Frequently Asked Questions

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Select from the following list of FAQs to find answers to commonly asked questions about Keeping Culture KMS^® and our service.

If you have a question that you can’t find the answer to, please use the contact page.

Who is using Keeping Culture KMS?

Generally, organisations using Keeping Culture are from:

Land Councils
Local Councils
State Libraries
Indigenous media organisations
Art and Craft Centres
Aboriginal Heritage and Social History organisations
Language Centres.

For many of these organisations, their archiving activities often form part of a larger cultural focus. Over time, they have accumulated important historical collections, that have cultural significance to the Indigenous people and communities in which they serve.

While the preservation of these materials is vital, the establishment of an archive supplements an organisation’s community engagement strategy. Many customers are providing access to their archives in local cultural centres, offices, libraries, exhibition spaces, art centres, community spaces, technology hubs, classrooms, age care facilities and so on.

Today, more than 50% of Keeping Culture KMS^® customers are from the not-for-profit sector, while approximately 20% are Local and State Government agencies.

Where can I see an example of Keeping Culture KMS?

The vast majority of Keeping Culture customers wish to keep their archives private. These archives are established as a cultural, social and historical record for the Indigenous people to which the archive serves; and not as a resource for the general public. Supplying access to an archive, and promoting its existence, is solely at the discretion of the customer. Keeping Culture does not give out details of these private archives.

One such exception is the Storylines archive managed by the State Library of Western Australia. As stated on the Library’s website, this comprehensive public resource is “a central point for Aboriginal people who wish to access the State Library’s extensive heritage collections, and a safe place to store records of people, place and history” and it “allows users from all around the state to engage with Aboriginal stories, language, perspectives and history”.

How did Keeping Culture KMS come about?

Keeping Culture KMS^® is the successor of the Ara Irititja KMS software developed for the Pitjantjatjara Council’s Ara Irititja Project. The project commenced in 1994 with the aim of digitally repatriating historical and cultural material to Anangu communities in the north-west corner of South Australia. The software has undergone several development iterations, initially using a FileMaker Pro database.

In 2006 the software developer and founder of Keeping Culture, Douglas Mann, began working closely with the Pitjantjatjara Council, and later the Northern Territory Library and other Indigenous organisations, to develop a new web application for managing cultural knowledge. This new application was titled Ara Irititja KMS and replaced the FileMaker Pro database in 2011.

The Keeping Culture service was established in 2015, at which point the software was rebranded to Keeping Culture KMS^®. Soon after, the software went under major redevelopment to create the second (and current) version of the system, released in late 2017.

Why is Keeping Culture using a subscription payment model?

One of the underlying objectives for creating a cultural archive is to ensure that the information and materials contained within the archive remains accessible for future generations. Many of our customers have invested huge amounts of time and money to create irreplaceable collections of cultural knowledge. It is of vital importance for the software to be maintained, developed and supported into the future.

An annual subscription fee for the service means a reliable and predictable annual income can be allocated to the development and support of the software. Consequently, long term planning for the software is achievable and customers have the assurance that their archives remain accessible and operable.

Since the adoption of the subscription model in 2015, the software has undergone major reform. We have worked collaboratively with our customers to build upon the fundamentals, while innovating new solutions to old problems.

Can we host Keeping Culture KMS ourselves?

The short answer is no. While this is technically possible, it would lead to an increase in the licence and service cost; creating a prohibitive expense for most customers. This is due to the undertaking required to develop the software for a generic deployment platform and supporting an external software maintenance program.

Providing Keeping Culture KMS^® as a cloud base subscription service has a number of advantages over a self-hosted scenario. These advantages include:

Maintenance and upkeep: The Keeping Culture KMS^® software and server environment are regularly updated and maintained without customer intervention. A self-hosting organisation would need to engage an IT consultant, or have these IT skills themselves, to perform these duties.
Stability: The software can be developed, tested and issues resolved on customer datasets prior to being put into production. This would not be the case for an isolated self-hosted archive.
Cost sharing: The licencing cost of integrated software, such as media streaming servers, is shared across all customers. In a self-hosted scenario, the organisation would need to bear these costs alone.
Prompt issue resolution: when a customer reports an issue, Keeping Culture can view, interrogate and resolve any problem without delay. This is unlikely to be the case with a self-hosted archive, where it may take a trail of convoluted emails to diagnose the problems.
Personalised and relevant support: a customer support query can be answered in the context of their archive. Equally, training can be undertaken on the customers archive. This is not the case for an isolated self-hosted archive.

While these advantages may not address the fundamental reasons why an organisation would prefer to self-host the software, Keeping Culture KMS^® can be deployed over a Virtual Private Network for additional security, privacy and network isolation. Furthermore, this can be undertaken in a datacentre region that is in close proximity to the customer. See question What is a VPN and how does it make the service more secure? for more information.

What support does Keeping Culture provide?

As part of the annual subscription, Keeping Culture allocates a specific number of support hours to the customer that can be redeemed for assistance during the annual subscription period. For example, the Single Archive plan has 24 support hours per subscription year.

These support hours can be used for the following:

Online training: personalised training in the use of the software undertaken via screen sharing meeting apps such as Skype.
Troubleshooting: the answering of questions, operational ‘how do I do this?’ instructions and solving issues a customer may be experiencing with the software.
Configuration: any customisation or alteration to the software that can be accomplished through existing software functionality. This includes customisation of appearance, changes to schema, application of content restriction, user and group settings and so on.
Consultation: broader discussion within the context of implementing and administering Keeping Culture KMS^® within the customer’s organisation or community environment.

To date, we have not had a customer exceed their support hour limit. However, in the unlikely event this did happen, a fee for each support request would apply.

Support is delivered during business hours by email, telephone, web conferencing apps and our website.

Support hours do not rollover to the next successive subscription period.

Once or twice a year we invite customers to webinar sessions to preview up-and-coming software changes or to demonstrate new functionality and improvements. These sessions provide an opportunity to give feedback, ask questions and hear how other customers are using Keeping Culture KMS^®.

Not all assistance is covered by the support hours model. Some tailored consultation and technical activities will incur an additional fee. These include, but are not limited to:

Data migration: importation of complex and relational datasets into Keeping Culture KMS^® or exportation of data into formats which are not supported within the software.
Offline training: any in person training where remuneration of travel and accommodation expenses is required.
Custom development: any customisation, addition or configuration to the software, or the customer’s archive dataset, that is not already achievable within the software’s functionality itself.
Optional extras: one-off setup costs for the implementation of “optional extras” that are not covered by the annual subscription fee. These include Portal and VPN setup costs.

What is a VPN and how does it make the service more secure?

A Virtual Private Network, or VPN, allows a private and secure connection from one network to another network via the public Internet; a secure conduit connecting two networks together.

Keeping Culture uses a site-to-site VPN connection to securely connect the router at your premises to Keeping Culture’s internal network in the Cloud. The Keeping Culture KMS^® archive is set up on the internal network where it can only be accessed through the VPN connection established on the router. Subsequently, only those computers on the local area network administered by the router, at your premises, can view the archive.

A VPN connection gives the effect of having Keeping Culture KMS^® installed at your premises, as a device must be connected to your premises local area network in order to view the archive. It is possible for an archive to be serviced by multiple VPN connections if multiple premises require a connection.

All VPN connections incur a setup and ongoing connection fee.

What is a Portal and how are they used?

A Portal is an alternative entry point into the main archive. It shares the same database, user accounts, restrictions and content as the main archive, however a Portal has:

a separate accession or archive number sequence from the main archive,
its own FTP account for uploading and ingesting media,
a different URL for accessing the archive, and
a customisable appearance to distinguish it from the main archive.

Portals do not provide privacy and autonomy from the main archive. With the exception of the four points above, every other aspect of a Portal is shared with the main archive.

Accession separation and decentralisation is the main purpose for using a Portal. For example, an organisation may have a satellite office or community that wish to contribute to the archive. But for cultural reasons, administrative difference or even just geographic isolation, it may be more practical to provide independent accession process from the main archive.

Where is the data stored?

The majority of our customers do not wish for their data to leave the country in which they reside. We are able to fulfil this requirement by utilising the numerous datacentres available within the Amazon Web Services eco-system.

For example, in Australia the data is stored in AWS’s Sydney datacentre (ap-southeast-2 region) and is backed up at our office in Adelaide.

Who owns the data once added to Keeping Culture KMS?

The customer owns their data at all times. This means the customer is responsible for obtaining any Intellectual Property and Copyright permissions for the information, materials and media added to their archive.

For absolute clarity, Keeping Culture does not own the customers data and the customer does not own the Keeping Culture KMS^® software.

Ownership and Intellectual Property details are comprehensively covered in our Keeping Culture Licensing and Service agreement.

Can I access a backup of my data inside Keeping Culture KMS?

Yes, all customer content is backed up daily to our Amazon S3 service. Keeping Culture provides customers with their own account that enables them to download their content using a S3 file transfer client or using AWS CLI tools.

Does Keeping Culture KMS use external streaming services like Vimeo or YouTube?

No, Keeping Culture KMS^® has its own internal streaming server. This prevents the archive’s media content and access restrictions from being fragmented across various external platforms. It also avoids copyright, licencing and privacy issues that may arise when using an external streaming service.

Keeping Culture KMS’s centralised approach to the management and administration of media records means all media file types are stored, served and backed up as one consolidated group of individual files. Cultural and access restrictions are governed within the one system, and for convenience, transcoding of video and audio media is handled by the system also.

Does Keeping Culture KMS use external mapping services like Google Maps or Bing maps?

Yes, customers can use their Microsoft Bing Maps account, OpenStreetMap or other WMS compliant mapping services as additional base layers within the mapping component. All other mapping functionality, such as generic base layers and layers generated from spatial information within archive records, are derived from Keeping Culture KMS^® internal mapping service.

We already have existing databases, spreadsheets and other datasets, can this material be imported into Keeping Culture KMS?

Yes, but how this is done depends on the dataset.

Within Keeping Culture KMS, customers can import comma-separated values (CSV) text files into their archive; including media files by referencing the file path to the media inside the CSV file. This approach is suitable for simple spreadsheets style datasets and Keeping Culture^® can provide training on how best to do this.

However, it is not uncommon for customers to have more complex datasets, like those from a relational database. In this situation custom import scripts are written to process and import the data. These custom import activities are not covered by the annual subscription. Instead, Keeping Culture will provide a quote to the customer prior to carrying out the import; this usually occurs before an archive is setup.

We have 100s of gigabytes of media. Can we have more hosted storage capacity?

Yes, the hosted storage capacity of an archive can be scaled to meet your storage requirements. There is a fee for additional capacity.

However, Keeping Culture KMS^® does not serve the original media files directly to the viewers browser. Instead, a web optimised compressed copy of the original media is created and stored on the server. The hosted storage requirements of the archive are likely to be only a fraction of the size of the original media.

For example, we have a customer with 210,000 images which occupies approximately 60GB in the Archive. Audio and Movie recordings take up more space but will be significantly smaller in size than the original.

For original and archival media, the software’s File Store component is used to transfer and manage these large high-resolution media files on an external S3 bucket inside AWS’s Cloud platform. See File Store for a detailed explanation on the storage of original media.

See questions Does Keeping Culture KMS store the original digitised asset? and How do I calculate how much storage capacity my archive needs? for further explanation.

Does Keeping Culture KMS store the original digitised asset?

Yes, the software’s File Store component manages the storage of ingested media and any additional archival files to an external S3 storage service inside the AWS’s Cloud platform.

Within the archive, File Store provides a folder to store an unlimited number of files and subfolders for each Archive Item records. These files can be securely browsed, downloaded and generally ‘managed’ with the archive’s interfaces – this includes restricting access with user account permissions and content restrictions.

However, the original files won’t be stored on Keeping Culture’s AWS account. Instead, your organisation would need to provide, and pay for, an AWS account where the archive backups can be stored.

Using File Store is optional, so there is no obligation to bare this extra expense. For more information, see What is File Store?

How do I calculate how much storage capacity my archive needs?

When a media file is ingested into Keeping Culture KMS^® the system generates a web optimised copy of the file for delivery over the Internet. The system converts a variety of image formats (including pdf) into jpegs, audio formats into mp3 and movie formats into mp4; audio and video media are streamed using Apple HLS with progressive download fall-back.

The resolution, aspect ratio and contents of the media, all have some effect on the final compressed file size. Below are the approximate file sizes for the three media types ingested into the archive:

Images: 1,000 images is ~300MB
Movies: 1 hour of footage is ~440MB for 576p to ~880MB for 720p
Audio: 1 hour recording is ~60MB.

The storage capacity of an archive can be increased in small to very large increments at short notice. So, if your project is starting out, or in its infancy, it would be advisable to only increase the storage once you have filled the allocated capacity.

From our own observations, collections made up of largely images and audio take several years to fill the 60GB storage allocation of the Single Archive plan. However, video collections will fill this capacity quickly.

We are a cultural group outside of Australia, can we use Keeping Culture KMS?

Yes, absolutely. While the Keeping Culture KMS^® framework has been established for recording Australian Indigenous cultural knowledge, the framework itself is highly configurable. Together we can collaborate to adapt the data schema – knowledge classes, field structure and appearance – to suit the recording and cultural requirements of your group.

Customer support and training is delivered by web conferencing apps, like Skype, as well as telephone and email; as we already do with our customers spread across Australia.

Keeping Culture KMS^® can be deployed in a datacentre that is within close proximity to the customer; reducing connection latency and storing customer data within their country.

What happens if we no longer want to use the Keeping Culture KMS platform?

In situations where the service is no longer needed, all data and media are returned back to the customer. This can be done by the customer downloading their data from the archive’s S3 backup account, or it can be sent back to them on an external drive if required. Once we know the customer’s data has been safely retrieved, the archive is decommissioned.

For piece of mind, our Keeping Culture Licensing and Service agreement details the process of terminating the service, so both parties are on the same page.

How quickly can we get a Keeping Culture KMS archive setup?

It usually takes 1–2 business days to setup an archive. Once that is done, we like to get straight into some online training with your team.

In situations where existing datasets are imported into a new archive, this process usually takes place prior to making the archive available. This will increase the turnaround time too.