 Okay, hopefully everybody online can hear me. All right. And I'm sorry for the people in person that I'm facing away from you. The camera's over here. So welcome to this session. It is called Opening a Communication Channel with the ETD Librarian. And this session will be presented by Kelly Rowan. Did I pronounce that correctly? Rowan. She's the Digital Archives Librarian at Florida International University. We will leave some time at the end of the session. Probably just a little time since we're starting late for questions. If you do have a question online, please make sure to enter that in the Q&A. And I will read that out as we receive them. And we'll get started. Rowan. I'm from Florida International University down in Miami. And a quick agenda. So I'm just going to give you a few seconds worth of information just for context about FIU and how we do our workflow. I know hearing about somebody's random stats at their university is not the most interesting. So we'll keep that for a few seconds. And we'll talk about the project I embarked on. The process I went through. So if you have any, you're feeling like you want to recreate it, you have a feeling for how what I did and how long it took. And then we'll look at the results to see if where the successes are and aren't. And then I have a Q&A. So just to give you some context of how we do things at FIU. First of all, we're the largest Hispanic serving institution in the country. We had about close to 60,000 pre-pandemic. Our numbers have dropped, obviously. We're usually tied for like second, as far as size of our student body. I have to admit that our librarian to student ratio is abysmal. There's no way around that. I mean, that's terrible, right? It's about 30, that's awful. So part of that undoubtedly is simply Miami is now, you know, Silicon Valley priced. So when we hire a librarian and they come down and they find out that we're not paying Silicon Valley salary. And now 85% of their salary is going to a studio apartment. They're a little upset. So we do have a retention problem. All right. So and then just some points of pride about FIU. There are Carnegie R1, preeminent research, university. All right. So we have an odd workflow, which I think is worth mentioning. Otherwise, it doesn't make any sense why I have no communication with students. So our students work with our graduate school coordinator, Brandy, who is in the back of the room waving at you. And she works with them to get it, you know, revisions, get it to the point where it's ready. The students do and they go to digital commons, which is what we're using as our institutional repository. And they submit the metadata themselves, their name, emails, you know, all that stuff department. And when they've got the revisions working with Brandy and they've got that ready. Brandy assigns me as editor, and then it, the process shifts over to the library. So I work in the libraries and I do the publishing. And right now there is no, I mean, digital commons preserves to it has multiple servers, you know. So, but right now we are actually out a preservation system, but it looks like we're getting one soon. We had lost a previous one hosted by the state. So that kind of explains why I don't have communication with students. I'm just the one publishing. Brandy is the one working with them, right? So what I wanted to do was kind of threefold. I wanted to, because I was getting random emails occasionally from students, but they would, they never came to me. They came to the library or our institutional repository manager or just the DCC or digital collection center, which is the part of the library I'm in, just our random DCC email that we look at every other day. They were all over the place, right? So I wanted to kind of clear that up. I had looked at our ORCID stats. They weren't going anywhere, so they weren't increasing. I was hoping to do something with that and get that up. The universities put an emphasis somewhat on ORCID as a way hopefully to kind of track alumni, you know, and see how their career goes and be able to write that up in newsletters and things like that for their statistics. And I wanted to go ahead and encourage open access as much as possible and we'll talk about the why of that. So the communication I have had with students historically has been things like finding, eventually the email gets forwarded to me that they'd like to add an embargo. I do that or it goes to Brandy and then she forwards it to me. They want changes to an ETD. The most recent was somebody published their, they did their thesis. I don't remember if it was a thesis or dissertation, but somewhere in the text they had their mobile phone number. And so we had to go back and remove it. I don't do that. So then that gets, goes back to Brandy. So I have a little panic button here because most of my communication students is centered around extreme urgency and panic and anger. So I get a lot of questions about the publishing timeline. We had two semesters where I just got a bunch of these emails of like, I graduated last week. I'm going for a job interview tomorrow. I need this published so that I can give them a link to my thesis. And I was like, the heck, you know, it was just kind of out of the blue for like two semesters of that, you know. And then this is, is anybody else using digital commons? So we just learned this. You guys probably already know this. You can laugh at me. That's fine. So we were, you know, we just left the update, you know, the message that students get that goes out after you publish an ETD. Yeah, we just left that at the default. And so all of a sudden I started getting these really hate filled emails because I think the first thing it says your thesis or dissertation has been published. And so rather than go look at like, go into digital commons and look at it, I would just immediately get these emails that said, I, I especially put an embargo on that. I don't understand how could this happen? This needs to be changed immediately. This is just like out of the blue again, just suddenly in one semester I got a bunch of these. And so we played around with it and we realized you can change that default message. So it now says something like it has been updated. However, the very next sentence is like, however, if you placed an embargo, it is still in place. I have had no more angry emails. So that's that's, that's like the bulk of my communication with students. That's all I have. I've also done some past orchid research trying to understand how well students understand orchid, which came to the final conclusion of that was they really didn't. They didn't understand what it was. Or in my mind, if I'm going to go forward with a publishing career, I want the orchid to identify myself. And maybe I already have published stuff. So like embargoing seems more likely right to me in my mind, like these two are probably connected, but students saw no connection. Anyway, that's past past research that I think I've actually presented here before. So our orchid usage has stayed at about 30%. And there'll be a semester where it bounces up to 42. And I've been fooled and I thought, oh good, it's trending upwards. And then it goes back down the next semester. It was up to 44% this semester. I'd like to fall for it again and say it's trending upward, but I have a feeling, you know, next semester, we'll just be back to where we were. All right. And so the other part, so communication orchid, and then the third part I was trying to address was to bring down our embargo rate. At one point we were up at like 48, like hovering around 50% of our students embargoing on an occasional semester. So we had a really high embargo rate. Now, do I care if you embargo? Not at all. Go embargo. That's does whatever. What I do care about though is the benefits that the students are missing out on. I feel like they're really missing out in just a common, especially with this plum X metrics where you can see not only your downloads, you can see who's reading your abstract and the number of people not who. And I feel like they're really missing out. I've had people find my own presentations in here from our like state consortium and then call me to come speak about privacy in a webinar for the state. This is like a really amazing tool. And I feel like students that are embargoing are missing out on these citations, but down, they're missing out on a talking point, you know, at a job interview of like, well, you know, my thesis has had 235 downloads. It's very, you know, high impact or probably a few more before you say high impact. But you get you get the, you know, the drift of what I'm trying to say there is that this is a great thing to be able to share with people. And I feel like students are missing out on that part. So I wanted to encourage open access unless they just absolutely really have to embargo because a publisher has put that, you know, on their plate. So when I started this process, the first thing I did is I wrote a letter and just so you know, this entire presentation is already up in digital comments at FI so you can just go search for it right now. If you want to steal the letter, go for it. Absolutely. And I wanted the letter to sound very, like, positive, very, I wanted to start with congratulations, you know, to grab their attention. Because students at this point, right, they're, they're, they're over the process. They've done a bunch of revisions. But if somebody sends you an email, you know, and now with office, you know, it says congratulations will balloons go out. Thank you. So anyway, I've had good responses to it. I put spaces. I know this sounds kind of like ridiculous level details, but I pretty much put a space after every sentence to keep their eye flowing through because I don't think anyone wants to be confronted with a full paragraph they have to read. I put in a direct link to orchid to get them to sign up. I did have to add. So it's a sign up should take about a minute and then you can add the identifier to your digital common submission or send it to me or send it to me part I added after the first few responses where every single person said would you add those for me. And I realized they're never going to go back in and touch that submission again. So I'm like just send it to me. So that's what I did. I threw in a sentence here about licensing because I'm kind of warming up to doing something. We have the option in our digital commons to choose a creative commons license. So I'm kind of warming up to doing something with that. So I'm kind of tracking it and throwing it out there. I'm not doing anything with it at the moment. Then I wrote the embargo letter. So if you didn't have an orchid, you've got that letter from me. If you embargoed, you got this letter from me. And if you didn't have an orchid and you embargoed, you've got both. So back, I think in the second paragraph here that you may have heard from others that you should send it should not be there. So I just made a list for them of pros and cons. You know, I tried to say things like open access helps break down economic and cultural barriers by making your research available to everyone. I don't think they care about that. But my results I've seen so far. I tried to do some myth busting. Like I've heard some students say things like, well, if it's here, I'm never going to get published. And that's that's not true. So I tried to bust some of those myths with my letter. And if you've got both the orchid and the embargo, there was like a kind of a stop in the middle and a great big bold red with three dots after this. I've also just to draw their their eye down because I know nobody wants to read this much. So anyway, any, I'll stop for any questions so far. Nothing available. Nothing available. So we have a six month one year and a two year. Yeah. So you go to digital comments, you can read the abstract, but it says not available for download until. And that's so you can't actually read the paper. You can just see the abstract. Exactly. Yeah, that's, that's, that's hard as words. All right, so in tracking, you can see just again, this is like a timeline issue like you're thinking of recreating any part of this column A was their name. Obviously I've deleted that for privacy reasons. I've removed their email, things like that. But I track the data defense just because we have a couple of semesters in the queue and I need to be sure I was only focusing on one semester. The degree was, I did not, that was just made extra work for myself. 95% of people graduating had a PhD. So the discipline was interesting and we'll look at that that gave me a chance to find out who's embargoing. And then I track the organ, you know, the stuff I need to embargo the organ, the licenses, because I see something in the future. But again, just kind of making extra work for myself. And then the date I emailed them, the date they responded and some notes about how they responded and what they said. I did realize later, there's a column after this that I had to add. I put in their orchid identifier because I also wanted to be able to go back and look at did they fill out their orchid. Like they got the number, but did they actually fill anything out? Otherwise, I think it's useless. So, and that's something we can talk about. So, all together there were 151 students. So I had to go through in digital commons where, you know, you manage it and open up each one. Choose the correct letter, look at whether they had an orchid and embargo, you know, put that letter into an email, copy and paste, but then add their names to make it personal, tracking the responses. I went back and entered orchids for everybody that responded. And even if they just responded with like, here's my orchid, I still sent them a thank you just so they have all, because it's also about like having another point of communication, right? So they work with Brandy and this is the person that's asking to revise and meet these requirements. I just want to be a person they can reach out to. So if they have questions in the future, there's somebody they can talk to. I'm not asking them to do any hard work, you know, in that sense. All right, so some starting stats right before we look at the results of this whole endeavor. 151 students, I ended up sending 97 letters all together for the summer. Students with no orchid. Anybody else see that? How many were there? Okay. Students who already had an orchid, people had signed up for, or it was a very high orchid semester. So 66 already had an orchid. I didn't have to send them a letter. 53 of our students embargoed. And out of the 97 letters they sent, I got 25 responses. Now normally, I can get a 75% response rate by putting things in like I had in that letter before I publish, meaning kind of implying that I'm not going to publish unless you respond. But it did not work this way. I got 25 responses. So let's look at those embargo results. Not a single person, not one, removed or lessened the length of their embargo. In fact, one person asked me to please increase the length of their embargo. One student attempted to put in a seven-year embargo, which we do not offer. One person did write to me and explained why they were keeping the embargo, that they had works in there that were, had been published in a journal. And when I, I didn't respond to them. I just left them alone looking back. I've done some research and I realized I should have asked them, well, did you give up your rights? Like what, you know, I should have engaged them in that. So, but I had to do some research about that first. So going forward, you know, I, that needs to be addressed. So I did go back and look at who embargoes. It's, it's basically our hard sciences. As you can see, chemistry, biology, medicine, computer science. And then our others up here, education and finance. They've, they've obviously got some professors telling them they should embargo. And then the others were just the top line is just everything else that was there. There was religion, business, psychology, you know, just everything else. So 57% of our science graduates embargoed. They were only 45% of the graduates, but 57% of them embargoed, whereas only 20% of all the other disciplines embargoed. So it's definitely our sciences who are embargoing. And that may have given me a clue as I think about this a little more, because I really just ended this project. It'll give me a chance to think about, you know, what I want to do going forward, knowing who embargoes. Okay, so I think one lesson from the embargo part of this is that there is a fundamental misunderstanding what librarians do, right? Because I say in the letter, like we are experts in this. And I think they remember story time at the library. I think they think, you know, we're in the library, we have some puppets and on the weekends, we still do story time or something. But I feel like they're, they don't trust us the way they trust their professors when we're talking about publishing and copyright. And I think without a whole change of how the librarians are viewed, you know, that they come to understand that we are experts in this stuff. I think it's going to be really hard to affect anything with embargoes, right? Because they're hearing this from their departments and possibly from publishers, but they may be going to publishers without having information about what they can negotiate, you know, and retaining rights and things like that or retain, like the publishers that I have worked with have all been perfectly happy with me posting a preprint version of an article in our institutional repository. And I don't know the students know to ask that when they go to these publishers. So, and this is where the librarians are experts, but I don't think they think that way about us. All right, so our orchid results. So embargo is a failure. To learn an experience. Let's rephrase that. It's a learning experience. So we started out with only 44% of our students having an orchid by the time we were done with this project. 60% now have an orchid. And I will say during the time it took me to drive from Miami to here, three other students did email me with their orchid. So we're a little over 60% now of our students have an orchid for this past summer semester. So the orchid went well overall. I mean, I only had 25 responses, but we did up the usage of orchid. We did increase it. The question comes in with this part of it. So 79% of students who received a request to register for an orchid did not enter any content. Now I'm looking over the upper right hand corner. So I get that. I just asked you to register. You haven't had time to input information. I get that. Now, 37% of the students who already had an orchid before their submission of the ETD had no content. So that means that 63% did. So they did go back. The people who had an orchid for a while had gone back and added content, but it was still only up to 63%. So I'm going to hope that the people who I just kind of bullied into getting an orchid will go back and add content. But if they don't, I don't know that orchid is very useful in any way. And that's a whole other problem. So what I learned from the orchid part is that students are done, right? So it's up to me at this point to offer to put in their orchid. I only got 25 responses out of 97 letters. So they're really, really done. So now I will say for this semester, I was kind of catching them at the end. They were done. They were graduated. And then they were getting these letters, right? So starting this semester, I can catch them the moment they put in their first submission where they're still working with Brandy on revisions. So this may be more useful, you know, catching them at the beginning rather than after they've graduated. So, all right. And so for the communication part of it, I got 25 responses. The majority of people thanked me. They seemed really appreciative. And the one who wrote back to me was like, thank you for reaching out. You know, they were genuinely pleased to have a contact. I had several conversations. Went back with emails back and forth with people over like finding, which I don't know much about. So I had to forward them on to Brandy. But we still talked about it. We talked about what a couple of people asked me about licensing. What this means? What is, what are like creative commons licenses? Somebody we went back and forth. He's like, how do I put this in a resume? Do I have this now? Where can I put it? You know, we shared some screenshots back and forth of where it could go in a resume, how to use it and things like that. One person thought I was just reaching out to immediately publish it and told me not to, but never providing an orchid. I'm kind of used to those panic emails, so it's fine. One person responded with an email that just had their orchid. No other text. So they were not interested in conversation. And of course, 75% of the students did ignore my email. But again, I caught them in summer after they graduated. So I'm hoping to turn that around by catching at the beginning of the process during the semester. So I feel like we've upped our, our orchid usage, right? So if orchid is going to be useful, let's go with the premise that it will be then moving it from, you know, 30% to into the 60s. I think it's good. And I think providing them, even if it's only a few people that really want to converse with me, I think it's good that they have this contact. So I will go ahead with some parts of this process into the next semester. So next steps. And this is where kind of we enter the, the Q&A how we do it. I would love to hear from you guys. I'm thinking of only sending out the orchid letters and just leaving embargo alone. Right. I can't change the entire reputation of the profession right this second. So I don't know that doing it, sending out embargo letters is useful. I, but I would love to hear from you guys if you think it is, or I just need to try another approach. I have thought about maybe you send out something about embargoes about like if it's embargoed, you miss out on these stats like none of the other long letter I had just like, you know, maybe a screenshot of statistics and downloads and being, you know, everything you can get from it. So that, I think the bottom one bullet point I have here, we have the digital scholar studio. That's what DSS stands for that we also manage our digital collection center. And I'm thinking of offering some kind of workshop. I know Brandy offers workshops on how to submit your thesis and dissertation. But something I kind of like the idea we heard in the, in the panel session, they were calling a meeting like a mixer and just something where I can get and let them come and ask questions about publishing. And if it's published, can I still use it? Do I have to embargoed if I put it in, you know, my, my ETD something where we can cover these things about licensing and, you know, like more of an informal discussion group. So that's a thought. I don't know if anybody have any other thoughts anything in the chat. Anything anybody would recommend. Yeah. They can, like if they are in the midst of getting published, they can recontact us, you know, with that, like contract, like a little more evidence than, hey, I'd just like to reembark. But they have to have a little more evidence than that. And we can, we can reembark. We can. Right. Did you have a comment? In Barga. 53 of the 151 in Barga. It was weighed out. It was weighed out. Yeah, it was very low this semester. I like that. Yeah. Right. Yeah, because I was thinking of the workshops directed at the students, but I think maybe do two, another one for faculty. Or even a joint. Right. And yes, I do because I used to teach in one of our departments. So yeah, I think we could easily. I love that. Thank you. That's a great idea. So if we've got some faculty there and brandy joins us from graduate school because there's there's always questions that pertain to that end of it that I can't answer. So yeah, I think if we do maybe a joint discussion. Yeah, I like that. That's great. That's exactly what I was hoping to get from coming here to present because, you know, when you're living in your little silo and you're thinking about approaches. It's hard to come up with new ideas from time to time. I think so. So the key handles. I'm the person handle. The university. I'm back with you and I'm here now. Yeah. No, I'm fine. So I think basically what she's saying is like, you're fine. Can everybody see it? Oh, yeah. There we go. All right. Right. I should see everybody. I'm the person handle. And I've also struggled with the bar. I hope to engage in it. The project will vary entirely. I do wonder if offering workshops with names of faculty, professors, even with students and faculty, I think you can ask me about earlier. Yeah. I mean, brandy, you offer stuff right at the beginning. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And you offer those at the beginning of the semester, right? Yeah. Oh, a little bit more. Okay. So we'll, yeah, brandy and I will definitely talk about like timing and like what else we can, we can do. I would love if the person from, okay. So I know I'm looking at this, but I'll, I see on my slide. They don't see me. So if the person from UNLV, I'm sorry. I can't see your name wants to reach out to me. That'd be awesome. No, no. No, no. Oh, it's up here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And for the person from UNLV, I will be there November 10th. So we should meet him. I will be there on your campus in the library on the 10th. We should meet. Sorry for other questions. I'm going to hand the mic to you. Okay. So I'll stand up. Yeah. So I just had two questions, two more questions to throw out to you. Do your students fill out their orchid profiles? Like has anybody gone back into their profiles and look? Anybody know if they fill them out? Because if it just has their name and a number, I don't see how it's tracking anything. Like, right? It's completely useless. Right? If they don't fill it out, I think. I remember all these orchid workshops when we first implemented it, like seven years ago, and I think I need to revisit a little bit about how orchid works exactly because it doesn't, it doesn't aggregate on its own. You have to fill it out yourself. This might be a problem. So our problem is, or my problem personally, I guess, is that I'm in a similar role to you, but I'm not a librarian. And we have our cataloging librarian who handles orchid IDs, but she doesn't deal with pieces and dissertations. So, and I don't know that much about them. So I really need to coordinate with her. I think if we want to have students getting orchid IDs, getting orchid IDs. Like more engaged. Yeah. It's been a struggle. I don't know how long we've been doing this, but at least five years. I feel like it's more though. All right. This is some of our wildlife that you're looking at in FIU. We're sitting now all around our lake. If you have not lived in the subtropics, we have two seasons. We have very, very, very hot. And then we have the season where it rains iguanas. So once it gets into the 50s, the low 50s and into the 40s, these guys freeze. They don't freeze to death. They just freeze. And then they start falling from trees on the people. But they're fun to look at and watch it. Like little mini dinosaurs running around the campus everywhere. So we'll tip about subtropical life there. This is another guy I found on the other lake. He's pretty. All right. If you guys have had success, anybody's had success encouraging people to open access, you know, not embargo. What are you doing? Please tell me. Anybody have any thoughts on that? I know some schools just flat out don't allow it. And I find it interesting. I mean, not an interesting sort of interesting. I expect the sciences to be the embargoing ones. But on the other hand, these are also the people who will, you know, if they go on to research in their future, will likely be working with government grants and everything will have to be open access. So I don't know, you know, anybody have any? I'm happy about that. Right. Right. You know, it's one of the tips I put in my bar go letter was like, hey, you can move all of society forward at a faster rate, innovation, you know, medical knowledge, everything. But I. So. All right. Anybody online comes up with any tips? Feel free to email me. So we don't really have anything to help encourage us on this. But it kind of leads me to the question. Sorry. Do you have a creative writing program? We do. How do you handle those students? Because they're the ones at UCF who are like, you know, panicking. Right. When they're, we do a campus program. And so they, it's available. Anybody within. I think it's currently the IT range or. Anyway, but they're the ones that are panicking. Because they're still going to be available five years after they graduate. Because what's the thing? She's the five years campus on the whole. So it's openly available worldwide after five years. When they come to you guys. So wait, say that, say that first part again of the question. So it's for the creative writing students. Yeah. What are you doing? It's an MFA in creative writing. And they have to put out, you know, obviously their creative work. Right. And the options at UCF that we give them are a one. We have an embargo for patents, but then they get one year, three years or five years on campus only. And worldwide will access after that. Okay. So after five years, it's, it's, it's out there. It doesn't have to please be prepped as well. And so it's out there after the five year. Okay. And they're the ones that we find, that I find in the library as the ones that are the most panicked. Because I would get. Yeah. No, I understand. Yeah. Wait, do you, how do you see that after their three years? So I think our MFA's are permanently embargoed. Right. Yeah. They never become live. Yeah. So they are MFA students to get an automatic permanent embargo. Some people don't think it. They just, they don't care, but most of them do. And so what we ask for is that they enter their metadata into your full comments and they submit a five page sample of the body text. We get the full text and we keep it and archive it. Like we don't ever publish it to different comments. But their five page sample is currently like all of this automatically open. Yeah. It's a bill. But they never get the full text. Like you've never published or published something. That's how it goes in that aid. Yeah. Yeah. Because that would create a lot of panic for them because that degree is meant for you to go on and write. I mean, it's not like, oh, I may or may not go into research after my degree. Like they went into a field that where they're going to write. So yeah, I can, I can imagine you get a lot of panic, panic. Okay. Well, um, so my contact information is here. If anybody has any thoughts, any ideas that I would love to hear from you. Um, I would, like I said, for the UNLV person, I will be there in the library. Um, so I would love to meet up. So send me an email. Thank you so much. That was, I definitely will contact you. Great. Awesome. All right. Thank you to everybody online and in person for, uh, this was a great presentation. Thank you.