 Okay, we're ready to go. Welcome to Directions and Digital Scholarship. I'm Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director Emerita of CNI, and I'm assuming you can all see the first slide up on the screen, yes, because I don't see it from here, so I just wanted to make sure. I'm really delighted to be here with you today to talk about this initiative. In 2022, Cliff started to talk to me about where CNI might want to go programmatically in digital scholarship, and he thought it was time to kind of take stock of what was going on in the community. Looking back at where things came from and how they were established, how they related to the institutional mission and priorities, what sustainability looked like at this point, what currently is happening with programs as we emerge from the pandemic on campuses, and where people think these programs are going in the future. And as we talked, we discussed that this really needed to be broader than talking about the term digital scholarship, and so that's why the subheading for this initiative is support for digital data intensive and computational research, and I think that's a very important piece of what the program was about. And so we began to talk about this last year, and in January of 2023, we actually started the program. We started with interviews online of 12 leaders in the library field or leaders of digital scholarship programs, and these were one-hour Zoom interviews, and I had two purposes in mind for these interviews. One was I had created a profile template for institutions to complete because everyone wants to know what's happening, what do these programs actually do, what's their staffing like, who do they serve, what disciplines do they serve, those kinds of things. And we had established such a template in the very first workshop we did in 2014. So I updated that and showed it to the interviewees, and they gave me some feedback on that, and for example, they added some components in the questions asking about support for infrastructure, technology infrastructure, and we saw, for those of you who are just at the University of Oklahoma presentation in the last session, that that's an area that I think is emerging in a small number of institutions in terms of the library involvement, but was important to ask. Some also suggested some specific things to add in the instructional activities portion of the profiles. In addition, one of the interviewees suggested a question which was what would you like to happen next in your program? And that was Harriet Hamasi, who's now Dean at Georgetown, and that actually elicited some really interesting responses which I'll get into towards the end of my presentation. So we received a total of 47 profiles. We put out a call for expressions of interest in attending two invitational forums on this topic. These would be online forums of two and a half hours each via Zoom. It's a long, long time, and we could have gone even longer. They were very lively sessions. And out of those 47, we chose 24 institutions, both representing a variety of types of institutions and programs, but importantly, representing people at different levels of the organization. Library deans, associate or assistant university librarians, and people directly involved in working in digital scholarship programs. Now all of the 47 institutions would have been well qualified to attend the two forums. And in the data that I'll be discussing in this session and in the report that will come out this spring from this initiative, I've looked at all of these things, the information I collected in the interviews, the profiles of the 47 institutions, the responses in the invitational forums. All of that is a rich set of information, mostly qualitative, some quantitative, that I'll be trying to describe and summarize for you in the report. In addition, when I interviewed the 12 interviewees, I gave them a sample list of questions that I thought we would address during the two forums and vetted those, and by and large, they remained relatively unchanged. And I'll get into the responses to some of those questions in a minute. Now we're here at this CNI meeting, and then we have two follow-on webinars that we'll be putting on this spring to further inform you about this program. Now when I interviewed people and during the forums, lots and lots of people who are directly involved in digital scholarship said, I don't like the term digital scholarship. I understand that, but no one had a suggestion for a universally or a broadly accepted term that was used to describe this set of activities. And so I've continued to use it. I'm not a proponent of it. I guess I'm a pragmatist, and I think it's what works right now, and so I will continue to use it. And in fact, in this presentation and the report, I'm shorthanding digital scholarship, data intensive and computational research as digital scholarship or DS because saying it all is just such a mouthful each time. So I like this definition from the University of Colorado Libraries, and I'm going to read some of it to you why I think it's a good definition. Digital scholarship extends traditional methods of research by leveraging new technologies and digital data to advance research and enhance pedagogy. While it's commonly associated with digital humanities, computational science, social science and data science, digital scholarship is applicable to all disciplines, and it often relies on interdisciplinary collaborations. And examples of some of the methodologies are text and data mining, network analysis, geospatial analysis, data visualization, digital exhibits, and digital project management. Now there are even more things that we'll be discussing and how people put things under the umbrella of digital scholarship or put them in separate buckets or separate units within their library or within their institution is one of the things that I think is something that I'll describe more in the report and in this session today. So I'm just going to show you a few of the programs that participated in the forums just to give you an example of some of the diversity that we find out there. So relatively recently at the University of Pennsylvania they reorganized their staff so that there is a new program called digital scholarship and data services. So they're under one assistant university librarian, which is definitely not the case in a number of other institutions. And some of their projects are on the right. All of these have links to their websites and my slides will be online. At McMaster University you'll see on the left some information about the Sherman Center, which is their longstanding and very active digital scholarship center. And on their website for digital scholarship on the right they list related services such as 3D printing, research data management, data services, GIS, etc. So they have them organized a bit differently. I also don't want you to think that it's only the large research universities that have digital scholarship programs. Some liberal arts colleges have programs and Swarthmore was one of the participants in the forums and so this is their website and the projects that they're highlighting. Some programs have a heavy emphasis on research oriented activities. I'd say all of them do some or perhaps half or more research oriented activities but Northeastern has a particularly heavy emphasis with their digital scholarship group. And so by the research orientation what I mean is that they're working as partners or collaborators usually with a faculty led project and often these relationships extend over a period of years to establish the project, to develop it, to curate it and perhaps to publish it all through the stages and hear some of their programs. Now in addition some of the staff at Northeastern and at other digital scholarship programs do their own research either meaning the staff affiliated with the library are doing their own digital scholarship projects or they're developing some tools to use in digital scholarship tools for the community. Some have developed more heavily in instructional activities and I don't mean that this example from University of Oregon means that they're doing more with instruction than with research but I used this example to show you the types of range of activities. So here they are recruiting for a course assistant for their humanities research data management credit course and on the right you'll see they're offering workshops on OER and digital publishing. So some of these programs for example include digital publishing as part of their digital scholarship programs in other libraries or other universities those programs are either in scholarly communication or a different division of the university or whatever. There is no one organizational model. We asked about the relationship of the digital scholarship programs to diversity, equity and inclusion programs at their institution. We asked this during the two forums and I would say I believe every one of the 24 institutions is doing something related to DEI. The most frequent were more partnerships on projects that highlight diverse groups and content and you'll see for example on the right University of Michigan is giving many grants to work with people on such projects. More exhibits, online digital exhibits highlighting diversity. Outreach to campus groups with diverse populations in order to make those ties and to make sure those groups know that these services and this expertise is available on campus and a smaller number were hosting events highlighting diversity. One of the main questions that we asked during the forum was how does your program align now and starting from its origins with the institutional mission and priorities. Many of you here in this room realize that often a digital scholarship program in a library started by really gong ho faculty member who was very eager to start working in the digital environment coming to the library and finding someone who was both had the skills and had the great interest in partnering with a faculty member on a project and develop that relationship. These things often happen serendipitously and not as part of some institutional mission or alignment or some kind of five year plan for the library but some of these programs are long standing and now we wanted to understand are they intentionally aligning with the institutional mission and priorities and it's hard a little bit hard to pin people down on that sometimes and in the conversations and I would say that my conclusion is that it's variable. However, my observation from the forums from the people who spoke to this topic in forums is that those individuals from STEM oriented institutions had the strongest sense of alignment with the institutional mission and I'm sure some people would disagree with me on that but that was my observation from the groups we talked with. I do want to insert at this point this is not a statistically valid sample either the 47 institutions who put in their profile files or the 24 who participated in the online forums. So this is a sample of institutions from the CNI membership and it gives a snapshot but it's not a statistically valid sample and I'm sure we missed some important trends but I hope we captured some important trends and of course there are changes in institutional priorities over time and that can be due to a new president, new provost, new head of the office of research, new head of the library and new technologies, right? Look what ChatGBT is doing to shaking everyone up and some of their priorities. Another thing that was really important for some institutions in terms of institutional alignment was the creation or forging of new partnerships which often led to an infusion of resources by the institution overall the institutional budget or by a specific office like the office of research or a particular college at the university that might fund a facility might fund even a staff position or more than one staff position or a new center where several units would be co-located say to work with a research data intensive research. Through the profiles and through the conversations in the forums we looked at the scope of the programs. Everyone does consultations and instruction but you'll see in the profiles and by the way they are already the 24 profiles of the institutions who participated in the forums are up on the website. And we have PagePope. Page, would you wave your hand? Thank you. We have PagePope, the CNI's communications coordinator to thank for getting those up in such a timely manner for preparing the profile and helping massage the data from those and from the forums and the polls that we took during the forums and it was a huge help. I could not have done it myself, literally. And so in the consultation section of the profile you'll see that we have a wide range of types of consultations ranging from consultations on things like project management, intellectual property, curation, data management plans, all kinds of things. In instruction we asked about workshops and various types, course related classes, credit courses and we have all of that data available for you in those profiles that are on the web. In terms of generalizing I would say everyone's doing consultations and instruction and in a wide variety of areas. Similarly, everyone's constituency includes faculty, graduate students if they have them, undergraduates and often community members and almost everyone serves all disciplines. So I think there's often a misconception that these are uniquely digital humanities oriented and I think from the beginning digital scholarship programs have served a wide variety of disciplines. Now what came up in the forums that was new to me was a representative from one university saying that 50% of the consultations they do came from university administration and I was unaware of that and so if I had to do a profile again I would definitely add that and she elaborated by saying these were questions on GIS, these were questions on from the facilities unit, looking at various types of data across the institution from the provost and the president's office so they wanted the expertise of the digital scholarship unit to be able to use tools to get answers from data that had been collected. In terms of changes in the past five years and particularly as we emerge from the pandemic what can we say that we know about these institutions? Actually, I would say there's less change than one might have anticipated. Everyone is still doing both online and in-person consultations. The online consultations have gone up but the in-person consultations have remained strong at most institutions. In terms of instruction, it's a little bit different. Everyone's still doing both but in some institutions they've slightly decreased the number of in-person offerings and are doing more with their online instructional kinds of offerings. In terms of facilities everyone felt the facilities are still as important as they were before the pandemic and so that was also an interesting finding. We did not ask any detailed questions about funding. What we wanted to know more these programs are funded from library budgets and we've known that for the past ten years or more and that's the type of programs that we're focused on in this initiative but most like a great majority of programs are supplemented by external and or internal funding so external by federal agencies like NEH and NIH or private funders like the Mellon Foundation and internal funding funds from the provost's office from the research office research computing and other programs less so from the Center for Teaching and Learning and Diversity and Equity and Inclusion programs but it was quite common to have some funding from other sources and all of them have some physical facilities. So the question that interests me most about this initiative is to try to understand the current state and where we're going in the future in the relationship of what we've known as digital scholarship which is in itself hard to pin down and data intensive and computational research activities. For example, where do you draw the line? There's a lot of digital scholarship that's data intensive, right? So I don't want to draw that line and I don't know if someone will but we put all these together and ask people about the relationship of these services and I do use the word services advisedly. I know that's another word a lot of people don't like but what I would say is most people want to use partnerships and collaborations instead and I would say that while some services or some activities, let's use the word activities are in fact collaborations and partnerships but other things are not. Like a one-off workshop is not generally a collaboration and it's an instructional activity so maybe services isn't the right word but given my age I still use it. So what I concluded from the responses to this question during the forums is that people said that they believe there is increasing overlap and if you attended this session from the University of Oklahoma which was in this room in the last session you heard them saying they started out with meteorology next stop is digital humanities because the same tools are being used and this is what I'm trying to get at. What are libraries doing about this in terms of the skill sets, the staffing models, the units they're establishing and trying to understand that better and in the forums they said but there's less overlap when high end research computing is involved and that was true in the answers in the templates for example in terms of the infrastructure section that's where people had the fewest responses saying yes they did some of these technology infrastructure activities. However we see that at Oklahoma I think it's out front in where some libraries may be going in providing these high end computing environments and some of them clarified some of the participants said except in initial consultations that many faculty feel comfortable in coming to someone associated with a library and talking over their project and not being embarrassed that they don't know if they're coding in and out of python or what they should be doing about this particular technical aspect of their project but they do feel comfortable starting out with someone in the library who can then refer them on give them some information to get started and refer them on and then found that very few have all of these areas under one organizational unit. In terms of new approaches some are already reorganizing library functions and staff so that these are under one associate university librarian or one assistant librarian. I'd say it's a small number at this point and most of them are recent and it will be interesting to see if others follow. Some use a concierge model and at the December CNI meeting NC State gave a great presentation on that model of having an individual or group of individuals who are the starting point and then refer on to the specialized areas. But pretty much everyone agreed that we need improved communication to constituencies so they do know what's available, where the expertise is, where to go, how to access and what is available in terms of level of provision service or partnership. When we asked about physical facilities pretty much everyone had some training in classroom spaces, consultation spaces, spaces for collaborative projects and many had computer or data labs. Least frequent were AI labs, data science labs or visualization spaces although many indicated that they had those spaces on campus but not in the library. Many mentioned the key partnerships I've already talked about, all of these with the exception perhaps, I didn't mention a museum partnership, a publishing program that wasn't part of the library or part of the Digital Scholarship Unit, the Office of Student Affairs and the Teaching and Learning Center. All of those were important. Sustainability is a tricky area and we asked about that so some of the things that promote sustainability it was very interesting to hear the way that they framed this issue. They didn't say we need money. They said we need strong administrative and faculty support because that's what will get us the resources. If people understand and support what we're doing and believe that it's an important contribution to the university's research and instructional programs they will provide more support and that either is preceded by or leads to an uptake of Digital Scholarship practices by faculty. Another thing contributing to sustainability is participation in the program by staff from many units. By that I would say people from an instructional unit in the library, from metadata, from special collections, the subject specialists, etc. If it isn't usually Digital Scholarship Units they're quite small in their staffing and in order for them to scale up their programs and they need the expertise drawn from these other units. And then clear guidelines both for projects and for levels of service are very important so that they have ways of accepting or saying, no, we can't really help you with that or we can help you up to this point. And what impedes sustainability lack of general understanding of the program and that includes within the library itself by other staff members in the library but also on campus by faculty and administrators gaps in staffing either literally the bodies because there's so much turnover the affordability of staff and the expertise and of course the expertise needed changes over time and then the lack of formal agreements. So a number of people said that one of their biggest problems was that you know, five, even ten years ago someone started working with a faculty member group on a Digital Scholarship project and they're still working with that project now and there's no end in sight there's no formal agreement that says we're going to stop at this point and archive it or not archive it or how they're going to end that involvement and priorities change there may be some activities that should be taking more staff time than what was done five or ten years ago and they're not sure how to get out of that so that is one of the things that impedes I'm getting a lot of positive nods on that one in terms of what's next for programs many put like three or more things so they're very ambitious which is great some of these things are their dreams others are things they are just starting the realities they're actually starting these things so some of the more frequent were creating AR and VR spaces and services establishing data visualization facilities more computational and data services expanding digital publishing a fewer number said more intensive instructional programs and strengthening campus partnerships and importantly several said provide a more unified holistic approach which is what I think this is about in terms of digital scholarship data intensive and computational research we need to have understandable programs for our communities so some of the things that we didn't directly address came out here and there were organizational structure communication and assessment I'm just going to go into these very briefly so with organizational structure I think some of the questions that we need to understand better what is included in a digital scholarship program some people include maker spaces for example some people include media services or publishing services or intellectual property and copyright advice others don't and have those separate is there a logic or is this just pure history and institutional history and circumstance how are digital scholarship programs and data intensive computational programs administered is there someone in the organization who has oversight to see where those synergies are where the staff expertise can be shared and to make decisions to say we need to be more flexible in how staff are used across the organization and how is the library represented in discussions at the university level particularly in data intensive oriented discussions which are taking place on almost every campus in communication I think there's more and better communication needed internally to library staff so that they'll become more excited and interested in participating particularly to subject liaisons and then to supervisors of these staff so that they will put in their job descriptions and in their performance reviews that they're going to be valued for participating in digital scholarship activities to external audiences by external to the library to potential users and partners so mostly faculty maybe graduate students and others to the university administration for sure need solid backing to get those resources and then to make the case to know how to make that case to funders for assessment one size does not fit all and so you need to understand the user needs of your community understand what's being done by other organizations and understand what you could commit to given the expertise of your staff and another question that we didn't ask but would be very interesting to hear the responses to is could they articulate what is success is it related to the institutions goals and strategic plan how do they express it and qualitative data and how and to whom would they communicate assessment results so that's what I wanted to summarize and much more detail will be in the report that will come out pretty soon we're also going to have a follow on seminar on April 20th this will be a one hour program with three institutions and I picked different institutions different programs but also I wanted someone at the dean level at the AOL level and someone who directly works with digital scholarship so I hope that will be very interesting it has not been announced on CNI Announce probably next week I would anticipate will put out the announcement and how to sign up for it and how to get the link for the zoom site so that's what I wanted to talk about before we get to discussion I would just like to acknowledge all of the interviewees and forum participants whether you directly participated or if you know someone from your institution did could you raise your hand if you were one of the participants or it's great to see you I have really bright lights in my face so it's a little hard for me to see everyone but thank you so much we wouldn't have all of this information without you so I wanted to ask you if you don't mind and then if you prefer we can turn to your questions who would like to address the question at your institution what are the connections and disconnects among programs or units supporting digital scholarship data intensive and computational research and if you'd like to say how would you make changes anybody game to answer that there's some microphones or there's a microphone there if you're at the back of the room it's really would be hard for me to hear unless you have a really loud voice if you want to say is anyone willing to volunteer and answer to that if not we'll move to your questions and I'll be very disappointed if there are no questions from you Hi Pascal Clarco I'm at the University of Windsor we're a very small library we have 68 librarians and staff total and we have an academic data center which is connected to our statistical Canada unit that provides access to census micro data that kind of thing they do programming in STATA SPSS they have a PhD who works in there who will advise on methodology then we have I'm in scholarly communications which is totally separate and I do institutional repository OJS monographic publishing working with those folks on things like funder data deposit compliance this kind of thing and then we have a very long newspaper digitization program which has started to look at how do we use this corpus of data for answering questions and they're kind of all in three different areas and we do have a center for digital scholarship which has more people involved who are usually on the humanities side I think all of these things could certainly work in tandem we do work together informally but I think we could do so much more if we actually had explicit kind of strategic alignments and maybe being organized in a more formal way thank you very much so I'm Andrea Kosovic York University, Toronto, Canada so I don't know if this is happening in the states but this has hit the AUL AD listserv that Amazon web services are targeting a number of different faculty a number of different departments okay I don't see anybody nodding their heads so it looks like a Canadian campaign but they're exploiting exactly what you have on that slide right so they are trying to divide the university and trying to insert themselves how can I say this more politically trying to manufacture a need that is already perhaps being met by a particular area and generating pressure on these different groups that may not already be in conversation with each other so I haven't heard about that happening at our institution but I can definitely share that that is definitely happening at other institutions so why am I saying this well I really see the linkage between these three areas really happening what connects all of these areas it's research data management it forces us all to have these conversations together across campus and I have to say when you have a shared process where all grants are vetted through the Office of Research Services and they start to understand what research data management looks like how it needs to be funded that creates those opportunities for us to be a little bit more closely tied and perhaps I guess identify within our institutional structures where these different programs might be best funded or supported but create that sort of connected network so we all can work together in some form thank you Shimo from the North's question thank you for this very interesting report look at your question I try to reflect some of my thinking based on the experience I had with the University of Cincinnati now with the Northwestern so the change I have been observed from these two institutions about this digital Scottish practices we have become much more broader we are we went beyond the humanity's social size and in the Cincinnati the center we have engaged actually many of the works already in the medical campus so we are applying the NIH grant so in terms of the sustainability for the future I'm thinking about particularly recently this freezing phenomenon about generative AI happening in any of the campus in the Northwestern Provost office already organized a universal wide of the working group looking at those issues now in the Northwestern many school centers already have this computational initiative going on by the way nobody called digital scholarship only library people call it digital scholarship so thinking about the future our model I'm thinking about particularly operational funding and the staffing model it has to be go beyond the library we cannot just employ library people using library funding or apply library special funding to keep this going for many reasons the impact for that model is very minimal you constantly run into the challenge to explain what you are doing versus other center versus other initiative doing on the campus so I'm thinking about in the Northwestern here is my thinking I'm still six months new so I have the opportunity I'm going to create a new practice based on some of the success lessons I learned from Cincinnati then we're going to create this time is joint multi-unit from the IT research office schools centers operation I'm not sure where continually call digital scholarship center however I do agree with you I have no idea what I'm going to call so those thinking thinking about in the future the staffing model I would say largely draw teaching research faculty IT research computing those kind of unit to together to join the library but how this governance going to work how this going to flow into the reader screen in the provost presence initiative my provost already said Shima I love your ideas but the questions other people also thinking about similar ideas as well so we're going to have to talking about this so those are the couple of the reflections I really appreciate your observations thank you Shima time for one more thank you hi Judith Conklin Library of Congress I'm looking at your first question and you're calling a digital scholarship and I've we use interchangeable terms also you know what is the right one I've heard it called digital transformation digital forward I've been using lately and as we talk about it at the Library of Congress it's becoming very apparent to me it's all about the data it's very much all about the data and what we do about the data and so you know how do you determine that through data governance throughout the organization and I don't mean just the library but at the Library of Congress throughout all of our business units and so we are working on that an agency data management type of governance we're not mature right now in where we want to go but we're having those great conversations and so governance of the data do we need a CDO we don't have a CDO do we need a CDO but I think everything that we're talking about digital is all about the data thanks very much and you have the last word thank you so much for engaging with me in this project and I hope you'll be reading the report and participating in the webinar in the future thank you