 from NCCU and an MA from UNCG and has occurred doctoral candidate at UNC Chapel Hill. Her professional focus is on supporting faculty and graduate students with their research and serves as the embedded librarian with NCANT's Office of Research Development, which includes the sponsored programs. This embedding brings scholarly communications, info, literacy, and reference consultations into campus sponsored research programs. So thank you very much, Nina, for doing this. Well, thank you, Linda. The health series has been such a fantastic tool for everyone. So I'm super glad to be able to contribute a little bit to it. So yes, I am Nina from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. We are in the same city as UNCG, but we are separate and we have a heavy research focus. And because of that, we started a lot of scholarly communications, public services stuff, and that is my job as researcher and grant support services librarian. And today I'll be talking to you about the NSF. I figured that we'll have roughly three groups of people that are independent from thinking. One that's just like, huh, I wonder what this is about. And one group that is mostly interested in the stats side of it and one group that is mostly interested in the grant seeker and faculty liaisoning side of it. And so I'm going to kind of split the time between the stats side and the supporting your faculty. I am better at the supporting your faculty and grant seeker resources side, but I think the stats side is super important because they are one of the big stats and data groups and that's something that everyone should know a bit about. I stumbled into being an accidental, if you will, research and grant support services librarian out of public services, representation of scholarly communications, and I'm very into that. So if any of you happen to ever want a researcher and grant support services librarian to come talk to you about your public services side of grant support and faculty liaisoning and scholarly communications, that is something that I do, especially if you're in North Carolina or nearby, I'm happy to come and talk to you individually. So that's my self-pimping. Also, I am part of the STEM link group that was mentioned earlier. So this is sort of indirectly sponsored as a pre-STEM spring session for that. And I hope that you all be able to come back for our STEM spring series. So the NSF, lots of people hear about the NSF. You probably have most been familiar with seeing it because you'll see a lot of times some kind of journal article or event will have the little sponsored by the NSF logo on it or a disclosure. So they're best known as a funding agency, one of the top funding agencies for promoting the advancement of science for economic reasons, for health, but not immediate health, like not clinical outcomes. It's more like we think someday down the line that the study of cell motility might have some long-term effect on health. And that's very much the kind of stuff that they do is both promote and track what we call basic research, the stuff that you have to know before you can know the things that are commercializable. So for those of you that have faculty in areas of math or theory of engineering or basic engineering concepts, physics, theoretical or not immediately commercializable things in computer science, basically any science, any engineering, any technology, especially those that aren't the kinds that you could right away get a commercial sponsor for because, oh, we could definitely sell this. And it's the kind of stuff that will help build our overall capacity. The NSF is super, super interested in that stuff. They fund about a quarter of 24% of the funding to colleges and universities. So they're not as big as the NIH, who is the biggest source of college and university federal funding. And one of their guidelines is that human health directly oriented go tickets to the NIH because they got more money than us. The DOD, of course, also does a lot of practical engineering and physics. But the more basic stuff, and so that's a lot of times what comes out of universities, is the stuff that can't go to market immediately, but will lead to overall improvements. That's the stuff the NSF really loves. They are one of the 13 federal data agencies. And when I say that, I mean the people who like not just the census, but say the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the National Center for Education Statistics, those groups like that that are the big data collectors. The NSF runs the NCSES, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. And the biggest point is just knowing that they're there. And you don't usually think of the NSF in the context of the NCSES, but they are there. And you can find them on that website. And they produce a couple of major reports. One is Science and Engineering Indicators, which is probably their best known report, and the underlying data sets that run like that. And they also track diversity issues that's another of their big reports and data sets. And then they also keep state-level profiles, infrastructure things, funding levels, where people are getting money to do research. Also, there's a really wide variety of stuff around STEM and the U.S. R&D machine. And so you can use that for all kinds of stuff in workforce planning, in industry, in assessing your universities. There's just a huge amount of data in there, but very narrowly defined to STEM. This is the NSF website, and that NCSES site is under the document library, which I don't think would necessarily be obvious. They're some part of the Social Behavioral Economic Services Directorate. And once you get under the document library, then you see that link for the NCSES. So if you can't remember the name of the NCSES, to Google it, they're going to be under the document library. They produce large-scale data sets, several reports. They have some data tools that you can use, including a great one called Webcast Bar that cross-links NSF educational data with IPEDS educational data. And apparently I forgot to finish the sentence there, but it's very useful for any kind of outcome assessment that you might do on campus. Another tool they have is SESSTAT, which focuses on the labor force. And then those of us who support data scientists always are being asked for micro-data files. They do have both public and private use micro-data, mostly focused around the educational types of data, so educational outcomes. But some really interesting stuff on once you get a doctoral degree, which in most of the STEM fields you have to get a doctorate to really do intense research, what happens to those people after they get out. So there's really some great stuff there. Let me pop into it so that you can see what I'm talking about. So this is the NSF website, and most of their important stuff is under their header here. Of course, like most websites in the government, you've got tons of news and how we're helping the taxpayer. But most of the stuff is going to be up in this top bar, and the NCSES is under the document library. They have all kinds of other stuff under the document library too. And here's that key science and engineering indicators. And then you see that they take their data and combine it with a lot of the other data units to come up with special reports and briefs that are a little bit more reader-friendly than just looking at the data sets. But they do also have some statistical tables that they produce. So pretty similar to what everyone else does, to be honest. And you can see there's a digest version of this, but the tables are where you're going to go if you want to really dig into the data. And they've got lots of good tools and tables available, and of course you can run your own from the data sources if you want to dig into it. So you can see that out of these, the state indicators are kind of a great place for those of you who do regional economic development types of stuff. In the list I saw some people that I know are parts of government agencies. So these are really good for those government agencies that are looking for economic development kind of opportunities. There's a lot on the academic body, so those of you that are university librarians like me are probably going to be interested in how the university is affecting research and development and what that part of the body is like. They divide it into people getting degrees and education into them and those that are producing research. And that's a really important division. Educating researchers and being researchers is a really important division to them. They do have K-12 for those of you that support a teacher education program, so I know that would be super helpful with a lot of the current trends that are going on in the Department of Education. And then there's these national and international issues around labor force and how much research we're producing, how much development we're producing, our industrial capacity, our industrial product that comes out. And then public attitudes sort of covers the things that you might do related to polling, related to what people's thoughts are. And so there's a lot of good stuff there for sociology and public policy, political science, because these are currently kind of hot topics because we like to think of ourselves as being one of the leaders in innovation. And these science and engineering indicators are a lot of the stuff that we use to figure out, well, are we really leading in innovation or are we just thinking of ourselves that way? If you're not a data librarian, you don't want to dig into the data sources, I recommend either the digest or the figures. They kind of pull out and highlight a lot of nice graphs that are super useful, and they include the Excel if you want to take that and make your own visualization. But if you're just looking for something to give some students, maybe teachers in training going into STEM, some good insights that are already kind of prepackaged. So the science and engineering indicators do a really good job of spanning intense data for people who work with data and then kind of prepackaged reports, prepackaged visualizations for people who want to know about science but who aren't really into data and aren't good with data. And that's one of the things I like about it. I don't feel that way when I work with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example. I think the NSF tries to be very conscious of the public view and the usability of what they put out and really highlight some things that are helpful for the more casual user. So basically any other sector that is also interested in STEM is going to get some value from that. So it's good for a STEM librarian like myself, but it's also good for people who are supporting education. I have a previous life as a business librarian, and this is really good for the kind of upper level, high cost, high education requirements, high infrastructure requirements studies about either the workforce or the business capacity building kinds of stuff. There's a lot of stuff going on right now and the workforce and the size of the STEM workforce is very useful for that. So it may be valuable for your institutions if they are looking to justify influxes of dollars either through development and fundraising or through grants and chips. Say look here the statistics to show where the critical gaps in our workforce are, where the growth in industry are, where the jobs that our students could get, those are really valuable. And then also for regional economic development and public libraries that are supporting their counties, there's just a lot of stuff that can be used here to identify gaps that would be helpful for community colleges that are developing new programs for universities or public areas looking to where to invest their money, what kind of infrastructure is most promising for economic development. There's a huge amount there that can be dug into. The challenge with working with it is because it's so focused on science and engineering that you can't kind of look across an industry. So you really have to find ways to take it and cross it with either the state level or the county level or with a specific IPEDS code or some other way there if you want to look at STEM compared to employment in general or STEM compared to education in general. It doesn't have those comparative data. It's just a very small slice of the overall educational or industrial data status. So you find that sometimes you run into a piece of data that you're like oh well and I really wish I could compare this to something in the arts for STEM purposes maybe and you find that it's not there. So it gets a little bit deeper into some of the data but in just this very, very bounded set of interests. So that can be a little awkward sometimes and taking it and crossing it with other data is a good way to try to get around that a little bit. Of course that requires a lot more expertise because you have to find somewhere to link it up. So it can be a little awkward to work with. Does anyone have any questions about the data part of this before I move on? So okay I'm going to go on to the grants part of it. And to give you a quick idea because sometimes when I talk to folks first of all I'm going to be talking about grants mostly for your faculty, not for your libraries although I'll touch briefly on library grants for NSF. But when I talk to people about grants a lot of times they're kind of fuzzy on it. It's money you get, right? But there's a little bit of more granularity to it. It is specifically when you're getting it from the government tends to be given to stimulate some sort of success. And a grant specifically requires reporting and monitoring which is why most of you will have some sort of sponsored programs office or sub-office or sub-sub-office to do that monitoring. So it's not the same as money that falls from the sky. It's money that has a whole bunch of strings and rules attached to it. If you want money that has no rules you want to talk to your development office and talk about gifts. It's also different from contracts. We hear about government contractors a lot. Contracts have a lot more rules than grants is. So grants are in between as far as how ruley they are. The grants are kind of in the middle of the ground. They're more ruley than gifts and less ruley than contracts. And somewhere on your campus you will have someone who works with grants. It may be a part-time accounting person. It may even just be one faculty member that does a little bit of proposal development. Or if you're bigger then there's probably research development or proposal development or sponsored research, or sponsored programs and lots of different names behind it. There's an office somewhere or person or part of a person that cares about this stuff on your campus. And so if you're ever interested in starting that conversation and trying to get your library kind of involved in how can we help with this stuff, research development or proposal development is usually a great place to start. I also have had a lot of success with RCR or Responsible Conduct and Research, the ethics office. And they usually know who else works in sponsored research or sponsored programs too, so that can just be a place that's been to talk to. So the NSF grants, as I mentioned, are grants specifically around science, especially basic science, and technology, especially technology theory. And if you do any scholarly communications or if you do any liaison that is not 100% around the topic of education and information literacy instruction, then you should care about grants. Because even if you are at a smaller comprehensive or community college, if you have biology faculty, you have chemistry faculty, anyone working in STEM cares about the NSF. The NSF is the people who pay to get labs set up and who help people create new outreach programs. Also all of the kind of technology innovation programs, all of the building of labs, especially if it's a new lab for a new technology, all of that kind of stuff, even if you're a predominantly undergraduate or community college institution, that stuff usually comes from the NSF in part or in full. So anyone who does electronics, biology, chemistry, physics, the whole deal, NSF may have a role for helping your faculty and your student researchers. And helping those faculty find stuff or keep up with stuff from the NSF is a great way for the library to build those faculty relationships. So it's not just, oh, well, I don't see where the library can teach my students. I mean, for those faculty that you already have instructional relationships with, that's great. But sometimes you've got those faculty that are like, I don't need the library to do instruction. There's nothing that we need from the library for information literacy. But then you've got the second way that you can try to relate to them. Well, what about if I could help you with your research? So it's another way to find ways to build relationships with your faculty members. The NSF makes grants by directorates, which are kind of subparts of the NSF that are focused on specific types of science. You can see that those directorates are biology, chemistry, information science, engineering, education, which is where if you're doing STEM education trying to build a better undergraduate or build a better graduate student, that's where you would go. They also do have one program that is focused on what they call informal STEM education, which is libraries and museums. So if you have a special library or if you have a campus museum STEM education program, that informal STEM education branch within the EHR directorate would be where you'd want to look. The engineering, environmental, geosciences, integrative, which is things that are cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary, especially if they're really going to make two or more disciplines work together. They have an international branch, math and physics. Well, the physical sciences, which are going to include physics. And then social behavioral and economic, which is sort of a catch-all for them of stuff that they feel is sciencey but not falling into one of the other directorates. So if you understand the directorates, you have a much better chance of identifying where you want to be when you're looking at grants or looking at talking to a faculty member about grants. The big plus is you probably know what your faculty members do. So this is a very liaison-friendly set. I really only have to go into a few of these directorates, biological sciences, EHR, and engineering. I never have to deal with the math and physical sciences directorate because I don't work with any of those or liaison with any of those areas. So you can really concentrate in on areas that match your liaison responsibilities, or if you're in a special library that match in with your special library responsibilities. And each directorate kind of has its own flavor, so you can get a good feel for the relevant directorate for your faculty. And I showed you the research areas within my PowerPoint, and that shows you the directorates here. But under the about us, they have this organization list, which will lead you to this organization list page here. And this gives you a more granular view of the directorate. So one of my areas is biology. Under the directorate of biological sciences, they have various divisions that are their more focused areas. And when you get a grant, it tends to be from a division or cross-divisional within a given directorate. So you can really get into where your faculty interested. And here's that formal and informal settings, the informal settings part of the division of research and learning, informal and informal settings within the directorate of education and human resources. I'm getting very governmental here. This is where the stuff that focuses on libraries and museums is at. Which isn't to say, and you can see that there's a lot of stuff on multidisciplinary. And you saw that there was a whole kind of sub-office for interdisciplinary. There is a lot of stuff that focuses on multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work. But most of the time, even if you go for multidisciplinary activity like this, they're going to end up primarily flooding it under one specific division, not just leave it floating between a whole bunch of divisions. So they're very top-down and very much want to get everything into a specific directorate into a specific division and then assign it a specific lead person within that division to kind of work with it. So finding these NSF grants is just like any other information resource. You can search, you can browse, or you can set up alerts, just like you would in any other types of databases. Searching on the website under the funding tab where we just wore that top bar. There's a fine funding to search on their website. NSF Fastlane has a search function. You can Google NSF Fastlane. That's where we submit our grants, but that's also they have a search function within that. And then grants.gov is a website that does all kinds of funding. Not every government funding is listed in there, but it's much more than just NSF. So if you're going to learn just one search tool, one database, if you will, grants.gov is probably the one to learn. For some funding agencies, you stay in the grants.gov, mail you. But with NSF, you can find it in grants.gov. And if you find an NSF thing, it'll bounce you back to Fastlane to actually put the grant in. And that's usually something. That putting it in process is something that you trade off to your sponsored programs office. Unfortunately, we don't need to know about that unless we're doing one for ourselves. Then if you don't want to search, browsing is also an option, just like with journal databases. There's a browse for all funding opportunities, A to Z, if you want to get the feel of them. Or as I showed you the directorates before, you can browse within each directorate. So let me see if I'm going in the education and human resources into the formal and informal learning they're going to have. And they show you your dig down over here. So this left-hand bar is really good for navigating NSF. The programs and then funding are both good places to go. Programs will usually give you the better browse. This advancing informal STEM learning is the most library-focused. But you can see there's lots of different ways of getting better K-12 for those of you that are doing teacher education. The eye test seems to be really popular right now, bringing teachers on campus with students for summer programs and stuff. And so once you dig down into a specific function, you can browse through their programs. And that's a valuable backup because predicting the search can be very, very hard until you've gotten a sense of what kinds of words that they use. So we're used to searching for journal articles which are kind of much smaller, whereas these are much bigger terms. So they're things like observatories or informatics. They're not going to be terms that are down to cell motility. It'll be broad things like biological instruments, biological sample collections. So it takes a little bit of practice to get a feel for what their terms are, to get a feel for what their terms are before being able to search. So starting with either the A to Z list or the Directified Directorate Program search to get a feel for what kinds of terms you're seeing is a good way to get a feel for that. So I recommend the browsing. And then again, just like with journals, we get set of alerts. They have an email or RSS system. You can do it through grants.gov. If you just go to grants.gov, there's a managed subscriptions option. NSF has a great email system that sends out a weekly set of newsletters. And because they've got so many different newsletters, you can just use checkboxes to control which ones you want. So if you only want your biology liaison, all you want to see is new program announcements in the Biology Directorate. You can get it down that narrow or you can turn on a whole bunch of stuff and see I want to see the Education and Human Resources, and I want to see biology, and I want to see physics, and I want to see engineering. You can turn on a lot. You can turn on a little. So it gives you a lot of control options for how much you want in that email they send you each one. And so when you were reading this, you might have wondered, what does a librarian do to help with grants? Because I just mentioned you can help faculty search, browse, or set up alerts just the same way as working with journal databases. On most campuses that are large enough to have any proposal development professionals over in their sponsored research program, those people are teaching a search class, and we're teaching some sorts of search strategies. And so working together with them to improve how the search can work. They may not understand about Boolean. They're getting very granular into the click here, click here, click here, but not really necessarily talking about Boolean terms to improve searching, to narrow things down, or to broaden things out. So a lot of times you can improve the workshops that they do just by bringing search expertise to what they're working on. And the NSF especially, but all government databases, are very classical types of non-discovery platform search interfaces. You've got your ands and ors and nots. You've got sometimes very, very close word matching that you have to use truncation and oil cards with if you wanted it to find plurals. So think like 2002 technology for the search interfaces, and a lot of times you'll be there. The big problem, as I mentioned, is the keywords are so different because instead of being very specific to a given study that the faculty member wants to do, you have to find a much larger umbrella over top of it. So a lot of times you need to do a different kind of brainstorming or term mapping process to figure out what potential terms might umbrella over what they're doing, what kinds of outcomes they might come up with. It takes turning your brain around a little bit because the keywords are so much broader. But it's a great way if you've got STEM faculty, which a lot of times are not really interested in getting their students in. They really want to get their students to the bench. They don't necessarily want them to be spending a lot of time analyzing their searches and using information literacy from their articles and so on. They just want to hand them articles and then get them to the lab bench, get them into the field, wherever. So for me, I find that sometimes information literacy is a little bit harder to sell to the STEM folks. And so this is a different way to start a conversation with those faculty for areas that don't have as much traction with them. Also, once a faculty member finds a grant that they're interested in, they have to put literature in throughout it to prove that there is some evidence that their study holds promise. So these are not studies that are already completed. These are studies that they're hoping to find the money to see whether the study will find something. So they need to use a lot of literature to support the probability that the study is well conceptualized, is cutting edge, is going to really have an impact. And so a lot of times it's a good opening to a conversation about broadening their literature search and having some consultations around their literature and so on. So a lot of the NSF structures, once you get into them, you find they're very librarian-friendly. And if you didn't already know this, you probably did since a lot of you are data and government librarians. But if you didn't already know this, there has been a change in the last year about the data of repositing open access to data and also public access reporting of articles after the study is completed. And we have traditionally known for the last several years that if they're funded by the NSF, they will need to reposit their data in a reusable format. And they have to have a data management plan that goes into their grant application. With the new rules, after they complete the study, any publications that result from funded activities will have to be reposited or filed with the NSF. And that filing process means that they need to work with specific field codes and work with the metadata to make sure that their articles are properly described. They have accurate keywords that are in line with the way NSF wants the keywords set up. Right now, the data management has been growing across all of the government agencies. NSF's been doing that for a while, so you're probably already familiar with that if you do any NSF work at all. But new to the NSF is going to be this public access of articles. And from past experience, when agencies have started to require faculty to reposit their articles, they've needed a lot of help from librarians for how to file them, because it's not necessarily a familiar interface to them, although it's like selling off a log for us. And so that can be another great conversation to have. So there's a lot that we can offer to our grants office and to our grant seeking faculty members. All right, so I have about 15 minutes left now for Q&A. Public libraries. Yes, the ASL, so an advancing informal STEM learning, includes anything that's not attached to a classroom, and they strongly support STEM learning for the public in informal, which is to say non-classroom environments. So that's going to be very public libraries, and as I said, museums. Most of their applications tend to come from museums, but their language is really clear that they want public libraries to. Could I talk a little more about Webcast Bar? I can talk some about it. So Webcast Bar is especially interesting because it links everything through IPEDS numbers. So you can say I want to have an IPEDS, maybe the IPEDS salary, and I also want to look at earned doctorates. I want to look at, actually, institutional characteristics might be more interesting. I want to look at how the library institutional characteristics survey and earned doctorates relate to each other. And then I can download it as comma or SAS. So this is nice because they do let you do a SAS file. You don't have to take it into Excel and then read. So you see I didn't get a whole lot out of this. I've got my averages. I probably would want to filter. I'm not sure why the library stuff isn't in there, which is very disappointing, because I wanted to see whether I could get it to spit out library funding, higher than average library funding, and how many doctorates that got. Process of filing articles. Yes, that I do know. You can see that I am not a data librarian. I apologize. So this is going to be the NSF PAR. This is wonderful naming, but not as bad as some of the ones that I've seen. So NSF PAR is, and you can see that this is in beta right now, the PAR is going to be their version of PubMed. They're kind of taking this from the PubMed model, although the infrastructure under it comes from the Department of Energy structures. This is where the actual articles are going to be. So eventually as we deposit more stuff here, it'll be like a science-y version of PubMed. So a lot of people are going to get their free articles in there, and that's what their goal is. As far as how to do the repositing, they will have to set up an account. These are the rules. So if you're starting from the PAR, the public access page linked down here will take you to this. These are their, like, why are we doing it? What are we doing? How are we doing it? So anyone who submitted their proposal after January 25 of this year, so what they call the 2016 proposal and award policies, when they get to the end of their thing. So they submitted their thing in February. They submitted it to say, I want to get some money. It went to the NSF. NSF debated through their peer review for maybe six months and said, yes, you can get some money. Then it has to go to the campus and the NSF, and there's a whole debate and a whole bunch of forms they fill out. So if they filed in February, they're probably not actually getting the money until like a month or two from now, October, November. And then they have to do the study or the program or whatever that was funded. And then when they write that up, so this is going to be a year or two from now probably, when they write that up and get it published, then that article will have to be repositive, which is why the PAR can still be in beta because anyone who is affected probably hasn't written much yet. They're very disappointingly to me personally, they're not allowing local repositing to replace it. So if you have in your local institutional repository some way to directly ingest into the PAR, since it's still in beta they haven't told us how they're going to handle yet, that may be something that you can tie your institutional repository in with. But for right now, they're not requiring, they're not allowing us to use institutional repositories for NSF. But when they put it in, they are going to have to have basic metadata and the metadata has to be attached to the article. So when they file the article, it's going to need to have basic metadata attached. Now when I say basic, I'm talking name, author, institutional provenance, funding provenance, keywords, that kind of stuff. But still, that can really throw faculty for a loop. So once they publish, they have a year to get it into PAR with its metadata and then PAR will ensure long-term preservation. But that means that if there's an errata or something that comes out, they need to have a system to put that in. And then the persistent identifier will be issued by the PAR and they can stick that in. With their final publication. Just like with PubMed, several of the big publishers are already trying to set up automatic ingestion into the PAR. But of course, you have to keep an eye on the whole licensing issue with that too. So frequently asked questions, probably going to be the place that you would take here. And then you can actually see their frequently asked questions. This is probably where you would want to take your talking points from if you were going to go out and talk to people about this. One of the big things that's a good faculty talking point on this is that the publisher cannot charge an additional article processing charge for open access through the PAR. So they can't say, well, because you're going to be open access with NSF, we're going to charge you half of our open access fee because you won't be able to access the rest of your build and access through someone. They cannot do that. So there's no allowed additional charges for the PAR version of it. So that may be something that's worth trying to enforce early on. They can choose to put in open access fees for the journals open access, but not for the added open access required for their government repositing. Most of the information we have, they've done some webinars and stuff. NSF does a lot of webinars, but most of the information that we have is through the public access rules, either the fact or their initial statement that they released back when they were initially planning it. And once they have a fast lane or NSF account, they'll also have access to the PAR. So you'd have to be working alongside the faculty members to help them go through the repositing process. And I see I'm at my time. Does anyone have any last questions? Please feel free to email me either if you have general questions or if you want me to come and talk more directly to you and your library. Thank you very much, Nina. Is there any last questions?