 Welcome to CNI's fall 2020 virtual membership meeting. I'm Diane Goldenberg-Hart, Assistant Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, CNI. I'm really happy that you could join us here today. And I'm so glad you could be here for this session, which is part of a series on the theme of transforming organizations, professions, and individuals. Before introducing the session, I just want to point out a few details. Closed captioning is available. Please feel free to take advantage of that. All attendees' microphones have been muted. Please use the Q&A box at any time to share your questions and moderated Q&A will take place following the presentation. The chat box is open and available. I hope you'll feel free to use it to introduce yourself, tell us where you're from, and maybe what you're hoping to get out of today's session or anything in particular you'd like to hear addressed. This session is being recorded and a video will be made publicly available on CNI's YouTube and Vimeo channels probably within the next week or so. We hope that you'll feel free to share it. All right, now let's get to the good stuff. It's really my pleasure to welcome Jennifer Hootman to CNI. Jennifer is the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Kentucky Libraries. And she's here to talk about how the UK libraries are trying to address digital scholarship teaching and learning needs within the institution and also how those efforts are being used to help build relationships across campus which is a topic of great interest to the CNI community. Jennifer, thank you so much for coming to CNI to talk to us about some of your work at Kentucky over to you. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be a part of the CNI Fall Virtual Meeting this year. And thank you all for attending. Just to give you some highlights and overview of what I plan to cover in this project briefing is I'm starting with a little bit of background information. I'll try not spend too much time on that because I wanna get to the meat of the matter which is our web hosting program. But in 2017, University of Kentucky Libraries initiated a digital scholarship center task force to do a study of the digital scholarship landscape at the University of Kentucky and conduct a needs assessment around digital scholarship. And also in 2017, they were looking for, conducting a search for a digital humanities librarian and I'm fortunate enough to have been hired as that person and I joined them in 2018, early 2018. And so the digital scholarship center task force work was already underway, but I joined in and they got me started with things right away which was really nice. It's actually was a great introduction to being in this position because I got a chance to work with colleagues closely and get to know people on the task force and have the opportunity to work with them in learning about the campus in terms of digital scholarship. So what a gift to a new person arriving in the role of digital humanities librarian. So I participated particularly with the faculty interviews and looking at some of the existing services, digital scholarship services that is on the UK campus and potential partnerships. So moving on that next year, we made several recommendations from the report and one of which is a web hosting platform that we got started in 2018 and that takes us to this year which we're getting close to moving into our second and third year with our program, Create UK. So the needs assessment that we conducted with the task force, as I have listed here, we looked at benchmarking institutions, faculty interviews, existing services within the libraries and on campus and made several recommendations. So some of the themes that emerge from the faculty interviews were consultation services, support for research data, work that was being done, research impact metrics, hardware and software support, physical space was also mentioned in the faculty interviews, the need for it, the need for support around scholarly publishing, supporting digital pedagogical practices and support around some kind of technical infrastructure to provide more avenues for practicing new digital pedagogical practices. And again, this view might look familiar to many of you as it indicates to me, I like the visual here of the map because digital scholarship practices as we are looking at them across the University of Kentucky landscape here is that it's spread out all over as I would imagine is the case at many universities across the state. So we have a number of different areas that have been working in the field of digital scholarship, probably speaking for quite a while and some that were a little bit newer. For instance, the CI CoLab is a group that is particularly focused on virtual reality, the new mappings co-laboratory, they even have a digital mapping online certificate. So they have been working for quite some time in providing some sort of learning experiences around digital mapping. And so as you can see here, we have a lot of activity happening on campus covering all kinds of aspects of digital scholarship. But also within the libraries, we have had over a number of years lots of work around digital scholarship and supporting that kind of activity on campus as well. Some of that being administrative work where you're supporting events and projects around DS and supporting and providing access to resources, data resources and digitized collections, which is very necessary foundations for faculty and students to conduct their work digital scholarship. We also provide a good deal of scholarly communication type services with our institutional repository, UK knowledge, copyright and author rights, consultations, assisting with article level metrics and consultation services. We also have a very robust oral history service through our Louis Benin Center for Oral History in our special collections and research center. We also have GIS support and other digital services provided against sort of that foundational support through our library IT services. And so some of the recommendations that merged from the needs assessment and investigation that we had done with our task force, these aren't all of them, but these are just some highlights. We definitely some more low hanging fruit is updating the library's website and providing more information about our services because we found out through those interviews that some of the things that faculty were articulating the need for support, we provided in some kind of way. So we also see that there's a need then to continue with our promotion of the services that we currently have and maybe even do a little bit better job of that. But there's also a lot of other places where we can hopefully fill some gaps. We're in a bit of a hiring freeze like most places. So we were hoping to hire a research data services librarian and that'll have to be revisited at a later time. We're also recommending partnering and promoting and hosting more events, partnering up with a variety of colleges and academic departments that were revealed through our look at existing services on campus already. So we saw even more potential partnerships through that study. We're also looking at online instructional models and modules trying to develop a more robust set of online tools for learning more about some of these digital scholarship types of tools that researchers and students can use as well as providing more instruction around digital literacy. We also recommended that we further develop our geospatial services and take a look at that space and build that out a bit more and also look at repurposing other spaces in the library for digital scholarship sort of work, looking at spaces for consultations and workshops that are specific to this type of audience. And then lastly here, what I'm highlighting today is our web hosting space that we recommended and we recommended piloting a virtual space for campus. So we have joined a host of other institutions across the land where we have decided upon Domain of One's own product from Reclaim Hosting. It's a very popular choice. We know it's not the only choice we were looking at other possibilities but some of the reasons behind choosing Domain of One's own was that there was less of a learning curve with it for those who are administering it as well as when I was at the University of Minnesota libraries, I had some exposure to Domain of One's own already and kind of understood at least at a surface level what it looks like, how it operates. So I was very impressed by it and it's really a good platform for those that are just starting out in digital scholarship work as well. I mean, those advanced users, they can pretty much gravitate towards a lot of types of platforms and not need as much help but to reach a broader spectrum of possible digital scholarship practitioners is to and researchers is to I think provide a platform that is already pre-populated with applications ready to go, easy to install that sort of thing and that certainly was Domain of One's own for us with the easy sort of one-click install. It also gave us a branded portal, a single sign-on integration with campus and they have 30 days of nightly backups and can accommodate up to 500 users. They also have some support around migration for students who graduate or faculty that might leave campus and a good amount of documentation for technical support. So this is just a screenshot of our CREATE UK Y.net site. This is our brand of portal for the web hosting that we're providing. That was certainly again, just to revisit that briefly is that that is something that really bubbled up out of our needs assessment that there was a real gap around the majority of individuals on campus having some kind of access to a digital space upon which to create and host their projects. So that is something with all the other digital scholarship activity that was going on on campus. That was something that we at the library has thought that we might be able to fill. So we're trying to get the word out as much as possible advertising, promoting our web hosting space that we call CREATE UK as a place where students and faculty can come to manage and share their research outputs and their academic work in digital form. So with that, some of the ways that we're hoping to really ground establish and grow CREATE UK on campus within this pilot time period, which is intense because it's a lot of work in a short period of time to get something up and running and widely known and accepted. So some of the things that we've been doing are promotional talks and media through campus communications. So I've been providing some campus presentations within the libraries to promote it within the library faculty and staff as well as on campus working with the Center for Enhanced Learning and Teaching to host some of those presentations because they have a built in audience with faculty already and graduate students. So they're a good partner to have in terms of promoting this particular program. And some invited presentations a few so far with the, I thought was a great one our information technology community of practice. I had an opportunity to present to them and they were very excited about this particular program for many reasons. And so that was good to have that kind of support. And the WRD faculty, that is the writing, rhetoric and digital services faculty. I was invited to a meeting to be able to present to them because we saw them also as a good fit for this particular service as well. We also have been providing individual and group consultations with faculty and students. And what's interesting here, again, Create UK has not only given the libraries or positioned us as a service provider in yet another way supporting digital scholarship. It has also provided us a position by which to be a collaborator and an entree to building at the very least communication pathways but even more hopefully longer term sustained relationship with a variety of departments across campus that we in digital scholarship and particularly me in digital humanities position might not readily have some sort of connection with or that connection might not be so readily visible. So Create UK, this program has really helped establish possibilities for those pathways which has been really exciting. So I have worked with faculty members in the School of Music, for instance. Also in the, in pharmacy in the College of Law, the Honors College and again, the Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies College as well, excuse me, Department and Public Policy and Administration and also within the libraries. So again, I've really been able to have kind of a breadth of contact with faculty and students in lots of different disciplines and it has proven to really help establish some kind of network around this particular program upon which we can build. Also been holding workshops and creating some tutorials around the applications within Create UK because again, even for those individuals who might be comfortable with the Domain of One's own platform, some of the applications they might be stumped with and really need a little bit of hand holding around getting like a WordPress site up and running for their class or an Omeka exhibit up and running. So the workshops and tutorials are meant to provide that sort of synchronous and asynchronous support around that because we, you know, it's not very helpful. I think if we just sort of drop a service and drop a resource and not provide that kind of sort of support around it because they're going to have questions and they're going to need help. Also, some of the technical support that I've been providing is creating templates within WordPress to make it a little bit easier to get started on certain kinds of projects within Press, doing some troubleshooting, looking under the hood, logging into their account and looking to see what they're trying or attempting to do and troubleshooting that and providing hopefully some solutions in most cases. Also, I've had a lot of design workflow recommendations or questions around that and so design could be anywhere between how do I change my themes, something simple like that in WordPress to workflow with the students. Like how should I deal with the media that they turned into me that I want up on the site, whether it be Scaler or WordPress or how do I deal with or take in their essays that are going to be included on this web project? And depending on the platform or the application, that could be a slightly different kind of workflow. Some of the examples that are emerging from this first year of Create UK have been interesting to follow and to see develop. And basically there are about four general areas that the work is turning into. And so we have a lot of portfolios that are being developed by faculty and grad students. Again, from that WRD, Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies course. Recently there was a spike because a faculty member had their students sign up in Create UK to create a portfolio for their class. So there's a bit of a spike there. We also have a lot of research websites and they were the early adopters to Create UK. Unbeknownst to me that there were a lot of individuals in the pharmaceutical sciences that wanted to set up lab sites where they share their research and share their information about their research team. So that has been quite interesting to follow in that area of development. And then also there's been the course projects, which is something that we're greatly interested in and supporting and growing as well. And like I mentioned before the School of Music, one professor in particular was an early adopter. He has created a scalar site for one of his courses, Recent Women Composers of the 20th century. And also again, this semester he's trying WordPress with his chamber music class where the students are including essays and that will be a part of this website. And then also one that has just popped up that I'm working on with a professor again in that WRD department. She teaches a class called Writing Bourbon and they're creating what she would like to see as a zine called Distilling Lexington. So there are a lot of student essays that will be stitched together to create this. So I'm excited to be working with her on that project. And then we also have exhibits that are popping up to which are from library staff and that being an anti-racism reading list that was developed. And also one that 1918 over here that focuses on our local campus history looking at the Student Army Training Corps and also the flu pandemic and how that affected campus. A couple of things I just wanna point out about a little bit of data behind CREIT UK and its growth. In terms of the accounts and those that have created domains within CREIT UK it's been a slow-ish but always increasing amount of account requests. So that's been good. And it's been at a rate at which I, who I'm an administrator of the CREIT UK program can handle. But as you see here, there was a recent spike that I mentioned a little bit ago because of a class signing on to CREIT portfolios. So the question here in the future would be about scalable support. And that's something that we definitely wanna take a look at as we move a little bit further down the road in our pilot. What this also isn't saying though too is something that we can take a little bit deeper dive on at a point in the near future too is to dig a little bit deeper because this doesn't show usage at all. So these are the actual single account. So a faculty member can have an account but have all of their students in several classes actually engaging with the application being added as authors or editors to WordPress platform for instance. But those don't show up in the actual accounts because those students don't have an account in CREIT UK. They don't have, they're not an owner of a domain. They are actually just being engaged in an application through their professor's invitation. So drilling down past the accounts to see how many individuals are actually engaging with those applications would be very telling. User type growth, we're seeing the growth where we were hoping we would see it. And the three largest groups there are the UK Libraries Employees. So it's nice to have some internal adoption and understanding and experience with the program, the CREIT UK platform. We're also seeing the graduate students and the faculty to grow. And so together they make up just about half of our account holders within CREIT UK. And that's the population we really wanted to target and hopefully that will continue to grow. So just quickly here looking ahead to year two and three. Again, I think we're gonna need to continue to promote and take advantage of any kind of opportunity that we might have in that regard. Continue to develop short videos, maybe how-to's on the various applications to add to the learning modules that we're developing. Follow up with account holders like CircleBack and check in, whether it be informally or maybe even a formal assessment of their experience with their CREIT UK account and what they're doing with it or not. Also looking at some assessments at the end of our pilot and what recommendation we might make. Scalable support I mentioned a little bit ago. If it does become so large and really takes fire, then it would be something that we would have to look at strategically. And perhaps that might come in the form of working with academic liaisons to where we support the liaisons who will then provide that direct support to their faculty and their departments. And then also contacting fellow Domain of One Zone adopters as well, I would like to contact some of them and to learn more about what they're doing on their campus with the Domain of One Zone. And that's what I have for you today. I am ready for any questions. Thank you, Jennifer. That was really interesting. And I have to say personally, very surprising that there is such a need for these kinds of services. So thanks for bringing that to CNI. I just found it fascinating. And I just wanna remind our attendees, the floor is now open for questions. So please share your questions with us in the Q&A box. And I'm sure Jennifer will be happy to address any questions you have or we'd love to hear your comments as well. I'm curious to know if there are folks in the audience who have detected a similar need at their institutions or are providing a similar service. I'm wondering what you're doing and how that's going. And I personally have quite a number of questions. I'm wondering, what kind of staffing support is there for this? Are you doing this on your own or do you have a team that helps you with it? I'm kind of it, which was going into it, that's something that we knew. So we were prepared for that. I think that, like I said, right now, it's at the increases at a pace of which I can handle on my own. But if there continues to be any sort of sharp increases like the recent one that we experienced that I refer to, then I think some sort of scalable solution would have to be kind of imagined because our digital scholarship department is two people, me and my supervisor, who's the director. And so I think it would be beneficial to take a look and maybe that's something to do now in anticipation of possible spikes, how we leverage our colleagues and get them on board with joining us and providing that kind of support. Right. I see we do have a question from Clem Guthrough and Clem wants to know if there was any pushback from campus IT to the libraries providing access to a domain in the one zone. I don't remember there being any kind of pushback or any kind of problem with running into our IT in terms of the services they provide. Like I said, I came in as the project was already underway with the assessment, but when we implemented, I don't remember there being any problem with our IT. We seemed to be on the same road, headed in a similar direction, but in different lanes, if that makes sense. So you're not collaborating with them in any way on this? Not at this point. Okay, got it. Clem, thank you for that question. That is an important and interesting one. And do you know, are they offering any similar type of service? Is campus IT offering any similar type of web hosting option? Not that I'm aware of, no. That's true, yeah. I mean, now in the past, there was a directory that one could have with their institutional profile. A set of folders that they could have access to that is on a server. And so there might be some individuals on campus that have this legacy access to server space but that going forward, that's not something that everybody is necessarily granted. And also while it might be some kind of server space for them, it's not something to where it's a fully functioning sort of like a supported server with installed applications and that sort of... Yeah, not as user-friendly probably. Certainly not, yeah. Yeah. And I also noticed on your user chart, undergraduates were not listed. Do they have access to it or have you made a decision to offer the service to other sectors of the community? Yeah, that's a great question. The way we're handling and approaching that right now, anyways, in the pilot, is to grant undergraduates accounts on a case-by-case basis. Part of the review, we only have so many counts. I mean, we have plenty I think for us to get through this pilot, but I think that if we open the doors to undergraduates, not quite sure how long those 500 seats would last and how it would be used by the undergraduates. But so it's a case-by-case basis. There might be an undergraduate, for instance, working with a faculty member to where they are tasked with setting up a site for the faculty member's course or something. Or maybe there's another case that would make a lot of sense. So right now, we're just focusing much more on the graduate students and the faculty. Understandable. They do have access to it in a way. If they're in a course where their professor has an account in which they're installed WordPress, for instance, then that faculty member might invite the students as contributors to the site and have them upload their essays or do something along those kind of lines. So they're interacting with it and that's the kind of usage I would like to kind of drill down into and get to know a little bit better this next year. But they are account holders. It's a good question. Well, I really appreciate the opportunity to hear about that. Thank you for indulging me in my questions. And I see we're a little bit past time so I don't want to hold everyone up. Just want to thank Jennifer one more time for sharing this project with us and a big thanks to all our attendees for joining us here today. If you want to hang around after I turn off the recording and have a chat, join the conversation, please feel free to do so. Just raise your hand. I'll be happy to enable your microphone. And other than that, I'd just like to wish everyone a good day, a wonderful weekend. I hope we'll see you back at CNI, if not this afternoon, then the coming weeks and days. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.