 Hello everyone and welcome to our poster presentations. My name is Terri Robinson and I will be your moderator for the next 45 minutes. A quick reminder before we begin during the presentation portion, please keep your audio and video muted unless you are presenting or you are asked to participate by the moderator. You may use the chat tab to ask questions which will be addressed during the Q&A portion. Thank you all for joining us and I'll turn it over to our first presenters, Jennifer Beamer and Ken Kotich of Claremont Colleges Library and their poster entitled The Conundrum of Senior Thesis in the Library's Open Access Institutional Repository. Great. Thank you, Terri. I'm Jen Beamer and this is my colleague Ken. You're getting us like two for one in one window. We were just gonna sit in opposite rooms and we figured we'd come in together. So thank you so much for having us and for letting us share with you today sort of I think kind of a show and tell about our thesis, senior thesis or in some cases called a senior capstone at the Claremont Colleges where we work together as a team in the interdisciplinar, I was gonna say in the institutional repository. We work together on a number of projects. Of course we do ETDs for our graduate institutions but senior thesis takes up a large portion of our work time. And we have seven colleges at the Claremont Colleges and five undergraduate colleges which see the value in our repository but don't often follow our workflows or follow procedures that we've set up for them. And so we wanna share a little bit with you. We're hoping in the Q and A that maybe you'll give us some feedback or you'll reach out to us later if you're having the same situation as us. And we will just jump right in. I'll do a few portions of the poster and then I'll hand it over to my colleague Ken. So essentially we have a fairly robust senior thesis program. It's existed for about 10 years. We have about, well, not very many I guess in the scheme of thing but we have about 500 deposits per academic year. Two or a portion of those come from two institutions that mandate students cannot graduate without depositing their senior thesis in our repository. And then three institutions of those five undergraduates have this optional deposit and it's really up to the student. However, they must have someone's approval an adult approval, we call it but it's really they're either the reader of their senior thesis or sometimes it's the registrar, sometimes it's a department head, et cetera. And so students self deposit their theses and then we have this kind of workflow of approval and based on what's the ways that they deposit. So they have three choices. One is open access. Of course, this is the information we communicate directly to them so they'll hopefully understand what's gonna happen. So fully open access where the metadata and the full text PDF are available. Most people find via Google Scholar our repository or campus only access which means they would have to be a current faculty student or staff to access the work. They would be able to see that there is a PDF but they cannot download it. And then finally embargoed and this of course just is the bibliographic citation or metadata and then they reach a if you use digital commons, you know, they reach this button that says you can't download this until a certain time and date that has been set by them or by us in the workflow. We do have a lot of requests for people to dark archive their theses but we don't do this. And also we have a number of exemptions. A number of our schools have sort of high ranking, I guess that's what you call them students who are going to publish undergrad students who are going to publish with faculty and so they don't want anyone to see their work until it's published or in a format that they wish to see. So I'm gonna hand it over to Ken and he's gonna talk a little bit about the numbers. Yes, thanks, Jen. Thank you. Yeah, so when I started working with Jen, part of my one of the earliest projects I did was to assess how often we receive requests for closed theses, these items that are campus only restricted from the outside world to access items in the institutional repository. And we found of course, a big discrepancy between the mandated schools that have to deposit versus these optional deposits where students upload and post their senior theses themselves with CMC and Scripps being the two mandated schools. So there's of course a higher amount of deposits per academic year from these institutions. And we're seeing almost about half actually be released closed meaning the students will be able to access them later when they can't access their email and all that. And then of course, people from the outside world who see it pop up in Google Scholar can't access the paper as well. So between 6,218 deposits for seeing 3,091 being about restricted or closed. And these are from stats I grabbed back in January. So that's a 49.71% closed in just from the senior theses, ETDs of the IR. Oh, sorry, Jen, can you scroll down? Thank you. Yeah, so and these, they of course account for a high amount of downloads and interaction from people coming to scholarship at Claremont, our IR. And we've noticed that the largest amount is from the CMC school, right? Because they have a higher deposit per academic year, but you know, and Scripps of course as well. The other schools, we are seeing an increase in actual interaction with the deposits that are coming from the optional schools. These being Pitzer, Pomona and HMC. HMC has been a steadily, a steady depositor because we deposit their math thesis. They aren't interacted with as much though. So that's why we see a little bit of a lower download amount. But the Pitzer and Pomona students that are starting to upload a lot, these tend to be more like environmental analysis departments or some humanities departments that see a little bit more interaction. And but even these areas with the increased amount of submissions for starting to get the last couple of years, these are also being closed. And we're trying to of course encourage open access in the IR. So you can see there the total amounts. I didn't include like the total of senior thesis in scholarship at Claremont because it's steadily growing. But yeah, so that's just a little pie chart there. So should we go to the next one? Yeah. Next part. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so I guess our conundrum lies in, it's a lot of labor to create these workflows to follow through, to follow through with individual students. And there's just 1.6 of us. So Ken is also a digital production assistant and helps with a digital library that we have and myself. We provide to each and every student. Of course, in group situations, we try to get as many as once together. We provide instruction on the whole workflow, what it means to put your work in an open access venue or closed venue. We provide handouts. We have videos. We have a team of subject librarians that get in touch usually with the students who are writing their senior thesis from the very start and help them with resources. And then we also support them through the posting process. So you can imagine our favorite week is the last week before graduation when all the students are calling us to say they can't figure out how to log in and they think they uploaded, but they're not sure could we check. And so the two of us cover sort of all the back end workflow. We also have a digital commons platform, but I would say we are sort of like, is the word frustrated or I don't know, we try to do all the things ourselves. We, I come from a d-space environment and so we wanna do the stuff ourselves. And so we do that the best we can. We reach out to digital commons when we need to. But originally the intent of this platform and also a very high value sort of a situation is our Dean loves the senior thesis and we want them to be open, but not necessarily close to everybody else. Hey Jennifer, sorry to interrupt, just five minute warning. Oh sure, thank you. So we do have lots of challenges I think as we've alluded to and I'm not gonna read them all off to you, but you can imagine in these workflows with different having mandated students talk to each other and some really want to post their work, faculty don't want them to post their work in the non-mandated. We also have students because they self-deposit, they have a lot of missing metadata. And so we go back in and try to fill that or we reach out to them. We also noticed that there's a steadily growing word of mouth about the library will archive your thesis for you. And so our Pomona and Pitzer colleges are just inundating us with papers. So we're working to fix all of this, these problems, but we would love to hear a number of years ago I think I sent out to this community, does anyone deposit senior theses? We would love to be able to document and share our work a bit more with everybody and get all the input from the community because it's a mountain to climb some days. So I think that's it, any other comments? No, yeah. I was just about to add the whole part about the weekly requests and that creates a big problem because people think they can get it but they can't. Right, we could have a whole other person just answering requests for theses that people want to read and they're closed. And so that, I think personally, that's a disappointment to us because you could probably tell we're passionate about open access, but we have to do what, we have to respect what the student authors want and certainly there are faculty members too or we won't exist anymore. So we work each day on trying to change minds and I think that's it. So thanks, Terry and thanks everybody for listening. Thank you, Jennifer and Kent. We do have one question in the chat. Someone asked, what do you use for self-deposit of the theses? So we just point students to the digital commons platform and they can sign in, create an account and then they can upload their work and label all of their own metadata, et cetera. We have a lot of dropdown menus so we point them to the right metadata to fill in but yeah, the digital commons platform is set up to be quite easy for self-deposit. Just got one more question. Can you explain about 40% missing full text? Yeah, so I think that, I think Kent's referring to hear the, so that we have this, the newer ones that are coming in, they don't wanna deposit their actual theses. So we're missing the full text option. And so they think that by not putting the document in or adding the document, that then nobody will read it. Again, I think this slides around a lot of nerves that students have, right? Like, cause they know the internet, what you can find and what you can't and they're a little nervous for people to read items. So that's a problem for us. If we were to switch platforms too, I think that's the problem. Yeah. Oh, yes. And also aspiring to have a different platform creates a conundrum for us because we're missing a lot of information from the self-deposits. So we would have to go back in and grab that. We do like to have standards and things, but it's very loose with students sometimes. Let's see. Does digital commons allow full embargoes of thesis files? They do. Yes, they do. And sometimes we go back and double check when people want them to release cause we notice that sometimes digital commons doesn't release them automatically. So we do go back and check. But yes, they allow full embargo. However, students often get a little upset when they realize the metadata is there even though it's embargoed. People who don't, faculty do too because they don't click through to see that they just are Google Scholar-ing around and they don't see that actually you can't access the text but you're getting a full abstract and the full author name, et cetera. Thanks, Jennifer and Ken. Thank you. There's several comments in the chat if you wanna check them out for people who can kind of commiserate with you and want to help with what you're doing.