia, but with multimedia content, and focused very much on the Horowhenua community and its stories.
Kete won a special mention at the World Summit Awards, and won the 3M Award for Innovation at LIANZA 2007.
Horowhenua Library Trust is also responsible for Koha, the open-source ILS.
The word ‘Kete’ is a Maori word meaning ‘basket’. It’s often used as a name, or part of a name, for a collection of resources, like a database.
