 So this is Alison Harvey from Cardiff University. The title of Alison's paper is No Money, No Problem, Supporting Research and Teaching with the Internet Archive. Alison is the Archivist and Special Collections at Cardiff University, and she'll be talking today about her work to provide fast and free digital access to collections in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. So without further ado, I will hand over to Alison. We're often asked to do more with less and sometimes to do something with nothing. This paper will describe my work during the pandemic to rapidly and efficiently develop a digital presence with neither budget nor infrastructure. This is in no way intended as a guide to best practice, but as an insight into what can be done with existing resources, namely developing the technical skills of collection staff to utilize free platforms like the Internet Archive and the unexpected places that these experiments can lead. In early 2020, our existing digital platform reached the end of its supported life and was decommissioned. We were in the process of procuring a new system when the pandemic hit. In the resulting rapid changes to organizational priorities and budgets that were necessary to combat the emergency, the procurement process was halted. So I needed to quickly find a free new home for our digital assets at a time where they were in more demand than ever and the Internet Archive seemed to offer a solution. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit that enables anyone to upload and freely host unlimited quantities of digital content on an open access website. Beyond free and unlimited hosting, it has a range of added benefits for users. For a free platform, it has an excellent user interface. Content is attractively previewed with a thumbnail of the cover or the front page and there are various options for sorting. Users can also filter their results effectively by format, date, subject, creator and language. Every item that's uploaded to the Internet Archive has optical character recognition applied by default, meaning that users can search for books using their titles and authors, but they can search for the text inside them as well. Again, this functionality and its accompanying interface is beyond what you might expect from a free tool. It provides a visualization of the location of matches within the text and a list of context-based results that limit the number of pages you need to load to see whether or not a result is relevant. Content is made further accessible by a range of download options that allow files to be extracted and reused in different formats. You can download the original high-resolution images, a compact PDF, or even the plain text from the OCR layer. The platform allows content to be grouped into collections that helps prevent it becoming lost among the millions of items that are hosted on the Internet Archive. This can help to direct users to defined sets of resources where they have a specific requirement, such as a cohort of students working on a project. And we're using this capability to support new and innovative methods of student assessment, challenging them to create online exhibitions or short films, activities that could be carried out remotely and that have the added benefit of developing their digital skills. All metadata is visible to Google and the Internet Archive benefits from strong search engine optimization. Links to digitized items will normally be found near the top of the first page of Google search results. There are also a few less obvious but very important benefits that I'd like to discuss and the first of them being interoperable metadata. It's free to host content on the Internet Archive, but we had to invest time in making our metadata consistent. Like many institutions, we had legacy silos of records relating to various internal and external digitization projects, all to different specifications. We decided to make our metadata consistent with Dublin Core, which can accommodate both books and archives and is highly interoperable. It's possible to download metadata easily from the Internet Archive using their advanced search tool. And having interoperable records means that they can be exported to any other platform simply and sustainably. For instance, we've shared our records with OpenText, a global search engine for digitized books. And we've also been able to swiftly respond to a recent call by JSTOR Open Community Collections, who are currently offering institutions free hosting for a pilot period. We weren't sure whether we would be able to commit to a paid-for subscription at the end of the trial, so we were keen to take advantage of the free hosting offer as soon as possible. Fortunately, JSTOR were able to harvest all of our content directly from the Internet Archive because all of our metadata was consistent and interoperable. So there was no input required on our part and our collections went live on JSTOR overnight. We can now track their usage on their analytics dashboard and the partnership has helped us to evidence demand visibly and tangibly to our stakeholders. Another hidden extra, tucked away in the Internet Archive is a AAAF image service. AAAF stands for the International Image Interoperability Framework. It's a technical framework that enables images to be examined side-by-side in minute detail and even annotated, even if they're from different institutions thanks to an underlying shared infrastructure. This kind of infrastructure is sophisticated and complex it's usually only found in larger institutions. However, you can get started with AAAF thanks to this image service that's been built into the Internet Archive because it's accessible by simply editing an item's URL. By taking the unique identifier from the end of any Internet Archive image URL and adding this prefix and suffix, you can create a AAAF compliant image file. And if you take the URL that you've just created and add it to a AAAF viewer, you can immediately see the benefits of AAAF's deep zoom capabilities. If you want to take things further, you can use a manifest editor such as that provided by the Bodleian to make multi-page objects and host them somewhere like GitHub. You can do all of this for free. Full details on using the Internet Archive's image service in this way are available from AAAF's online training pages at bit.ly-IA-AAF. Being able to generate AAAF compliant images opens up access to new and innovative digital tools such as Exhibit, developed by the University of St Andrews. This can be used to tell stories with items, to design virtual tours and exhibitions. It's free, openly accessible and it's browser-based. It allows you to create a project and add AAAF images from any institution in the world that supports the framework. Using a simple interface, you can turn pages, zoom into details, add as many captions as you want to make guided tours of books and images. With tools like this, you don't need an expensive AAAF infrastructure. It allows you to host just a few key items and use them in innovative ways. Here's an example of how you might use the tool for pointing out details in a book. You can add as many books or images as you want from any institution that supports AAAF and indeed the Internet Archive. It provides an engaging, sensory and interactive means of supporting remote teaching and assessment. The final benefit I want to mention is that the Internet Archive not only acts as a library but as a data source. I mentioned how easy it is to download plain text from the OCR layer of hosted works and this data can feed a variety of digital scholarship applications. If this is of interest to you, a good place to find out more is the website programming historian. It has a number of step-by-step tutorials relating to the Internet Archive. One demonstrates how to conduct data mining for text analysis. Another how to extract illustrated pages to support machine learning and visual-based research. So what's the catch? It's scalability because usually users ingest items to the Internet Archive by adding files and their metadata one at a time through this web interface. We began migrating our legacy content in this way and in fact, in the early days of the pandemic, it was a really useful activity for collection staff who had been plunged hastily into remote working. But as the advantages of the Internet Archive became clear, I was keen to scale up and improve our efficiency. In particular, by the time library access was restored last summer, I wanted to add lots of new and in-demand content to help meet our student needs while they were studying remotely. Individual upload wasn't going to be sustainable for these quantities, so I began to pick my way through guidance written for developers, which described how to bulk upload multiple items using Python via the command line. What I'm describing might sound bewilderingly technical and I thought so too at first, but if you work with metadata, the skills and the principles are surprisingly transferable once you get past the jargon. You don't need to be a developer to attempt this, all you really need is a spreadsheet with your metadata and a Linux environment. So the first you hopefully already have and the second might require a little more creativity. I first attempted to run Linux on a virtual machine and then to try and partition my computer's hard drive and let's just say that both of these methods caused more problems than they solved. So finally, I started experimenting with a Raspberry Pi. These are small but mighty mini computers that can run Linux. They're very affordable. This version sells for just 70 pounds. It has eight gigabytes of RAM, making it twice as powerful as my work laptop. It provided the correct environment I needed to open the command line and connect to our internet archive account. And just two lines of code later, hundreds of items began ingesting. If you're interested in having a go yourself, I've documented everything I've learned in this slide share at bit.ly slash internet archive batch from metadata preparation to setting up the pie out of the box to running the ingest. As far as I know, this information isn't available anywhere else and certainly not in a language aimed at non-developers. If you're tempted to give it a go, take a look and get in touch with me if you run into any problems and I will do my best to help. So I've talked a lot about what the internet archive has to offer service users but our archive has benefited too. Our staff can ingest new content directly so we don't need to call on IT teams when we want to add something. And this means that we can respond very quickly to media inquiries that might be time sensitive or event driven. If necessary, we can make new content live within the hour to support features on our collections. We've also been able to raise our profile internally. We digitized hundreds of photos documenting the university's history, buildings, students, staff and events from the 1880s to the present day. And this has supported the remote work of our colleagues in departments like alumni and marketing by opening up an image bank for their use that is vast, searchable and filterable. The unexpected happy ending to this story is that by putting our collections where they can be seen, used and valued, we've been successful in leveraging support within our institution to invest in ex-Libris product, Alma Digital which you can see here in use by the Natural History Museum. I've been asked to project manage the implementation in recognition of the technical skills that I spent lockdown developing. As an archivist, this isn't perhaps something that would have previously been seen as part of my remit but I strongly believe that our professional skillset is highly transferable to this kind of work. So to reiterate the methods that I've described today do not represent best practice but they are intended to show what can be done with existing resources and a willingness to experiment because you never know where those experiments might take you. If you have any questions, I will attempt to answer them today or you can drop me an email. And thank you for listening. Great, thank you very much, Alison. Really enjoyed that. It was really helpful way to kind of blaster you some of that what you described as bewilderingly technical that people might have a bit of a fear around that. So it was great to kind of break some of that down I think and just see the amazing tools are actually available free of charge. So I'm sure there'll be plenty of questions coming your way at the end but before we get to that point I am going to introduce our second speaker and this is Joseph Marshall from National Library of Scotland. So Joe is the Associate Director of Collections Management at the National Library of Scotland, previously Head of Special Collections at the University of Edinburgh. So his presentation is The Archive of Tomorrow, Pandemics, Misinformation and Building the UK Web Archive. Thanks Joe over to you. Okay, so I want to talk to you today really about two main things. So one is about what's been done over the last 18 months in terms of capturing the story of COVID-19, the story really of our times for the last 18 months in terms of online information. And the second thing is about some of the things that are being done to build on that success and that's very much responding to the theme of today about crisis as a catalyst for change. I want to say at an early stage that web archives is a new area for me until I joined the National Library of Scotland in 2019. I'd never heard of the UK Web Archive. So I'm still learning but I think it's really exciting and really important developments. So what is the UK Web Archive? Well, you probably know that's within the UK we have legal deposit legislation which entitles a number of libraries to collect a copy of every book printed within the UK and Ireland. In 2013, that right was extended to electronic publications including the right to harvest websites within the UK domain. So that's why we have the UK Web Archive which is a collaborative enterprise with the legal deposit libraries underpinned by the British Library that manages the key infrastructure. At the moment it's around 10 million websites. I think it's more like 750 terabytes of data now and that's captured through an annual trawl of the UK domain supplemented by manual capturing of URLs by the web archivists around the UK legal deposit libraries. So it's an enormous data set. We rely very much on thematic curated collections to help people navigate through it. It's very successful as a preservation medium but access is really quite challenging. So because of the legislation the vast majority of the content you can only access if you physically come into the reading rooms of the legal deposit libraries. And that seriously limits its usage. We've negotiated open rights for a small subset of the data, about 1%. That 1% attracts about 100 times the usage of the rest of the connection. And there are further limitations. Again, we can't do at the moment very much in terms of data analysis at scale. So usage isn't what we would like it to be and there are a few pioneers. I'll give a shout out to Jane Winters at the University of London, Gareth Millwood at the University of Birmingham who have done some pioneering work but we would like to do more to fully realise the value of this amazing resource. So this is one reason why we talk a bit about the archive of tomorrow. What can we do to make it into the archive of today? So in terms of one of these curated collections back in 2005, the curators set up a pandemic outbreak collection in response to avian flu. And that was very useful because when COVID came along they were able to quickly set up another sub-collection to capture everything to do with COVID-19. And that has already over 7,000 URLs of websites that have been recorded. It's part of a global collecting initiative as well. So the International Internet Preservation Consortium has been leading on this. There's been great work done in Canada and a big shout out to everyone who's been involved in this to try and record what we've all been living through for the last 18 months. So just a couple of screenshots then about what this content looks like within the UK Web Archive. So here you have a collection called Pandemic Outbreaks which is a sub-collection on coronavirus UK and that's further segmented by the various nations of the UK. So the UK story is preserved in this way. And then within these collections this is examples of some of the stuff that you will find. So you have some Twitter feeds and some material from Facebook and some websites, here's a skeptical Scott website, so a voice of dissent. But you'll see that most of these have this red warning notice viewable only on library premises. So access isn't what we would like it to be. And metadata is fairly limited as well. So what's kind of in scope with this approach to collecting? So it's about capturing the official story. Obviously the facts, the death charts unfortunately, the case rates, also the public information, the public health announcements, the signage, the efforts to communicate. And a lot of this is already captured through the UK Government Open Web Archive. But then you have the question, what is official information? Does a Donald Trump press conference count as official information? And because something is official, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true or right. And of course, we're particularly interested in the non-official story as well. So I mean the wider social impacts of everything, whether that's the supermarkets in March 2020 when tin tomatoes and toilet roll were disappearing, artworks in response to the pandemic, the impact on the cultural sector. And here's information from the Edinburgh Festival about we have the latest cancellation. And of course, the voices of dissent, the conspiracy theorists, the anti lockdown protesters, material not just produced by official sources, the NHS but by community groups, social media, arts organisations, charities, et cetera. And there's great work being done in many cases in a private capacity. So this is Graham McKenzie who's a GP in Scotland who's been doing fantastic work to capture Twitter feeds that use the hashtag COVID-19 UK. And doing some great stuff, analysing these and the kind of language and terminology that's being used. So one of the things we've learned over the 18 months is this is all really important but it's also really ephemeral and vulnerable. This is a tweet from Professor Melissa Terrace who says, web archives are going to be essential for any future historians trying to figure out what happened during this pandemic. And here she's retweeting an excellent Twitter feed called COVID one year ago, which itself retweets, deleted tweets, issued early in the pandemic, in this case from the US Surgeon General telling people not to bother with masks. Other things that we'll need when it comes to the public inquiry. So Boris Johnson boasting that he shook hands with everyone shortly before he himself nearly died of coronavirus. This is available by YouTube but that's not necessarily great as a long-term vehicle for preservation and access. Another fantastic site is Retraction Watch which so Retraction Watch records scientific papers that have been published apparently in reputable journals and peer reviewed and then taken down. And already over a hundred scientific papers and COVID-19 have been published and retracted. Here's a particularly pleasing example where an Elsevier journal publishes a paper on how COVID-19 can be prevented by wearing jade amulets. And this has now fortunately been retracted but it's important that we do have a record of this kind of absurd misinformation apparently being published as scientific truth. So I mean, what are the issues that Sunia we've learned from this? So I mean, it has been a really important period for I think raising the profile of web archives and hopefully starting to mainstream web archives as something that's key to collections and research because future historians simply won't be able to understand what happened in 2019 to 2021 without access to web archives. So what can we do to help historians have the content in the first place and also help them navigate what is really quite a complex ecosystem. I think we've learned as well that COVID-19 has been a crisis of information and misinformation which is played out online and quite literally information is a matter of life and death and we do feel the need to capture the full story. So not just the official communications but that much wider richer and in some cases really quite difficult picture of the general response to COVID online. Other things that we've learned. So lockdown has really highlighted the restrictions on access to the UK web archive. And so for most of the last year nobody has had access to most of the UK web archive because the legal deposit libraries have been physically closed. That's a real issue for us. There are gaps in what we collect. So dynamic content like YouTube has seen a minute ago that this content is really vulnerable. It's easy to be deliberately destroyed. And here we are. We're just talking about COVID. What are all the other health issues that are so important? So a group of us have got together over the last year to discuss what we might do on the back of this. And we propose a project to the Welcome Trust which is a partnership with the National Library of Scotland the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh with key support from the British Library to set up a new project team to really build on what's been done over the last 18 months. And some of the roles in that project team would be a metadata analyst, a research software engineer, rights officer and a number of web archivists to really grow this collection and to create more discoverable content. So the project has a number of aims. So what is to create a new collection of around 10,000 archived URLs within the UK web archive on the theme of health information and misinformation. So growing on the attempts to capture COVID but looking at health much more widely. We then want to use this collection as a test bed for a bit of experimentation. So looking at you, what are the options for descriptive metadata? What can we do within the legislation in terms of computational analysis? What are the issues about ethics and rights? We also want to really build that research network so include more people in the process of collecting and build use cases as well to really unlock the value of this kind of resource. And we do want the project to be, it is a pilot project. So we propose it for a one-year period and we want to have a report that at the end says there needs to be some legislative change because if things like the UK web archive are going to serve our communities now and in the future, it needs to have greater freedom. We haven't solved all the problems by any means and that's partly why we're calling it a pilot project. So we still have some really big questions to answer. So one of those obviously is how do we ethically capture and describe misinformation? And it's no use harking back to old concepts of archival neutrality. If we get it wrong, people will die. And so that is going to be a topic which we will really explore through this pilot project and we expect to have a really robust ethical collecting framework. People like Jessica Ogden have been doing some fantastic work recently showing that web archives themselves can be used as a vehicle to disseminate misinformation. So we have some big challenges to grapple with there. We also have questions about what we can do at scale. So when you're talking about a connection with 750 terabytes of data, manual curation isn't going to get you very far. So what can we do at scale to speed up the creation of metadata to clear rights, to do more to make this content more navigable, more discoverable? And following on from that, what can we do in terms of analysing the data at scale for digital scholarship, working with the British Library, within the partnerships and within the context of the legislation? And we're also really interested to talk to other people who might be involved in this work as well. This can only work if it's really collaborative. Already we've got great support from a number of other bodies. I'd give a shout out to the Digital Preservation Coalition, the Adam Turing Institute, the National Archives, the National Records of Scotland, the Internet Archive and the BBC, all have been really interested and engaged with us. And I'd be really pleased to talk to anyone who's here today or who would be interested in talking to us further on this project. And the final thing to say is that we heard just a few days ago that our application had been successful. So the Wellcome Trust has given us 230,000 pounds to get this project started and we expect the project to begin in December this year. So I hope you find that interesting and I hope there'll be some questions at the end and then I'll hand it back to Emma. Great, thank you very much. Congratulations on the funding. That was like a really nice positive way to be able to end that presentation. So congratulations. And also, thanks for that. That was very interesting thinking about, you know, the role of the web archive in documenting the pandemic from so many different angles, but also I think a really neat way to kind of pull together a lot of the issues around preserving digital material in general. So fascinating. Thank you, Joe. I will introduce our third speakers now for this afternoon's session. We have Jacqueline Sundberg and Natalie Cook from McGill University. The title of their presentation is Inviting Generation Z into the Rarified World of Archives, Digital Game Creation. McGill Library has developed an interactive virtual exploration of McGill's campus history and libraries through a two-part alternate reality game which is called Raising Spirits, A Timely Diversion. And as I say, Jacqueline and Natalie are here to tell us all about that project. Sounds fascinating. Over to you. Thank you. Welcome, my name's Jacqueline Sundberg and I'm here today with Natalie Cook, Professor of English and the Associate Dean of Roar, the Glam Configuration of Rare and Special Collections Units at the McGill University Library. We're here to share about a project that we did last year, Inviting Generation Z into the Rarified World of Archives with Digital Game Creation. Here on screen, we have Amy Redpath-Rotic. Her papers, journals and correspondence are in the archives at McGill University and they give interested readers a snapshot into life at McGill and in Montreal in the late 19th and 20th centuries. But how do we tell her story today? Here she is with the cell phone in hand, although she passed away long before cell phones were the main way of communicating. But there she is, smartphone in hand as I said, the face of the first of our games called Raising Spirits, A Timely Diversion that we created last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. You know, there are actually five flights of stairs, five doors and a check-in desk with security gates to navigate for visitors to reach Rare and Special Collections at McGill. So it's rare that anyone stumbles upon the Rare Reading Room. 2020 added the extra barrier of COVID lockdowns. Quebec lockdowns and curfews were some of the longest and the harshest in the world. So our doors were firmly closed to all. Even in normal times, like many Rare and Special Collections units, our collections are also perceived as inaccessible, handwriting ledgers, diaries, library records, old photographs. It takes interest and deep curiosity to bring people through the door up the stairs and up to their eyebrows in a hundred year old correspondence. In a guerrilla style survey conducted in 2019 about archives and rare collections, our undergraduate students said things like, these aren't for me. Don't I need a reason to go there? Am I even allowed there? This is open to the public. Our collections are quite literally behind lock and key these days, a real barrier particularly to undergrad students and to the general public. To unlock these extraordinary collections for a broader public, digital games gave us a new, non-threatening environment for play and exploration and discovery. All of a sudden though, it was us who were on the outside looking in into the world of game development. And there were some very real barriers and hurdles that we had to cross to go into that world. We're now three games into this game development journey and we've learned with every iteration and still have much more to learn. We learned to make questions progressively harder in order to maintain a balance between challenge and reward for the players. We learned that players don't like to read instructions. So we've gradually developed ways to make our game navigation more intuitive. We learned that creative game development team needs a combination of individuals, not only with very different skill sets, but who think and work differently. And perhaps most importantly, we gradually found out how to productively harness the wildly creative and entrepreneurial working style of game developers. I think text messages at two or three in the morning with the collaborative, unionized and methodical work style of our library which is housed in a public institution. We began by hiring my former student, a very talented young man who grew up to be an award-winning educator and game developer and he helped us as a consultant during last summer. Paul Darvasi as a creative director, masterminded the first games, brought a couple of his collaborators on board and trained our staff along the way. Why? Well, yes, it was a fun and interactive way for players to learn about McGill's history and the campus and the library collections remotely. And it also gave my staff who otherwise might have been very frustrated during the COVID lockdowns, a challenging project that created and energized a team dynamic as well as teaching them skills. It also had the potential to reach Generation Z, audiences who might not typically enter the physical spaces of our rare collections. What we created is a multi-platform online experience. Puzzles take the player from Instagram to Twitter, Bandcamp, Google Street View, library catalogs, YouTube and more. The narrative begun in the first game was continued in part two. You see some of the images here of character cards. We inserted our librarian guides into the second chapter of the game to give a more streamlined progress and to give the player support as they move from space to space. This provides a non-threatening way of interacting with librarians. Something we learned through beta testing is a major cause of anxiety for many people in the real world. In the game space, players could interact with librarians repeatedly in a non-threatening way. Ironically, our staff were shy as well. The librarians chose to hide behind reference texts, behind a plague mask, or even behind bars, rather than show their faces. So anxiety was something perhaps we had in common. Our third game takes the new tack and a new format. We've built a quiz show based on McGill history and alumni hosted by the McGill University beloved mascot, Max Marklitt, who introduces players to McGill alumni, whose stories are less well known and certainly under celebrated. All three games invite exploration of the campus or library spaces. This is the Redpath Museum, and players can click and drag and explore in 360 degrees and they can click on information points, on puzzle elements that are hidden behind a lock. They can hear audio narration that tells them information about the space and guides in terms of navigating from one space to another. Their spaces are very open and they encourage exploration. Their players are free to make noise. They're free to leave and return whenever they like. They're free to fail. They're free to get support when needed by interacting either with Max Marklitt, the friendly guide that Natalie mentioned, or with the librarian guides who are hidden in those spaces. The players have an experience that's free of judgment or the insecurity of being in a place where they feel they may not belong. Because of COVID closures, these games also provide some of the only access to these spaces, like the Redpath Museum that you see on screen here, which is still close to the public as are our library spaces currently. We launched the first game during the Frosh or Initiation Week of 2020. So it's no surprise then that it received significantly more users than the second game and the third games in the early days. The second game received the most daily users during the first three days after its launch. But we launched the game at Halloween. And if you remember last Halloween, it wasn't possible for the students to party with one another or to go out, trick or treating. So playing a spooky game together, especially a virtual game, provided them with a wonderful activity. And we had some really positive feedback from players and testers for the first game, which you're seeing here on the screen. In terms of statistics, it's quite interesting to compare last year's numbers when we launched the games with the previous year of in-person visitors to our reading room. During the same period in 2019 to 2020, we had 2,296 people in our reading room for special events. So those are the people who come in who are members of the broader campus community or the general public who come for special events on various topics as eclectic as our collections. But on the right side of the screen there, you see the number of game users from the same period in 2020 to 2021. So it's with it, it's 92% of the in-person visitors that we had for events the previous year. And then, as Natalie pointed out, it's an entirely different public who are visiting these games rather than the people who come through our doors in person for events or for reference. Another interesting thing to compare to the previous year is the combined digital outreach methods that we have used in the last year. So digital games and the creation of these three, if we add to that the virtual events that we've also been holding, our outreach has reached significantly more people than the same period the year before in-person. These digital methods have actually blown the virtual doors open to a new public and a different audience. So Game One relied heavily on the expertise of our consultant, Middle Right. He brought along his team, which included a high school student videographer, Nick Vassos, who is on the top right, along with a Mexico City game designer, Elisa Navarro, who is in the center at the bottom. So we already had an international group assembling this game, right? The game brought new staff skills to the forefront. So Archivist Julien, top left, learned twine skills. Archivist Aaron and more staff member Hannah, both in the center, developed websites, dug into the archives and worked on narrative design. Digitization expert, very talented guy, bottom right, developed animations and photospheres. And by Game Three with Jacqueline Bach from maternity leave, we produced the game entirely in-house. Jacqueline resurrected her coding skills and design skills, and we ran with the skills and partnerships that we had gained through the first two games. As much as possible, we used online and open access resources, publishing our work under Creative Commons licenses. Full citations and bibliographies obviously provided. By December of 2020, our team had new skills, and we once again had access to campus for research and digging into new or rather old resources. For the third game, we were therefore able to do more research and digging and to tell some of the stories that required that level of work. So we explored the yearbooks and our archives, and we found less well-known stories, the under-celebrated ones perhaps from the Gills past. On screen here, you see the character cards from Game Three. We have the 1949 Black Carnival Queen, Ms. Beryl Dickinson-Dash. We have Dr. Phil Edwards, who has five Olympic medals to his name. These are stories that we leaned into with Game Three, and we got to spotlight. These characters were drawn from different fields of study, different decades, and even centuries, and we brought them together for a collaborative gameplay experience. The players collect their teammates by exploring campus and solving puzzles, and then they take part in a trivia challenge drawing on the expertise and stories that all of these McGillians brought to the game. So we launched that game in March of 2021 with a live Team Trivia event, bringing people from all over together for an evening of fun and promoting the game to a new and very different crowd. There were some very surprising developments. Roar, which students once described as a place that intimidated them, is now perceived as a game development hub plugged into campus game development groups. We're in the midst of a major building we design, and the architects are now building in smart, versatile, and creative spaces suitable for active collaboration and technology for Roar. Had we been designing this building before the game development project, these creative spaces wouldn't have had the kind of technology and the priorities they're receiving. There was another unintended consequence. One Friday the 13th in 2018, one of our rare library spaces was actually damaged by fire. The architects have since then managed to restore that space, taking advantage of the game's photospheres, virtual representation of it. We now have game players from abroad who have told us that they are so excited to be coming to campus, and part of what they're wanting to do is to explore in real space the spaces that they had managed to explore in their virtual game. Orientation in this fall, in the fall of 2021, will welcome students to Montreal, but it will also be another chance for us to welcome incoming students in a game environment that does the best of what libraries can do, look back to our past and look into our collections while also taking advantage of cutting edge and emergent technology. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Jacqueline and Natalie, that was absolutely fascinating. I'm just amazed by the kind of dynamic, interactive, just original originality that has gone into that and how much you learn through the process is also fascinating. Not to mention things like the influence that had on things like the building design, and those unintended consequences. So can I just invite the panelists please to turn their videos and microphones back on and we can go into the Q&A part of the session. I'd quite like to just kick off actually, it just occurred to me as Natalie and Jacqueline were talking. It was really fascinating to see the numbers of game users that you had. I just wondered if you could say a bit more about how you could then break those down to sort of understand any sort of patterns of growth or change, how do you know that it was a different audience or a younger audience or a student audience or however they were made up? So the honest answer is that we weren't incredibly granular in terms of asking for age information, let's say, of the students. But one of the things that we can tell is because you can track game players through their IP addresses, you can tell where they're coming from. And so it's a very, very different audience in terms of the international demographics. So in the first five days of the game launch, for example, our biggest hits were coming from Hong Kong, from Australia, from India. And so we were getting a lot of the international students exploring what was going on. And we could also tell where they were coming from because of the timing of their gameplay. And so one of the things we did, in the beginning, we thought we'd make it competitive. So we wanted to have leaderboards. But it became really obvious that students needed to play with people in their time zones. And so it was quite difficult to gather those groups together. So over time, we dropped the leaderboard idea, but we did, with incoming fresh, start to talk about how we could group those students together and have various chat sessions. So the answer is we need to refine our information on the demographics, but just as a function of it being online, we have quite a lot of information as opposed to the in-person events, which obviously are local. And we have much more detail of our demographic there, which tends to be an older group of retired individuals who come for that. And do you see that that older group being a group that you could draw into having an interest in participating in the game, is that part of one of your objectives? I'm looking at Jacqueline's smile here. The honest answer is we've had difficulty getting an older demographic who are not typically gamers to play. So for example, the senior library management, my colleagues were quite shocked by our introductory video for that first game because essentially it's a game about disruption and contagion, and it takes the library welcome video and distorts it because we're inhabited by ghosts and contagion. And they kept on poking at their screen to see what was wrong with the technology when they looked at it. But the other answer is when we saw the players, we've realized that it's not the incoming first-year students who are playing. It's actually, it's graduate students, it's recent graduates, it's adults. So the game environment is hosting a really unusual, surprising variety of players. I'm also smiling because we had better testers for each release of each chapter of the game. And one of those was my mother who fits the older demographic. You know, you draw on your family connections for better testing. Also because she's not a gamer at all, but she wildly enjoyed it and she loves puzzles and word play. And a lot of the challenges in the game that we created were based on archival documents or correspondence, maps, things from the collections, in fact, and they lend themselves really well to puzzles of that nature. So my mother and all of the people that she shared it with from her friends group really enjoyed the puzzles and the exploratory nature of the games. So that was, like Natalie said, we don't have concrete information necessarily from the Google Analytics on people's demographics, but we do have on a small scale feedback from our better testers and from the online survey that we do have provided with the games for feedback. So what we did find was surprising is that older players, when they did play it and got into it, sometimes enjoyed it. And then we had a tranche of people in like, I don't know, the middle-range age-wise who just found it wildly strange and didn't acclimat well. So I think it's more based on personality and their willingness to be disoriented and to explore and to try something new. It's more down to personality than demographics really is what we found. And it was quite surprising on that front. Fantastic, thank you. Really interesting. Okay, and then I have another question. Possibly this is more in Alison and Joe's area. Just thinking really, so you've obviously talked about the UK Web Archive and the Internet Archive. I'm just wondering if there are fundamental differences between the two that perhaps those of us who aren't used to working in that space might want to understand a bit more about. Shall I kick off, Alison? Yeah, go for it, Joe. I mean, the Internet Archive is absolutely fantastic because it's almost a sort of a private enterprise which has grown to be such a brilliant service. The services Alison describes are incredibly rich and free. Of course, the UK Web Archive, however, is the record of the UK's website output. And we can do things within the UK Web Archive as a much greater depth. And so we can capture websites more or less in their entirety, whereas the Internet Archive is capturing things more or less just at the top level or at least at the higher level. And so there is a difference in terms of the granularity of what's captured. So we have the stuff in the UK Web Archive, we would just like to be able to do all the things that you can do with what's in the Internet Archive. Yeah, that's a great answer. I don't think I have much to add to that. So you don't necessarily make the decision, I suppose at the outset of this project, it's just which is the best fit for what it is you want to do. Yeah, the Internet Archive has a Web Archiving function, but that wasn't one that we were using. So we were using it as a digital repository largely, so uploading our content and collections to there. But they also have a Web Archiving function too, which is where you'd find the crossover with the UK Web Archive. Okay, thank you. So I'm going to turn to the Q&A in the box. We've had a question here from Mike. Now this is for Alison, I think primarily, although of course anyone else, please chip in if you have anything to input. How do you get around copyright issues when putting materials such as photographs on the Internet Archive? Do you have to use Creative Commons and hope for the best? Or is it only using those images that you're sure have been cleared? That's a really good question. Yes, everything does need to be copyright cleared if it's going on the Internet Archive, and we release our content on a Creative Commons license. So this is obviously the big message behind my presentation is this was fantastic to be able to achieve these things with the Internet Archive. There's a lot of things that it can't do as well. So it was very much a building block towards the place where we wanted to get. Our long-term goal was to acquire a digital repository that we could manage in-house, give us control over our collections and who was able to access them as well. So it's going to give us that functionality of authentication so we can make batches of material available to certain groups of people and others. That will allow us to release a lot more material than we've formally been able to. We also have an option of allowing different resolutions of images maybe to different groups of people in conversations with donors who are maybe concerned about reuse, particularly when material could be exploited commercially. Those are conversations that we can now have, whether they would prefer us to restrict to a user group or maybe restrict to the quality of the images that are produced. But either way is better than the situation where we currently cannot release that content online. So this has been a journey towards the implementation of a repository that will allow us to do that. And as part of a kind of broader strategy then around that, once you've released that content online, what is the plan for the original material? Sure. Well, we continue to carry on sharing material on the Internet Archive and on JSTOR, wherever we can. So wherever licenses allow us, I wouldn't see ourselves removing any of that material or stopping sharing in those places either. Those platforms, although they were stop gaps and they were very useful in the situation we found ourselves in, they have value in their own right to. The Internet Archive has fantastic search engine optimization and it can be found in that content by anybody who's searching the web. If you do Google searches for results, those things are going to come up to the top of the pages of results. And that makes it very accessible to members of the general public. JSTOR is obviously a part of the average researchers toolkit. That's somewhere that they're using already for finding secondary sources and the Open Community Collections Initiative is going to mean that primary source material is surfaced alongside that secondary material. So we see that as a fantastic tool for delivering digital content to academics and researchers. And then our new repository will be embedded in our catalogue, our library catalogue. So we see that as that's going to target our students because that tends to be the first place that they will go to find things. So these three platforms have different benefits for different user groups, different user behaviors. It's going to reach our students, academics and researchers and the general public too. And as far as I said, you can't have enough venues for your content if you can release it, release it as many places as you can. As long as it's not going to cause you significant duplication of effort. And yeah, with that in mind, thinking about having digitization workflows that are designed around the interoperability standardization of metadata so that something is created once and can be distributed wherever it needs to go without excessive effort. Thank you. Just picking up a bit on then, so kind of Natalie and Jacqueline's points about how they've learned a few surprising things about the kind of end user. Have you similarly had any surprises thinking across those three different platforms about who's using them and how? Yeah, I think we saw material being used. We haven't particularly expected to be as popular as it has been. So I remember one inquiry I had about a periodical that we have called the Ladies Magazine which features these lovely colored plates of women's fashion from the late 18th and early 19th century. And the person who was inquiring about this didn't want images of the whole, but they didn't want the whole thing copied. They were just interested in the plates. And I did this job as part of our kind of inquiry service and supporting research during the pandemic remotely. So we normally wouldn't put a work online if we hadn't digitized the whole thing. But in the case of these plates, they were so beautiful and they already existed and they may as well go online. So I put them up in an idle hour one afternoon. And they've been incredibly successful and they're really, really popular. And I think that might be a lesson when you're thinking about digitization. Don't be afraid to just do a little sampling of collections if you don't know where your priorities might be for digitization, where the appetite might lie. There's no harm at all in doing a little bit from each collection and seeing what gets used. Yeah, you won't know until you try. That's a really, really good point, actually. We probably make assumptions, don't we, all the time? Absolutely. Realizing it. Great, thank you. I have a next question in the Q&A box. So this is from Alan Sudlow. He says, congratulations, Joe, on your funding news. So thanks for sharing that with us. The question is what research questions does the project identify to explore on misinformation and the pandemic if you're in a position to know that at this stage? Thanks, Alan. I think it's fair to say at the moment we're really identifying research areas rather than specific research questions. So I mean, we want to understand, well, in the first instance, what we mean by misinformation. So in a way, this is a kind of professional research question. How do we define misinformation? How do we categorize it? How do we catalog it? And if we're going to go out and collect it, what kind of language are we going to use? For example, when we're talking to creators of websites, I mean, we can hardly go and approach somebody and say we'd like to archive your website because we think it's misinformation. So there's a whole piece around your professional ethics and communication that we really need to develop. And that for me is the first research question. The kind of researchers that we've been talking to through developing the projects are pretty wide-ranging. And so we've talked to some historians and some clinical practitioners, in fact, because people who are interested in how public information impacts on clinical outcomes. And hopefully if we'd create some data during this project, we'll be able to map that against other data sets and see what the kind of trends are. And we're also interested in social studies, cultural studies, that there's a whole range of people who could benefit from understanding some of the trends, misinformation, sort of spreads and develops and changes, and being able to track that and analyze that in a more sophisticated way. So I think the specific research questions will come out, but the first thing we need to do is to raise the level of awareness to clarify some of the language and start building relationships with the different research scholarly communities who hopefully stand to benefit from this. Fascinating. It's actually quite a way to responsibility, isn't it, if you stop to think about it too much. Thank you very much. And Alan says, yes, there's that kind of picking up on that interesting point about how you approach those content creators with misinformation, that's going to be very interesting, I think, to work your way through. Okay, next question is from Caroline. Now, I think this is about, well, in theory, really, I think this relates to all of the projects around being an amazing opportunity for staff to learn new skills and engage new audiences. So in many ways, I think I could probably throw this open to everyone, which is how you would keep the momentum going and help staff to pick up the threads of some of this more routine work as restrictions ease. I don't know who wants to start. Maybe Jacqueline, Natalie. Natalie, you can go ahead. The reason we're hesitating is because Jacqueline and I met yesterday to discuss precisely this issue. So we are, we're looking at a fall that's going to be on site with the campus. And our staff members, Quebec declared about two weeks ago that the pandemic was over. So our premier just decided it was and has said that. So we've gone back to the green zone. And that means that our staff members are expected and invited back downtown. And downtown looks like a ghost town at the moment. You know, so our, our staff members have been going, going to campus pretty much 30% of the time because we have non-circulating collections. And so we're pretty comfortable with it. But the 70% of our library staff have not touched campus for 15 months. So we're really struggling with how do we boost morale? How do we think about keeping that momentum going? And our staff members actually through the games, but we also published a pop-up book at the same time. We actually had work-wise the whale of the time. We had some projects that were meaningful. We developed some skills. We worked very, very hard together and we created a group dynamic. Right. And so the problem now is we're going back to earth with a bump. Right. And we're going back to normal work and normal routines. And we're really struggling with how to come up with some projects that, that are meaningful. So we've developed a podcast series that, that's going to help us do that. We, we are developing some hybrid webinars, but I don't think we can expect to have the audiences that we had when it was purely virtual. And so I'd like to be able to give a really good answer on this one, except to say that ironically we're struggling because we, we realized that our work style was really suited to what was happening during COVID with the lockdowns. And we are needing to think through what our on-site presence will be and how we can leverage the kind of energy and excitement that, that we felt and experienced during COVID in hybrid times. I'll add a touch of a silver lining to, to Natalie's more sober, sober take on things. I will just say that for myself and the others who worked closely on game development, the skills that we acquired are pretty remarkable. And I was impressed by Allison's presentation and the upskilling that you did during the pandemic. And we experienced a comparable thing. So as Natalie mentioned, my colleague Judy Yang learned twine, which is a narrative game development platform or software, and you can program as wildly creatively as you are. And I myself got back into the coding skills that I haven't touched since like library school, perhaps. Although I do web work on a regular basis, I agree completely Allison that the crossover between archival and librarian skills and the technical skills is, it's an easy bridge. The crosswalks are there to use the data term. And for myself and my colleagues, we do have a new perspective on our materials as well. So you see potential beyond them as a document. You see potential for the other uses that you could use like that you could make of them. And Natalie, one of the other things that's on the horizon is a new grant and a new research interest that now has a game built into the application, to the grant application. So the attitude, the attitudinal shift is there. And that will come with us regardless of what the hybrid work model looks like. So that attitudinal and skills shift, I think will definitely, it came as a result of the pandemic and the crisis, but it will stay and it's like embedded. So well done to Allison, to you and whoever else on your, did those, did that skill development in the last year. Thank you. I think it's definitely worth pointing out that it wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the pandemic. I think that we have been so bogged down up until that point of you keep the day to day running the reading room and all those little micro transactions that happen through your day. Really difficult to plan and to sort of have that mental space to think, what would I do with my time if I had the liberty to think, well, you know, okay, I don't need to go and deal with the reading room today. So yeah, I think that it's really important we've had such a challenging time in the last 18 months and clearly a lot of good has come out as well of this experience. I think it's worth pointing out as well that business as usual, that idea of returning to business as usual, probably for us it won't be quite the same as it ever was before. We used to operate a reading room that was kind of open nine to five every day, you drop in whoever wanted anything could kind of turn up and be dealt with and we've obviously been operating an appointment system since last August to manage access and while that had the immediate effect of being able to facilitate access to collections during the pandemic period, it's also been shown to us what are significantly more efficient that way that is to work and you're able to manage your time a lot better. So I would have front facing hours, I can have back facing hours where I can do that thinking and those types of activities that really weren't possible before and there hasn't really been an impact I think for users. It's a little bit clearer to them how to come in, how to use the archive. There's a system, you know, you book, it's a lot less intimidating perhaps and just needing to wander through the door and try and find somebody to talk to. So yeah, I think there's positives all around. That sounds like yeah, there's a lot of positives. Jo did you have anything you wanted to add to any of this? I think the COVID situation really helped. It did help people clarify their thinking about why it's so important to capture what was happening online. We talked about a big web archiving project back at the end of 2019 and what happened during 2020 completely flipped that thinking. We were talking about having conversations with the Wellcome Trust, the stuff that was happening on the ground and the information wars. It just really pushed it up the agenda. So yeah, we need the project funding to do the job properly though. A lot of great stuff has been done by people just working from home doing their day jobs to take this forward. We're very grateful that the Wellcome Trust have decided to put their money to this so there will be a paid project staff to deliver this on a longer term basis. I had a question, if I may, you mentioned the vulnerability of the ephemeral nature of the material that you archive in this project. I just wondered what system did you use? We've also done web archiving projects in the last couple of years and I know ours using, I don't know how to pronounce the acronym, archive IT or archive anyway. We're using that software and it captures static versions of these pages. So it's captured in perpetuity on a specific date. Is that the same of course probably way that you're going about it? It's the same principle. The UK web archive is its own platform distinct to say the internet archive. It's the same principle. You capture a web page as it is on any given moment and one of the decisions that we have to take is how often you capture a web page. In some cases during the pandemic websites were updated every few minutes if you think about some of the news feeds the government pages, the NHS pages and a lot of that to be honest probably has now been lost because people were not capturing it in real time. So there are some really difficult choices to be made. At the moment the default position is an annual trawl. So the whole UK web domain is trawled once a year to capture things. But then it's done by the machine. It's up to us as QACES to decide what we want to capture more frequently. At the moment we can't really do that in any automated way. We need to do that on the basis of choices and that's pretty challenging when you're talking about 10 million websites. I'm going to whiz back into the Q&A in case I've missed anything. So Victoria says we would be able to see the game. So I think Victoria that Jacqueline has shared that in the chat or Natalie has shared that in the chat. So if you move over into the chat box you'll find a link there. But she also asks how did you manage to achieve a balance of ethics and sharing of information? So I'm going to I think that in a way that's for everyone, isn't it? And Joe, you've kind of touched on that quite a bit already but I don't know if there's anything else you wanted to add. I'm not sure we have achieved a balance. Yes, it's something that we're really grappling with. We have a professional duty to capture the record of what's published online. But the big question is how we describe that and help people navigate through that in a way that's ethical. And again, when you're talking about health information if we get it wrong, if we describe misinformation inappropriately there could be real outcomes for real lives. So yeah, it's one of the questions that we're doing the project to answer. I have a slightly different comment about ethics. When we started to create the game with our game consultant the world of ARGs likes to drop players into an alternate reality almost as a surprise. And so what he wanted to do was to send an email out to all incoming students with a bogus course schedule for the students that was actually going to date back to 1895. And so he wanted to use the registrar's listserv to send that out to all of the incoming students. And so we were faced with essentially, you know, the ethics of a phishing scam that would be to students from an institutional email address. So obviously we couldn't do that. But it turned into quite an explosive debate because from the game developers point of view that was the most authentic way of producing an ARG from our position and certainly my position as a university administrator there was no way on earth I could send a phishing email to all incoming students during COVID especially if it was going to be a game about contagion and disruption and all the rest of it. So that was a good week long debate about ethics and I won, I had to win but that was sort of an interesting moment where it was clear that the ethics of a game developer and the compass of a game developer was quite different to the compass of an administrator or a librarian. I'll add a note on the same on the topic of the games and ethics actually and I was having a conversation with our game designer, Paul last week actually and talking about he was talking about the advantage of working with archivists who had a looser attitude towards the integrity of archival documents if we put it in jargony terms because we were willing to use documents outside of their historical context and we were willing to create a narrative based, a fictional narrative based on historical content and we were willing to play kind of fast and loose with these photos, as you saw we manipulated the photos, we used snippets of things out of historical context and what we did by doing that is expose players to a lot of archival material and invited them to explore the context of those documents for themselves. We provided all the citations and bibliographies but it definitely was a different use of collections material and from an ethical point of view we are taking things and using them for our own purposes so there was very conscious decisions about what we chose to use, which characters we chose to feature we chose strong female leaders in STEM or in history or in philanthropy so we made conscious choices about what materials we used but we also used items a little freely outside of their historical context so there was some other ethical debates but Natalie's was perhaps more pertinent for the here and now. It's kind of drawing parallels in my head with some of the conversations about the deep fakes that's happening at the moment there's some similarities with that isn't there you could sleepwalk into some sort of minefield if you're not very careful I imagine so yeah it's really great to kind of air what some of those could be I think anyone else who's thinking about this type of work