 and I'm your moderator today for this session, John Hagan. And so we're going to hear from John Feudrow from the University of Pittsburgh Library System who's going to talk about standardizing chaos, ETD support service changes before and after the pandemic. And so this will be kind of an extension to the panel discussion we heard earlier and we have some nitty gritty details. So without further ado, please help me to welcome John. Okay, I'm just going to get my slides up there. Looks like we're good to go. So yes, thank you for having me here today. I wanted to try and give a little brief history of our program. We often think of ourselves as somewhat of an outlier and some of the way we have things set up in terms we have a decentralized approval system set up at Pitt and a lot of the history came before I took on this position. So I have to speak through what I know of the process and the history of the program. So let's see here. ETD's University of Pittsburgh, it was in 2004 that the formalized program came about that required an A degree granting school to have an ETD for their graduate students. And to do that, the libraries were involved as of last week, we have a 10,102 ETDs deposited in our system. ETDB was the local instance. So there was the original repository system, if you will, that we used to consolidate the ETDs that were submitted. But in 2009, we switched over to e-prints and that's the current iteration which is de-scholarship at Pitt. The overall process and how it was set up was managed by the Office of the Provost. They had a ETD process group that was made up of people from the registrar, different units, different departments within the school and some university library system staff members who participated in the construction of the process and develop the policies and the templates and such. Every school that would be required to have a ETDs in the system had at least one main ETD contact. They were responsible for doing the reviews of the formatting, communicating with the students, approving the forms and so on and so forth. But more team members were added as they needed. For instance, our Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences graduates the most students per semester and they have two people right now but they often other schools have had graduate student assistants and so forth, even if they needed to, depending on the variety of requirements needed to how they deal with their students. And at the onset, the library was responsible for the repository set up in management. So it's had the ETDB to ePrince but they were there to set up the metadata fields, the workflows that we used in ePrince to facilitate which again, the student creates the record in ePrince. They is then submitted for review and is partitioned off by their schools. So each school's contact is basically an ETD admin in our system that they can then go through and give feedback via that system. I'll talk a little bit about that in a bit. But we are also there to help with any changes that need to be made. If there was a new school, school name change, things of that nature. The libraries were facilitating that role. The creation of the Word and LaTeX templates were also part of the library's purview at that time or they volunteered to do that. And so they created that with their knowledge at that time for what was needed. And we actually use a student to create the LaTeX template that had been in use and still is technically since 2004. Also, any formatting technical support in workshops that would be given to the students were facilitated by the libraries. So the student experience though, it was they were taken to a provost site, the ETD site that used to be out there. And the information, however, wasn't always easy to find. There was a lot of the wall of text problem I tend to see in websites from the early 2000s. There weren't a lot of particular guides. And for instance, one of the things that I noticed when I first came onto this position and looked at the website at the time, they had video tutorials that were PDFs, which is one of those sort of the issues that I wanted to try and fix when we came aboard. The updates to support documentation, they were quite infrequent. And it was a chain of who would make the approvals, who would make the changes and the people in charge of the site had to ask their IT representatives to make the changes to the site. So there was a breakdown in the process of how to get timely information, especially if we would have the same website in the same situation set up then and had a pandemic happen, I would wager that it would take a lot longer for them to see the sort of changes that be made. So also schools would sometimes alter handouts for specific requirements, which is not necessarily a horrible thing, but it could sometimes lead to having a version of a form in a particular department website that wasn't up to date with changes that had been made. So there was a lack of consistency across the documentation that was being given out to students. So there was a lot of confusion there and we were seeing that coming through some of the EQ support tickets that we could read through in the past. As I said, the Word template and Lottec template, at least the Word template in this instance, was heavily customized because we took it upon ourselves at that time, from my understanding, to make sure that a lot of accessibility standards that we thought would be needed were incorporated. So the creation of the bookmarks for the PDFs version of each ETD or something we used a word to facilitate, but it required a lot of education on the students of how to make that happen and consistency within the styles and formatting and creating the guidelines. So the students that we find often lacked experience using Word templates. Yes, they could create a Word document, but understanding how to use styles and how those styles could be altered if you're just cutting and pasting in from another document you were working in, there was a large gap there and the understanding of how that was working. Also, our guidelines that were created for the ETDs were based upon print manuscripts. In essence, instead of looking, and this is more particular for Lottec, they were trying to mimic how the type setting was done on the original print manuscripts. And that may seem, you know, amenable to most concepts of document creation, but there were certain conventions in Word that you had to work around to make sure that would work and facilitate them and visually look the same. And in instance, the original template that I started the renovations from had a lot of text boxes for the preliminary pages. So a lot of students would accidentally shift the text boxes on the main pages so they would be off center and they wouldn't understand how to center them because they didn't know that that was a convention that was made. So basic things on a manuscript format and typeset sounds good in practice, but sometimes lead to problems if you don't understand the limitations of the actual device or application you're using to create them. Similarly, the Lottec template was very heavily customized because it was drawn up in 2004. A lot of changes had happened for the modern era. We came in in 2017, 2018 with a transition, which we'll talk about in a second here, but if I hadn't been updated a number of years, there were many different packages that now were in conflict, some things had deprecated in terms of Lottec. So trying to understand that we weren't the ones that actually created it and the student who had created it had moved on. We ran into some roadblocks there and there was a lot of disgruntled students who couldn't get to the work they wanted to. So I've heard this in several other presentations today, but the required forms that were all analogs, everything had to be printed out and initialed with signatures from the committee members and advisors. And so there was an interesting roadblock there for a lot of students in the timelines for approval because they didn't know they had to get these forms physically signed and maybe they couldn't get them physically signed because the advisor or faculty member wasn't in town. They weren't available, but they couldn't get something improved within the repository by this ET admin because they were still winning on a paper form and couldn't get that communication line straightened out. Graduation fees were also paid in person at the student payment center on campus. And that could create a problem too, as well if they were trying to get something done on the weekend and they maybe couldn't get intimate payments or had other outstanding fees or something of that nature. So there was a lot of confusion of where to go to pay, especially as things progressed in terms of online payment via the different modules on campus. We had the UMI and ProQuest forms that we had up on the website. They were quite outdated. And then this was not a slight to ProQuest, this was a slight to how we administered the documentation, but there was also an open access publishing section to those documentation that the ETD contacts in the schools weren't really aware how to answer that question to the students and the advisors didn't know either because via our de-scholarship ePrint repository, we were providing open access content via the deposits, but we also had to copy in ProQuest and the student didn't understand whether they had to pay an extra fee just to get it in the repository. And it was confusion and it was always a stumbling block for trying to educate everybody what that actually means. What they are actually paying for, what the services mean. And there also was an ETD processing fee that was above and beyond that. So there was a lot of fees and forms that nobody understood a lot of the particular details on. And the largest problem that I noticed when I first came aboard was that knowing who to ask a particular question was quite unclear. We had a distribution list that was entitled ETD support which was meant to answer the particular formatting issues that were coming about and how to correct things in the submission process. There was ETD feedback distribution list that we created which was more or less about the process in general. There was also the scholarship distribution list which was answering questions about the repository and the process there. But then you also have the direct line to each of these ETD contacts within the particular schools that created the problem though who do I ask this particular question? I have a question about copyright. Well, do I ask the person in the school? Do I ask the scholarship? Do I ask ETD feedback or support? And there was just too many places to ask a question and that became to me a problem. So as I mentioned in 2017, the original setup of our office, the Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing was under the IT department in the university library system. We split off just in terms of how would the view manager was new supervisor and we were put into a different responsibility center within the libraries. And this allowed us to then reconfigure what we were going to do for ETD support because that was given to us as part of our responsibilities and in particular, I was given that responsibility for ETD support which had been in another staff member or faculty members responsibility center. So I'm coming on doing, I did repository management in the scholarship and worked with some of the ETD support people there. But now I had to relearn and figure out what we could do with the process and how this was being run. And it had been, again, about almost 15 years at that point for most of this process. So we had to take a look and see what we could do. So the initial changes I decided to work with with my supervisor, Lauren Callister, we sat down and we started talking about how these different processes could be envisioned in the future. And the ETD process group who had not been meeting in a most regular basis, were given a new charge. We sat together, down together and said, listen, maybe we, and Jonah, it's on chat, it's also putting some notes there about the initial abstracts. The new charge was to actually start meeting in a more regular fashion and set up a project, in essence a project management setup that we could have responsibilities for certain aspects of this and codify things in a way that made sense. And we could actually see some progress rather than waiting for it being reactionary, we're gonna be a little more proactive. So I took it upon myself as well to look at how to do a process audit, looking at what had been done, getting all the information I could about how things were set up, what we could do to make those changes because coming in from just doing repository management, having a background in reference librarianship, I understood that there may be some ways that we could work on the process and the workflow for ETD support. If I treated it more like a technical support as well, because it's not necessarily reference. This isn't, in essence, we're not teaching them how to do research. We're trying to solve a known solution to a problem they're probably having just because they didn't see this particular aspect of the guidelines or this particular tutorial that didn't go to a workshop. So knowing where there were breaking points in the process was a way that I could facilitate making these larger changes. Obviously we needed the templates need to be updated. So I took that upon the phase one of the process and realized what do they actually need to see? What are the guidelines really say? And where are the guidelines out of touch with what's actually needed? That was part of the project management application that I was looking at to say, ask why five times? Because there's probably a reason why something was decided upon in 2004 that's not necessarily required now. And it may be a problem with the application, say Word or LaTeX, that we can just change the guidelines. If this is the group that makes the rules, let's see if we can change the rules. And that sounds pithy in some way, but I decided it might be a solution. Then why do we have to try and break an application to fit a particular guideline if we can just make the guideline change? At the same time, we were also doing a website reset. So we were able to take the website out of the hands of the Office of the Provost, even though they still were there to give approval to the website and the content that's there. It was now under the responsibility of the University Libraries and we created in Drupal and we re-envisioned it. We can take a look at that later and there's a link here, I believe in the slides, but we tried to set up more or less a journey, a process of like, okay, now we're writing our document, we're formatting it and then we're submitting it and what happens after I submit it? So we tried to make it into a three-step process with all the different iterations of what could be useful for the students at this time. And that allowed us to then also look and see what is really out of date? What areas can we change to make sure that it actually helps the student rather than just confuse them? At the same time, the E.T.D. support services perhaps needed a bit of an update as well. At the time, the services were this staff member, faculty member, I guess he's a librarian, I apologize. He would be in one office, but he had moved office several times. They had an E.T.D. support students that were assisting, but they could often be in different locations. There was no set location in the library so you had to kind of look for them and find them, which I thought was quite odd. Why have a service point that's moving across the library? It didn't really, to me, facilitate actual consistent support. Nobody knew where to find you, and they're not gonna come to find you. So we also looked at making a E.T.D. queue and our LibAnswers from SpringShare. Originally, the libraries had a basic, just one queue for all answers to come for reference librarians, or any questions to the library, but we had made a particular queue for the archives, special collections, and we made one for E.T.D. support at that time. And using that system, I was able to not only make sure we had a particular queue for E.T.Ds, but we were using the LibChat functionality, as we'll see in a bit here, and the FAQs and things of that nature to sort of make sure everything consistently says the same thing, and we're giving the same message in different venues. So we also, then, from the E.T.D. process group, and I'm gonna speed through these. I don't wanna go too much into the details. There's a lot here. We had three different phases we're working on. We're right now in phase three, but in phase one of the process groups plan for making sure this workflow goes well. We were looking to get out of the paper forms as much as we could. The first thing to go was the ProQuest paper forms that were always giving out in packets to the students. So we started using E.T.D. administrator form. However, the problem with that is we don't use the E.T.D. administrator form to actually deliver the content that was just to get the metadata and to make sure they understood that we were going to be delivering their E.T.Ds to ProQuest at some point. So there was, again, more confusion there from a lot of the staff members, and what this really means. They don't see the submissions there. So it was a stopgap solution at the time, but it was, again, trying to get out of making sure there's all these paper forms floating around. We don't really need those. We can do things electronically and have the same end result. We also set apart in the office of scholarly communication and publishing to reduce the embargo length. We had a maximum of five years that students could ask for right out of the gate. We decided to take that down to two. Maximum of two years at the initial, they could request an extension of another two, up to another two years. So maybe a maximum of four if they were as proactive to do that, but we were trying to limit the amount of time that they were sitting within the University of Pittsburgh only access because we wanted to promote open access publishing and get the E.T.Ds out to the world. And we haven't had a lot of negative feedback on that. So we do believe that's been a positive and it helps us to reach out and educate not only the students, but the advisors and faculty members and staff members in each of the schools, about what open access really means and what the positives are for open access. The E.T.D. proof of form was also made into a fillable PDF. Not an online form, we didn't really get into docusign at that time, but at least giving the students the ability to create this form easier than having to get Adobe Pro and things of that nature. It helped a little and we're still working on that as we go forward. The E.T.D. site featured a lot more updates and training and best practices in the back end. So we were able to create those as a sort of suite to get onboarding as we incorporated that into our annual meetings where we would sit down and talk with the new E.T.D. contacts was we had the number of schools that had some turnover and their approvers. So we had to train new people each year and it became problematic if they didn't have this sort of wealth of knowledge from doing it for 10 years, how do you get them up to speed and know all the resources that have in front of them? So we started trying to have annual meetings where we could talk about the problems they see coming up, making sure that you're aware of all the options they have for support and where to get answers. And again, I was working through trying to make sure that E.T.D. support was simplified. It was a one channel. We got rid of the E.T.D. feedback distribution list and all those other distribution lists made it into the form that we have on our site and we also started to incorporate ways to schedule meetings with the specialist, myself and Jonah McAllister-Eriksson who works more or less in copyright and also with a lot of the formatting that we do for E.T.D.s. And it was very helpful for the students to have names that they could put to the support and request one-on-one consultations with us even at our office physical locations. Phase two, we were working to integrate the program. This was started in fiscal year 2019. So this would have been the end of last year, integrating the ProQuest Agreement into our de-scholarship workflows. So instead of having to go to E.T.D. administrator, we were working to put it directly into de-scholarship to eliminate even another form. It was, this would just be another, right before the license agreement in de-scholarship, you would see an agreement saying you were, we will also be submitting your work to ProQuest and giving them a link to create an account there to facilitate any other of the services they wanted to acquire via ProQuest. We're also working to adjust the thesis and dissertation processing fee which hadn't changed, or had changed slightly but didn't really factor in the amount of processing that was required for different types of E.T.D.s and different schools and what the money was actually going towards for E.T.D. support. So we're working on that, integrating that was also looking at what the costs were for microfilm because our theses were sent to one vendor and dissertations were sent to another. So trying to figure out how we could balance out some of those costs and get the services we actually needed. We were looking at doing online payment and how that could be done through the Student Payment Center and that had been working as something more or less that the registrar and the provost were working on. The libraries weren't as involved in that but we were there to help lend any possible tech solutions we had heard of we had used for our own purchasing within the libraries for things like our archival collections and purchasing copies and things like that. The Graduate Myelso forms were made standardized across the schools. That was again a backend solution of how to keep track of where students were in the process. We were again making sure that E.T.D. approval forms could be managed and docusigned where we're going to IT departments to try and figure out what would be the best way to do that and each of the schools had to be amenable to that as well. Which again, decentralization has its pluses and minuses and that's one of them is make sure everybody's doing it the same way. The provost also wanted to push exit survey changes so that had to be pulled into the process and figured out how we can make sure we could just change one out for the next one next year. And we were looking at alternative preservation options meaning that we didn't want to keep collecting microfilm if possible but there was still a longstanding tradition of keeping microfilm and we didn't have a secondary digital solution ready. Although our repository is a great digital solution for preservation and dissemination of these E.T.D.s we needed to find a secondary solution that archival, the archives and special collections unit would support and we're still getting that. So on the phase three here and this is where we're going soon we're gonna be starting at this semester looking at the docusigned milestones things of that nature. Developing a process for a RADM request which is already technically there but we're gonna make sure that gets codified in the right way and that we have that process ready to go much the same way for crossing embargoes and how that works. That was always kind of hidden behind the scenes so we're making sure that's gonna be in the forefront of our site that people that they need that question answered they can get there. Looking at how we do quality assurance data for the process we're gonna do another process audit and we're gonna enlist some third party entities in university if you will not involved in the process to look at it and give us feedback on things we can do to improve in all aspects of the process for E.T.D.s. And also review and I heard this in several other presentations I released one of the presentation or require a recall that looking at how committee members can do remote participation which is already happening before COVID but making sure that we have that standardized and everybody's in agreement and understands the process and it gets all the forms in order because it definitely is something we worry about because it had happened before we had to make special consolidations for doing that previously. We also wanted to review and recommend changes to the university regulations governing graduate study. And so we had to make sure the university was gonna allow us even though the provost office is the one who controls the larger process of the E.T.D.s. There are issues about these changes and making sure that they fit into the university's role as a whole and rules and regulations if you will. So again, making sure all the forms are in order and working properly for everybody who's involved and we get the output we need and how do we control those? Because again, everybody was using paper forms. They were keeping in file folders within each office and now how do we help them to facilitate all these different electronic forms? How do they store them? How do they manage them? And what happens and what's the retainment schedule and things like that? But as we all know, and now for something completely different, the pandemic hit in March and it threw a bit of a monkey wrench into a lot of our plans. So we had to start thanking ahead and we're doing it quickly. We closed campus March 2020 and the E.T.D. services that were immediately impacted at least in the libraries side of things. We're walking in support, we had to walk in support to us that we had finally put a sign up for and people were visiting quite regularly. However, now they couldn't be there because the libraries were closed. The formatting workshops were all done in person at our main library location. Every once in a while, we would do a satellite one of that at a particular departmental site. However, again, we couldn't facilities. We didn't have the right application for performing workshops online. We could have used something like Panopto. We'd even given thought to something like Skype. We're doing some YouTube live. This was prior to COVID, obviously, since the pandemic. We were just talking about how we could reach out to students who were not in Pittsburgh. We have a lot of students who were for ABD or they were non-traditional students who weren't living on campus. They were doing remote education, but they couldn't attend these workshops. So we made a video prior to this as well, but we needed a way to actually perform these workshops. And this gave us a really good arguing point to say we need an application that will do this. Students couldn't access computer labs anymore. So how can we help them format a document if they didn't have all the software that was available to them? And we actually were suggesting to them if they had no access to those particular computers. The forms obviously couldn't be physically delivered. So luckily we were already thinking along the lines of getting rid of all those physical forms, but there were still some things that were physical at that time. And ETD contacts and support staff were all starting to work remotely, including the time we had two student assistants. One actually left the university prior to the closing. So we were left with one student who I had to try and coordinate with. And also we're working on their own studies to make sure we can get this all straightened through. And even though they were technically hired by the libraries, they're not staffed. So there's different limitations to what they could access, what they could do and the software they had. And I don't know what type of technology they had at the time. So it was a lot of figuring that out. So there's a link to the notice we put up. It's still there for COVID-19. And we decided to say, well, what can we do for walk-in services? Well, what if we just use the Lib To Answers chat service from SpringShare LibChat to be there for the same hours that we had for walk-in in our office? I would say that if your library has any sort of chat like that and the ability to create multiple queues, that's a great solution to change up your walk-in services, just make them visit us at this chat location. We have an office, actually our sister office in the Digital Scholarship Services office who do sort of open office Zoom meeting, like a Zoom conference meeting. And we gave a thought to that and said, well, that would be an interesting idea, but at the same time, it's hard to have a queue of people coming into an open office for ETD support. It used to be different. We had a desk where they could sit at you and say, excuse me, I'll be right with you, helping somebody else here. We can grab my colleague here. We thought it might be a bit more interruptive to the process. So having the chat is easier for one person to manage. We can then create tickets directly from that if we need to send it out. So it's a little bit easier to manage that way. And we had our ETD support, OSCP and ETD support assistant working remotely with the chat, basically. So they could do that on their own, be still working on their own studies and be facilitating chat. For the workshops, we were lucky the pit got to Zoom and we were able to then just easily say we're gonna start scheduling via LibCal, which is also a spring share product. And we could provide a Zoom workshop that we customized ourselves, created our own presentations and new slides and figured out a way to do sort of live captioning using Google Slides in the background, which is not perfect, but at least allows us to make sure that we have some ability to create captioning while we're talking. And so that's been working out great. And we actually have seen an uptick on the number of people who will be attending. Less people don't show up, I should say as well. We often have a lot of people who would sign up for every workshop in the semester and then only show up to one. So your numbers seemed odd when you're looking at the possible people who'd be registered, but now more people are showing up and it gives them, I think, a little bit easier of a time to be able to manage it and the timing of their workday and such. The no access to computer labs was a problem, like I said, but PitIT released a virtual lab instance that mimicked the same software that would be on the computing labs we had in our library. So we were able to allow, to push people to that and say, hey, if you don't have this on the computer, here's a version on a PC that you can use. Because if you're not familiar with what goes on with Word for Mac, it's a different client than on PC. And there's a limitation to how it creates a PDF because we don't actually force them to use, force them to use Adobe Acrobat to create their PDFs. We can do it directly, strictly through Word, using the styles that we've created and some of the format we've done to the template. And unfortunately, if they have a really large file, it will just error out in Crash Word for Mac. So having an option for them to go and use a virtual PC has been really good. And the forms, as we said, we created really quickly a fillable PDF form, got permission for doing that. And there was a mandate that went out from the provost that said, you don't have to get everything signed in person, an email is fine. We're gonna make this work. We're not gonna worry about some of those particulars. So that may change as we go forward, but at the time, that was what was happening. We are all working remotely and we're probably gonna be working remotely until there's a solution that makes sense for us because we had an open office. It's tough for us to come back and schedule that. So we are being delightfully, for me, asked to stay home as long as we can until there's a solution in general for the population here. So we had to start talking to the staff who are also staying home with the reviewers who are in these different schools. How can we support them and talk about ways to use the technology at hand? And one of the things that I suggested early on as a possible solution prior to the shutdown was to use Adobe Acrobat. And so to step back one second here to say that our process is the students submitted the PDF version and de-scholarship. And what had happened previously in previous years was that the reviewers would look at that. They would create notes in a separate file, send that file as an email and return the PDF and the record to the user work area and in our de-scholarship or e-prints repository. So there was often this disconnect where there was an email that had all the particular details for what was wrong with the ETD. But not necessarily when they came to ETD support, they would say, you send us a message saying something was wrong with the ETD. Well, we weren't the ones who did it. We don't know what they're talking about. And there may be a disconnect of the word version versus the PDF versus the notes that were sent. So one of the things I suggested was using Adobe Acrobat to annotate directly on the PDF version that they sent and they could create a second version of it and send it back with them in de-scholarship and upload it that way. And it allowed us to be able to go in and access that directly and say, ah, they're talking about this. Here's what they really want to see. Here's what they're talking about in the guidelines and so on and so forth. So I was able to offer tutorials to the staff members to sit down and talk about what here's the changes we made to the templates. Here's a common solution to this problem. You may even be able to suggest rather than have them come to us. Not everybody takes us up on that, but just trying to educate the staff members to make sure that they have the ability to work with the students in a more streamlined way, lessen some of that confusion. Using Box OneDrive and then Overly for the LaTeX templates has been great because we can then use the Zoom consultations if they need to work with them directly or just provide them the solutions via Box OneDrive and not have to worry about the email chains that have given nowhere. We can make sure they're all unbox, annotate there, provide comments, put it in a ticket and our live answer system would have you. So that's been a really useful tool, having some sort of collaborative space to work from. And because we're decentralized, we don't often involve the reviewers in that formatting review or at least the formatting changes that we're doing. They tell us what they need to, what needs to be done before they'll approve it and we try to go from there and work with them. We also linked our calendars and Outlook to a LibCal, which is another spring share product, so it's a whole suite, not trying to sell a spring share, but it's been working for us. And I'll add students to request Zoom consultations with myself or Jonah during our normal office hours. So again, we set our hours in Outlook and it goes from there. So looking at the avenues of opportunity, in my opinion, what things could work in different processes, everybody's different. And again, ours being a decentralized process has its pluses and minuses, but I always think having agile solutions versus fixed, one of the things I really wanna see change in the future is this sort of strict ETP formatting and review process. We have people who, you know, if there's something off by an eighth of an inch between a spacing of a line, they're sending it back or if the block quote is not justified properly because it's not using the block justification or the left-right justification, it's using left, things like that that I feel are not necessarily the biggest problem in terms of making a document in type setting. I would like to see more flexibility in terms of accessibility and adaptability in different ATDs, even in the PDF form. I know we're talking beyond the PDF as we go forward and what other ways we can collect information and documents and supplementary materials and things of that nature. But even in terms of if one student in physics writes a particular document this way because that's how they're disciplined writes documents and formats things versus this is a student in the arts who's doing it this way. How can we come together and say this is all that's really needed, the accessibility of the document, make sure the links work, making sure it's consistently formatted within its own environment, rather than it has to be this particular guideline of type setting that really doesn't change anything and how people read the information. It's just a formatting to be formalized. So that's my particular opinion on that and I'm hoping to keep working with them on allowing students to have a more individualized voice in the type setting, just so we make it work for people who want to read it. Centralized management can be a problem though. I think some people are quite tied to that. I like the decentralized model in some ways because it allows us to seek partnerships to educate others and the staff on these different ideas. Five minutes, I can see it already. I'll try to zoom through this. So what are we gonna do in terms of the future? What are things that I think are probably gonna come up and that be a problem? I'm not sure how remote services are gonna continue or back in the office. I hope that we can find a nice hybrid model in ways to support the students. And again, we already been thinking about some of these issues in terms of how do we reach out to students who are remote? What can we do to help them with the technology gap that they may have with not having the applications we suggest and reach out about education and some of the open access, especially concepts that we promote? What can we do to make the templates more user-friendly? Now, we also have an accessibility mandate coming up. So we're gonna have to really climb quite a steep mountain to figure out how we can integrate all these accessibility concepts into our processes. And I am not looking forward to that, but I do like a challenge. So that's gonna be fun. What other aspects need attention in the process? Again, that process audit might bring that up. We might also see things that we weren't aware of on the library side that will come out of the administrative side of the process. How can we also reach out for and gather an audience for niche things that we may not have been offering before? We don't offer a lot tech tutorial right now or at least a workshop and we may have to start doing that. And the closest thing we have to an expert in the library is in that and I don't consider myself an expert. So again, another challenge we'll have to figure out. Granted, overleaf might be our solution for that, but we need to figure out what other ways, what are the things students need to see? And also what other ways can we support staff members in our schools so they can be more independent on how they do feedback? That's always the thing that I wanna try to support. I don't want them to always feel like they're helpless. I don't wanna feel like they don't have an answer to this. There's a lot of answers we can provide quite quickly and we can just put into an FAQ or put into a standardized document behind the scenes so they can feel like, ah, I know this already, I've done this before, here it is. What can we do to facilitate that? So the last slide is questions. I know this seems dramatic, but this is literally a slide the university gives us out for putting in slide decks and that's the cathedral learning. I swear it also doesn't have a laser and it's not on fire, but there's a good question for that. So, John, thank you very much. It was very comprehensive and really the decentralized environment harkens back to my days at West Virginia University in herding cats and just be polite about it, but it was always a huge challenge with decentralized environments. We have a couple of questions in the chat panel here. Maybe I can read them to you. First one is, for what spectrum of circumstances would you allow an erratum? Sure. So far we only had a few. Normally we try to stay away from sort of vanity changes. I hate to say them, it sounds again, not really professional and to say it that way, but somebody just wants to change a particular name of something in this or they had a capitalization problem or something that is probably not gonna be approved. It's really, we've had one where somebody had the wrong factor in one of their data tables. So it was like that research is gonna cause a problem. So we need to fix that. We allowed them to make that change. We also had several instances where if there was somebody was saying abusive relationship where they needed to change something because they felt like it was gonna be a problem, we put that through the provost and it was allowed to do that. So we have some basic guidelines, but it's still up to the school and the provost office. Is there's a two tiered approval to that? So it goes to the school, the dean of the school and they say, yes, that will be allowed. Then it goes to the provost and they say, yes, we'll allow that too. And then we create a new copy, put the erratum on there and go forward. So yeah. Very good. I swear to God I heard a cat meowing. There was a cat, yeah. Is it when somebody liked to comment heard in cats? That was my favorite phrase too. So next question here, we got another commentator. So do you have any recommendations for digitizing the print copies of thesis and dissertations from years, decades past before electronic submissions? And are you contacting those people asking for permission to digitize? Sure, that's not something we are definitely, I've always thought we should do that. We don't have that process in place right now. However, we do have an option for if a author comes to us and says, I'd like to digitize my thesis. The process we have is we basically just say yes, we'll do that as long as you allow us to put it in de-scholarship. As long as the digital copy will be available to the world, we'll do that for you for nothing. We do it in-house for like, I think it's $25, $30, something like that if they just want to have a copy for themselves, which sounds weird, but they can then get a print copy made as well of the digital version. But we really haven't looked to see what with vendors we would use for digitization. We may do it in-house. We have a pretty prolific digital library team here that could possibly help with that and facilitate that. But it's not something that the university has asked for. So we're still waiting on that because obviously that will be the impetus into that. Okay, one quick final question. Is that still using E-prints? Yes, we are, not for much longer. We're actually in the process of looking for a repository alternative. We just feel like E-prints has had a long life and it's probably at the end of my opinion and some of our other staff members that we would like to move forward to something else. But we haven't picked one out yet. We're literally at the beginning of that process. But the E-prints has been good, but the support isn't there in community in my opinion to continue with what we need to do. Great, great. Thank you. I think the suggestion here is that you could work with ProQuest to harvest out things, but you can read that chat. Oh, very well with ProQuest. For further possible solutions. So thank you very much. That was quite informative and thank you very much from my esteemed colleague in Pittsburgh, just 50 miles up the road from here.