 Today's session is realising a vision for the digital shift, RLUK's digital shift manifesto two years on. And I am absolutely privileged to have the opportunity to share this session as well as our current RLUK digital shift working group. And I just wanted to say a few words before we move on to our speakers. It was in May 2020 when RLUK launched its digital shift manifesto and it provided an ambitious vision for the research library community for us regarding the ongoing digital shift in our collections, spaces, stakeholder relations and skills. And while it was envisaged before the advent of COVID-19, the launch and the implementation of the manifesto did coincide with the pandemic. And as a result of that, we've learned an awful lot during that time, both individually, institutionally and collectively, across research libraries, UK and beyond. In today's symposium, some current members of the RLUK digital shift working group will reflect on the ambitions of that manifesto and the future challenges and opportunities facing the community around the digital shift. How can we continue to build on the manifesto's vision and its success over the last two years and also seize our collective learning from the COVID-19 pandemic? We include some contributions from colleagues who had originally contributed and lead on the manifesto's creation and colleagues who have used the manifesto in their work and are actually out with the working group. So as we reflect back, it was on Monday the 18th of May when RLUK launched the manifesto for the digital shift in research libraries. The webinar was attended by over 450 delegates from across the world. It was a product of more than a year's work by members of the digital shift working group and the vision that it created was for the research library of the future. But critically, an overview of how this vision might be shaped and the tangible steps and work plans, which we'll touch on at the end of today's session, to enable its realization. And I had the opportunity, since I was chairing this session, to revisit the recording for the manifesto launch. And I was struck in particular by Masoud Polkar's digital shift champion and the director of Leeds University Library. And Masoud had made some closing comments that this was the beginning of a long journey, but also that it was a journey which was when we needed to think holistically around across print collections, users, space and staff. All of the multiple touch points that we experienced professionally and I think personally in our lives around digital. And these are all underpinned by the vision and the work plan of the digital shift manifesto. So today's session is really an opportunity to update on that launch, on that journey and on that ambition as we look back to the heady days of 2020 to reflect and to celebrate some of the impact and to engage you, our wider community, who sit at the heart of all of the work which RLUK does and what's the manifesto seeks to inform. It's been really fantastic to have the opportunity over the last couple of years to hear from individuals and from institutions who have used the manifesto and its framework to help to inform and shape some of their discussions internally around their own strategies and their own ways of realising some of their digital shift activities. And it's a privilege to be the chair of the digital shift working group. Its membership has grown and evolved over the last couple of years. Many original members have moved on to new roles. Many of them are now directors and new directors and new members have joined us, readily sharing their dynamism, their experience and their expertise with us. And we'll hear some of that today which I'm looking forward to. So here is today's programme. So we've got the introduction and welcome. And then following that, we'll have the early years of the digital shift manifesto from Torsten Reimer from the University of Chicago. We will then have a session on the shift to digital where colleagues Josh Sindal and Claire Knowles will share some of their experiences from their institutions and sort of back that digital cold face. We'll take a break for a few minutes and then we'll return for the shift within digital picking up around that move towards digital maturity with Ian Gifford from the University of Manchester and Susan Haftbenny from the University of Aberdeen. And then we will move into a discussion and next steps session. I'm going to provide an update just on some of the broad brush work plans and some of the activities which the digital shift working group are doing in the medium term as we move forward and we'll be actively encouraging some questions and answers. We have some provocations for colleagues on the call as well. And please, I would encourage you to continue to dynamically use the chat and use the Q&A so that we can collectively work together to celebrate and reflect on the digital shift forum. But without further ado, I am delighted to hand over to Torsten Reimer. Torsten was the chair of the digital shift working group and indeed a real leading light in the realization and creation of the manifesto. Torsten is now the Dean of Libraries at the University of Chicago. So we very much appreciate the fact that he is joining us from his morning in the windy city. And I'm going to pass over to Torsten. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the kind introduction. Let me just quickly share my screen. Yeah, thank you, William, for the introduction. It's really great to be here. Having been involved in the early stages and being a historian by training I also found that the suggested title the early years is quite fitting. But when I was reflecting on what I was going to say, there was something that was slightly bugging me about the title. And I finally realized yesterday evening what that was. And it's this. Not Pink Floyd, and I should at this point apologize to any Pink Floyd fans in the audience. But the early years I realized is a term that I think is quite often used when someone in the marketing department, things like, oh, we have this artist that we had for a really long time. And can we make a bit more money? And maybe let's make an early years compilation. And I had this in the back of my mind yesterday evening and this morning when I walked to work. And I was thinking, does this in any way apply to the work of the digital shift working group? And I'm pretty confident that I can say, no, it doesn't. I thought it might be useful to reflect a little bit about sort of the early stages of the work and maybe how envisaged this would go and how it's gone since. That sort of strikes me about giving presentations in this context is that pretty much, I think throughout my career, whenever we talked about interesting digital technology and how we can deploy it, I think easy sharing, reliable easy sharing of presentations on screen. That's something that we still haven't cracked and maybe might want to add onto a digital shift agenda. Yeah, anyway, so I was thinking about how we started the work for digital shift. And it was a working group. That's what it's still called. But I would argue it's actually become something bigger. I mean, originally we were tasked with developing this manifesto, which we did. And I was really pleased to see this because I think for those of you who have been involved in working group, it's relatively easy to pull one together. It's a bigger challenge to keep everyone focused and engaged in particular through very busy periods. But I think what we've seen already while we were working on this, there was a really, really strong resonance from across the community. And there was interest not just in the UK, but way beyond. And we've seen this in the sort of continued activity. And I would argue that the working group really has sort of shifted and become a steering group that's pulling together activities from across the different networks in our UK and also coordinating activities of other library associations and communities. And just, I think, looking back over the last two years, I think quite impressive has been achieved in terms of the number of events and activities that have been run. I'm going to say a little bit more about this later. But it seems to me, and in particular now, looking at this a bit more from the outside is that the work of this group and the whole networks and the RLUK community that's been supporting it feels really strongly embedded in the work of RLUK. I think this is partly a sign of the ongoing importance and also some of the lessons that we've learned about the importance of digital and the digital shift during the pandemic that gives me a lot of confidence that what we are really talking about is the early years. And in many ways, I think the work of the group was really just about laying the groundwork, building onto this theme that Nesut mentioned when we launched the initiative about this really being a long-term initiative. And I sort of want to approach it in the next few minutes very much from a perspective on laying the groundwork for things that are going to come over the next few years. I don't intend to speak in much detail about what's in the manifesto. I think you can you can all look that up. It's on the website, but pick up a few themes. But before I do that, I obviously have to acknowledge members of the digital shift working group. We're not going to read all the names. And as William said, I think quite a few of the job titles of people who were in the group at the time have changed. Some of us have even left country or in two cases, even changed continents and new members have come onto the group. But I think this sort of captures the membership of the group around the time when we launched the digital shift manifesto. And I should say that everyone was on this group because of some expertise that they brought personally, but also crucially because of their engagement with the RUK networks. And the RUK networks played a crucial role in pulling this all together. So at the same time, as I think I want to acknowledge individual colleagues who put a lot of time and effort into this, it's really been a true community initiative across RUK, across all the networks. And I think it's been made better and stronger for it. Now, why did we do this? If I wasn't to cliches, I would probably show a slide like this one about some attempt at visualising artificial intelligence. And in many ways, I feel it's perhaps not necessary to say why you would want to have a digital shift manifesto considering the ongoing importance of digital, not just, I think, in libraries, but crucially the transformation that we've seen in the last few years across society, that we've seen in teaching and that we've seen in research. I mean, this is obviously an important point. We are not in this just for ourselves as libraries. We're there to support the communities that we work with both in and outside of our universities and outside of our research organisations. And they've all been affected and will increasingly be affected by digital. So that in itself, I think, is a good enough reason to have a digital shift working group. But I'm presenting this, I think, with a reflection that one shouldn't approach this naively. I think sometimes digital is presented as this sort of radically new, all transforming, all changing things that will transcend the physical and transform many businesses and operations into almost completely digital forms. And that may be true in some cases, but I think it's much more nuanced when we look at the library world. And in fact, you could say that digital has been around in libraries for much longer than I have. I mean, some of you who have been around in the 80s may recognise this or sort of similar screens from library systems from the 80s. So depending on, I think, where you withdraw the line, you can comfortably say that digital has been in research libraries in the 80s. In some cases, it has been well before. And so when we're talking about a digital shift, I don't think we should. And I think, thankfully, I hope we haven't conceptualised this as something that in itself is radically new. But what I think we have seen over time in a digital environment is a shift where something that maybe initially was an isolated areas, then crew crew across wider parts of library operations is now really permeating everything that we do in libraries, even some parts of our work that have no direct digital impact are in some ways driven and informed by information and by digital elements that sit outside of it. So we're not thinking about digital as something that's new, but we're recognising that that is not just a shift towards digital, there are shifts within digital. And it's an ongoing activity where we constantly have to update our skills. We have to realise what's happening in libraries, what's happening outside of libraries. Do we speak the right language? And do we have the right interfaces of engaging with our users and patrons? And do we have the right infrastructure sort of behind our services to power and inform not just what we do, but also the thinking that goes into developing the services? So crucially, I think we thought about this as an ongoing evolving shift. And I mentioned the ongoing and evolving part in this because we didn't put out a plan and said, that's it. That's what we're going to do in two or three years and then everything is done. We realised that we would have to have an activity that can be flexible enough to react. We didn't necessarily foresee that there would be a global pandemic, but we did know that there would be other shifts and changes that would happen. And we also felt that what we are looking at is not just a shift away from physical to digital. That is way too simple. In particular for libraries, there are some businesses who maybe realise opportunities in the digital space and then they made the, in some cases bold, but in other cases also relatively easy to do them and say, let's take our resources and move them from the physical and analogue into the digital world. And we can't do this as libraries. It needs to not completely because partly we are guardians of knowledge. Now, a lot of this knowledge still exists in print form, but also the service expectations quite rightly that our users have of us. They involve access to print. They involve access to spaces. They involve physical, in-person, engagement, advice working amongst users, but also of working with library staff. These are all critical elements. So we never thought, and we never championed our approach of a digital shift that said, this is going to replace the physical, the analogue of the book, but rather thinking about complementing it. And that arguably is a lot harder because libraries have this challenge that we need to keep core physical operations going. We need to develop, evolve, improve our digital operations. That's already a big enough challenge, but then crucially we need to bring both of them together. And that's an intellectual challenge. It's also a researching challenge. And like all the other elements that I've mentioned, it is also an insignificant skills challenge. So these are all challenges that we felt we'd be facing in scoping this work. And we can see this in some of the feedback that we had from the community. I'm not going to to read through all of those, but as part of our engagement, I think a whole host of issues were raised, including for example, how to have sustainable investment in digital in a very constrained financial environment. And this goes back to the point that I've raised about supporting physical and digital. Thinking about how to approach these challenges strategically and having reliable foresight that informs you if you have scarce resources where you want to put them, how you set up a culture that really makes it maybe not seamless, but at least not an insurmountable challenge to continually improve your services and have a culture of sort of innovation that is also sort of open and transparent and makes it easy for staff to engage. And crucially, I think in my mind, probably the biggest challenge in a way is the whole matter of skills in digital innovation. That is crucial in particular an environment where we often can't pay the salaries that we need to bring experts into a library. In some areas we can, but I think we often have to think about how we can train our staff and help them gain new skills. And this is, to me, I think really one of the critical challenges, having a culture of innovation and working across our organizations and with partners to make sure we're moving in the right direction and that we have the skills and tools ready and that we are seen as trusted partners so that we can master some of these emerging technologies and some of those technologies that are really not emerging, but still I think not fully embedded in our operations. So how do we identify these community needs? I think we run a serial of virtual group meetings that were influenced by all the expertise that we had around our virtual table, but we also engage with the RUK community through the networks and brought information in. We run workshop and a range of sessions and based on this then put together a draft. And the idea then was that in March 2020 we would run sessions at the RUK conference that we don't have to cancel due to COVID and that then led to the manifesto being launched based on that engagement at the virtual event in March 2020. So that was the initial work of the group, but it's I think since evolved into something a lot wider and it's built around broadly four themes. I mean, like any attempt to reduce something as complex at this into a diagram, inevitably, I think it's a bit overly simplistic, but the key themes that we had were skills, scholarship, spaces and stakeholders. And scholarship in that sense, I think is largely about how we serve our user communities through collections, through engaging in research and teaching spaces obviously is providing the environments digital hybrid and physical in which that can happen. Stakeholders and advocacy is about the ongoing development of relationships with our partners, but also advocating for the resources that libraries need. And then skills is the point that I mentioned before, the part that powers everything and skills cut across the library and also means that we felt it was crucial in this work to think about how we can help leaders in the library sector to evolve their knowledge, their thinking because ultimately any kind of complex sort of culture change and transformation needs that well-informed leadership. And therefore we felt it was sort of critical to think about this not purely in a technical but really largely in a social and enabling context. We put together a program and just at the very high level brought it down into three phases, an initial short-term thought about maybe roughly about two years. It's sort of broadening our understanding reaching out beyond our core communities to just assess sort of where we are, what are key challenges, what kind of gaps do we currently have and then create a forum for discussion that can help sort of inform future activities. And that's the word that's largely been completed. Then I think the second phase is about more of ongoing engagement and then based on what we've learned move forward addressing for example skills gap and moving forward of activities to support the community. And then the third one we've probably deliberately kept a bit vague because it's difficult to forecast that much ahead but also we realized there would be changes and obviously COVID has been one of them. Now speaking of COVID, this I think in many ways was a test of the digital shift. It was a test of the whole way of how we worked as a group because everyone became significantly more busy but there was also significantly more demand. And RUK has been able to I think support libraries through a range of activities. There's also been a report on COVID-19 and then this article that I've screenshotted here that came out of the work of the working group. And there are a whole host of things that we've learned and I think I'm not going to go into any detail but one of the crucial ones I think that many universities realized is the importance of library spaces at the heart of the university and the massive hole that opens up when those spaces have to be closed. And the challenges of then moving operations online in an environment where the systems are maybe not quite as scalable but also I think the huge benefit that libraries have been enabled in particular, I think to deliver through the lockdowns in terms of helping to move teaching and learning online. And I think quite a few barriers that we for a long time thought would be very difficult to cross in the end, we're not that difficult to cross. I think looking forward a key challenge for us is going to be some of the access to content that we've gained, some flexibility for deploying systems and working patterns that helped us to weather the storm. How can we make sure that we don't lose them after the pandemic comes to an end whenever that will be. But certainly I think at the moment it looks like we have an environment of ongoing challenges but not the lockdowns that will be a key driver for this innovation. So that was a key test I think for the whole piece of work and it's taken us in some unexpected directions and arguably in some ways sort of really re-emphasize the importance of some physical elements of library service delivery. And I think closing now I want to highlight two of the many deliverables that already have come out of the working group. And the first one is something that I'm particularly excited about is the digital workforce development strategy. I think this is a piece of work that has really been informed by this understanding that without a skilled workforce and a culture in which this workforce can really work actively and successfully we are not going to really reap the benefits of the digital shift. That was a crucial part of this working group and it's been taking forward if I won off the UK networks and I'm really pleased that we can now sort of see this published. Now no longer being on the group but looking outside as a customer if you will I think I would encourage the group and others to really keep on the focus about helping libraries to master those challenges and help us to in an ongoing way develop our workforce because we don't know what some of the future challenges are but we know if we have a workforce that feels empowered to make changes I have the skills and access to training and the organizational culture to take on challenges to be excited about that's the key part for our success. And I think one way of supporting this that has been really very successful is the digital shift forum that's drawn participants from all over the world in several thousands of events that have already been run under sometimes really challenging circumstances where everyone was very busy and bringing in lots of different perspectives so we've all been able to capture and make available and I hope that that will also continue to grow because it's critical to bring I think the library community together to share knowledge and information and to sort of help us support each other in some of these ongoing challenges and for me, I think that's really the crucial thing that this work has achieved it's created forum at the space that we can all support each other where we can learn from each other and I think that gives me a lot of hope that we're not just already looking back over a best of catalog but that over the next years of the digital shift activity we'll see more and more exciting activities happen. Thank you very much. William, I think you muted. Yes, I'm just demonstrating that there's some digital skills I still need to pick up particularly around Zoom. So thank you very, very much, Torsten. That was great and a really good sort of kind of refresh of the sort of the foundations both of the kind of genesis of the digital shift but also where we're going. So there haven't been any questions sort of bubbling up at the moment but I'm going to encourage people to keep thinking about questions and chat. We have some thank yous to your good self and hopefully you're able to still join us for some of the rest of the session today then that would be fantastic. With that in mind then I am going to go to the next session and we will move to the shift the shift to digital bringing in Josh and Claire and there you go. As if by magic, Josh has set that up. So Josh is Associate Director for Research at the University of Nottingham and he's going to talk to us today about this manifesto for the digital shift. Thank you very much, Josh. Thank you, William. And thanks to Torsten for that overview which was very helpful. Of course, our L UK positions the digital shift as a strategic strand which cuts across all portfolios of our workers, research libraries as the nature of our work across collections, operations and audiences shifts from analog to a mixed analog digital environment. Reflecting back for me, I think it's inception added to delivery two years ago was as much about rationalising and articulating our experience as it was about declaring publicly our intentions for the next 10 years. And when it was launched I was in a different role at a different institution but now reconstituted head of open research at Lancaster University Library where we'd been guided by a digital first strategy for around a decade or so. And so when it landed, I recognised the drivers for change captured and conveyed by the digital shift manifesto. And it's fair to say that it felt compelling and it felt familiar. And it still resonates today in my current role as Associate Director for Research at University of Nottingham Libraries, Manuscripts and Special Collections. As my work, our work as a sector continues to position libraries as digital leaders enabling the effect of exploitation of technologies, pushing conceptual boundaries of what a library is and what a library does. And as a digital shift manifesto, as Torsten said, it is pervading, permeates all areas of my work. And as I go on, I'll discuss how it's aligned with my own experience over the last two years or so of working with exceptional colleagues to institutions to exploit the digital shift. And I'll explore that through our services, our infrastructure partnerships and expertise which actualise aspects of the broad portfolios of open research and digital scholarship. So over the last two years maximising our digital shift capacity has necessitated purposefully developing the skill sets of our staff. We really shouldn't underestimate the potential of our current staff to upskill. I know colleagues who hold and colleagues who have developed and applied specialist digital skills but there's no doubt at all in my mind that as we move towards 2030, the wicked challenge that we must engage with is around attracting, recruiting and retaining staff with specialist digital skill sets. Be they research software engineers, developers, learning technologists, AI specialists or indeed data scientists. Now I believe that the call to action here is both clear and compelling and agree that responding to it will require collaborations right across the sector. And so I agree that the RLUKADN digital workforce development strategy and related initiatives are really vitally important. I think over the last two years we've also been making progress in the research, training and development space providing environments where communities of practice can form within our universities that bring researchers and members of professional services together to build digital scholarship competencies and capacity. I've highlighted just a few wonderful examples of instances where we're building digital scholarship capacity within our universities and the first spring, the first thing rather that springs to my mind is our summer of data program that one of my senior research librarians here at the University of Nottingham, Beth Montague-Helen is leading. So as part of this program, Beth has convened to sell out sessions which have included Carpentries session. For those who aren't familiar with the Carpentries, they develop foundational and practical coding and data science skills through interactive workshops that enable attendees alongside the trainers to do things in practice, to take away those skillsets and apply them in their research. Now, Beth's focused on coding in R and research data management, but these approaches can build capacity right across the broad range of descriptors here on the screen. In my own day-to-day work, I'm consulting on research, grant, development and looking really at projects that will enable and embed and translate digital scholarship within the arts and humanities. In all these activities, I guess we are really nurturing that mindset of digital curiosity and experimentation, really bringing the digital to life and making it accessible to our researcher community. And I think the wonderful thing is the extent of which skills development is really unlocking the latent potential of our collections, particularly when it's joined with digital infrastructure, hopping back here just briefly to my time at Lancaster University Library in this space, a reminder of the wonderful Lancaster instance of the Cambridge Digital Library platform, which shares and preserves unique and distinctive visual and multimedia collections, high-resolution digital objects displayed alongside rich transcriptions of TEI markup. Now, I won't say too much more on this because I dare say that we'll hear more about another instance of this platform and a consortial approach in today's session from Ian. But what I will say is that initiatives like this, they really do augment the analog enabling innovative forms of scholarship that really deepen and enrich our understanding of the arts and humanities, of what it means to be human. What I will say about my experience over the last two years and our sectoral aspirations for the future is that to realise the digital potential of our collections, we really must continue to engage with complex copyright and licensing issues to ensure that we can, for example, leverage the power of text and data mining or enable the application of computational linguistic techniques that frame our collections as corpora. And I think this means interrogating our subscriptions renewals and acquisitions and negotiating terms that allow us and our researchers to apply these techniques. And that means working with product vendors as well and challenging them to deliver solutions that empower researchers, for example, by developing graphical user interfaces that enable the novice user as well as the seasoned coder to do their work. Moving on to spaces, spaces that enable library staff and professional services, researchers, students, and indeed the public to come together to develop digital scholarship practices that really open our collections to new possibilities. Spaces that are purposefully designed to blend the physical and the digital and seamless and interactive environments that act as in-q-discipline, the act as interdisciplinary incubators, excuse me while I stop forming over my words there, and as springboards really for follow-on initiatives. I wanna think about these spaces. I'm instantly taking back again to my time at Lancaster University Library and the 11 million pound capital project which included a dedicated events exhibition and collaborative space. And this includes library research labs which offer a flexible environment where the library will partner with its diverse researcher community to promote interdisciplinary open research and digital scholarship throughout the institution and beyond. I think it's important to say though that while the digital shift was at the core of our vision for these spaces at Lancaster University Library which did deliver these wonderful unique spaces that you see on screen, you don't necessarily need significant capital investments to emulate the approach or deliver similar opportunities and have no doubt that our colleagues at Lancaster will continue to provide our RLUK constituency with valuable insights by showcasing these spaces and sharing their approach during the years to come as a new member of our RLUK community. It's easy and perhaps understandable, I think to tend towards looking at the digital shift through a technical lens, through conversations that focus on next generation digital research infrastructure, data repositories, research platforms or full lifecycle research environments which enable those seamless workflows with interoperability baked in. But I think really the thing I would like us to do for just a moment is to zoom out almost and reflecting on my experience, the thing that I recognise is that the digital shift is really all about people. As Thorsten said, we can only achieve our ambitions by working with key stakeholders within our considerably sophisticated organisations be they IT services, strategic planning and governance procurement or our research offices. We need to work with these stakeholders to achieve our aims and in this sense, the digital shift can only be driven by careful relationship management and advocacy and those relationships are built on trust and credibility and so over the last two years and as we move forwards, I think it's really important that we develop that digital fluency and our own expertise and have confidence in our expertise and ability in the digital space as well. As library knowledge and information professionals, our contributions in the digital space are significant and they are nuanced and as I prepared for this session, I reflected on the last two years and was reminded of our extensive role as service providers, partners and pioneers in the open research space and a realisation crystallised and that is that we do bring the extensive expertise but we also bring equity. We double back and we focus on our values. We look to our university charters, statutes and ordinances and we champion the use of digital to provide an augmented future where the free exchange of robust research improves humanity's prospects. As library and knowledge professionals, I would assert that we stand strong as one of history's original information technology providers. Since times immemorial, we've innovated operating as a socio-technical nexus, the interface between repositories of knowledge and our people. The pace of change may have accelerated as our role has evolved but I am confident that we will continue to thrive together in our digital shift as we move towards 2030. Thanks very much for joining me. Brilliant, thank you very much, Josh. That's incredibly inspiring and I particularly liked the way in which you had reimagined our slightly cooler fashion, the framework. So I'm delighted to introduce our second speaker in this session who is Claire Knowles, who is Associate Director for Research in Digital Futures at the University of Leeds and I'm going to hand over to Claire. Thanks very much, Claire. Thank you, William. Can you see my slides, okay? Yes, you're looking good. Thank you and thank you for inviting me and thanks, Josh, for your talk. I was sat here nodding, going on, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was great to hear and to see your slides. So I actually can tell you a day about the library vision that we announced at the University of Leeds last autumn and it very much correlates with the work that's been done in the digital shift. So I'm going to talk to you a bit about how we've got to our journey through the vision over the last few years. So first of all, I want to share a quotation from Masood, our University Librarian and Keeper of the Buddenton Collection here at the University of Leeds who was also the RIUK Executive Sponsor for the Digital Shift when it was launched two years ago. And at that time, he was at the University of Leeds. So the RIUK Digital Shift Manifesto and Digital Shift Forum have played a significant role in shaping our thinking for the future of libraries at Leeds. The discussions, insights and ideas brought to life by the RIUK community were fundamental to the way we defined our digital future strategic program. So I'm going to talk a bit more about that and it's a huge thanks to the community and everything that we've seen come through in the webinars, the manifesto, et cetera, that we can build on that. And that's why it's a great community to work in, isn't it? The collaboration we see between our libraries. So a bit about the timeline. So we started work on our strategy, which has become our vision in 2019. So that's when the University of Leeds started its work on its strategy and we were following on from that. So we started right at the end of 2019, we've worked about what we were going to do and consultation began in 2020, in January. And as you can see, I've put some stars at the bottom, which were key events. So that was, I think, 17th of March, I saw on the RIUK website when the Digital Shift Manifesto was published. And then you can see those sort of red triangles, further on which were key events for us in the UK with COVID hitting and lockdowns happening and what that meant for us all and our staff and our community with that acceleration that we had to do rapidly to Digital, but also obviously what it's meant for us all getting through this, hopefully, once in a lifetime experience of the pandemic. So in May of 2020, we shared three library thought pieces which were preparing for our strategy. So I think it's interesting if you look at the names of these and then see what comes on in our vision. And they were three thought pieces, one around collections, one around research of one around student experience. So we've had a couple of other events happening. So we had our new VC, Simone Bytendike, join us in September, 2020. And there's a focus frame which it leads on collaboration and global issues, et cetera, which you can see in the title of the university strategy, which is universal values and global change. So that was launched in February, 2021. And in November of last year, we were launched Knowledge for All, the University of Leeds Lagus vision for 2030. So that is taking us on to 2030. And at the moment, we are working on the forward plans, which we're gonna release soon and we've split the vision into two forward plans, one to the end of 2025, and then we enter the one 2026 to 2030. So when you look at the university's strategy, you can see down in that bottom corner, digital transformation is a major part of the university's strategy. So there's those five key elements under the strategy. And then there's an enabling strategy, which very much picks on the culture that we need, people, the ways that we work, the facilities, the equipment, what do we need to facilitate that sustainability? We have an aim for net zero at the University of Leeds for 2030 and our role in the city and the region in which we work and in which our staff live. So Knowledge for All has four key elements, one of which is digital future, the other one open higher education, then sustainable environments and enriched experiences. It's very much with our library vision that it cuts across the library. It doesn't relate to the structure and what team because these cut across all of our teams to a greater or lesser degree that we all need to be involved in the digital, opening up our education be that our teaching materials, tutors, our research, which I'm heavily involved in the sustainable environments, that's our digital environments, our built environments, what we put in those spaces, the use of them and enriched experiences, the physical, the digital for people who are in Leeds, people who may never come to Leeds, people who interact with us remotely. And then there's the underpinning themes from that and this very much comes back to what Josh was talking about about the people. We cannot do any of this without the people. And that's where it is fostering the culture of innovation. You try surface, can do what can happen. How do we achieve these things without doing that? Sometimes small initiatives, sometimes bigger projects, opportunities for all, enabling all of our staff to be involved in delivering the vision and those opportunities across the whole of the vision as well and forming meaningful partnerships be they partnerships within the library, within the university, within our local community, within consortiums like RRUK, N8 and White Rose that we're involved in as well or international collaborations. We need those partnerships to enable us to achieve this and again to bring together things across for the nation. So another thing that we've been doing at Leeds very much came out about the changes that we saw with those rapid changes that we made for COVID and to enable us to react really quickly to what we needed to do during the COVID situation. So last April, we started work looking at scenarios of what was going to happen in the next academic year. So we base this very much on two axes. What's going to happen with social distancing because that really impacts our space and who could come through and the presence on campus. So this is the time when we were planning that we were very much still social distancing. So we looked at the four scenarios for this but very much focused on the two in the middle that are highlighted in blue because we've pretty much done social distancing in very limited access. That was the first lockdown and we've been paired for that and that's what we were working with in that situation. And then scenario for no social distancing and limited presence was a different thing altogether. We didn't feel it was likely that we'd need to plan for but we did do planning around social distancing and hybrid teaching and no social distancing and hybrid which is where we're at at the moment. There's no social distancing in place but it's very much still a hybrid environment for us with teaching and pupils presence on campus and likely to continue like this going forward in some shape or form. So across the library services we looked at the renovations delight of which I picked up I think from Michelle Blaker and one of these webinars about what would we like to keep that we've changed? What do we want to stop doing from pre-COVID or stop that we've added? You know, one of those things that we added that we don't necessarily want to continue. What do we want to change that we've done it but it wasn't quite right and we want to adjust that? And what are the things that we'd like to add? You know, we're doing that, why don't we do some of that? And then we looked at considering that into three different areas. That's our people, staff, students ourselves and the public spaces, user spaces, office spaces storage spaces as well and the digital so our systems, training skills and very much when you look at what came out of it even the people in the spaces a lot of it had digital elements to that as well. You know, if you're looking at, well we still want to be able to continue to work from home there's a digital element to that and e-books, et cetera. And then we looked at adding the muskud sheds and weights with the mosquit. So these are some of the things that came out from those scenario plannings and it was very much things to keep and to add and it picked up on the digital elements of this virtual events we've all seen and this is a great example how we meet a much wider audience with having moved to these digital events. There's nothing quite like meeting people face to face but the reach, the flexibility being able to record and watch back later it's been great to be able to do them like this. We've had issues with our inquiry system and that just came to the fore where more and more things were coming through because people couldn't necessarily face to face in COVID. Hybrid spaces, hybrid meetings all came across as well. The digital exhibitions, it's been great for us to be able to open our collections digitally and we've seen that as well with the launch of our exhibitions the Cottony Fairies exhibition launch that we had online got far many more people than we'd fit in the space in parks and court. Opportunities to engage with people through volunteering, et cetera, and consultations. So these are things that we came through COVID and we wish to keep. And then back to the vision. So as I said previously that one of the elements of the library vision is the digital futures. And this way picks up those different elements that we see in the digital skills that not only skills for us for ourselves but skills for our students supporting them in the digital skills that they need for study and for the workplace going forward. User focus, digital experience and the digitization processes very much like how what do people want from when they go online? What makes it easy for them? How do they want to interact with our collections? Digital humanities and digital scholarships are picking that up and digital and information poverty and ethics which again, with respect to those skills our students come from many backgrounds and we need to make sure that we're providing opportunities for all of them. Digitization program, this really came across during COVID and access to materials for the arts, humanities and cultures faculty at the University of Leeds, e-books, et cetera and we're looking at how we digitize more make them available, what to want, how will they be used? Looking at our infrastructure we desperately need to do that and that's what we're looking at at the moment to make sure that it enables these other things to happen and connections to be made between collections and then looking at records management and digital preservation. How do we preserve the born digital and digitized content? And then lastly, digital is also coming across in other areas of the library vision. It's not just that in the digital futures when we're looking at open educational resources and the White Rays University Press there's the infrastructure behind that. How do we make things available in the way that people want to use items beyond the written word, including visualizations, images, 3D models, et cetera? The smart campus and especially with our aims for net zero how do we make sure we're making the best use of our spaces and they're adaptable? Maker and entrepreneurial spaces I'm very jealous of those pictures I saw Josh. Sustainable storage, you know we need to make sure that's for our digital our physical, we're getting things out and we need to reduce getting things whether not necessarily our engagement program is very much aimed to be physical and digital and hybrid going forward. And then the user experience for all of those physical and digital spaces. And as I said before, underpinned by people with the innovation, opportunities and meaningful partnerships. So it's inclusion, it's very much that the digital is here, there and everywhere throughout what we do. And we need to remember that in the way in which it's an underpinning environment to help us deliver what we want to do going forward. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Claire. That's fantastic and incredibly exciting and ambitious. There's quite a lot there. I don't think you're gonna be sure of things to do. So I'm going to open the floor as well if colleagues have questions for Josh and Claire in the next few minutes before we take a break. We have one question. Unfortunately, it's actually for me since I was reflecting, listening to both of your talks about the sort of comments around sort of values and equity and various other things which I think are kind of baked into the digital shift. But kind of Lisa from Aberdeen was asking, I kind of wondered about whether there's a culture wrapper around the sort of framework and it's great seeing Josh, seeing it sort of reimagined as well, helps you sort of think about it in a slightly different way and also the sort of comments around the sort of values and all the things that I think we sort of take for granted. So Lisa, I'm actually not sure that I have many more thoughts on this just now since it's really only just sort of percolated but I think it is and whether wrapping it in a culture sort of wrapper is the right approach and I would value Josh and Claire's thoughts on that since it was some of your work that kind of just really sort of triggered that. But I think it is incredibly important that for all the focuses on digital shift as you pointed out and as Masoud had said back at the launch, this is holistic. It is not just a, it is an ongoing journey and it is also one that has, it is very much grounded in some of our values and our kind of approaches to various things as institutions. I've just, yeah, just some thoughts to contribute there, William. And I'd probably come back to, I think it's actually a misquote from Peter Drucker, the line of culture each strategy for the breakfast. But I do think it's fundamental to our endeavors in this space and I often think about culture as the oil that lubricates the machinery of our great institutions of higher learning and that's so much about how we create the environment and the ethos in which you have that digital curiosity mindset, that growth mindset. So I really quite like the idea that there's a culture wrapper that we can encase all of this within that or it becoming in and of itself a strand that's interwoven into what we do here. So yeah, some really good points there for us all to reflect on. I don't know if Claire's got any thoughts as well. Yeah, definitely agree. And we've been doing some UX training at the University of Leeds and it's really interesting thinking of it, those small things that you can try and that you're not afraid to fail because I think that's what often where people think, oh, it's so big and where do I start? And thinking about, well, what's the problem that my users are facing or I'm facing and how can I go about trying that? Because I think that's where it's building confidence as well, I can try that, I can do that, this is it and it is that innovative way of doing it. And I think maybe breaking down sometimes what digital means, that digital is not central IT. You know, and that's probably where sometimes people think, well, I'm not doing digital, but I'm doing this on the other and it's like, no, that is digital. And I think that's where the carpentries are really helpful as well. Josh, going back to what you've said, it just show that some of that data manipulation, data munging, moving things between some of it is digital as well. It is and I think I'm going to sort of take the Josh Sendall copyrighted phrase digital curiosity away today. I think that's something that I think is absolutely, you know, to be encouraged and I guess sort of plugs back into that value. Claire, you have a question from the chat, which is, can you send them a bit more about discussions and work around open education resources? Yeah, so we've been doing work with the White Rose Libraries and there's a toolkit I think coming out, which is going to, I think was announced at another meeting earlier this week. So yeah, watch out for that. It's very much been done at White Rose level with our colleagues in York and Sheffield about OERs. And we also have an open educational champion at the University of Leeds that we work with. And it's very much looking about, what does that mean OERs? What do we want? How are we going to share them, et cetera? So I think we're very much starting on some of that and hopefully you'll see more coming from White Rose and from Leeds, right? Okay, so if you can... Thank you, Lisa. Yeah, if you can share and let us know around that, that would be fantastic. Susie Cheek has asked a question for you both. How important do you think the technician commitments could be for supporting recruitment and nurturing talent, but also for positioning what the library can offer? So obviously the technician commitment is something that RLUK has been very involved with and very committed to. I wonder if there's anything you guys could comment around that? Critical. You know, I was just gonna say, I think that the work that RLUK, the AHRC and ARMA are doing in this space is really fundamentally important. I'm really looking forward to seeing some of the outcomes from that work. So very important is what I would say. Yeah, completely agree. I think it's critical and I think it's really useful for us in the conversations we have in our institutions as well. I was talking to somebody going, do you know how RLUK signed up for this? You know, how does this align what you're doing? And I think that's, it's really critical. And I think it's helpful for us and for those we work with. Fantastic. And just in the background there, my RLUK colleagues have just posted the RLUK link to the technician's commitments. So if anyone is sort of parsing chat, you will find a few links and various things to pick up from. So we are ready for heading into the second session of this afternoon and starting to look at that shift within digital. And I am delighted that we are joined, first of all by Ian Giverd who's the head of digital development at the University of Manchester. So I'm going to, without further ado, hand over to Ian. Thank you, William. So let me just press the magic button here screen. Let's see what happens. Can everybody see that? Okay. Okay, let me just, this is where I need to start the slideshow. All right. Perfect. Right. Great. Yes, thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. As William said, I'm Ian Giverd, head of the digital development team within our research and digital horizons directorate at the University of Manchester Library. And I'm going to give a brief overview of some of the things that we've been doing in relation to our ongoing digital transformation. Obviously, I can only cover a few things in the time. So I'm going to try and focus on some of the major changes and developments from the last two years that we hope will help us to mature as digital practitioners, innovators, and service developers. So if I can squeeze this all in, similarly to Claire, I'm going to briefly cover our strategic vision and how digital is firmly embedded within it. And I'm going to talk a bit about some of the structural changes that have been made in support of this. I'll share a few practical examples of digital innovation at the library. Reflect on some lessons from recent collaborations we've been involved in and ended with a quick reference to some other related work and future plans that we have. So I joined the library in 2010 and as with many other libraries, the digital transformation has always been happening. We've already undergone two major digital programs between 2013 and 2019, one called our library and one called digital first. We've also had ongoing attempts to introducing some form of agile working with varying degrees of success. In fact, to try and facilitate this, we became early adopters for the university's Office 365 and Teams rollout program and actually got access on the 2nd of March, 2020, exactly three weeks before the national lockdown, which I have to say made a huge difference to our ability to respond to the pandemic in the early stages. In 2019, Chris Pressler joined Manchester as university librarian. And as you've seen, we had a good track record with digital programs, but we'd never really set our sights further ahead in the next two years. And Chris immediately set about working on establishing a long-term vision for the library, which got interrupted by the pandemic, but it was finally published in January, 2021 and it's called Imagine 2030. So it has strong links to the university's strategy and builds nicely on our previous kind of work for the previous decade in digital innovation. It has three strategic programs focusing on our local, national and international presence and each program has an explicit digital element, although similarly to the league's vision, it's clearly recognized that digital is fundamental to the success of the entire program. So each program has a number of league priority areas. The first program is called URM Global and it has Manchester Digital Collections as a priority area. The second program is called National Research Library in the North and has digital scholarship as a priority. And the final program based at the local level is called our library and it has what's called a digital library, Manchester as a priority area. I'll do a little unpacking of those three digital areas. So the first priority area is called Manchester Digital Collections, which as well as being a reference to a range of collections and activities is also the name of a specific system and just as alluded to this already, the system was the subject of a case study actually for the new review of academic librarianship which I think may have already been linked here as it became a major priority for us during the pandemic. So MDC as we shorten it to is a high quality triple IF image viewer with curated content containing rich TEI metadata and it's based on Cambridge Library Digital Viewer. It was launched in January 2020 with nine collections and about a month into the lockdown when the dust settled, we realized initially to our surprise that it was possible for us to actually keep developing it remotely. And we made a decision to double down with quite an aggressive content loading schedule and have managed to increase the number of collections to 35 within two years, which far exceeded our original expectations. We've also developed a number of technical innovations in the system, including a dynamic, an interactive homepage and a number of backend tools to support curatorial staff working on images and content. In addition to this, in May 2021, we launched the first exhibition in the new Manchester Digital Exhibitions platform, which is based on Amica S. And we're currently working on developing a university-wide service where academics can choose between a more limited self-service model based on a standard template or a bespoke service working with library developers for more customized content and features. Now both of these systems are key contributors to our second priority area, which is a digital scholarship. So we have been contributing to digital scholarship in many different ways for a number of years, but never really in a clearly coordinated fashion and with little or no strategic direction. So we've just undergone a major academic consultation about the library's contributions to digital scholarship. And we formed a project board, I'm including representatives from academic and research, an operations group, and we're in the middle of drafting a vision statement and a roadmap, sorry, I jumped ahead, for the next few years so we can provide a unified view of all the library does, consolidated service catalog, and a clear direction of travel for the future. The final priority area is, well, it's basically still to be defined. So we've turned the digital library Manchester and we're holding an internal visioning workshop in a few weeks. And it could actually encompass and any number of things as this slide attempts to show. A critical part of it from my point of view as well as my colleagues and digital services team is having a clear strategy in place around infrastructure and managing growth and how we can adequately develop and support future services to meet goals of this vision that I might have said that's not all it will contain and there'll be a number of aspects to it, but early stages for that one. So in order to ensure the libraries in a position to effectively implement this vision, during 2021, we had a major restructuring exercise affecting the whole library called digital, called library reshaping, which included the creation of new digital leadership positions, including Lorraine Beard, who I'm standing in for today, who's the head of our directorate, and included my role as head of digital development, also my colleague, Kieran Talber, who's head of digital services and Bida, who's the research data management strategic lead. And it included a number of changes and key changes within the digital teams themselves. So within our digital services team, these changes included creating clear routes for development and progression, bringing library systems and support teams closer together and enabling more empowerment and developed decision-making at lower levels of management. In the digital development team, two senior developer roles were created, increasing the total number of our developers. Again, enabled clear progression routes for technical staff. In addition to this, the library's web and digital communication developers who were previously in the comes a marketing team moved into the development team, which among other things has enabled us to work more closely and collaboratively on website development and innovations. So speaking of innovations, I'm going to move on to a few practical examples of things that we've been working on over the last couple of years. Firstly, live dashboards have long been an interest of mine ever since I was a library developer. And just prior to the lockdown, you developed an in-house digital dashboard on a physical screen displaying occupancy data alongside live physical checkout information, breaking things down by faculty and we used a bit of AI to show things like common duples and triples. But as soon as the lockdown occurred, it became redundant and we had to pull the plug. So very shortly after the lockdown, we ran an experiment to see if we could reuse some of the digital elements of the dashboard and turn it into a digital only dashboard. And we managed to do this up to a point because we only have access to a couple of sources for live e-resource usage. But we did manage to link it to live information from a number of other systems or services such as our digital collection system, our library form system and one or two others as well. We did it fairly rapidly, but it served an important purpose in the early stages of the lockdown when many of people assumed that because the physical library was closed, that was it, the whole library was closed and nothing was going on. So this was a really nice way for us to visually demonstrate that we were still very much open for business and there were still lots of things happening. Secondly, we did a lot of soul searching during the lockdown about our digital interfaces, thinking about the experience of remote users when this was the only way they could access services. One thing we questioned was, why do we generally treat our websites as one-way message boards or was presenting information in a static hierarchical fashion when that's not really what the web was designed to be? And we've decided to experiment a bit with this on the web presence for our newly launched Office for Open Research in April this year when instead of just defaulting to our usual way of presenting things, we've actually stored web content in a graph database with the intention of making display content more dynamic and relevant. So all the articles are tagged and we can dynamically pull out things like latest and trending content and allow users to explore tagged and related content in a way which wasn't really easy when we defaulted to our standard CMS approach. I mean, it's still early days with this but we're hoping to do some more interesting things with it over time. Finally, one of our biggest successes over the last two years is the adoption of robotic process automation or RPA within the library's development team as an effective tool for automating repetitive data-centric tasks which is what RPA is particularly good at. Working closely with our ITS automation team we've been able to utilize our university sent for UIPAP platform, UIPAPB being the kind of the vendor and platform which supports scalable RPA while allowing us to develop and support our own robots. So here's some examples of processes that we've automated and some of which have actually had a really big impact on both the teams and the services they support. So to pick one out, our previous process for transferring student data to Cortex for our e-textbook program was highly problematic. It could take days to make changes to course module information which resulted in poor user experience but now it's extremely efficient and we've had a drastically reduced number of access issues. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about two major collaborations that we've been involved in over the past few years which have had a big impact on us. So following our initial project with Cambridge to adopt their image viewer platform they have now launched an open source consortium for the underlying platform and technology and we are working very closely alongside both Cambridge and Lancaster University to move to a collaborative development model as well as developing a shared vision and set the values for the ongoing development of the platform. Alongside that we've been involved in a major international development project with Harvard and Stanford universities turning Stanford University's email archiving and appraisal total keypad into a full blown email preservation system which we're co-project managing with Harvard as well as providing the development resource. So aside from any software or service deliverables these projects have had a big impact on us as before these projects we've not really been involved in many large scale collaborative development projects and in the past we've often been quite hesitant to get involved in large scale projects and preferring quite often to do things ourselves and have that control over those projects. So although there have been and continuously many challenges in working closely with other large institutions in addition to the benefits of shared resources shared responsibility and support, et cetera. There have been massive benefits in observing interacting with and learning from other team cultures and approaches firsthand which have been a real revelation to us and it's actually kind of changed our mindset I think in terms of the way that we approach large development projects and we're beginning to think much more and more about actively looking for development partners from the outset. And so we're kind of thinking now we have a few examples where we can actually do this with some research development projects that we have on the go at the moment. There are of course a lot of other things going on each of these areas could be a presentation topic on their own. We have lots happening with research data management. We have some major library spaces projects in the pipeline. Hybrid working is obviously something that's affected everybody in a very powerful way which we've been working along with. There's also been some quite interesting work taking place in Manchester around cyber response which was flagged as one of the major risks for us. And I've been doing some work on behalf of the library to understand our readiness really to deal with them cyber attack such as doing guided exercises with external consultants and reviewing the mitigations that we have in place if that happened. And finally, just in terms of future plans work is continuing on all the priority areas I've mentioned. We're continuing to realise the benefits of the reshaping project. We want to do a lot more with RPA if we can and we're planning to run a chat about pilots over the next year. And we'd like to try and identify a few more practical use cases for AI in the library. We found it a few, but that's not been as straightforward as we first thought. We want to continue with our experiments with web and particularly in relation to our special collections and how their access and displayed over the website. And as I mentioned, we'll be looking to continue and extend our collaborations and what there's a particular software platform that we've been working on called the Open Access Compliance Platform and we're currently actively seeking people that might want to partner with us on that particular project. So, that is everything I was going to cover. I'm going to hand stop showing if I can find the button. Fantastic, Ian. Well, you guys have clearly been busy over the last couple of years. So there's some really exciting initiatives and some real breadth of work there. So, fantastic. So, I will actively encourage colleagues if I may have a question or two for you, but I'm going to wait until we do that and we'll wait till the end of this session. So, I'm going to introduce our second speaker in this session, Susan Hafpeni, who is Head of Research on Information Learning Services from Sunny Aberdeen. Although, I believe, Susan, you may be referring to some work from another institution as part of your presentation. Yes, very much so. I am joining you from Aberdeen at the moment, but I'm going to be reflecting on the work that I undertook when I was working at the University of York. So, I'll just get my slides up now and hopefully I can work technology seeing as I'm going to be talking to you about digital skills. So, hopefully you can all see my screen now. Looking good. Great. So, what I'm going to talk about now is sort of the work that we undertook at the University of York in terms of developing a programme of staff digital skills initiatives. So, at this point, I do want to give a big shout out to the people on the call who are from York and in particular, Ariel Rebman, who I believe is on the call, who was instrumental in working with me on this project since she joined the University of York in 2019. Hopefully I got that right, Ariel. So, this is going to be a whistle-stop tour of basically the last six years of developing a digital skills programme. So, some of this work is before the publication of the digital shift manifesto, but much of it aligns and is informed by that because during this time, I did work closely with Massoud, who was obviously leading in the digital shift area for RLUK. There was also Michelle Blake, who was working on this project at York and Sarah Thompson as well, who was working on this project as one of the senior managers at York and involved in the digital shift work as well. Okay, I think I've dropped all the names I was going to at the beginning. I'll get into the presentation now. So, as I mentioned, this is going to be a whistle-stop tour of sort of six years worth of work. So, we first started looking at the development of digital skills at York back in 2016. So, what kicked all this off was the Maycore Break Report, which was published by a select committee from the House of Lords, who were looking at digital skills and the digital economy. They were really exploring the exponential development of digital technologies and what that impact will be on the workforce. And this report really indicated that need to develop digital skills. So, it showed that 56% of the workforce needed the digital skills of a digital maker. So, being able to code and do complex digital tasks or digital workers, so being able to configure digital systems. 95% of the workforce would need basic digital skills as well. And there's a lot of concern at the time about us not having those capabilities within the workforce and there being a digital skills deficit, which I'm sure you've come across in this time as well and been working on your own strategies towards addressing. So, in response to this at York, we decided we'd launch a program of staff digital skills projects. Our initial aim was to develop this scalable and sustainable digital literacy program. We were ambitious in our approach of wanting it to meet the varying needs of all our stakeholders. So, it wasn't just for library staff at this stage, it was right from the offset for all staff at the university. And we really wanted this to ensure that we got the best return on the technology that we had. So, it was about raising awareness, baseline capabilities, surfacing the information we, you know, services we had and really about launching a blended learning program. So, our first stage to doing this was to map what we already were doing and to identify the key project. So, we already had some digital skills training that we were delivering on and we'd already start to explore a number of projects which intersected with digital skills. As a result of this, we did formulate three key projects that we were gonna work on in the initial phases. So, the key one was information services. So, this was working with our own staff to build digital capability. We also wanted to look at digital leadership and partner with organizational development and people at the University of York where we had leadership programs in place. So, we wanted to embed digital skills within those programs. And we also had another strand that we were looking at at the time which are training pathways which was a project which was going to develop the materials that we needed to in response to the needs from the various groups we were engaging with. So, really at the first stages of the project it was a lot of learning. We didn't just launch all these programs straight away. We really needed to understand what our stakeholders needed in terms of digital skills and what support we already had, what support we would need to develop. So, we spent a lot of time looking at existing digital capabilities frameworks. Our initial objective wasn't to develop our own framework, it was to work with what we got there. So, we were looking at the JISC model which was established in 2015. And a bit later on we were looking at the Department of Education model for digital skills which came out a little bit later on, let's say 2018 for that. As a result of this, we were kind of working with 95 digital capabilities that we were trying to run getting an understanding of confidence on, getting an understanding of what resources we had to that. And running focus groups across all these skills. So, it was quite granular the work that we were doing at this stage. And this resulted in lots of audits. And here I've got a graph up from one of our audits which was mapping skills to existing training that we were doing. We did spend a lot of time doing this and if I can offer some advice here, don't go as granular when you're looking at auditing digital skills. Because it did take us a lot of time. We did get a lot of data from that but in terms of the usable data, by the time you'd sort of written reports and collated it, people had developed their digital skills, things have moved on. So that was certainly the beginning part in terms of the intelligence gathering. We were going a bit too much of a deep dive. Although the focus groups that we ran and process mapping as part of this intelligence gathering, I did find a really useful exercise in that early stage. And as part of those focus groups, one of the things that was really key that came out of that was some of these attitudinal or psychological barriers that people have with engaging with digital skills. So people saying, oh, it's not my job or people saying like they already know there was a lot of overconfidence when actually abilities weren't really there so evidence that or underconfidence or being scared of saying that you're failing because you're talking to your manager in these focus groups. So we knew whatever interventions we put into place, we'd need to be mindful of this attitude of oh, I can't or I can already do this or the time constraints. So it was really helpful to gather that rich feedback from the focus groups. Another thing that came out in these early stages as well was baseline digital skills. So this was back in sort of 2017, 18 that we were launching this, but it was really clear at the early stages of this project that we needed to address really basic digital capabilities. One of the things that came up time and time again in the focus groups, particularly with IT colleagues was people don't know what a browser is. So before we could really start to build on digital capability and get into some of the aspirational goals of our project, we knew that we'd need to develop a guide and I've got that up on the screen now of the IT Essentials Guide, which would enable us to point to that and really give people that starting point before we moved into any of their more complex tasks. So that really brings me into when we started, once we gathered all that intelligence, started to get an understanding of our stakeholder groups, we really started to develop some resources in response to developing staff digital skills. So first thing that we did was we formulated our approach, which was very much based on the focus group work and our understanding of digital skills and what we wanted to achieve. So what we wanted to do was map our new program into these three foundational areas for developing digital skills. So we had IT Essentials, which have talked about those baseline skills. We had working practices, which we really wanted to contextualize in the type of technologies and the infrastructure that we had at York, what the systems were. We're a bit atypical in terms of higher education in the fact that we were using Google, rather than Microsoft products. So there were some of that that we needed to consider when we were developing training and skills frameworks. And the final part of that framework was really thinking about digital transformation. Some of this was informed by this SAMA model that I've got on the other side of the screen, which came from our IT colleagues who are really interested in how we move from translation using digital tools to digital transformation. As part of this process, we did develop our own skills framework and mentioned that we were working with the GISC one and the government basic digital skills framework, but we were working at such a granular level when we had like 93 capabilities to 134. I think we had at one point, one of my colleagues who joined the project Friday Chidlow said, this is just unworkable. We can't have all these capabilities that we're mapping to. So we developed our own digital skills framework for working practices at York. It was split into these six core areas in terms of IT essentials, innovation, ethics, collaboration, information literacy and communication. And then within those six areas, we just had 24 skills. So a much more reasonable and manageable amount of skills to map to. We also developed a digital skills diagnostic based on this framework that people could start to assess their confidence within these various areas. We did introduce some additional training and support. We already had some training sessions and we've been very much focused on bespoke training for various departments, but we decided it would be useful to launch some generic training sessions that all staff would come along to. So we've put these into the three key areas that we had for our framework and we've got them there. So in terms of some introductory workshops to Google, some bite-sized training sessions for staff over a lunchtime and through to developing an app script course so people could look at how they could automate processes. We had the program which was looking at digital leadership as I mentioned, and as part of this, we were able to embed digital skills into their leadership, existing leadership programs. And we also worked with the people and organizational development to embed digital skills in some other endeavors they were working on. And probably our key achievement at this stage was getting digital skills acknowledged in all professional services, staff, performance development reviews which were done on an annual basis. By this stage in the summer of 2019, we had got senior backing for this project as well. So the VC was talking about this and supported our digital skills framework and also the chief operating officer who was talking about digital culture at this stage. We then moved into the final stage of this project which I'll just quickly whip through in terms of looking at digital culture. So it wasn't the end of our digital skills journey. I feel like it was just another beginning for us to work through this. So obviously changing context at this time, we all know there was a global pandemic. This really changed our working practices. It meant we had to digitize processes. It meant our work force really needed to develop digital skills. It felt again like we were going back to 2015 with some of the reports that were coming out in terms of the skills deficit. We hadn't cracked it. We still needed to work on the development of both basic and advanced digital skills for our workforce and ensure that there was real engagement with any training we were putting on. So we did see an increase in training at this time and we saw an increased engagement with the training we were offering at York but it still didn't reach all the workforce from the reports that were coming out then. It's about 40% that new initiatives were reaching in terms of digital skills development. So we still had some way to go. At York then we did have some developments that we were working on and I suppose these will be similar to what you're experiencing at your own institutions with hybrid working, new change programs that you might have or new organizational structures as part of this. Throughout these new projects though from the library and information services, we really did start to engage with the conversation in terms of any success of a digital transformation project is reliant on people. It became our mantra at most project meetings that we went to. You've got to think about the people. You've got to think about the skills development as part of anything that you're using with digital technologies. So this brought us to a new vision for staff digital skills at York which was really looking at a culture of digital curiosity making the perceived impossible possible. And I really promise I didn't edit that slide, Josh. It was up there before I think it's minds working in that sort of digital shift and digital mindset that we are that it really comes down to that culture. So we started looking at sort of developing digital fluency and having a digital mindset to enable that resilience and keep pace with demands of a fast changing environment. We wanted to really emphasize in the new objectives the new ways of working in digital transformation and digital leaders were still key for this next phase of the project. So our next chapter at York but also as I was leaving York, I will say we started to formulate some digital first principles for embedding this digital culture. We start to look at the development of a core set of digital tools to really help build advanced capability in use of that core set rather than having sort of a disparate collection of technologies that we're using. And we started to think about how we could engage with members of our community to be digital advocates, champions and coaches so a more devolved IT support model. And with that, I will put up the slide with acknowledgments there were lots of people who've worked on this project and hand over for questions. And Aztec, thank you very much, Susan and clearly great minds thinking alike. I don't know that both you and Josh could have a book ended the two sessions around digital curiosity within the digital shift any better. So opening the floor, we've got a couple of minutes before we get into the last session. We will need to finish absolutely just before 4pm but opening the floor for Susan and Ian. So I'm just going to sort of shamelessly say, Susan, yeah, I think a lot of that certainly at the level of York resonates with the wider work that we want to look at around the digital skills framework. And it's interesting that you comment that some of it feels as if looking at those reports from 2020, 2021 that perhaps sort of nationally or more broadly there's not really been as much progress so which is really interesting but it looks as if certainly from the baseline and the programming and things that you've done then that clearly, York has made a big impact I think across the piece. Yeah, it's quite interesting with the report. Sometimes I look at it and I feel, oh, it's depressing but I think in terms of the baseline capabilities we have improved and depending which report you read I mean, if you read the Lloyds consumer index you made like five years worth of progress in terms of those basic digital skills in that time. So we are seeing, as you say, there is some wins in there. So I hope it didn't come across too negatively. No, I wouldn't say that it was, I think it was sort of pragmatic and indeed actually sort of underscores as Thorsten was kind of commenting and as we'll say just briefly in the next piece although I may not need to that it reinforces how important the work that we're spinning up around the digital skills framework and the digital workforce strategy actually is not just from sort of that baseline but through to particularly thinking about the work some of that reshaping work Ian that you've been doing at Manchester as well and really sort of harnessing quite a lot of those sort of higher level skills sort of a much more kind of specialist digital skills and obviously then rethinking some of the work with the websites or moving things forward with CDL and so on. Yeah, definitely. I mean, this has been mentioned before that recruitment is hard to get those raised specialist and I think we've been quite lucky and we've had some people in the team that have come over from ITS and have brought some of those more kind of advanced skills and knowledge of how to kind of do some more interesting things within the website but it's similarly with the AI as well. You can talk to people about it but actually and you can kind of buy stuff off the shelf with AI solutions baked into it but how is to be used in a kind of a more practical way where you can adapt it to special use cases it's quite difficult I think to get those kind of quite advanced skills in place with enough understanding of library circumstances and use cases and the actual skills you need to adapt it as well. So we're here, we're still kind of working our way through it really. Yeah, no, I can absolutely empathise with that. One question that I was just going to join to the mix so I was really interested in the sort of that collaboration piece that you're doing. So is that something you're finding I guess in the one hand quite scary but on the other hand incredibly valuable as you know obviously you've been doing work with kind of Lancaster as CDL has become more open source and even again the work with kind of I've jotted down E-pad and Stanford and email for digital preservation. So I think that's been really interesting to see as well. Yeah, it's been a huge learning exercise for us and the funny thing with those partnerships we didn't necessarily set out looking to do them. I mean the digital collections one which was driven by a very enthusiastic academic who kind of hated our existing image of you early on. So it was something we got involved in necessity and with E-pad we were kind of adapting the software which got Stanford's attention and we were sort of invited in but it just the huge benefits that we've had from just engaging with them by week basis and comparing our own approach with theirs it's really made us realize that even though there are it's challenging sometimes. It's kind of made us kind of hungry to do more collaborations really. I think our mindset was very more reticent and stuff. We were quite lucky having a big development team that could do quite a lot of stuff on our own but we're not really experienced at the sort of power I guess of kind of those really intense collaborations and it has changed the way we look at things and we're really keen to kind of be a bit more proactive now I think in terms of future collaborations and there's a lot more than just the benefit that you get from this particular software it really is about those developing those relationships which along lasting sometimes and can lead to other things in the future. So it's been a really beneficial experience. We're talking about collaboration but having the experience of it is another thing. Absolutely, well thank you both. We've only got a few minutes left so we're going to lead into the last slide but can I ask all of our collective audience to just give you that virtual hope you can feel the virtual glow of applause and thanks. We've had sort of various comments and so on as well. So thank you both very, very much for that. I think there's a lot to sort of pick up and take from there and we're just going to move into the final session where we've only got a few minutes so I'm just going to give a flavor of an update of some of the work that we're doing around the digital shift working group ourselves and give colleagues an opportunity for any sort of last questions that they may have. In the last couple of minutes then I just wanted to highlight. So as Thorsten had commented the digital shift working group I'm not going to read all the names here but obviously we're delighted that some of our members Susan and Claire were able to join us today. The digital shift working group is drawn from across all of our UK's networks and it has been incredibly satisfying to work with all of these colleagues because it does cut across all of the work of all of the networks and embed itself across all of the strategies. As Thorsten and Identify had commented these were some of the five areas in the short term. So some of that included the highlights such as the COVID-19 report, the article in the new review, a lot of the engagement with HRC, stakeholder mapping and so on. So there's been a lot of really good foundational work which has been done led by Thorsten during his time at the group. And I really just wanted to finish with the two areas that we're really building on going forward there's engage and build and engage is around one of the key pieces of that is going to be looking at doing some baseline of where individual institutions are as part of the digital shift and some of their kind of IT, some of their resilience, their engagement around the various different dimensions and around build that really leans into what Susan had commented around the sort of digital skills by having that scaled up collectively across research libraries UK and that's through the digital workforce strategy which is going to be coordinated through the associate director's network but again we'll cut across all of the, all of the our own UK networks and we'll tie in to the strategy and some of the broader work which we are doing.