 This project that I'm going to talk about is something that I've been, we've been doing with ACRL, and that's the Association of College and Research Libraries, which is a division of the Association of the American Library Association. And we're looking at the higher education trends, and this is a very aggressive project. We started in August, and we have to be finished in June. And when I looked at the higher ed literature, what I found the top things, and this just came out last week in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, the top trends were information literacy, the safety net, so this campus is safe for individuals, the sanctuary campus, the cultural divide, defending diversity, and harassment vigilance. Then I looked at Times Higher and tried to pull some topics from there. What came out that I thought matched somewhat was this improving digital literacy, the cultural wars, the Brexit, we have our own sort of Brexit happening, and free speech. And when this project that we're doing right now with ACRL, the title is How Far Have We Come and What Do We Do Next? And we were asked to come up with an agenda for action-based research on student learning and success. And ACRL has done quite a bit of work on this in the past. I don't know if any of you are familiar with a study that was published in 2010. It was called The Value of Academic Libraries or The Vowel Study, and that is one of the things that we used as our basis so that we could move from that 2010 to today. What we did is we have three data sources, and it's an iterative process. So as I said, we've been looking at a lot of literature. We looked at LIS literature, we looked at higher ed literature, and then we looked at the literature that was higher education that included library and information science. So we looked at these separately. We did content analysis, and so we were looking, again, at themes, trends, and also types of research. As you can imagine, I should ask you, what do you think, as far as a research method, what do you think we use a lot of surveys? We like to do surveys. And then we do a lot of interviews now as well, because as one librarian told me, it's just talking to people. And so we do a lot of that until it comes time to coding, and then we don't have a lot of data. So that's something we have to remember. When you collect it, you need to probably analyze it and disseminate it. We also came up with an advisory group, and this is for 14 individuals who are library deans or directors in different types of library, academic library. So we have community colleges. We have your four-year colleges. We have your research universities. We also looked at them regionally, because there are some regional differences in the US. And so we looked at the four regions of the US. We also looked at the secular, non-secular private public. So we wanted to have a representative from each of these groups or several representatives from these groups. And so we have a nice, I think, sample to look at, because the community colleges' issues are very different than what we're hearing from the research libraries. Now, another thing that I was concerned about with this project is that, and I heard some of it today, the open access, the data management, the data reuse, we are not touching on that because ACRL is siloed. There's another group that's studying that, which I think in some ways is a disadvantage that it's not all one big piece. So you won't hear that from me today. This is all on student success and learning. We also, these 14 individuals who are an advisory group, had to make a commitment that they would introduce us to someone in their provost office, which is probably your chancellor, vice chancellor, who would talk to us and we would be able to interview that. So that was part of the deal, that if they came on for the advisory group, we had to have a connection. As I said, we looked at the literature from 2010 to 2016, but every day I find more, so it's in 2017, now it's creeping. We took the themes from the 2010 VAL report. Most of the studies were published in the U.S. However, we do have some U.K. and Australia, because Australia seemed to be much more advanced in this area than we were in the U.S. So we were looking at their literature as well to get some ideas. This was an easy way to depict some of the topics, the themes that came out. You'll see, and this is all of the literature, so the higher ed and library and information science literature. You'll see collaboration, learning in college, service, communication, success in college. Research support is there as well. And again, that isn't an area that we were looking at. Now, when you look at these themes, the orange is the combination of higher education and LIS literature. And the sort of purplish color is the higher ed literature, and the turquoise is library and information science literature. You'll see the combination of the higher ed and LIS is service. When you just look at the LIS literature, it's the service. And that came up a lot. When we talk to the advisory group, service comes up a lot. When you talk to provost, that's not it. Now, they may define service differently, so it could be the context, it can be semantics, but service wasn't on their minds. You'll see with the higher ed what was really important is the success in college. Why? Because right now in higher ed, funding is tight. It's probably going to get tighter. And so everyone's competing. And so the universities are competing within themselves and with each other. And so it's very important to demonstrate success, but it's also very difficult. And how do you define success? And so those are some of the things that we're trying to get to. So as I said, we have this advisory group. We conducted a virtual focus group interview. It was 90 minutes. We transcribed the, we recorded and transcribed this interview. We used EnVivo, which is a software, it's basically a big database, but it's a software package for qualitative data. And so that we could run some numbers and look at themes. We made sure that we have an army working on this project. And two doctoral students who did the majority of the coding. I came in and I did the coding at the end of a sample, and I threw everything off. And so then they had to start over. And it's another reason why we, it's a project that's taking a lot of energy, but also is on a very fast timeline. When we looked at the focus group interviews, the librarians talked a lot about communication. They needed to communicate to their administration, to the faculty, to the students. They talked a lot about collaboration, service, and being involved in institutional planning. You'll also see the research support there as well. It was interesting to see where collections fall. And it wasn't something they talked about a lot. These are some quotes that I wanted to give to you. Now this is a research university, academic university librarian, a secular public. We had to take away the regional part because then you could identify the individuals because our advisory group is public. So I can't tell you where this individual is from. But what the individual was saying is that she said, I think part of our success in reaching to students and faculty is the way we collaborate with others. And she kept talking a lot about collaboration. And another one said librarians must have the ability to recognize how the multiple stakeholders within their specific university ecosystem interrelate and leverage their relationships to attain shared goals rather than just library oriented goals. And so looking at the big picture and becoming a part of the university. Another one was talking about, and this comes up a lot, that this fake news. And where do we come in? This is really important now that we need to be educating these individuals on how to be good citizens and how to evaluate the literature, the news, and be critical thinkers. Not just in their academic work, but in their everyday lives. And that came up a lot. I must say these interviews were before, with the advisory group, before the presidential election. Now when I interviewed the provost, it was the day after the presidential election and that week. So we have some very interesting data that we probably wouldn't have had two weeks before. So with the provost, these were individual interviews because we did not want them to be afraid to talk with other provost because they may not want to tell their secrets or their fears. We asked them questions like, how do you envision higher ed in the next five years? Which was a really scary question to them the day after the election. And we took detailed notes, again, we did the coding. And you look at this, communication again is very important. They just kept talking about how we have to communicate. And librarians need to communicate their worth, their value. One provost constantly talked about the journals and how much money he spends on journals. And he came from a science background. And to him, that was the most important thing were these journals. But why are they so expensive? And he was obsessed with that. Institutional planning, another thing. Learning in college. But that learning in college, again, was looking at their everyday lives. They talked about their Greek lives. So their lives with the sororities and fraternities. They talked about their everyday lives when they're out with sports and different things. And this is a quote from one of the provost, non-secular private. People are talking about the problems of educating people to be citizens more. With this election being indicative of that. This is a hard thing to confront right now, because we are going to have an administration that doesn't think that's important at all. And so his concern was how are we going to educate people, to be critical thinkers, and to be good citizens. Whenever we may not have the support of our government to do that. And this provost was from a public university research. And the drive to knowing more about what students get from a college education is not going to go away. We are going to have to continually look at quality. This drive towards knowing what students get from their college education is going to continue to be important. And I can't imagine that part of it would go away with a Trump administration. And this was the constant theme of the interviews. And many ways I was a psychologist to them. And I had to keep bringing them back to what we wanted to know. And some of the interviews went on, they were supposed to be 45 minutes. And that was hard to get from a provost. Some of them went on for an hour and a half, almost two hours. And I do think it was because of the timing. Now, when you look at the themes of the advisory group, which are the academic library administrators, to the provost. Now, the advisory group are the dark blue lines. The provost are the turquoise lines. Communication is very important to both. But look at the service with the librarian compared to the librarians compared to the provost. These are some more quotes and I don't want to, I'll let you read them. But I just want to say that this whole learning is very important. And this again is a provost. And what was coming out was librarians need to be thinking more as educators and to be a part of the teaching and learning, which we have been. But we haven't told anyone that we are. They're not seeing it as teachers. And I think it's because we talk in terms of service. Again, this learning and service, this is an advisory group member. And the advisory group member is talking about shared initiatives on campus. And how we need to be involved in that and look at the institutional planning and the mission of the university and be a part of that, contribute to that. Space, this was the provost, of course space was of concern. And he kept saying, I want a place where the students can come together. They need to have a place where they can study, where they can meet each other. So, and he talked about pulling them together. Again, the space and collaboration. And one of the advisory group members said, we share our space with the writing lab. We share our space with the computer labs. But that's not it. Sharing space isn't what it's about. It's actually sharing programs. Sharing these ideas of teaching together, learning together. We should be with them teaching in these labs. And so it was very important to them that we don't just look at the space of sharing. Service, this was a provost. And he said, many of our faculty and students research now. It's less about going to a physical space, but about accessing information in their offices. And he thought this was a challenge for some of the librarians. Privacy seems to be more of an issue with us as librarians than with others. And we're so afraid of collecting data and how much data we can collect, because we don't want to inform anyone outside of this institution or even within the institution of what individuals are doing. When we've interviewed doctoral students, they were very worried to use any kind of an online reference service because they thought that their major professors would know that they did not know something. And so privacy is very important to us, but the advisory group, this advisory group member was saying, we need to put some of this aside. We need to collect data and report data in different ways and not be afraid to collect some of this demographic information and to track individuals for five years after they leave the university. These are just some of our recommendations to identify and articulate both learning and success outcomes, which sounds easy, but it's really not. Focus less on service and more on sharing space and collaborative programming. Again, this whole collaboration that came out with both the librarians and the provost, the collaboration, the communication. This whole idea of assessment and looking at student-centered outcomes. That's and look at diverse populations. Diversity came up quite a bit as well. And we need to be looking at all different types of individuals and their needs, whether they're learning challenges or their everyday life challenges. Develop relationships and it's all relationship building. And we've been hearing that a lot too. It's amazing that someone said it's amazing what you can learn and do if you just walk around campus sometime and talk to people. Continue to develop and foster these relationships and engagement with the academic administrators, faculty, students, the research groups. Represent data in different ways. That was another thing that kept coming up. We don't know how to present information to different audiences. And so we need to learn how to do that and a picture will tell a thousand words and it's hard to find that one picture. Priority areas are these, we came up with six. Communication, collaboration, mission, strategy and alignment, teaching and learning, student success. And then we are coming up with questions within each of these priority areas. And these are examples of the questions within this student success priority area. And these are the areas that we will target in future research. And hope that we can get funding agencies to also start looking at these areas. So these were just some of the research questions. And our last priority area is learning analytics. And that's something we haven't been doing well in the US, especially in the academic library environment. The next steps, this month we'll be showing our visualization tool. So we've taken all the literature that we've used and we're going to have this interface where individuals can put in themes, you can put in journal titles, you can put in the color. You can put in many different things and the methods. If you're interested in a type of research method, you can put in the type of institution, so if it's a community college or a research university. And find out what the literature is saying and then move on from there. You can maybe learn from that, hopefully. Or you can also develop your own research in that area. In May we'll have this full report. It will be out for public comment. We also have a report out now that's the first draft. It does not have the research questions yet. That's what we're working on now. But again, we have open times for public comment. And this should all be available in June and we will present it at the ALA conference. And we have, as I said, this has been, it took a village to do this. And I think it's going to continue to take a village to finish this. And I've just been very lucky to have individuals who really share the same vision as I do and see this as something very important. Thank you.