 Welcome everybody. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information and I'm here to welcome you to one of the project briefing sessions of our spring 2020 virtual member meeting which will be running until the end of May. We'll be hearing a presentation today from MJ Tue of the University of Maryland Baltimore and after she's done, Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will moderate Q&A. There is a Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and you can use that to type in questions for MJ at any point during her presentation as they occur to her to you and we will save them all till the end and Diane will work through those then. So with that let me just briefly introduce our topic today which is the development of a unified intentional and evolving approach to research support and I think all of those words are really important unified and intentional are both critical and if we've learned anything over the past couple of months evolving is the name of the game these days and I believe that MJ is going to share some of her experience in adapting research support strategies during the last couple of months as well as the thinking that led up to where the University of Maryland Baltimore found itself in early in early March and with that I'll just welcome you all again thank you for joining us. MJ thank you so much for doing this presentation and over to you. Okay thank you. Good afternoon everybody and thank you Cliff for the introduction I appreciate it. It's delightful to be here as time has gone on certainly my topic has evolved and been more intentional and hopefully will be a unified approach to talk about how we approach research support at the University of Maryland Baltimore. So again delightful to be here one of the things I need to make sure that I do before I get started is say that I have to give a big shout out to Alexa Mayo who is our Associate Director for Services without whom we would not have come as far as we have come in supporting research over the last few years at the University of Maryland Baltimore. Those of you that are familiar with the University of Maryland Baltimore know that we oops it's not going let's see here there we go those of you that are familiar with the University of Maryland Baltimore know that we are in an urban setting and we are a health sciences human services institution so health sciences meaning that we're medicine nursing pharmacy dentistry the human services side is social work and law and so we are a smaller research institution but our research portfolio is big we do about almost 700 million dollars worth of research every year so we're no strangers to research enterprise. One of the things that really occurred to me when I was submitting this abstract was the fact that I attended a wonderful wonderful session after CNI in December 2019 about critical roles for libraries in today's research enterprise and it was absolutely timely and has proven to be even more so over the last couple months but as the report came out early in 2020 which seems like years ago now the top four key challenges that the report identified were reorganization to support new roles single customer facing service communication and marketing and partnering with the research office and as I thought about submitting an abstract I realized that over the last five to six years we have really had those same challenges and so I thought well let's let's see if I can develop something and tell you a little bit about how we have engaged with those challenges I can't say we've solved them all but we certainly engaged with them. So it as with most things it all begins with a vision and an idea and it never gets executed without being a very detailed plan so we're going to talk a little bit about my main responsibilities in this which had to do with the idea that we really needed to support the research enterprise better. We needed I'm in charge of strategic thinking and innovation as the director of the library and as the associate vice president for academic affairs so my job is to make sure that we're always moving forward and I would also say that anybody who knows me in the library says that I'm a relentless promoter of the library and all the wonderful things we do because we do amazing things there. So let's get going and talk a little bit about how over six little over six years ago so it has it has some legs we embarked the leadership team in the library embarked on a strategic listening tour it was time for us to do a new library strategic plan the university was working on a new plan we had just had a new president put in place about I guess seven years ago and so strategic planning was on everyone's mind so we decided to engage in a strategic listening tour where we talked to the deans senior leadership the certainly the research office key stakeholders like the faculty senate the staff senate the student organizations all to help inform our new library strategic plan because we knew we needed to do something different we needed to be more out there and outwardly focused one of the key questions or the key question that we asked these leaders was to envision their success whether it was their school their division their unit and so to find out what was their best future and what we could do to ensure their success so as you can imagine being a university there was some conversation about education and being a healthcare institution some conversation about supporting clinical care but in truth the overriding theme that came through had to do with research success in the competition for resources and a renewed focus kind of on entrepreneurship and innovation what was really humbling for us was that there was very little understanding of the entirety of all the things the library could do our expertise our services our resources people still continue to think of us as being the building that had books and journals and was a great place for people to study yeah okay we had things online and that was it but really had not embraced something we thought we had embraced and communicated a lot about which was our expertise so as we wrote our strategic plan we came up with our key challenges and you'll see that they are very much parallel to the key challenges that were identified in the December programming from CNI first of all we needed to identify the essential research services that we were going to be retaining and continuing to offer and what needed and trying to figure out what needed to be added we knew we needed to enhance the library faculty librarian and staff expertise we needed to build a holistic service supporting research from idea to impact or as we jokingly say from room to tomb from the time they come up with an idea to the time it's published shared however it's going to have an impact in the greater scientific community and we would need to brand and market so we were going to build a research service and I can say that if you look at the four top four challenges from December it's very familiar so first of all I don't want to identify essential services we did a big job of assessing researcher needs we did surveys we did conversations we did strategic listening we had focus groups we had every possible way there was to ask questions about what do researchers need talk to the research office everything we wanted to identify and align services that we were already doing that were vital to the research life cycle and those of you again are I'm sure very familiar with what is involved in the research life cycle the circle of the research life we also identified libraries with similar services in this case we were very interested in bioinformatics and in things like systematic reviews so we received a small award to go on a road trip to we went to wash you in st. Louis to talk to them about their bioinformatics services and we went to the University of Florida to talk about their systematic review services in their health sciences library and then the really the real work began and I can't stress how valuable this was we developed a 12 page matrix and the 12 page matrix was on the big paper not just the eight and a half by 11 and it identified what needed to be done what did we want to do what did we want to expand it identified who needed to do it what skill sets did we need did we have those skill sets in house where did we need to build more skills where do we need to hire different people and of course the big question that the director always gets is well how are we going to pay for all this you know where are we going to the resources and funding to do these things and then finally a timeline and our timeline was very aggressive and it was also involved a lot of changing some of our physical space to embrace supporting research moving to a one service desk adding some additional features in the library so we the second step for us of course was enhancing library faculty and staff expertise and to identify the knowledge gaps we knew sort of from our matrix what we wanted to do where didn't we have any expertise where do we think we could get expertise we wanted to look at things like systematic review training molecular biology bioinformatics and so we send people to the systematic review training that used to be held at the University of Pittsburgh and I believe every single one of our librarians went to that training at one time or another over the next couple years over the you know interview interceding years we send a number of people to the bioinformatics program at the national library of medicine used to host and we learned all about omics proteomics genomics any other omics that were out there we were learning about them and also just to note that this is an ongoing thing once we identify the knowledge gaps once we identify the training opportunities this has gone on and continued every time we need to learn something new we learn something new we've made a commitment we spend a lot of money on staff training and staff development never has a director been more grateful than when things started appearing more in webinars so that I could send multiple people to one program at a time and so that there were opportunities for people to learn things all at once and then we identified staffing gaps this was difficult because again you know in in many institutions they don't just give you new positions so you have to make use of positions that become open over time and retool them and and convince people that it's a better idea to use the positions in one way or another so we ended up taking some of our positions and we ended up identifying emerging technologies librarian who works primarily in our innovation space which was one of our new areas we also hired a molecular biologist who is our data scientist recently we added a data librarian who works kind of with our data scientist on kind of more the library side we have an instructional designer that isn't a librarian at all and we quickly realized that there are a lot of things a lot of times when it's not necessarily librarians we need to have but a community of people that can support research enterprise and can talk to the researchers the way they like to be you know talk to we build a holistic service we identified the key services that were supporting research and we integrated the new components and some of them I've already mentioned systematic reviews research impact reports for example we work with the school of medicine every year with their promotion and tenure reports to take a look at the people who are up for promotion and tenure and talk about the impact of their research or their publications so that's something we do data management we've been working closely with researchers writing grants to help them with their data management plans what we realized was that it was not going to be a new division in the library in the library we have services resources technology administration and we're the regional medical library for the southeastern united states so we have 57 staff there was no need to slice and dice and make another department because what we wanted the department to be was multidisciplinary so as we have this expertise and as somebody calls for some particular type of expertise somebody could come in from services they could be teamed up with somebody from technology they could be teamed up with somebody from resources so it's multidisciplinary and goes across the library this way as opposed to in silos and we add new components as they're needed some of the building enhancements I mentioned were high performance computing center in an innovation space in our presentation practice studio I think perhaps our greatest challenge has been branding and marketing I don't know that we are in the library community the best branders and marketers I think we tend to think we communicate a lot but we learn from our strategic listening that once you communicate you think you're communicating a lot you need to ratchet it up and communicate some more because people only hear what they need to hear when they need to hear it and so it's a constant pushing things out pushing things out and so we develop one stop shopping for research support where we put our suite of services and we aggregated them in one place on our webpage now that does not mean that a person if they want to use any particular research service has to go through that gateway if they know that they need a systematic review there's a way for them to get to systematic reviews originally we branded it as being research connection expertise to advance your success that was our original name we've thrown that out because that was meaningless now we just have a question doing research and we have a lot of our elements and I'll show you a screenshot and of course marketing and promoting has been a big deal we are always talking about how we support research and we do get a lot of traction from that I think we're seen as valuable members in many areas of the research team some of the things that we've added that are included and you'll see these slides later they'll be shared so you can take a look more closely but some of the things that we offer as part of our research service have to do with things like systematic reviews we've always done research consultations we added things like data wrangling and visualization and that's maturing now in the library as we continue to work with that another thing that's very interesting is we all we don't all sit but a number of library staff sit on the institutional review board and one of the services we started to offer as part of that service was to look at consent forms and turn consent forms into plain language so that researchers can communicate with subjects a little more easily we're also in the process of developing a citizen science online certificate course that should be completed I hope by the fall and knock on wood anyway so that's some of the stuff we offer but we're constantly reimagining realigning and evolving this and this has never been more necessary than in the last couple of months so we are aligned with the university strategic plan which is a core of what we do theme to in our university strategic plan is research and scholarship and this dovetails and is often cited as being a good example of how this particular theme is supported we have ongoing conversations with the research community office of research and development we also put together an hshsl research advisory committee which is made up of the research deans from all the schools we are constantly reviewing and evaluating and assessing and adding new things in we have redesigned and rebranded which i alluded to and we are constantly promoting if not the service itself certain elements of the service this is what the website looks like um as of the day before yesterday um and you can see down in the lower middle section it says doing research and if you click any one of those areas you'll go to certain things like help with your research takes you to a whole raft of things covenants we added this year which is a system a software program that aids in putting together systematic reviews and organizing things our bioinformatics and innovative technologies people are down in the lower left of that blue box and the systematic review service which is incredibly popular um is has its own little cube as well it's a little square unfortunately covid-19 interrupted yet another reimagining of the research enterprise where we were actually going to redo the web page and we're in process of doing um usability testing or just about to start usability testing in late march and everything kind of disappeared then so we're working on some ideas about how to do usability testing with some new design and engage some of our users to help in a virtual way to do usability testing we're still working on some kinks on that so some of the suggestions i think you know i always say oh these are captain obvious you know for building a service like this but you know you really do need to assess and align with user research community needs we made the mistake for many years that i think a lot of our libraries do which is the libraries develop their strategic plans and develop their services based on what they think users need and i can't stress enough about how we really need to partner and align with our research community and with the research users individual researchers every year we get a list from the research office who are most highly funded users are and take a look at what they're studying what they what there may be particular needs are we talk to them if we have the capability to do that anyway we can insert ourselves into research we try um you need to know your strengths and what you can and cannot do we're a big health sciences library but we're not a big library compared to maybe a larger research institution so we really need to know what we're good at and what we really can't pick up and do we need to know what other people at the university are doing too so that we're not crossing paths and and um you know and getting in somebody else's way that's doing good work so we do spend a lot of time and they and others have the campus do another time too where they um talk to us and say well we're doing this and we promote what they do and they promote what we do so it's pretty good assessing the staff training and staffing needs the marketing plan if you need to call in if you don't have experts in your library call in people from the university to say you know is there a brand that we should look like we try to imagine what success looks like for us and we try to evaluate that and of course I always say promote like crazy so let's talk about COVID-19 real quickly here the downside of the COVID-19 absence and we've been out since March 14th and I learned this week that we will probably not be back on site in our fullness um maybe potentially as late as next May that's a pretty interesting thing we'll be working on plans for how we get partial staff in but um lack of access to print collections that's that's key to the to the researchers some of them are looking at things that are foundational to some of the research they're doing that goes back prior to anything being digitized or available our innovation space is a place where we've been doing a lot of 3d printing and prototyping and so as part of this our emerging technologies librarian crept into the library and stole a 3d printer and has now been cranking out masks and mask pieces and ear savers and our poster printing service we think is probably just going to die because unless people go to public meetings or have public displays we won't be printing posters and our presentation practice studio is lagging as well however in the six weeks from May March 14th to May 1st uh we launched about six systematic review collaborations and each one of those takes about 40 hours to complete so systematic review is not it's very time in labor intensive literature searches and you can see the data 19 research consultations faculty reference questions 281 and this is just a little snapshot of some of the things we're doing the researchers are going gung-ho and especially the ones that are doing research on COVID-19 and as you can imagine on a health sciences campus that's huge for us interlibrary loans our interlibrary loan fill rate which is important sometimes is usually around 95 percent it has slumped to 87 percent because of our lack of access to print collections so new initiatives that we're doing while we're while we're away we're conceptualizing and planning what we're calling the CBAD the center for bioinformatics and data and so we are working much the same way we did to bring the research consultation service or the research service on board we're applying those same principles to start up you know to kind of standing up a center for bioinformatics and data we are working with our friends across town at jhu on looking into collaboration tools because we have a joint cts a award with them and so that's where we're going there we've been asked to design a summer elective an online elective for students on research we're looking at developing a potential certificate course in data management that would be offered during mini-mesters throughout the year and we have converted all our classes to online format and develop and we are developing new classes some of the classes that we're working on or have already been converted as you can see they're very much research support and very much data support and very much just the whole research life cycle supporting from choosing the right journal and introducing you know introduction to social to systematic reviews so there's quite a wealth of things and this is just again a sampling so what do i think the future of research is well this has really turned us over kind of over the last i would say nine weeks i think that's what's going to end up happening is for the time being people are going to follow the money they're going to see where the funding the research funding is for either finding cures or treatments or better better ways to combat covid-19 or predict what is going to come next so as the money comes out that's where our researchers are going to follow it we're fortunate that we have an institute for human genomics and we have robert gallows center for vaccine development at umb so we're seeing some very active research going on and of course what what are the perceived and real needs for research so what needs to be done a lot more partnerships that's actually my last point collaborations and as we know as politics change in the united states whatever influences the department of health and human services will have an impact on nih who are huge huge funders at umb and so whatever the hot topic is whether it's the cancer moonshot aids hiv uh back in the day of george bush um parish nursing um and we'll also i think funding for research will go to people who have had past success um you know money seems to follow the successful researcher so we will spend a lot of time watching our research community and trying to figure out where we need to jump next as well so with that kind of finished here and i would be happy to answer any questions if there are any and i'm sure these slides will be shared and thank you again for the opportunity thank you mj that was really interesting and particularly given your perspective being right in the middle of um things right now as we're in the middle of this crisis so we really appreciate your coming to see and i to share uh some of the experiences you had prior to the crisis and the update after and i just want to remind everyone to please type your questions into the q&a box and i will read them aloud so that mj can field them here live and with that i will go ahead and dive into the question we have received from sarvani who asks in your strategic planning efforts identifying stakeholders and partners did you work with the office of information technology if so can you please share some thoughts on that that's a great question and they are one of our most avid partners uh the the center for information technology services actually is my my co-do's payer for cni um they are um at um be their main responsibility is to um support infrastructure and so they are making sure that the network is running etc etc however um we have had an intersection recently and particularly some responsibilities i have in the area of data but we are always conversing with them you know i probably on the phone at least weekly or on teams or whatever at least weekly talking with our cio um they are we have a great relationship with them the the thing that i i do need to point out is the library itself has its own it team and we have one two three seven people in that which is a great luxury to be able to have our own it team which takes care of library related things but also any innovative technology that we bring into the library we develop we work with the it folks on the campus to make sure it rides on the network appropriately so yes we did okay that's great that was a great question thanks so much sarvani and thanks for that answer mj um i was also wondering if you could speak a little bit to um the the impact i think you said that you uh are producing some impact reports um can you talk a little bit more about what you're reporting how you're gathering that data and what's um we have a liaison program as many libraries do and our um liaison to the school of medicine uh is has a faculty appointment in the department of epidemiology so that's sort of related but as she became more involved with the school of medicine especially after the faculty appointment um the university had entered into this cooperative work with uh the university maryland college park our sister university down the road and um they wanted to test the efficacy of collaborations between the college park faculty and the umb faculty and so we developed a methodology where we took a look at h indexes we took a look at where things were published we took a look at um how things were referenced and andrea really developed the methodology for doing this and after she did such a successful job at it you know be careful what you wish for the dean's office said huh we could really use those reports for our faculty who are going up for promotion and tenure we want to see what the impact of their research is uh we want to take a look and see who their collaborators are we want to see if they're bringing you know if um you know who's citing their research all those kind of things so every year she works with whatever the number of people are that are being promoted to work with them to develop as part of their dossier an impact report of how what the impact of their research and their funding has been how much funding they've gotten we are starting to do that with our dental school now and um in a smaller sense much smaller sense with the school and nursing as well terrific so interesting thank you thanks for that Cliff has a follow up to the it question um he's wondering does main it handle high performance computing um for example to support genomics or is that handled elsewhere a little bit of everything um the igs the institute for genomic sciences uh has an incredible array of computers and everything else and so central it provides and i and i you know this could have changed in the last week and i may not know it but um they provide backup storage for all the igs data uh but igs pretty much has their own computing um however we have been asked by the institute for genomic sciences to work with them and to work with central campus it we would be providing a lot of the um what i would call informational training support um campus it provides a storage uh lately there's been some discussion at the university about um uh primary data storage and certainly central it has been reluctant is way too strong a word but has been a little bit hesitant to move into central data storage because they feel that things are happening in um uh azure and one drive and all kinds of other places where people could be storing their data there are ongoing conversations about whether this is going to change and whether we are going to end up doing things like centralized data storage at the university but right now um i think that conversation has got to be on hold for a little bit till we see what the economic impact of COVID-19 is going to be yeah interesting and actually um sarvani weighed in thanking cliff for the question because uh as a hpc manager part of central it at my university that was the focus of my question so and you know it's interesting although the hpc the high performance computing that we have that is run by our data scientist is a really really heavy-duty basically workstation yeah and so what we that's where we're ending up doing a lot of data wrangling and dating and data investigation and um because there seems to be one of the gaps that we've identified has been researchers generate the data researchers get the data back but in this world of visualization and everything there's a gap between getting from there to the publication or to how they present their data so we have moved into a niche where we're doing a little bit of not a little bit we're doing a lot of wrangling and could do a lot more if we had more staff to do it um so it's um it's interesting it's it's just an interesting time all around data and we talk about it weekly and um there are pros and cons to many different approaches is what we're discovering yeah and what we learned at our executive roundtable on um research continuation and support is that a lot of a lot of the the gaps are starting to bubble up to the surface the gaps in service are bubbling up as a result of some of the previous types of support that researchers were getting um now disappearing for instance you know student support in um wrangling data and the faculty is now has come to the library and some occasions looking for training in those areas is that something you all are seeing as well yes we're seeing that as well and i don't want to understate the importance of the time that's being spent on policy because we are working to develop trusted relationships with the clinical enterprise for their whatever eight million records of patient data and how will we get to that who will have access how do you vet you know just the whole um authenticating people getting access to that data so i spend a significant amount of time in policy meetings too kind of from a i'm kind of represent kind of the end user area on that right a lot of stuff yeah and and as a follow-on to the data wrangling uh question cliff is asking um he states data wrangling is really important and a huge need can you tell us how much staff you have committed to that currently to to um it's just a very much very much a service service in its infancy we are also looking since we have only two people that then they're not a hundred percent dedicated to that by the way they do other informatics and wrangling things but we're we're kind of using the teach a man to fish methodology and which is let's see what kind of training we can do that will help people do wrangling on their own and then we can help them when they get stuck we can get them started we can be a vehicle to make that a more the norm i was taken by who did i hear i guess i heard i don't know the name is escaping me i think he spoke in cni but he's out at uh in california where he came to talk at umb and i was so taken by the fact that uh he was talking about how students medical students in their first year are all required to take a programming language that it we don't need french and german anymore we need r and python and i think there was a requirement uh out at the university california system at least with their medical schools that um that's one of the things that required and we would love to see that yeah we would love we've been looking into library carpentries to get ourselves trained as trainers um and and so that we can again expand that whole universe of what we can do yeah it was a big focus lots of opportunities for sure lots to do well mj this has really been delightful thank you so much um and cliff also says fascinating thanks the demand for wrangling is near infinite indeed through that i i want to thank our attendees for joining us and thanks again to everyone for being here very much appreciated and thanks so much everyone take care