 Welcome everyone. I have with me William Wallace from the University of Utah Library, and he's going to present his poster, Managing Library Thesis Awards. All right, so Shane, if you want to share your screen. All right. Is everyone seeing my screen? I assume. So I will be super fast. First of all, let me apologize for the extreme delay here. That was most likely at my end. I was clicking around. The second thing I'd like to say before I start is it's truly an honor to present here. I'm just now kind of dipping my toe in the waters of the ETDs and thesis kind of management in general. So as one of those first steps, I prepared this overly wordy poster, which will be made available to the rest of you for your discretion. But rather than have you try to look through all these words here, I'm going to give you a quick walkthrough presentation here of the contents. So let me swap that. Hopefully everyone is seeing what I would like them to see. I'm going to be, again, as fast as I can. So I'm Shane Wallace. I'm an assistant librarian with graduate undergraduate services at the University of Utah. I lead with a number of groups on campus and I work with the Honors College as one of those liaison bodies. And that is how I entered into the world of thesis management inadvertently. So I'm not even going to go through this outline. I'll just mention that some of the stakeholders involved. I work for the library, which is its own college at the University of Utah. But this project involves the theses that are generated by the outgoing seniors, undergrad seniors at the Honors College. So as part of their cumulative project, they need to prepare a thesis and present that thesis to an advisory board that kind of evaluates if it's deemed appropriate. It is then offered as a potential to be nominated nominated for the library award. And that's where I come in. So this project was actually initiated 14 years ago from the library. That's the interior of Marriott Library right there. I came to this about four years ago and to be honest, I don't really know how this project began. And I'll give you some details about what it looks like in just a second. There have been significant turnovers at the Honors College and the library and within the library in our digital scholarship team, which is the group which actually manages the theses. In that context, you know, we've got this project. So these theses are nominated for consideration from within the Honors College. They are placed into a shared secure web location. We actually anonymize them ourselves just for the purposes of review. And they are generally thrown into two different categories, either historically research-based and creative, although sometimes depending on the advisory board, we've also used the alternative categories of science versus humanities. Once the college has provided the theses, before they are fully digital digitally available, I call for volunteer librarian readers. I provide them with a rubric. Those readers will take, you know, one, two, maybe three theses, read them and evaluate them according to the rubric. I then take those scores and I synthesize them, create a master list of which theses have been most highly scored. And we meet to discuss to whom we should give the award. I communicate that with the Honors College. This is available elsewhere. This is what our scoring rubric looks like without the little check boxes. The Honors College ratifies the results. Then I work with our internal book arts and preservation, book arts, print certificate, preservation, create sleeves for that certificate. We get signatures from deans, department chairs and advisors as appropriate. Then I write a summary of the winners' efforts and the contents of the theses for our dean, who then at the award ceremony, which happens right, just about concurrent with graduation, the dean gives that speech. We all eat some fancy food and they get a check for $1,000 each. And then it goes on to digital scholarship. So we do have, we host the institutional repository through our own library, our digital scholarship department, intakes all of the theses and makes them available. And let's see. So I'm just going to kind of skip forward. So the reason I actually initiated this poster concept was I'm trying to think my way about how to do a little bit of research about the efficacy of what this project might mean. Because historically, it's been a great project. Although there have been some challenges, it's always tricky to juggle the anonymity for the students when we're doing evaluation. And in fact, my taking over this project led to us discovering that as an artifact, with all of the theses that were submitted to the digital repository, we have been retaining an end page that had personal information on it. So we've had to retroactively go back and remove the last four years of theses from our institutional repository and go through theses by theses and pull off those last pages. So anyway, there's a lot of challenges on that front. Of course, coordinating the people who do the reviews, doing analysis afterwards, and supporting digital scholarship because they're a very hardworking team. So I sort of have to act as their face man with Honors College and also the liaison in the other direction. But it's been a big success. Every year it goes off. It encourages young scholars. It enhances threads of interdisciplinarity in the sense that the Honors College works with several, in fact, every other undergraduate program and graduate program on campus. It's good publicity for the library and the institutional repository. And it also is an opportunity for librarians to be involved and engage in some review of content outside of the library. So good stuff, bad stuff. We do this project. I'm just trying to figure out if there is some research to be done in here, how to improve this, how to make it more meaningful. People say good things about us in a general sense, but I'm curious about actual measurements and metrics. So this isn't a large scale project. I'm going to interrupt you and give you like a one minute warning. Perfect. I'm wrapping up. So we're great. Yeah, nothing like past talking for one minute. So I don't have a lot of numbers for this particular project, and it's only partially involving directly ETDs. So I began to think about presenting this information in a more substantial way. So this is my first foray with that. So that is an overview of the project. I have a number of questions about how we can actually think about measuring impact and also improve the project itself and how to use this as an actual tool, not just for the library, but most importantly for the students and the students' scholars to kind of provide them with an opportunity to understand how these mechanisms work. Most of the Honors College, a significant percentage, I believe it's over 85, go on to graduate school directly with the intent of creating a dissertation or larger scale thesis. So this is really a process from their end, which they will be cycling back through, you know, in four, six, eight years. So I will cede the stage here and just say if this is of any interest. And once you had a chance to look at my way to wordy poster, I welcome questions, comments. If anybody else is engaging in any project, like this out there or knows of anyone who is and would be curious or intrigued by the idea of developing some research, I'd be happy to talk to them. Great. Thank you so much, Shane. So I think your session will be available in replay for anyone who wants to watch it later. And the other sessions should be available now for people to log into. So thank you very much. Thank you, Terry.