 Hi, my name is Jennifer Hootman and I am the coordinator of digital scholarship at the University of Kentucky libraries. And my presentation today for the CNI project briefing video series is create UK, a review and recommendations for growing and enhancing campus collaborations. This is a follow up presentation to the CNI fall 2020 virtual membership meeting presentation that I made it was called create UK opportunities for digital pedagogy projects and collaborative infrastructure and I included the URL here to the CNI YouTube playlist and So if you're interested in learning a little bit more about how we even came to this particular program called called create UK, please feel free to listen to that one. You can find create UK at create UK.net. And it's part of a three year pilot program that we have that started in 2019 and it ends this June, June 30 at 2022. And as a point of reference, it is a web hosting space for faculty and students to create manage and share their research outputs and add academic work in digital form. So create UK is our brand of portal for a product that we license from reclaim hosting it's called a domain of one zone. And some of the specs behind create UK is that it's a managed private virtual server that accommodates to 500 users 30 days of nightly offsite backups 250 gigabytes of storage single sign on campus integration, a brand of portal that I've mentioned documentation templates to support ourselves as administrators as well as our community of users and we've been able to make customization so that documentation as well and migration strategies for graduating students. So again to kind of illustrate a little bit more what create UK is our distribution of users lies heavily with faculty libraries employees and graduate students with faculty at 33%. That's our biggest group libraries employees at 22% graduate students at a little over 20% and a handful of undergrads and and the other category. We have a number of different individuals that are lectures postdoc scholars research analysts, data management analysts instructional designers lab technicians it professionals so lots of different types of people on campus that have been interested in knowing what create UK is utilizing it for their own purposes. And some of them also wanting to look under the hood and see what what it's like and what's available there for the people they support. So we're right now we're right where we're hoping to be which is, we really have focused with on faculty and graduate students as our primary group of community users. And that's where we want to grow as well, increase the number of faculty and graduate students and, and certainly supporting undergraduate usage as well. If it's very if it's if the uses that they for the undergraduate students for create UK is specific to a course or a particular research project or group project that they have in a course, or more than happy of course to work with undergraduates and as well with this particular in terms of the distribution of installed applications again. Just like the previous graph this is information from the beginning of our pilot 2019 through February 2022. So you can see who the clear winner is here WordPress. So we have almost 100 installs of WordPress. So Mecca sites and scaler as well. And in that other category category again there are a few Drupal sites sites that have been established graph has also been installed on a couple of accounts, and a number of WordPress based profile templates have been utilized for creating portfolios in particular. I'd like to also talk a little bit about the ways in which create UK has been used by our community over the pilot. And one area is faculty research and so we've had a number of projects. And these are all out of these examples are all out of the College of Arts and Sciences. This is a bit or a low project by Dr Stephen Davis is a great example he's in the history department, and he has developed a number of digital humanities projects around the truth and reconciliation transcripts out of South Africa. So mapping some machine learning that he has applied to the transcripts and have yielded a number of a very interesting interesting and fascinating results that can be utilized by other researchers. And he's using the create UK platform to share out that research. We also have the documenting racial violence in Kentucky project that has been getting underway this past year and student interns are working with some faculty, creating biographical sketches as well as digital mapping that they're going to display through their create UK site. We have Kentucky Hispanic Heritage Project just starting, which is oral history and also a language Atlas program, or excuse me project that is starting as well. Where some language maps will be created or excuse me displayed on a create UK website that can be utilized by other scholars around the world. We also had a number of research lab sites set up a number of faculty in the College of Medicine, particularly the Sanders Brown Center on aging, the College of Pharmacy College of Health Sciences has a number of faculty that have really had the need to share their research. So they have these websites. I think all of them are WordPress, where they've been, like I said sharing their research but also explaining what their research is to a wider public showcasing who is working on that research in the lab. What kind of funding that they've received the publications that they've made are all shared on this particular site and it's been helpful for them in terms of funding. Not only to other but also to recruit and to whether it be people to work in the lab as well as to recruit other people to collaborate with in their field. So these research lab websites have been advantageous for those. Again in the College of Medicine Pharmacy and Health Sciences in particular. We also have some growing examples of course projects and portfolios we've had classes that have assigned students to create teaching portfolios for instance. We've had classes that have utilized in this in these two cases that I have as a screen capture on the presentation. They've utilized WordPress to showcase student writing, and the students are also learning to use WordPress in addition to sharing their writing publicly. So some of the programs that have been faculty in these programs that have been using create UK for the classes have been out of the writing rhetoric and digital studies program the School of Music, and the modern and classical languages, literatures and cultures. And we hope to really grow those use cases as well. We've had some digital exhibits that have been created. One in particular here called 1918 over here utilizes omega on the create UK platform and this was a nice project showcasing digitized materials in our archives at the University Kentucky libraries, which tell the story of the student army training core, and the Spanish influenza epidemic during this period of time, very timely topic topic, and a nice exhibit. We also have an exhibit utilizing WordPress for to promote some anti racism readings that we have in our collection. So that's those are many of the different ways in which create UK has been used by our community at UK. And we, since we're nearing the end of our pilot. We have recently issued a survey and got. I think a useful amount of people that have responded 31 responses were received and out of the 120 some I believe accounts. I was hoping for a little bit more but as is the case with a lot of surveys. We'll take what we can get in terms of feedback and the feedback has been very helpful and it's been delightful to see it's it's very, it's very satisfying on our end to be able to see that overall. The majority of our users have been satisfied with create UK generally as the platform and satisfied with technical support, as well as the number and choice of applications that are available on the platform. So it's good to see that the overwhelming majority are satisfied with create UK. But of course you know there's always work to be done to improve this, this level of satisfaction, and it is nice to get sort of to take the temperature of our community in this way and it does give us that feedback at least. One of the more critical questions that we had in the survey was do you think create UK has enhanced support for research teaching and learning at UK. And this is an area that I would like to explore further that I'll touch upon here in a moment, but again it's it's great to see that about 82% of those responded thought that is somewhere between somewhat enhanced to greatly enhanced. So, this is, this is very positive, and it's nice to see this this positive feedback from most of our, our users are have seen the impact that create UK has had either for their research or for their teaching learning. And here's just some of the feedback that we've received again that sort of highlights the affordability, the UK branded portal, and the help around having one place to go to for platforms to utilize for digital projects in class so that basically a time saver for the faculty so we have here a few that I'll read. I really do think that we need resources like this so that we aren't going all over the internet looking for things that are going to work for our needs. When there are standard programs that we know we can count on then that helps me build my syllabus and speak to the students with authority so it's like for this this user that this has been a considerable time saver as well as, you know, something that they feel that they can count on and to feel good about using with their students. Another one is say create UK ended up being perfect for my online course and students were able to affordably learn about the process of building a website both from scratch using HTML CSS and using a CMS in this case. The later one says most opted for WordPress. And then another one here says like that it was cleaner than using a free web app for my website and that it is UK branded. And then lastly, I learned a lot and I know that if I were to use it in the future I would be a lot more prepared, even with the learning curve between me and my students. We were still able to create something really interesting, and that I was proud to be a part of. So that last statement actually is very meaningful to me because there's there's an honesty there about, you know, this was, you know, there's some learning curve here but even with that, you know, we produce something that was worthwhile and it looks like this person would likely be likely come back to use create UK again in the future with their classes. But that also points to one of the things that we want to do going forward so we're renewing so renewal is also is. Very good thing. And I'm glad personally that we're moving forward with this. And I think there's so much more we can do with create UK and grind it. And the ways in which that I see moving forward in growing create UK I think increasing collaborations with specific entities on campus fostering partnerships and strengthening our support technically and innovating around how we assess create UK. So those are the four areas that I that I see moving forward that would be great to delve into. And with increasing collaboration one unit in particular on campus that I think that we need to do more with is our center for the enhancement of learning and teaching. And I think that collaborate collaboration needs to be deeper and hopefully we can innovate uses for create UK and support of digital pedagogy that's happening on campus. I also think that we need to foster partnerships with a variety of academic units and faculty and deepen those partnerships so that we are part of the process of embedding that digital literacy education in the curricula and strengthening support. I'm thinking technically here in terms of helping users get started. As was mentioned a moment ago, a moment ago, and in other remarks in our survey, I could definitely see that there was some need some some supports that need to be in place for faculty in particular just getting started with create UK. One email explaining how to get started just isn't enough I think maybe there needs to be some short video tutorials that highlight. Specifically how this looks and what to do with our portal. And how to get started installing applications and utilizing those applications working with students. And innovation around assessments is a final thought that I have here. We have plenty of so far quantitative data, we need a more qualitative data we need more feedback around, in particular what I'm thinking here is measuring student success and measuring the impact of create UK on students and on faculty. And we really need to get at that core more and learn, learn from the faculty and students exactly how this is this program is having an impact. So that's the end of my presentation. Hopefully there will be more to come in the future about create UK. I'm very excited about the future of this particular program and I think there is a lot of exciting developments yet to be had. So thank you for listening and if you have any questions about create UK please feel free to feel free to contact me at any time. And again my name is Jennifer Hootman and I'm at the University of Kentucky libraries and my email is JL Hootman at UK y.edu. Thank you.