 And we're going to go ahead and get started with the next set of presentations. As was mentioned earlier, my name is Gordon Danes. I am the curator of research and instruction services at Brigham Young University. And I have had the privilege of working with the project teams working on the question, how do the library's special collections specifically support and promote teaching, learning, and research. These teams have worked very collaboratively and there's a lot of overlap in the things that they've discovered about the effectiveness of using primary sources in teaching. And I'm excited to see the two presentations that we'll be having this afternoon. But I also wanted to point out that the University of California, Irvine and the University of Pittsburgh have both made their posters and some presentations about those posters available on the special collections question page of the Research Library Impact Framework website. And I would encourage you to go take a look at those posters and listen to their presentations. And we'll have an opportunity to have questions for all of the project teams after we conclude with the two presentations that we have here today. First, we're going to have the opportunity to hear from the project team from Johns Hopkins University, and I will go ahead and turn the time over to them. Thank you, Gordon. I'm going to share my screen. I have a short PowerPoint. I also want to acknowledge that Heidi Hare and Josh Everett are on the Zoom with me. So they'll be able to answer some questions when we get into that into that portion. So OK, so I'm hoping that you all can see my my slideshow. So I'm Margaret Burry and I'm the assistant director for academic liaison and special collections at the Johns Hopkins University. And I'm very delighted to be here today to talk to you about our practice brief for our Freshman Fellows program. So a little bit of background. Our Freshman Fellows program started in 2016 and it was the brainchild of Heidi Hare, who is our amazing, amazing outreach librarian for special collections. She noticed that our upper level students were really enjoying the work that they were doing as our Dean's undergraduate research fellows and thought, wouldn't it be so cool to give this as an opportunity to incoming freshmen? So she designed a program in conjunction with three of her other colleagues in special collections, where we precurated a set of materials. We reached out to freshmen really almost as soon as they were accepted, pointed them in the direction of the materials, gave them background on the program, which included a thousand dollars stipend at the end. So I will say one of our findings is money. Money is always a good motivator. And they had to apply. So they basically had to write an essay and say why they wanted to be a freshman fellow. So we ended up with this incredible first class that was involved in a variety of projects. Keana explored dress reform and first wave feminism. Lucy Massey looked at translating texts in Latin at the George Peabody Library, and that actually trans that translation experience has carried through all of our freshman fellows. Faith Terry worked with our university archivist and looking at the history of student housing at Hopkins and Caroline West explored our amazing collection of Shakespeare first folios. So as you can see, it's a really wide range of research topics that the students engaged in. And we realized as 2020 approach that, oh, my gosh, our first set of cohort would be graduating. So wouldn't it be a wonderful idea to figure out what kind of impact did it have? We were having a hard time figuring out how to structure it. And then, lo and behold, fortunately for us, ARL announces the Research Library Impact Framework in 2019. So we put together a proposal that allowed us to not only assess the program, but also develop a brief that would allow other people to implement this should they want to do it. So as I said, our team consisted of Heidi Hare, Jessica Keys, our user experience analyst, who put together the semi-structured interviews and conducted them with both the mentors and the students, two of our liaison librarians, Steph Gamble and Josh Everett, who both had expertise in the application of rubrics to student work. And I was the nominal head, but honestly, I think all I did was was pretty much make sure they didn't have too many obstacles in place as we moved through this process. So our approach was a series of semi-structured interviews. And our report is on the website, so you can see the interview questions there. We conducted them both in person and via Zoom. And the second portion was to develop the rubric to assess the students' work. So what did we find out? Well, this quote was one that appears in our report, and it really, really struck me as the best way of summarizing what happened when someone becomes a freshman fellow. And it's that they really do build, they have an opportunity to build confidence in themselves and in their abilities to be on campus. And this quote is even more compelling when you read in our report that the student who said this was actually waitlisted. And she said it wasn't until she got the freshman fellowship that she felt, I really deserve to be here on campus. So that was, I think, an amazing testament to the quality of the program. Additional findings beyond the sense of confidence was building a sense of community. The four students really did bond as a cohort, and they came together in an amazing experience where they got to show their research to the public during an annual festival in Baltimore that's called Flower Mart, which takes place for those of you who know Baltimore, right around the Washington Monument in downtown Baltimore and right near the Washington Monument is our amazing George Peabody Library. So this is a photograph of Caroline who worked on the Shakespeare first folios sharing some of her research with the general public. And what the students said was, you know, it was great to talk to their cohort. It was great to talk to their mentors, but to actually be able to work with to talk to the public about what they had learned and try to interpret that and share that in that type of a setting was so meaningful for them. They were also very comfortable applying for other grant opportunities. All of them went on and got other grants. And for those who were majors, had majors that really didn't deal too much more with primary sources beyond freshman year, when they were looking for electives, they actually went out and looked for courses that allowed them to engage with textual analysis and primary sources. And Hopkins, as you may or may not know, has no core curriculum. So there is actually a lot of flexibility when students are going outside their major. So we were very pleased to hear that they took that opportunity to continue to engage with courses that worked with special collections materials. And then for those students that were humanities or social science majors, they found that when they encountered primary sources again, as they moved through their academic studies, they felt they had so much more fluency and comfort with them than their peers did in their classes. And they felt that made a great impact on the work that they did as students. So the mentors, mentors were drawn from the special collection staff, and they really looked at it as an opportunity to help get students outside of their comfort zone and try to do something different. I would also say as someone who works closely with the mentors, it also got them out of their comfort zones too. It helped them think about new ways to enhance their own research skills, how to explain how to do research to undergraduates, how to deal with that perennial question of do you fish or do you teach them to fish? And they all indicated that they also grew as well. They felt that working with the students really strengthened their soft skills. Someone commented that she had to be really careful to understand because she had two teenage boys where not not to parent but to mentor and what the difference between those two things was, it also helped us with collection development. For those of you who are in special collections and really any part of the library, you know that whatever we spend money on, we really do want people to use and what better way to know that something's going to be used than to know that you already have a student who's working in that area. So two of our curators commented that whenever they started looking at catalogs, they would say, oh my gosh, look, this is something that would be really, really helpful for my freshman fellow and we also gave the freshman fellows an opportunity to use some collections money to purchase materials. So you can see in this slide that and I believe Heidi probably bought these for Kiana, they are women's style books that were used in Kiana's research and they also felt and improved their own research skills. When you begin to think about finding other resources for students, connecting primary sources and secondary sources, you begin to realize that there are other ways to explain it and that you become a better researcher by the time it's all said and done. So challenges, big one, no surprise COVID. We had four freshman fellows in that first cohort. Jessica was able to reach out to three of them and interview them in person before we shut down. After we shut down, she was not able to connect with the fourth freshman fellow. So we have interviews with three of the four. It also meant that the mentors were interviewed via Zoom because we wanted Jessica to concentrate on the graduating seniors first. But I think because we've all worked together for so long, even though it was sort of early days of getting used to connecting on Zoom, I think that those interviews were still very successful. I don't think we, Jessica and I were worried that we might lose a little bit of the give and take that you normally have when you're face to face, but we felt that it really did go quite well. And I would say our biggest failure and it's truly just a matter of time. And for those of you who've seen our report, you'll see just how big our rubric is. We have not had a chance to test it yet. So we are hopeful that we will test it against the work products of this year's group of freshman fellows. I'm saying that to kind of commit us to it. So stay tuned for further work on that. And if anyone looks at the rubric and has some feedback and thoughts, please do share that with us. So next steps, I think we've laid a solid skeleton. So testing the rubric, as I mentioned, the other thing Heidi and I have talked about is it would be really great to talk and we have continued the freshman fellow program. I mean, even during COVID, they were just working remotely, which was a really, really interesting too. So we want to kind of go back and explore what happened there. But we think it would be really valuable to talk to the freshman fellows at the end of their freshman year a little bit more broadly about how the project went and then catch up with them again as seniors to see, do we see anything different or do we see some of the same things that our first cohorts expressed when we spoke with them. We've also been so fortunate that we've been able to avoid mentor burnout because we have brought new mentors into the program. Heidi has mentored across all of the cohorts. And so she has been the through line as it were. But we brought in a couple of our liaison librarians. We just brought in this year, which was so exciting, a colleague of ours and GIS and data services, who is working with a student on a historic map collection that we just acquired. So this student is getting to not only work with the original cartographic materials, but is building in a GIS story map component into it. So we're super excited to see how that's going to turn out. So we'd love to get this larger group of mentors, which I think now numbers about eight from the original four to talk together jointly in a focus group about what they took away from the program. So this is one of this is the way we summed up our report. And I have to give a shout out to Gordon, who I was struggling with the value section. And Gordon, I don't remember exactly what you said when you read it, but you said something to me, which led me to come up with this sentence. So it's partially yours, your sentence to Gordon. Our evaluation demonstrates that young scholars value their deep dive into our collections and the experience impacts or other curricular activities and their sense of community at Hopkins. So this photograph, I don't know, you may remember that first photograph we took, which had the four of them kind of on a poster, which was actually taken for their first blog post. This was taken of the fellows right after they had done their presentations down at Flower Mart. And I showed this to my husband last night and he said, they look extremely pleased with themselves, very confident, and like they really have formed a cohesive community. So that's what we have. And after everyone else is done, Heidi and Josh and I will be happy to take questions. Thank you. Thank you so much, Margaret. That was a very informative and very interesting presentation. We'll now turn the time over to the project.