 time to get started. Thanks for joining us and welcome. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information and you've reached one of the project briefing sessions that are part of the spring 2020 virtual CNI member meeting which will be running through the end of next week. Today we have two presenters both from Johns Hopkins University, Said Choudhury and Edwina Picken and they will be giving their presentation after which we will field questions. Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will moderate the Q&A and I direct your attention to the Q&A tool at the bottom of the screen. You can use that to type in questions at any time during the presentation and we invite you to do exactly that. Pose questions as they occur to you rather than waiting for the very end of the presentation. I just want to say a word or two about this. There's something terribly ironic about a session given how what's happened over the last couple of months and how closed many spaces are to us that looks at physical space. Although I would also note that the interplay between built spaces, digital spaces, and services has been a long-standing theme of CNI's interest and certainly has been one of the centers for example of the work that are now emerita associate director Joan Lippincott has carried out over the last few years. At the same time I expect that this is going to be a highly relevant presentation today because we are going to hear not just about implications of service provision in physical spaces but also in library digital spaces and I think that Said and Edwina are going to have some very enlightening and informative things to say about what's been happening in this area over the last couple of months. The need for student services didn't go away when we moved to remote instruction. If anything it probably increased so I'm looking forward to this presentation and it just remains for me to thank you for joining us and expressed by gratitude to Said and Edwina for sharing this with us and with that over to you Said. Thank you Cliff. That was a very kind and really important introduction because I was actually going to say the considerable work that Joan has done over the years, the context, the overall context that CNI has been providing in terms of library spaces and you're absolutely right that topics of student services particularly wellness and mental health which is the focus of what we'll be talking about today not only remain important but are probably even more important than ever. I certainly hope everybody's staying safe and healthy during this unprecedented time and one interesting aspect of the timing and the way that CNI itself has done a pivot in terms of responding to the COVID crisis is we have to have a fairly major pivot in the month of March when Hopkins like many other institutions basically went to online learning and campus was basically shut down so we had just started the journey in terms of what it means to think about student services around wellness and mental health and physical space and now as you will hear in this presentation we'll start to think about it a little bit in the digital space as well. So Edwin is going to talk about the actual student wellness initiatives. We've actually had an earlier presentation so we're not going to go into too much depth around the research behind that but rather the implementation of what we had done in the middle early part of March late part of February only part of March which we eventually have to pivot later in that month and she's going to talk about how we become more integrated into the overall fabric of mental health and counseling efforts within the university and some of the questions that we need to explore in going into the future and I'm going to provide a little bit of more of the context and sort of overarching framework that that's important for this and you can see this quote at the top of the slide that said who owns this and this is an actual quote from our vice provost for student wellness at Hopkins it's it's worth noting that the fact that Hopkins has identified a vice provost to student wellness is a really important signal and initiative if you will and he said this when we launched what we're now calling a wellness station in the physical space of our learning comments there were lots of individuals from various student services coming into this space we had a launch event that was sort of a showcase and public affirmation if you will about the importance of this in the context of library spaces and working in collaborating with the library and he asked this question and said here is this wellness resource that his office supported and collaborate with us but it's not in one of quote their spaces and I think it sort of begged the question of how do you think about this in a more integrated way with the library as a partner and as Cliff mentioned we've been looking at continuity of university and library types of services from a research perspective as you know or may have seen in the email the executive roundtable let's see and I did on this as producer report around that there's of course academic continuity in terms of how we continue to teach in new ways but there there is clearly as Cliff mentioned they need to think about student service continuity and the continuity of wellness services and that's that's challenging in its own right and we'll go into a little bit about why that that's the case in one important overarching I guess question maybe is I think it's fair and I'd be curious to hear what others think of this that we we in libraries particularly when comes to our spaces are more comfortable with the idea of supporting academic functions it's my understanding that this is not the case at least not yet at Hopkins but that many libraries actually have classes in their spaces at least during certain hours of the day we are quite comfortable or at least even supportive of graduate students maybe having office hours and of course students like library on academic work in libraries but the growing question of whether student services types of activities are also inappropriate or a natural kind of function that should exist in in library spaces as well you know what we found earlier in the year is student services office folks were coming into the library and literally setting up a table in the cafe and they would just put a little table tent saying do you need help on career counseling you need help on on you know mental health counseling and so on and we as a library in our management team what we're quite sure what to make of this is this something that is appropriate is something we should support is it something we should advance is it something on which we should partner so that that overarching theme of how our library space is potentially usable and important for not only academic functions but student services is the overarching kind of lens that I think is very important for this and of course major question is how will this change given what's happened with with the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that so much of our activities now online and a good portion of it at least will continue to be for the foreseeable future so it'll be really critical for us to imagine what all this means in the long term as well a little bit about the arc of the work that we've done again we've talked about this in previous session so I won't go into this for too much detail but I do think it's helpful to understand this in case you didn't see those presentations we've had three iterations of large-scale visualization or displays in a very high-traffic public space within our learning commons and they'll make all the birdie learning commons it was not a space originally designed for such usage we we did not our learning commons was launched about nine years ago at this point we did not have dedicated spaces for visualization or displays that you see in other libraries so we tried to explore whether it could be spontaneously sort of organically created within a space that wasn't originally intended for that we started off with custom developed hardware and software that was largely a research project prompted by computer science department the chair computer science department of time was interested in different forms of interaction with large displays and we had a graduate student who developed all of the hardware and the software and we put it in the space the second iteration or incarnation of it was an attempt to tie it more to medical research and to explicitly focus on games what we learned from the first iteration was that a game that was available on that platform was the most popular by far than any of the things we put on there so we were a little bit more intentional a little bit more specific focusing on games and thinking about it in the context of a medical project we worked with a group that had a artistic and a design background as you see from the pictures the first version was not particularly aesthetically pleasing or interesting and the second version started to incorporate some design and artistic elements and then finally where we are or where we were I should say a few weeks ago we really embraced this idea of games for student wellness at Wieners prior research informed that in a very significant way and we streamlined the hardware and the come on software made it much more commodity based so it's not really complicated technology anymore but it's much more accessible it's much more usable and it is very much focused around student wellness and if you just sort of go through these three different slides that I'll show you this is the first incarnation the person standing in front of the deck is Kell Garan he was the graduate student computer science who designed this and there were certainly interesting aspects of this and some of the lessons we learn but we the fundamental lesson was this this was just too complex too difficult to maintain and that games were really the most engaging aspect of it the second iteration is what you see here and that cable that you see in front of you is the artistic piece that was introduced as part of the next incarnation sort of trying to draw the eye and draw your interest to the space and it was around one of these games that I mentioned it was medically focused and then the current iteration we had as the current iteration is what you see here so you can see it's basically a kiosk at this point with a standard iPad embedded within the kiosk connected to a display it's not a particularly large display at this point you can see students as they're apt to do sort of taking over the space so to speak it is their space it's not really taking over just sort of becoming much more fun comfortable with being near the display and you see these clouds on top that I'll let Edwina talk about but it's those are clouds that were created by local artists and they're very important in terms of a theme that we've developed around wellness and the library support for that so I will turn it over to Edwina who's going to talk about that particular setup and what we're now calling the wellness station thank you say it so yes so the most recent iteration of the visualization space which now is the wellness station really has sort of crystallized around the idea of providing wellness resources to students giving them a portal through which they can access counseling resources from Hopkins but also a variety of games that I've researched and have benefits for stress relief and sort of sort of brief anxiety help and so all of this has been inspired by the fact that Hopkins released a mental health task force report in 2018 where they identified student mental health as a university priority and the vice provost for student mental health and wellness is one of those offices that came out of this task force report and so when they did a survey of Hopkins students they found really especially high levels of stress and anxiety at Hopkins compared to similar schools and they found they had quotes such as you know it feels like a pressure cooker at Hopkins or you know it's difficult to identify and find resources to get help and one of the ones that really hit close to home for us was that the library was one of the places where students feel most stressed and that makes sense because that's where you know they're studying and they're working but it's also where they're gathering just to be with their peers and it creates a climate that it does not promote a very healthy environment and so we really with library space wanted to create an area in the environment that would provide students with some sort of stress relief bringing it to them instead of having them go out and find it themselves when they're already feeling stressed and so some of the recommendations from the task force were that we needed to create a climate of awareness and support for student mental health and wellness and stress reduction and promote resilience in the context of stressful situations and what role can the library play in that we thought making this wellness station a kind of centralized station with an access portal to counseling center resources to wellness resources but also financial and academic resources all in one place so instead of them having to come to the library and set up their tables students can just access it centrally and then the added art place art installation that you saw there with the clouds is a piece of artwork titled the rainbow nimbus which is comprised of if you could go back one slide so we can see the cloud again so these are colorful sculpted clouds which were designed by local Baltimore artist called Operation Arts the Alliance for Responsible Trade and Sustainability and the clouds actually emit patterns of lights and sounds that are aiming to support mental health through kind of the psychology of color theory and light therapy that represent different changes in patterns in a human mind it was kind of the idea that you know in your mind there's a constant input of thoughts and feelings and information that can cause stress and anxiety and can turn adverse and affect your mental health and physical wellness and so the clouds work also kind of a shout out to one of the counseling center at Hopkins new intervention called Silver Cloud which is a cognitive behavioral therapy online base what is it called it's kind of a service where all undergraduate students can have access to CBT and so we they were launching it in around February and so we teamed up with the counseling center and with the student affairs office and decided that we would have a launch date kind of a launch event where we would have the vice provost and psychologists counselors people from the rec center all coming to the wellness station we would have silver cloud up on the wellness station screen and then we would allow students to come by and ask questions and we could talk them through the resources and kind of show them what it's like because one of the reasons one of the reasons we hypothesized that the station in the past wasn't getting very much use was because we never formally introduced it to students we would sort of put up the screen and it would be would have things on it but we never introduced it to students and said you know this is its purpose and it's for you for you to use it for you to own it and so when working with the counselors and with student affairs they really encouraged us to have this launch event and we also really wanted to stress to the students that these resources and the games the small casual games on the station were not a substitute at all for counseling that they're not intended to minimize or address the serious issues that students are facing but they are significant in that they're offering small interventions and breaks from stress very small steps that may be helpful or useful for getting through the moment because what I found in my research is that not all leisure activities are created equally when it comes to rejuvenating and when it comes to restoring your mood and so if a student is stressed out before an exam and they can choose to either scroll through social media or you know sit there and do nothing or play a quick game of Tetris on the wall there's actually research evidence that they will be less stressed if they play a game in which they can feel like they're making progress and having achievements and if there's a social aspect where they can come together and feel a sense of community and laugh together that's even better and can we advance to the next slide so we had this launch event back in February and it was really exciting to see all the students who were very interested but we only had about two weeks of usage in the physical space before COVID-19 forced us to shut down the library but we did have we were tracking how often the games were used using the ipads and tracking functions and so we do have some anecdotal evidence that the games were used pretty regularly and as for the counseling websites and so in transitioning to digital resources we decided that we would create a blog post on the Johns Hopkins Library website in collaboration with Student Wellness Office in order to post links to all of the games that were on the wellness station and all of the resources so that students could have an equivalent digital space through the wellness station where everything is there and there were many physical constraints because of for example the iPad could only support games that were in landscape mode not portrait mode and so by having the digital blog post we were able to kind of open up the range of resources that we could provide students with and to promote connection to the space and to the university we also included a recording a video recording of the clouds so of the rainbow mimbus clouds changing colors and responding to ambient sounds in the environment and so we put a little two-minute loop of the clouds online and then invited students to download that and you know add their own soundtrack if they wanted to just to kind of promote connection to the university and we've been participating monthly in mental health task force meetings with the university so it's really been an incredible journey for the library to come from a place where student affairs and student services will use the space to try to get students attention and and use it for their own for their own endeavors and now it's more the collaboration where we are helping each other to get the word out and we're looking we're gonna have another blog post in a few months and we're working in tandem directly with student affairs and it's kind of unclear hopkins is still deciding whether or not students will be coming back in the fall but we are very much looking into how the environment can support wellness in a way that you know excellence and wellness are not mutually exclusive and i think that's a statement that at hopkins it often gets overlooked that wellness is not in competition with excellence it enhances it and that's really the the message that we want to get across in the library um next slide so that's uh another picture of the clouds this is after the shutdown so it's it's an empty space but they respond to noise and music in the environment they're pretty what's the word endearing these clouds and they've actually hopkins has had some ideas of maybe using these clouds as a symbol of wellness throughout the university so we could have one of these clouds in the counseling center or one of these clouds at maybe the school of education or the school of public health in their wellness spaces to provide kind of a unifying wellness symbol in these spaces because i think what was really lacking for students was a sense of unity in a sense of a mission for their own wellness everything was very disjointed the main what came first was academic excellence and what came second was you know we'll take care of you um and so yeah we're really looking forward to seeing how we can continue to help students because with the covid pandemic there's been an increase in all mental health issues so not only anxiety and depression but there's been increased eating disorders there's been increased trauma and abuse and there's been compromised abilities to provide support and resources so for example a lot of counselors are unable to provide students with their normal counseling because their licenses do not cross state lines and we're working we're in these meetings with the counseling center directly so when they find out that they have a new update for telehealth we can update our blog post and let students know immediately or when counselors say that they're going to have a virtual discussion space for students we can update our blog post with that too and we're really just trying as much as possible to have a digital community that is a reasonable maximally for the the wellness station space but we're going to have to reconsider what it means to offer space as a community gathering or research space as a library going forward with students there or without students there and yes this initiative has been conducted under the auspices of the association for research libraries research library impact framework pilot program which will be continuing throughout this year and i think i will open it up to any questions let's see how more to say saeed i do but there's a helicopter right overhead so i'm going to be on mute for a few seconds all right thank you i'll just take a moment to thank you both while we're waiting for the helicopter to clear saeed's airspace thank you both and we know and saeed for that really interesting discussion um and i think i'll go ahead and read a loud christine will feisenberg's question while we're waiting for saeed saeed i'll just keep an eye on your microphone and when it goes on mute i'll hand it back over to you uh so christine writes i wonder if students reported feeling particularly stressed in the library because it's the place they go on campus where they feel most able to tackle especially challenging or complex projects and tasks any sense of whether this is the case at john's hopkins and she continues uh not sure whether the the answer to my question matters for the space design either physical and or digital but if so would be interested in hearing how so so i think uh people can hear me now yes i hope so um one of the maybe somewhat unique characteristics of hopkins is we actually don't have a student union um so the library ends up becoming a gathering spot for the students in a way that may not be true at other institutions so in addition to having a large number of the students coming through for various kinds of reasons i i think that the reality is that since they are in fact mostly in the library to study and to attack these kinds of complex projects and tasks that is a stress inducing kind of experience but because they also view it as a social space so one one interesting data point is the senior class chooses to have its farewell party in the library that there is that sort of attachment there i think it's that combination of i'm here to study which is stressful but i'm also here to socialize and i'm also here to de-stress and get away from that is what's prompting us to move a lot of the wellness resources to where they are rather than assuming it's sort of a bifurcated or or delineated space it's it's a fluid kind of movement between study stress activity versus i now want to unwind and relax because i want to talk to my friend right so that's really interesting an important point edwina did you want to weigh in on that uh yeah i think we just um really want to kind of reconceptualize as the library is a multi-dimensional space so it's not just for for studying or for reading it's honestly most of the students aren't reading there when they're taking out books but it's a really place for engagement whether it's engagement and in academics or with each other or in wellness um we just want to sort of facilitate that as much as possible right okay thank you and thanks for that question christine we have a question now from steven bell how do you differentiate for students the difference between your wellness space and the campus wellness center so i i should verify this sort of edwina i don't believe there is a dedicated campus wellness center um there is a there is a counseling center certainly um but to her earlier point we're being very careful to to make sure people don't think we're trying to substitute for dedicated professional counseling in in terms of wellness activities um as she alluded to from that task force report and the subsequent activities and decisions in the institution is we don't have a cohesive coordinated sense of wellness across the different institute the different campuses the different divisions and the different entities so to that point of the vice provost question who owns this everybody should own this it's not something that only the wellness center should do or only the counseling center should do or only the library but rather students don't necessarily view it as i'm now in the counseling space and i'm in the library space it's i have an issue i have a problem i'd like to get it resolved and and understanding that you know we're never going to become a counseling center and a counseling center is never going to become a library but is there some middle ground where we can meet so that students aren't constantly confused about where to go and that no matter where you are and no matter what load you're in as a student whether it's social or academic you get the support and the resources you need or at least you get a pointer to the support and the resources you need right i think that's that's really important because the counseling center was having a lot of issues where there would be very long wait times where students would try to make appointments and they would have two three four weeks before they'd be able to see a counselor and also just the issue of the stigma of mental health but also where you know you're not going to go see a counselor go to the counseling center until things are bad enough that sometimes it's it's too late or there's already been you know significant issues or problems that you've had so the idea of trying to integrate wellness so it becomes more part of the everyday living of the university is is really part of our goal and there actually is the counseling center set up a little kind of more casual chat with a counselor function in the library it's just down the hall from this wellness station where for a few hours each week they have a counselor who just sits in the room and students can go and it's called chat with the counselor and it's kind of a more casual service and we what we point to that on the wall and we're looking into how when that counselor is in we can have sort of an active tracking button on the wall that sort of points to there and says you know in a green light that says you know they're in right now go go check it out just to increase awareness right well and i think um i think you said sort of at the beginning of your presentation that um originally part of the impetus for this was that you were noticing that student services was setting up in the library is that right did i understand that correctly that's correct it was spontaneous they would basically go to the cafe and and sit at the table and say they were available and and did you ever did you do you know what what drove them to do that i mean was that part of your strategizing with this i think they recognize that it's where the students go they they had the same motivation as can we move our services and our presence to where the students are rather than expecting them to come to us right it's so interesting it's fascinating and so and christine will weisenberg also just wanted to comment uh you know such important context regarding the lack of the student union thank you i have seen this play out of at a few other institutions and i'm familiar with some of the same challenges that this presents so and i think uh steven bell also relating to this um this thread he asks haven't passed uh project info lit reports identified uh the stress is related to library anxiety and getting stressed out about having to do research in our somewhat overwhelming research environments and lacking confidence in one's ability to to do college level research so yeah yeah that's a very good point and i think one thing that uh edwin you talked about in previous cni presentation is we we have you know i guess a premise that people will actually study better you know to this point of excellence of wellness and not at odds but actually reinforcing that people actually absorb information better and think more clearly and be able to do things better if they have a sense of balance so trying to introduce that balance into the space where they may feel on balance for whatever reason and this is not only unique to libraries i'm sure there are other places on campus where people feel stressed but just trying to introduce that sense of balance no matter where they might be is really important i think right right so true well that was terrific and some really great questions um if you have any other questions uh please feel free to type them in to the q&a box like to hang around and chat with the we never say just raise your hand and i can turn on your mic i just want to thank our for sharing your work with us here at cni thank you so much and thank you to our attendees for making time for us here today hope to see you back at cni really soon take care everyone bye