 Welcome everybody. Go ahead and get started. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of the coalition for networked information and you've reached one of the project briefing sessions for the third day of the second week of the CNI fall 2020 virtual member meeting. We do have closed captioning accessible a recording of this will be available. There is chat available and Diane will moderate Goldenberg hard from CNI will moderate a few questions and answers at the end. I apologize one more time for the connection problems. What we're going to do is we're going to pass this over to our speakers in just a second. We are going to run this a little late. So we will do a full 30 minutes till 40 Eastern time. I will just say very briefly that this presentation addresses one of the critical issues about the relationship between libraries and the research enterprise, which we know has become an absolutely pivotal organizational challenge and community and I'm going to turn it over to Nina Exner from Virginia Commonwealth University, who will start the presentation she will be joined by Steven Bollinger this head of systems at North Carolina agricultural and technical State University over to you Nina. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your time. I am staying with my camera off because I've been having technical problems and apparently I brought the Grimm ones with me to jinx the entire session. So you're not seeing me, but thank you for coming to our session. I'm Nina Exner. Please go back up. I'm sorry. I wasn't ready for the next slide. But I'm mostly going to be concentrating on a program that Steven and I started at North Carolina agricultural and technical State University Steve would you like to introduce yourself. I'm Steven Bollinger I'm the head of library systems but again being at a medium university I wear many hats so I am also a liaison librarian and that's what I'm here to talk about today, how both of those things work together. And this is actually a rather old project, but thank you. But we wanted to bring it to your attention for, because it's become more important in the, in the profession. So first, let me touch on what the research enterprise is in case you're not a research enterprise geek like we are, and haven't heard about this term before. It's a kind of generic term for all the stuff on campus. The stuff is the technical term I suppose that works towards getting or keeping or increasing grant funded research and all the different people who work on getting and fulfilling grants. And you may think of the Office of Research, which could have any of a number of names at a and T, it's called Dorad at VCU, it's called OVPRI, and at many places it's just called Office of Research. That's what the research administration professionals usually call the central office. And at research universities that central office is probably a much more complicated place than you think it is, in much the same way that people who are not librarians think that libraries are sort of a monolith with two or three different roles and everyone's a librarian, or IT is a lot of computer guys sitting doing programs, or, you know, much the same way that outsiders tend to be unaware of the nuance and I want to touch on that here and I'm going to bring it back later, because it's an important part of our, what made this project successful. There are also departmental research administrators though, and other professionals in each department at a university that are part of the research enterprise and that's why it's a whole enterprise not just the central office. Furthermore, there are core facilities at many larger institutions, if you're at an R1, R2s that may vary, and usually there are centers and institutes and all sorts of other things, as well as the people we usually think about getting grants, the faculty, and the postdocs. Next slide. Why should you care about the research enterprise? Well, I want to be realistic here real quick and say, possibly you should not, depending on your institution, that's going to sound weird since I'm talking about it, and I do think it's an important topic but it is very time intensive. So you want to think about the role of your campus strategic plan. If your strategic plan, like the one at NCA&T, when we were doing this and still now, really focuses on increasing grant funding, not fundraising, not donations, those are held by a very different department and go through a very different process, but increasing research grants, if that's a big part of your campus strategic plan, then this is a good role for IT and libraries and all the other teams that are involved at CNI may want to look at. But if it's not a big strategic, part of your strategic plan, this may just be an interesting talk to hear, but not more relevant to you. I think two core pieces you may want to look at are the CNI Symposium proceedings from last year on libraries in the research enterprise. And the very recent OCLC report I saw Rebecca Bryant at one point on this list on social interoperability in research support and a lot of ways that is what inspired us to want to talk about this project right now. Next slide please. At the critical role symposium, which I did not have the pleasure of attending because I somehow managed to miss that it was happening. There was a whole lot of different challenges discussed. They did breakout groups. And they talked about a lot of strengths and benefits and great projects that were in place. I cannot recommend enough looking at this report. But there were a number of challenges and the project, the approach of liaisoning, not just talking to but liaison style outreach addresses some of those. These are a few of the different ones that were listed in that symposium. So I'm not going to read them out, but you can think about it in the context of that, especially if you were at that symposium. Next slide please. We'd already said what the research enterprise is. Next slide. But what you should not be taking from that is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, vice president of research, blah, blah, blah, associate deans of research, blah, blah. That's not, that's often what people think of as the research enterprise, but it's not the best way to approach building relationships with the research enterprise. It's not to say that your vice president or vice chancellor isn't a critical touch point, not to say that ADRs aren't one of the major lynch pins that hold together the research enterprise. They're not good contacts, but they're super busy. They don't get into the nuts and bolts of things. And so they can be good contacts, but one, but they shouldn't be considered the whole of or even the key contact point for nuts and bolts getting things done with the research enterprise. It's my turn. So let's talk about how this approach is different. Nina has mentioned the library liaison approach and our institution pivoted like many of you have from being bibliographers into a liaison model. And of course, again, as mentioned earlier, but for those who missed it, we have, you know, the medium sized institution we wear a lot of hats. So I look at the library liaison approach as an important way to deal with this one of the things that I work with my colleagues to so that they understand is that really a library liaison is a consultant. And I approach it in that way. So in this case, one of the legwork pieces that you have to do is really look for understand the landscape of research on your campus. What activities are underway? What are the priorities? What are the needs? One of those things that you can do is actually attend meetings or ask to attend meetings. So all we all know that's very challenging in the time of zoom and social distancing and people aren't in their offices. But it can still be done. And especially when it, you know, hopefully when this is all over soon, it's definitely something that you can do as a library liaison, whether whether it's working with faculty in an assigned college or department or unit, or whether it's reaching out to, again, your campus's research infrastructure, whether it's one of the centers, whether it's the actual office of sponsored projects or anybody in between. So it is a reactive model in that way, because you are looking for opportunities to provide assistance. But you can't just dive into this, you know, thinking that you know all the answers, and you also can't, you know, go in talking about books or things because people's minds just close right down. The ideal is that this really does demonstrate the social interoperability that OCLC has coined and that really it allows us to facilitate communications because of our multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary connections that we can make, sort of being a neutral party on campus that has exposure to a lot of different disciplines and ideas. So what is networked information about it, since this is the coalition for networked information. One of the things that Nina and I found very quickly, and personally I found even quicker than Nina was that a lot of the research professionals just don't get technology. It's something that's seen as a check box that, you know, we'll handle that later or there's IT people for that. And they don't, you know, that's not their passion, right. So having someone that is involved in the process who has a grounding in information technology, and has an understanding of what the challenges are in that space can be very, very helpful, especially with setting realistic expectations around capacities, capabilities, budgets, that kind of thing. Understanding the technological aspects of research computing is a major challenge for a generalist like me, but at the same time I know enough that I can be very helpful, especially in proposal development, reviews of proposals, these sorts of things. It's an opportunity to help faculty and researchers and the Office of Research know that there are going to be specific issues around research computing that will need to be addressed. On our campus, one of the big challenges was we have a shared research facility. It's the Canapalus Research Facility. It's part of the UNC system. And of course, the minute that I say UNC system, you know, the optimists are like we're all holding hands and singing kumbia songs. The reality is that three years ago, none of our researchers, faculty or graduate students from that facility could access the campus network, which meant they had no access to any of the library's license databases. They were locked out of our campus. So as an information technology person, having established myself on campus as a good collaborator in information technology space, having a relationship with my campus information technology organization, as well as having the communication and entree with the research people allowed me to attack it a couple of different ways. One, I had to do a top and a bottom approach, which is at one level I went to the CIO and said, you know, this is a big problem. We have a major research facility and none of our community can access our own campus's resources from there. And then a bottom up, which is going to the help desk sort of IT help desk level and saying, you know, okay, helping students and faculty raise this issue from that side. And of course, immediately they told us, well, just have them use the VPN, the virtual private network, which this is a, this is a sensitive research facility so the network is locked down our VPN would not connect. So it took about 18 months to sort of navigate this situation where it's like a student came to us with the problem at first a PhD student, and it came up in a research consultation about something else entirely. But it was like, well, why are you coming to Greensboro and you're in Kannapolis and the student was I can't access any of the stuff from Kannapolis I have to come here. So, moving that through finding out who the advisor was tackling it from that side understanding the faculty perspective the researcher perspective, and then getting the campus IT people to understand no you can't just tell them to use the VPN it doesn't work. Identifying who in the campus infrastructure group was responsible for firewall and for security and the VPN, and then connecting them with the IT person at the Kannapolis facility who is employed by a different university and the IT system to get them to talk about creating a private VPN tunnel between the Kannapolis facility and our network so that they could actually access our resources. So it can be done. It's very helpful. But it, it takes a long time and it takes a lot of commitment to impatient to meet the right people to make sure that the right people are talking to each other and to say the right things. So, as sort of intimated there there's there's islands of expertise across campus and they can be located one of one of those islands frankly is the library. And the other islands exist all throughout these centers colleges departments units and and obviously research itself. There are things that librarians could do in having, you know, a mandate in our very existence to be interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary and work across campus. We can connect people in ways that other people just don't they don't encounter it or there's there's not an opportunity for them to understand. The other part of it is that it as a vocation sometimes takes pride in making people feel dumb. And that's unpleasant for anyone people, you know, the people that you're dealing with, especially in research, competing in grant development are talented researchers. They are professionals they are committed to what they're doing, and they don't like it people coming in and saying well you haven't ever heard of this or thought of that. So, you have to approach it with the sensitivity, which, you know, I think people who are systems librarians and who are in this field are there because that's what they enjoy is making technology work for people. So, in this case coming in with that humility and coming in with that ability to try and reduce the complexity of it, but it make it understandable is really important. And that leads to the sort of final challenge which is okay well there's only one of me on campus and there only was one of nine and she departed so how do we scale this and provide a continuity of service across, you know, years to the to the research enterprise. And part of that is that we do professional development amongst ourselves. And part of that is that we approach things in a team format. So, again, when you're undertaking this it's very overwhelming it was overwhelming for me as a junior faculty to start this 10 years ago. And I know it's overwhelming for my peers. So, one of the things that we've talked about in the professional development that I've done in my organization is to again to treat this as a consulting issue. And to look at it from that way to bring something to the conversation. You can't just stumble up to research people and go the library has stuff. The office the technical term is nine and pointed out earlier. You need to bring something to them that they're already interested in or looking for or might need. Again, this is why you go to a lot of meetings that maybe have nothing to do with you undergraduate research meetings. You know, you go to classes that's, that's a big one. If you're, if your research office is putting on seminars and workshops, even if they're on zoom, even socially distance now. And you have your name seen in that participants and attendee field. And this, you know, you'll hear what your colleagues are asking and you'll hear what what those workshops are meant to address on campus. And then you can play matchmaker to figure out well is this something I can provide this is something that I can work with one of my other liaisons to provide. Most of the time when I engage as a liaison in this space, I do it as a team. I do that for continuity in case I move around vacation or offline or whatever or sick or anything. And I also do that because again I'm an IT professional not necessarily a subject matter expert. So, um, that team approach is really important, both again for continuity to pass those skills on. And my example about this, which is actually sliding from the other slide to this one is that we had a talented researcher in our Alzheimer's lab, which is an NIH funded facility. And the researcher was having difficulty with red cap which is application that they use to capture data for human subject trials. So, in this case, anti actually belongs to again a part of the infrastructure of the UNC system. We have shared membership in a center that's on UNC Chapel Hills campus that provides red cap services for researchers, but the researcher in this case had somehow knew about the center and knew that existed but was under the impression that it required a consulting budget in order to use the service and she's working on a grant. She's filling a grant actually her budget is committed it's spent she doesn't have any money. So she approached our STEM librarian about this issue and then he very quickly called me and on the scene and said well this is it stuff. Well I didn't do any IT stuff but I did. I was able to do something that helped our, our faculty by introducing them to the director of the center, and clarifying to them and, and making that introduction clarifying to them that there was no cost custom development was required to use that application. And I also in the process introduced my colleague into how you do a professional introduction across the campus, and, and how you should handle this kind of situation. So, again that the team approach and spreading those skills out, not only provides continuity, the researcher now can contact either of us and get an answer for whatever their problem may be. That also means that where I fall down and don't I'm not a health person. I'm, that's not my thing. That's not it is my thing. So, having somebody there who had the sort of life sciences background to be able to deal with those issues was invaluable. Minding time here. So back to Nina. So, there, Stephen gave a couple of really good examples of recent projects at anti. We actually had so many specific small projects that we put them in a timeline, which is appended to the end of the slide deck that was uploaded. And the reason for that is because there were a lot of small things that came up that the library could do technologically, or through instructional and literature services. So, this project as a whole that we're speaking on is really the project to treat the office of research as a liaison unit and the same things that one might do to be a liaison in library subject terms could be done. To the office of research or and or to the departmental research units, because no one knows what we do in the library or in it, even people who are really library or technology or academic technology advocates tend to simplify what it is that we do. Likewise, we tend to simplify what it is that research staff and research administrators research professionals do. So, the process of liaisoning spun off a lot of different projects, some small, some big. So, the, the goal is to sort of keep in mind throughout that visibility and attendance at different office of research or research enterprise events are it's going to have long term benefits to help make the organization more visible and help create projects. So, I'll give a really simple example of one of these benefits before we transitioned at a and T was that they needed someplace to put up PDFs that were subscription restricted access, but they weren't being the subscription was that the PDFs were emailed to the office. So don't ask me why it couldn't be managed through a normal subscription because the organization producing the magazine was just not that large. And so we used electronic reserve systems for a while to create a sort of digital library for them. There are a lot of little things like library guides like reserves, like the ability to operate zoom until everyone went home and started using zoom I was a touch point for zoom at the office of research and both institutions sometimes. More recently as I transferred to VCU, a lot of those same skills helped me kind of hit the ground running, but I still do the same approach. So I might go to something about how to handle reimbursement for vaccine trial participants and how how credit card payments are handled and I don't care about credit card payments for vaccine trial participants, but possibly in the in the course of that some brief of how that can integrate with data management, which is my job might come up and I might be able to message someone to say hey we could have a meeting about this. So taking this liaison sort of approach helps to build gradually a strong relationship with the research enterprise. But if you have a strong relationship with one part of the research enterprise, it doesn't mean that you know all of the possibilities. I'm pretty strong with certain parts of my enterprise but their departments where I know the research administrators, but I don't work with them yet I haven't made that connection. There are always more units to to talk to and more roles that you can take on so if you're doing maybe data management now and you've got a tight relationship with the pre award dmp writers that doesn't mean that you've even exhausted all of the data management possibilities, much less all of the research enterprise possibilities, and looking at the time I should stop there. And we should go on to the next slide, so that we can have our beautiful pictures up and the ones that look somewhat professional. And this is our contact information. And we're ready for Q&A. As I mentioned before, there's a whole timeline in the slide deck of some different points of how this relationship more more prosaically evolved maybe if you want details on that. Terrific. Thank you Nina. Thank you Stephen for that wonderful presentation and under duress, no less. We appreciate you rolling with the punches that was really great and very interesting. And of course the floor is now open for questions. So please go ahead and type in your questions. There has been some active chat, and I see that Rebecca Bryant is has dropped a question into the Q&A so let me get to that now. Thank you Rebecca. Can you talk about what's most difficult in this approach, or if you had a magic wand, what would you fix. Although Rebecca's heard me talk at some of the research enterprise professional meetings to so that she may have already heard this, but I think the most difficult thing is actually the jargon barrier. So I'll give an example of working with the RIO, the Research Integrity Officer. So the way that research integrity uses the phrase data management is different from the way that libraries use the phrase data management. And so several times I've been working with human subjects or research integrity or responsible conduct of research, any of the ethics see people and been having what I thought was a conversation towards data preservation and sharing. And it turned out that they were having in their head the same conversation but they were talking about privacy and security and anti sharing. And it sounded similar enough that we felt like we were just not quite getting each other, but it's at one point we realized that no we're actually talking about radically different topics. And we need to go back to the beginning of this conversation and and change the revisit the entire structure we've been through so jargon differences if I had a magic wand. The, that's probably the single most difficult thing. That's very interesting. Speaking the same language and yet speaking such a different language. Thank you for that question. Rebecca and thanks so much for that response Nina Steven have you got anything to add to that. Would you like to add anything. If I had a magic wand, other than the obvious answers that I won't go into. I obviously turn over is just brutal. Right. I'm sure that had the problem with red cap. One of the problems was the person who is our point person on campus that worked with the center at Chapel Hill had left the university so that kind of left our, our people in the office of research scratching their heads going well we know we have access to this but we don't know how to talk to about it and we're really busy. And so again that was an opportunity for the library to sort of step up and say well we can, we can help you with that. The other thing, just to echo Nina's point, all of you are probably well aware that it has its own jargon as well. And so especially when you start getting into research computing, and when you start talking to it people and you start talking to the researchers and you start talking to the other entities on campus there's a lot of translation and wait are we sure we're talking about the same kind of thing moments. So that's definitely a problem everywhere, to be honest. Really interesting. Thank you. Seeing as how we do not have any more questions in the Q amp a. I'm going to go ahead and propose that I just go ahead and turn off the recording on this session with a lot of thanks to our presenters for hanging in there through our technical difficulties and to our amazing attendees for letting us know right away there was an issue and hanging in there and joining us. If you would like to hang around and approach the podium and have a chat with Steven and nine up please feel free to do so. Raise your hand and I'll be happy to turn on your microphone. And with that, I will bid everyone a good rest of your day. Thank you for joining us at CNI and we hope to see you back here soon. Take care everyone. Bye bye.