 I think we're ready to go. Welcome to the CNI virtual spring meeting and I'm Joan Lippincott. I'm the Associate Executive Director Emerita of the Coalition for Networked Information and we're so pleased that you could join us for this webinar today and I'm really delighted to introduce Jennifer Nichols who's Director of the Catalyst Studios at the University of Arizona and she'll be speaking about catalyzing student success, how to center digital literacy, access to technology and interdisciplinary communities of practice in innovative library spaces. I've been following the Student Success Zone project at the University of Arizona for a little while and I'm really eager to hear about the various components and the progress that's being made and in particular help us understand an important concept that it's not just about physical spaces, it's about what happens in the spaces, about what we offer our communities and about the expertise that we provide. We will be taking questions at the end of the presentation. You can type your questions into the Q and A box at any point during the presentation and at the end of the presentation Jennifer will be taking those questions. You can also use the chat but we have some preference if you type your questions into the Q and A and we'll be putting any other say any links or other information into the chat for you if something like that comes up. So I think we're ready and I want to make sure everyone understands that the session is going to be recorded and I hand this over to Jennifer now. Thanks Joan. Good morning from Arizona. Good afternoon for those of you not here. It's a nice cool soon to be 100 degrees here. So I'm you know I'm not the first person to say this I'm sure but I love presenting to an audience and having the interaction of you all so this is a first for me to present without being able to see who I'm talking to. So I really look forward to the last few minutes when we can interact a little bit more. So I've tried to create an engaging presentation given the platform as I'm sure many people have said before me. So catalyzing student success suddenly looks very different than it did on March 1st. Today I would like to talk about the student success district of the University of Arizona, the library's role within this and particularly the role of catalyst studios of which I'm the director within that. There's no way that you're not all consumed with thoughts of what we should be doing today this summer this fall this winter amidst an unprecedented pandemic it would be difficult to stand by plans to renovate space create new positions etc. Therefore I want to situate what we have done within a thing that we now all find ourselves operating a learning space in the age of COVID-19. Today I find myself reflecting on how our physical spaces are in some ways already irrelevant. We carefully calculated how many people we could see in our new spaces to ensure we were not costing our students anything in the way of access to quality study space. Now we may be removing chairs at every table to ensure we're not contributing to the spread of a deadly virus. We're considering how to limit in-person access to future programs instead of how to attract as many users as possible to our beautiful new facilities. I desperately want to be here telling you about all the decisions we made that were economically sensical what we learned from the lessons of our predecessors why we should you should do it the way we did it. And there are many things that may be relevant again in the not too distant future but what seems more pressing is redefining student success for now. So ironically perhaps I have this definition of catalyst on the screen and as I edited this presentation as late as this morning I've pondered how we are unchanged what parts are unchanged how the core principles of how and what we do have become more important than ever but we'll get to that a little bit later. What I'd like to do now is talk about the project overall for those of you who haven't heard about the student success district what we started how we're using that foundation to define student success specifically within the catalyst studios and we'll talk about the subtitle of this talk as well digital literacy access to technology and interdisciplinary communities of practice. Okay so first the student success district as defined at the University of Arizona is a joint initiative between the libraries student success and retention innovation student engagement and career development and campus life programs of the provost's office. Our goals to encourage students to move seamlessly between spaces that provide a full range of services and support helping them to reach their academic and career goals. Here is a rendering of the main library at the top left see if my cursor will so this is these three buildings are the main library. This is the Bear Down gymnasium as referenced by its roof and this is the historic gymnasium of campus and this is the Albert B. Weaver Albert B. Weaver science engineering library newly named during the student success district and then this is a new four-story building that's the student success building so this interconnected district has outdoor patios and walkways that are designed for collaboration. There's meditation gardens as you know Tucson has exquisite weather for working outside most of the year even in these hot days with plenty of shade it's very easy to be outside and enjoying that space so we're really trying to activate both the inside and outside space and I'll tell you it's I think it will become more important than ever now so our goal really is to collaborate collaborate across support services making referrals making things seamless for students to facilitate discovery and encouraging them to be on site more. We often as many of you probably experience in your libraries as well have students who come in between classes to get work done and will settle there for an hour or two and then go on their way so by co-locating these services we're really hoping to leverage all of the service that is here to to help students really be academically successful so this dynamic space really helped us to take some of the things that we were working on in the past and I believe it was two years ago I was at CNI presenting with my colleagues about some of the digital scholarship maker activities and data science activities that we had been piloting in actually in the science engineering library and so we were able with the student success district to then take all of those pilots and all of the planning and move it into this dynamic new space to be able to really take advantage of all of campus wanting to maximally collaborate so that we could serve students. So I'll just say before I dive into Catalyst Studios that you know we had a lot of opportunities for the library's portion about what what were we doing what was the focus of our renovations what were we trying to accomplish there and there's a lot of scholarship around why maker spaces in academia are important what role they play and my particular interest is really how having the maker space within the library is even situated perfectly to maximally serve students in an equitable way so I'm really excited about not only that we have been trying these things for many years and have a new space in which to try them but that it is centered within the library and this library is centered within the student success district so before I dive into Catalyst specifically I want to show you a little bit about what's happening in the library renovations in the district here is the entrance to the main library which again was the I'm sorry I can't go backwards here we go was the is the far left building so this is the entrance to this building this is special collections here if you're following my mouse this is the west side what we call the west side and this is what we call the east side okay so this is the west side these renovations are being completed as we speak I haven't been able to see a lot of them because since the stay at home order much of the work has become has has been able to be accomplished our goal was to open up during spring semester so the last time I rode my bike through and looked in the windows it was looking fully furnished and ready to go so for all intents and purposes we are ready for folks to come back to campus on the west side as far as I know so this is used to be those of you who've been here before this was used to be the reference stacks study space and the liaisons offices this is a grand staircase that go connects the first and second floor to our information commons so this right side picture is the bottom floor and then this will be our tech lending area where folks can try technologies before checking them out and also our computers and more study rooms will be down here on the first floor this again is the west side so we have a collection of study rooms of various sizes these will be used internally as meeting rooms for our staff and librarians to meet with external stakeholders in these spaces easy to find and then they will be converted to study rooms for our students in the evenings and weekends on the this far right side are are some of the tables and we will be mirroring the furniture on the outside so both the inside and outside of the building will be activated for study space okay and this is a rendering of the science engineering library's new entrance and this entrance is facing east facing the bear down gymnasium and the meditation gardens and a lot of the wellness activities will be will be parallel to this space what was nice about the science engineering library renovations is we have a collaborative classroom in there that many classes that used to be large lecture halls of two to three hundred people are trying to activate their learning and have small group more active learning curricula and so they're building specific spaces we have the first one ever made I'm sure there's been presentations at cni about it within the science engineering library so we wanted to create more space for those students to then leave those classrooms and stay and study in the space and make a connection between the first and second floors or the second and third floors in this case and and open up the building that whole facade was all brick okay so here is the entrance to the main library when you first walk in straight ahead are the the information desks they're they're modular and designed to be moved in the future as necessary we have the whole shelf here and we're hoping to greet everyone and be able to send them to the various parts of the library very easily this space has been staffed since january through the construction and we've learned a lot already in just those few weeks of being open here in the glassed inside is the beginning of catalyst this is the data studio and then we'll go in there a little bit so here if you go past the data studio this is the open study area in the middle of catalyst studios so i just wanted to mention for those of you that don't know that we're talking about catalyst studios with a capital cat because we are the home of the wildcats and so sometimes people will see it written out and and then it'll click for them if they're local wondering why we named that and for those of you who have ever tried to name a new innovation space most names have been used before so we had a an interesting time trying to choose a name but suddenly this seemed to make a lot of sense for us and i've been able to really think about the ways that the library is and has always been a catalyst so i just wanted to mention that because sometimes people wonder why we spell it the way we do or we articulate it the way we do okay so as you enter into catalyst studios the first thing you see is this approximately 800 square foot data studio those glass walls completely retract so that we can expand the space there are tables and chairs for about 24 people in there comfortably we've been able to add up to 50 people with just chairs and it features a 4k six by three data visualization and wall this enables us to have multiple inputs you can see our data management library and i'm sorry specialist for nando there is using this in a way that many people use it which is to have both their slides and their code up teaching in here but you can also maximize all of those screens for the 32 nine aspect ratio output this is also outfitted for lecture capture so as i've been thinking about maybe the campus being open a little bit this summer possibly open in the fall or even not how can we provide these spaces perhaps for lecture capture for folks as we move more things online and how could this maybe be useful to that end which again was not something that we thought of when we first planned this space the kinds of things that happen here are a lot of drop-in hours we had a lot of events planned for late spring that we didn't get to try out and i'll get to those in a little bit okay here is the green screen studio this is within our terry seligman vrar studio this is just much more picturesque than the the rooms with the vr in them so i chose to show you these this is a a green screen syclarama and that really just creates a 3d backdrop for virtual production i hear that we are the second one in town only so we have been working to understand the optimal lighting in the space you'll see the picture on the right is too much green light if you try to photoshop that there's too much green to get it all out and i wanted to show you all the picture of them dropped in the middle of the desert the picture on the right is our president robbins uh the donor terry seligman our dean vice dean and robin huff eible who has been the project director for all of our renovations and the project on the left is a is our student abhi helping a paramedic instructor develop mixed reality lectures where they're dropping in anatomical models and lecturing to the students in that way and then here's the maker studio which i find really beautiful one of kind of the cornerstones of the student success district and it's again the walls also open up both on the inside and then that far wall you'll see over here opens up onto a lovely patio again i'm thinking about post-covid or in the next year when we are still very much within these considerations how are we going to be able to use these outdoor spaces in new ways what is lovely about the maker studio is that it has reconfigurable workstations with fully articulating and movable tables and chairs you see the projector there and has a sound system so that we can teach and really one of the things that we wanted most was to be able to have purposeful instruction and still be a maker space so in our previous space we were very small it was very difficult for us to both have a class in there and have people drop in and continue to use the space so we love this configuration and so far it's worked out very well with those intentions okay so the stations that we feature in here these are during the soft opening so there's some things are are not set up yet but we feature 3d printers vinyl cutters sewing machines laser cutters cnc routers we have micro computers we have button makers we have a letter press and many more other things we have a small staff we it's myself an operations lead a technology lead we have 10 undergrad students and three grad assistants and they really staff the space um our space is open has been open and i i'm sure this will change in the future but it was open initially from 12 to 12 to 8 sunday through thursday 12 to 6 on friday um so as i said earlier we're the first part of the student success district to open and we were open for a total of seven weeks we opened on thursday january 16th and our last day open to the public was march 6th when we went on spring break so in this time we tried a lot of things some were very new some we had piloted for years and some things were on the calendar and were not quite ready to to be tried or were canceled so um again i just want to reiterate that what we're going for here in the programs that we host are really highlighting how we can build these communities of practice how we can contribute to the interdisciplinary conversations how we can increase digital literacy and how we can increase um access to technology so here's a short list of the things that we've done um let me make sure i'm not missing anything here um so the certifications for use of the technology in the space these are run by the students who who work in the space and um we started with laser cutter certification 3d printing certification vinyl cutter certification sewing machines and we were just adding cnc when we stopped operations and so what these mean is that a student has about usually about five to ten participants depending on the certification people sign up ahead of time and they go through the safety protocols the basics of operation and then people get some hands-on time once they participate in the certification we indicate that on their library record and then they're able to book time through our libcal system to use the space to use the laser cutters to use the 3d printers and some things have reservations and some things are first come first serve but this also doesn't allow people to use them outside of our operating hours for safety and also for consideration of not only physical safety but community safety and people feeling like they're supported in the use of their of the machinery we also have drop-in hours and many of these things again we have been doing for a long time these are primarily provided by others in the library from other departments librarians and specialists and also other partners some of these partners are in partners in our student success district and we'll also have offices in proximity to where we are in when they move into the student success district eventually but many of these folks are really finding like the adobe folks or the data visualization specialists who work in research computing they're finding that having this space that is central to campus and is open to everyone and really positioned in a way that anyone can have access has really been the best part right they can put up information online they can say they're going to meet in their office but by being visible in this space they're really finding they're getting new kinds of questions they're getting new people discovering them and that was really the goal and that's really like the definition of student success for me was how do we co-locate these things so that people can find them and understand what is available to them as students or members of our community we did have several workshops primarily around the topics in the drop-in hours we have a digital scholarship and data science fellowship my colleague Jeff will be talking about that next week I encourage you to go to hear more about that and that's really designed to build the digital literacy skills and build these interdisciplinary communities and then those fellows will teach more content more workshops within Catalyst for the full campus community we also host student clubs I'm the faculty advisor for the 3d printing club which has members across almost all colleges over a hundred members more than 30 show up every week so really trying to be the home for some of these student clubs that do also address these issues and finally we're starting to pilot faculty fellowships we'll see where those go in the future but they're primarily for faculty who can use the space in unique ways for their curriculum and how might we help support some of the equipment that they might need okay how am I doing on time all right so I just want to say that within those seven weeks we were we recorded 789 visitors which we're really excited about that doesn't include participants to workshops that didn't walk in and sign in that doesn't include everyone who walked in and didn't sign in so we know that we're on to something and that we really need to rise to the occasion and continue to meet the needs of the students no matter what happens in the fall no matter what happens in the summer so these are some of the things that the students have designed in this during the stay at home orders they've been teaching themselves more skills and then trying to understand ways that we can engage the community online better so we've had some drop-in times like the woman trans femme craft hour we have a knitting hour on Monday nights we've moved online in ways that we can and we're also about to announce a new slack community for all of the community to engage with one another over the summer and see how that goes that way it's in place fully for the fall no matter what happens okay so here's some more of the designs that they've made so in closing i really just want to remind us of some of some things that i've been thinking about around student success in this particular time and i i want to say that for me it's always been student success has always been how can we include these new ways of creating and stimulating ideas and scholarship for everyone i see making in our spaces as a new avenue for the library to reach students and a new possibility for supporting very important and disruptive ways of thinking uh we talk about innovation all the time we celebrate bold solutions the non-traditional we all know that bill gates and mark zuckerberg steve jobs didn't graduate from college so we need to challenge ourselves um as we work in these institutions to do something different right um to think about how we're so accustomed to be oriented as cautious and conservative thoughtful and deliberate data-driven decision-making evidence-based solutions how are we going to challenge ourselves to continue to be responsive without being careless to be risk-taking without being reckless and try things that may not come out the way we intended i just want to acknowledge that there is no empirical data on the cutting edge and while we seem to be explicitly reminded of this every day i still think it's important for us to acknowledge that here we are on the edge together even if we don't want to be and it's okay to keep trying to do these things when we build these innovative spaces we're going to have to pivot but how can we still be that core catalyst how can we still return to the principles of making everyone as equally important and including them all in all the decisions that we make so um with that i'll close and open it up for questions because i've been talking i haven't been able to look at them so i'm going to stop sharing my screen so we can have a conversation thank you so much jennifer and you can leave your slide up if you like okay we're almost at time so i want to let people know that we will continue beyond time for those who are able to stay online and we do have one question and then i have a couple um if you want to stay on that i'd like to ask um steven bell asks after the renovation will librarians have their own offices or did you create an open office space with no personal offices so i know you talked about the staff being visible etc but can you talk a little bit more about that it actually steven has just um added to that the digital aspects of these spaces okay let's go with the actually separate uh so yes that was one of the things that happened the librarian offices were shared offices but usually two to three librarians now they are in shared open office space um and we have a few different locations within the main library where everyone is located did you have any sense of how that was working in the short time that you were occupying them um i think you know it was an adjustment for many people it was very challenging so one of the things that we did was create um those small meeting rooms downstairs and prioritize that they would be used by us for our for our external meetings and um so that was what we were planning to roll out later this spring and so that we could because so much was under construction we had already gone through this contraction of meeting space in general at the library so faculty and and staff were struggling with that a lot during the renovations just not not having anywhere to meet anyone so we're really looking forward to having more spaces to be able to schedule meetings that were very easily findable and having folks encouraging folks to have office hours in those spaces and some people are having office hours in catalyst so that they're very visible but this this western side set of meeting rooms was hopefully going we're going to try and see if that addressed some of the needs of faculty and staff uh jennifer before we get to stevens next question do you have a slide after the one on the screen that shows your contact info yeah okay if you put that up thank you and stevens um second question is the digital aspects of these spaces tends to appeal more to grads than undergrads who are much more the focus of student success initiatives are you developing any specific projects targeted undergrads for example an introduction to digital scholarship not just in not just open workshops but targeted projects that involve liaison librarians yeah that's a great question so we have um we have an initiative with the liaisons to start to identify faculty that we can work together to develop curriculum for for specific courses and really trying to push beyond the very obvious connections and help people follow up with people who are interested in how can we do things a little bit differently within this this art class or this math class or this english class and then help to develop in that way i have an interesting project that i'm working on this summer with the undergrad with an undergrad research project where um they're fellows basically and then they go through a whole summer intensive so we're trying to figure out how we can pivot that a little bit online and do some digital literacy skills with them ahead of time and that program is really focused on getting them the skills they need to get into graduate school and there's a lot of deliberate engagement but since catalyst is open we started talking about how can we specifically support them and then i do some work with incoming um undergrads through upward bound programs and we're going to do we were going to do a week in the maker space we're now going to do a week of design thinking and doing and and and thinking about how we might apply in the fall when they can come in some of these technologies in new ways and start to have those conversations very interesting thank you um in addition to typing a question into the q and a if any of the remaining participants and there are a number of you would like to directly verbally ask a question of jennifer you can go into the participants section and raise your hand and we'll uh we'll bring you into the conversation while waiting to see if anyone takes us up on this i wanted to ask uh it's a question and a comment when i visited the cabot science library at harvard they had this really interesting feature where they had a big screen that faced in on one side and out because there was a really heavy heavily trafficked area right outside that the entrance to the library so that they could show any instruction sessions or any programs that they wanted both inside and outside and i'm also thinking of the virginia commonwealth university library renovation that has a really big screen on the outside of the library i think it's above or next to the entrance where i think they're using it mostly for exhibit type information but i just wonder if any of that is in the plans or if that's something that you think might be useful with your indoor outdoor environment yeah i'm glad you asked that so what wasn't obvious from the photos maybe was the data studios at the very front of the library and that passageway we have a starbucks on the outside and it's a walkway between athletics the entire athletic compound and campus and a bit two big parking garages so we see thousands of people walk past there and you can easily see the data visualization wall through there so what we have wanted to do is curate content from all over the student success district that can be on the wall when we're not teaching in the space and then also helping instructors who use that space if they're using the traditional they're using it for their slides you know they don't need the full power of that wall how can they make one half a slide that says what is happening you know this is a a meeting of this group open to all you know come on in kind of thing and invitation so people know what's happening and then use the other half of the screen to for their presentation so we've talked about those things and started to curate content so we can run that because they are 24 hour screens and we definitely want to take advantage of how many people come and go and then on the backside we lost a little bit of space as we built out the room and so we have this display area and I've been working with a faculty who designs he's an architecture and information faculty who designs installations so we've been trying to design an installation with projectors in that kind of display box so that we can actually leverage that too that sounds great can't wait to visit sometime I would love to have you all thank you okay I think we're starting to lose people I don't see any hands raised is that correct Diane and that's correct okay so I'm going to mention that if you look in the chat you'll see a URL for the slides from today but in addition to that we will have a recording available for all of you and one that you can also share with anyone at your institution and encourage you to do so and I want to thank Jennifer for a really terrific presentation and for giving us a great overview of their new facility and the kinds of programming that they are developing there thank you Jennifer and thanks to all of our participants who've taken time out of their crazy unpredictable schedules of recent days I hope everyone stays healthy and safe and thank you for joining the CNI virtual spring meeting