 So, we'll turn now to the first of our attributed project briefings for today. We're going to hear from Joan Colank of the Weissman Institute of Science, who is going to be talking about research information management system analytics and how they can actually help researchers, as opposed to just being inflicted on researchers as sometimes these systems can be. So, I welcome Joan to CNI and over to you. Can you see my screen? My presentation? Yes, we can see it. Okay, good start. And I'm unmuted, all even better. Hi, I'm Joan Colarec. I'm Chief Librarian at the Weissman Institute of Science. And my talk is about a process we've developed here to monitor open access obligations of our researchers. And while I will mention our systems, this borrow analytics and so on, it's not meant to be an in depth how to in any way to these systems, or any specific program, but to be a brief description of how we've used our tools to answer a growing need. And I hope you won't get whiplash because it feels like we're moving from a really big picture at JISC to a really narrow focus here. So, there we go. Hopefully I just changed my slide. First, who are we? Weissman is a basic research institute with various science faculties and we're located in Israel, but grant wise our heart is in Europe. Grants from the European community are a large part of our funding and important to management and researchers. We are small, we have no undergraduates, we only start at the master's level and up, and our library is small too. But we serve a diverse and demanding community where everyone expects a really high level of personalized service. Now I joined Weissman Library in 2016, so I've been learning a lot in the last five or so years. Our library is, one might say, aggressively virtual and high tech. The Weissman Library really early on in like 10, 15 years ago decided that they wanted to have a virtual library and have pushed it in a big way. And while it's 92% of all of our books and journals, we're at 98% with our journals and articles and such. So this has served us well since 2020 and we've been able to maintain and expand our library services with little interruption. Getting to the point of this discussion Weissman started in the research repository business in 2003, and we passed through some homegrown and ill fitting systems until 2018 when we moved into pure. Now that was a huge step forward and it allowed us to start developing additional services for our researchers. Before that we were basically just writing down, you know, recording articles as they came out. At the request of researchers almost immediately after that move we also created our first institutional repository, one could say that with quotes, using Alma digital and Primo which we had implemented in 2017. And it started out housing theses data sets and our open access versions. And ultimately we soon found that this combination did not suit our needs and in 2021 we moved into a spuro, or as we call it whiz works, which now houses our combined Chris and institutional repository. Hopefully you are all familiar with the Chris rims. They're basically the same thing. I recently read you know a few months ago I read the OCLC report on research information management in the United States and I found it really helpful because of its clear definition of the various use cases for rims or Chris systems in the university. And I included a link at the bottom of this page. And we were proud to learn that we were already serving all those use cases in one form or another. So I don't know how that happens. And today I'll only be talking about the compliance monitoring use case but it does relate to the open access workflow as well. So, of course, compliance monitoring in the US deals with the different with different funders and in Israel. As I mentioned for now our library is very ERC oriented and so we are concentrating on the ERC funding requirements. And if the but if the OCLC report is right it's likely that US compliance requirements will continue to grow and if so perhaps our experience will become more relevant and helpful. And just to quote the report for a moment. This use compliance monitoring is about making sense of the complex regulatory environment and the people grants and publications within it. It's also about tracking sub components of the university community only some publications resulting from specific grants by specific by principal investigators are necessary to monitor. And in relation to specific funder requirements. The local oh a policies at US institutions seldom include any consequence for non compliance failure to comply with a funders mandate could result in a loss of funding. And that's where we are. So we're trying to help with that problem. And sorry to bore you with a long quote but it really did describe the whole thing better than I could. So even if your experience is different. This presentation is just one example again of how an existing system or system tools can be leveraged to solve new and developing problems in a library. So as I was saying we started learning about open access needs in 2018 when we first moved into pure and Alma digital and at the same time we also started to hear about grants and their compliance needs. And we knew nothing. So this led to a lot of struggling and we finally figured out that we needed to meet with our grants office. We had an initial meeting with them two years ago. And since then that's developed into an amazing partnership because every time we meet with them we learned from them and they learned from us and we all we both both sides come out better. And the grant folks explained about reporting requirements and frequency and help us think about the support, which could most help our researchers. So in response to this first problem that we learned about our first solution was that we started collecting grants and related researchers, and then adding connections in related assets. And because we had already started adding open access information as soon as we moved into pure this coincided nicely, and provided the basis for the service that we provide today. So, then once our researchers learned that we had grant information, we started getting requests to help with compliance reports, about a year and a half ago. And first we got the occasional request and then we started, we got to the point where we're getting at least a handful a month, and then we realized that there was another problem, which is procrastination. All our researchers would come in the last week before their grant was due. They would ask us to do help them. And for one report one week night notice can work but when several researchers, all get together and give us one week to complete their publication review, generate and find all the open access, the required open access versions and then respond to them in an orderly manner and time for their ERC deadline. We had a problem. We went back to the grants office for another meeting, and we learned from them that they actually emailed the researchers two months in advance, they didn't have to come to us one week beforehand. And all they had to do was start start CCing the library on these emails and boom, we knew what we had to, we knew that we had the information we needed to provide a proactive service. And so now we're able to start reviewing the related publications in time with time to spare and be well prepared for that last week's, before that last week turns into a frantic push. But then there was another problem turned out that grant compliant reports can happen a year or more after publication and researchers would often have trouble putting their hands on their accepted versions so long after publication. I know there's universities in the US and elsewhere that require that their researchers provide open access versions to their institutional repositories but Weizman is not a place like that Weizman. At Weizman, it's not the customers always right, it's that the researchers always right and we were not allowed to require anyone to do anything. We were just there to help. So what to do. And that's quick. There we go. And so we, we had needed a new solution and what we've been experimenting with is that we started developing this process which combines tools from Esporo, Alma and analytics, whereby Esporo provides the grant information added to new assets. And then analytics provides a report which checks the updated assets for a compliance. And then in analytics we were also able to generate a user friendly narrative view customized to the researcher in order to try and give ourselves a more friendly face. So that's a schedule to report with a cover letter customized to compliance monitoring, which is automatically sent when an updated asset meets their criteria. So I should say yet again we have an unfortunate addiction to customization and personalized services at Weizman and this may all sound a little crazy to you guys. So maybe why my definition of a good system is one which offers a huge toolbox supporting unlimited creative solutions, because we tend to need them. So, and one of the things that I like best about this solution is that it drew not only from multiple resources with multiple tools among our systems. Sorry, my lights just went off. It also drew from multiple resources in the library and that means people. So for example, the process started when our research grants librarian suggested creating the report, the reporting system, and assist then the systems librarian took that idea and used expertise and analytics to put together the report and the narrative. And another systems librarian said, Oh, hey, we can do an a letter we can do a cover letter with this Alma letter system that will make it even friendlier. And it's just I like it when a, you know, a lot of different resources come together. And so now we can send an informative targeted email that has a chance of grabbing the researchers attention in a user friendly format because attention is a precious precious commodity. So to review those steps in a little more detail to give you an idea of what it looks like. Step one requires that a grant be entered in a sporo and that a link to the grant be added to all relevant assets, and that open access details appear in the asset to. And so at the top, you can see the how we, we actually also record the acknowledgement in full text, but it also has a link to a specific grant. In the bottom you can see the difference between what an asset record would look like with open access and then on the right without open access the one with the red border. So that's that's our basic basis of information that we need. And then step two uses analytics to check automatically if those recently updated assets contain the required open access version. It's a little complex, there's a lot of small print on the screen but you know it doesn't have to make sense it's just an example that you can create such a report using analytics, focused in on one researcher, and their grant. And in step three we expanded our use of the analytics report to create what's called a narrative and or Oracle analytics or server, which is the analytics system used by a sporo and Alma. I don't know if any of you guys have access to Oracle analytics, but if you do, you should really get to know narrative use because they're kind of cool. And they let us turn the tables that come with, you know, usually in analytics you get a table or a chart, but this lets us turn analytics into documents, or in this case a letter. And we can integrate text with results provide context explanatory text or even extended descriptions. We can interspersed the text with fields from individual table columns in the analytics results and HTML HTML formatting is also available. And using this narrative, what's a narrative is the term it's it's you know a table is a table and a narrative is what you see here it's the term that they use an Oracle. We're able to strategically place links to, for example, with works our system, the article page and with works which they could the researcher can click through to the publisher landing page, and to the researchers own profile page that if by some amazing chance they could try and self deposit they could. And I'd love to delve deeper into explaining how narratives work, but there isn't really time in today's meeting to explain the whole thing. But again they are an interesting alternative to the standard table or chart based analytics output. They also provide surprising solutions, which you might not expect from analytics, and I highly recommend them to anyone with access to such a system I don't know how broadly this, this concept is available in other analytics systems though. At the bottom there's a link to more detailed presentation about narrative building that I gave last year and there it actually does go into exactly how one can build a narrative so you can see the process there and no self promotion here. So in that and in that example we use the narrative to create a formatted order document generated by our own analytics system. And while the specific solution might not fit your organization I really do think the concept is, again, really cool. I was thrilled when I found it. And back to our process, the last step was sending the report. And the problem here that there is no letter in Alma that lets us send the result of an, you know, our narrative letter to the researcher specifically. But we were afraid that if we just send a generic report email that no one would open the PDF that was attached with the full details in it. So we found that we could use an excess cell customization tool in Alma to conditionally add the needed text to one of our existing letters. And I have to say that I really another reason that I love this solution is because that excess cell tool in Alma was actually developed in Alma in sorry in olive, almost 20 years ago. And here we are using this far from new tool to help us assemble a brand new product using, you know, cutting edge tools within the existing system. So, obviously this presentation is not meant to be a proposal that everybody here run home and try to do exactly what we have done because that makes no sense. And when I started putting this together I kind of thought my goal was to describe our path through possibly relevant problem and provide food for thought regarding how excellent infrastructure with diverse tools can be used to provide creative solutions and pull multiple pieces into a coherent whole that meets local needs without local software development. Because if you have the infrastructure and if you know the tools as new needs arrive, often a solution can be found, and then improved and we're currently in this stage of improving on that because to make it a little perhaps a little more scalable. But as I read through the OCLC report there were frequent mentions of local solutions developing a custom harvester local data store, etc. And working on this presentation reminded me that over a long career in libraries I become a huge fan of off the shelf software so if while I'm trying not to promote a single piece of software I did find myself wanting to say, oh my god it's so much easier to work with off the shelf software than homegrown solutions. I've worked in Olive Alma, almost all the ex leavers products, pure be pressed spring share homegrown solutions I've even written my own solutions. And at this point I pick vendor solution, every time. And maybe, maybe I'm preaching to the converted and you are all already have excellent versatile well supported tools that mostly serve all your needs as they develop. But nevertheless at my organization I see a deep undertow that's always pulling us towards local development. And that kind of led me to try and list this make this list here on the screen of the value of off the shelf software, which brought me to another realization that really what I value the most in this list or this area is being part of a community built around a specific product combining both similar goals and similar tools, or the same tools. And I confess I really like that kind of a community, or a community built around similar goals like CNI. The community is a really great place for us to expand our horizons and find new ideas and whatever either way the power of sharing is pretty formidable, and the library world is constantly blows me away with the amount of sharing that's done. So I just wanted to say, thank you for letting me bar be a part of your community today. I've been been enjoying the CNI presentations and I look forward to meeting and learning from you, some of you at in San Diego next week. And hopefully, if there are any questions I've left just the right amount of time. So, back to you guys. Thank you very much. That's a really interesting look at chaining together a number and adapting a number of a number of off the shelf tools and it's great that you pointed at that OCLC report, which I think is is a very helpful survey of the current play especially as it exists in the US. And for people who haven't seen that it's well worth taking a look at questions for for Joan. Everyone's ready for a break. Well, I suspect they're working up to it. I'll just toss out a quick one while while folks are thinking for a minute. So, you know, you you make a very interesting argument about the, when you're using vendor tools, you end up with a community that can share solutions, add on extensions, things of that nature in a way that, where everybody's got their own homegrown solution doesn't really facilitate. And I think I think that's a very potentially that's it that's an important argument and I wonder how much you're, you're seeing that kind of sharing particularly as the number of vendors has thinned out over the years through mergers and acquisitions. I've been part as I mentioned I've been part of different communities, you know, I'm still kind of have a foot in the pure community spring share they also try to do some sharing. I'm really a huge fan of ex Libris, because over five years ago they made the decision to make all of their documentation open on the web, and they've got an amazing long standing community there's a really powerful user group in the United States there's a worldwide user group with, you know, each of them has conferences each year. And the list serves, you know, the list serves are just amazing. And I, I, you know, I just the, you just you're reading an email from a listserv and it's like, Oh, great, that's something I've been trying to figure out how to do. So I, that's why I, I, by the time I was done writing my presentation I just had to say that because it's, I can't imagine being in a homegrown solution at this point it would just be very constricting and I don't I think homegrown solutions tend to solve yesterday's problems to not, and they, and, and vendor solutions tend to be building constantly and developing tools that let you solve new problems as they come in. And what I was saying by the way it's very much it's like our researcher comes it's like, you know, I need to have a place to put my open access article so that I can fulfill my requirement. And they just come they say they given a need and we can say okay well we've got this tool and we've got this tool and we could probably make that happen within a month or two. And it's happened over and over again so big fan. Okay. Questions or comments for Joan. I think you're right Joan I think everybody is ready for a break. Joan I'm on your website right now and I was just trying to find where, where I could link to for my AD, who is in charge of scholarly publications, because I think this would be interesting. Is it, is there a link at the bottom. There is a couple places. We are very small so our web tools are developing always at the bottom there's a section of links. You guys see the. Thank you so much. We haven't integrated into the search box yet because our people don't really need to search it it's more for external people. And again one of the things that I love about the current solution is that we're indexed on Google Scholar and so on and we're just seeing growing visits from all over the world. So, loving it. Thank you. Other questions for Joan. Okay, hearing none, we're going to go on break a couple minutes early. We're going to resume as scheduled at 2 p to 15pm Eastern daylight time. And we will pick up with what I think will be a very interesting talk from Ken Cleenstein. Please take a stretch and join us again in about 15 minutes. Thank you so much. And thank you Joan for a very thought provoking presentation. See you next week. Yep.