The UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive contains tens of thousands of high value cultural heritage items related to a long series of earthquakes that hit Canterbury, New Zealand, from 2010 - 2012. The archive was built by a Digital Humanities team located at the center of the disaster in New Zealand's second largest city, Christchurch. The project quickly became complex, not only in its technical aspects but in its governance and general management. This talk will provide insight into the national and international management and governance frameworks used to successfully build and deliver the archive into operation. Issues that needed to be managed included human ethics, research ethics, stakeholder management, communications, risk management, curation and ingestion policy, copyright and content licensing, and project governance. The team drew heavily on industry-standard project management methods for the basic approach, but built their ecosystem and stakeholder trust on principles derived directly form the global digital humanities community.
The UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive was built following the devastating earthquakes that hit the Canterbury region in the South Island of New Zealand from 2010 – 2012. 185 people were killed in the 6.3 magnitude earthquake of February 22nd 2011, thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed, and the local community endured over 10,000 aftershocks. The program aims to document and protect the social, cultural, and intellectual legacy of the Canterbury community for the purposes of memorialization and enabling research. The nationally federated archive currently stores 75,000 items, ranging from audio and video interviews to images and official reports. Tens of thousands more items await ingestion. Significant lessons have been learned about data integration in post-disaster contexts, including but not limited to technical architecture, governance, ingestion process, and human ethics. The archive represents a model for future resilience-oriented data integration and preservation products.
The Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 have shone the spotlight on a number of tax issues. These issues, and in particular lessons learned from them, will be relevant for revenue authorities, policymakers and taxpayers alike in the broader context of natural disasters. Issues considered by this paper include the tax treatment of insurance monies. For example, building owners will receive pay-outs for destroyed assets and buildings which have been depreciated. Where the insurance payment is more than the adjusted tax value, there will be a taxable "gain on sale" (or depreciation recovery income). If the building owner uses those insurance proceeds to purchase a replacement asset, legislative amendments specifically enacted following the earthquakes provide that rollover relief of the depreciation recovery income is available. The tax treatment of expenditure to seismically strengthen a building is another significant issue faced by building owners. Case law has determined that this expenditure will usually be capital expenditure. In the past such costs could be capitalised to the building and depreciated accordingly. However, since the 2011-2012 income year owners have been prohibited from claiming depreciation on buildings and therefore currently no deduction is available for such strengthening expenditure (whether immediate or deferred). This has significant potential implications for landlords throughout New Zealand facing significant seismic retrofit costs. Incentives, or some form of financial support, whether delivered through the tax system or some other mechanism may be required. International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) require insurance proceeds, including reimbursement for expenditure of a capital nature, be reported as income while expenditure itself is not recorded as a current period expense. This has the effect of overstating current income and creating a larger variation between reported income for accounting and taxation purposes. Businesses have obligations to maintain certain business records for tax purposes. Reconstructing records destroyed by a natural disaster depends on how the information was originally stored. The earthquakes have demonstrated the benefits of ‘off-site’ (outside Canterbury) storage, in particular electronic storage. This paper considers these issues and the Inland Revenue Department (Inland Revenue) Standard Practice Statement which deals with inter alia retention of business records in electronic format and offshore record storage. Employer provided accommodation is treated as income to the benefitting employee. A recent amendment to the Income Tax Act 2007 retrospectively provides that certain employer provided accommodation is exempt from tax. The time aspect of these rules is extended where the employee is involved in the Canterbury rebuild and comes from outside the region.
