 to the CNI Digital Scholarship Planning webinar series. And if you participated in previous sessions, welcome back. I hope you're all doing well during this difficult time of the pandemic. We're so pleased to have close to 300 registrants from five countries and a wide variety of institutions. I'm Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director Emerita of CNI and I'm moderating the nine sessions of this series. Each of you is registered for all nine sessions and don't worry if you need to skip some. We'll have recordings available for all sessions as well as a set of questions to guide planning discussions on your own campus. And both the video and discussion questions for sessions one through three are already on the website. We have two speakers for this session and we'll take questions after each. Please type your questions in the chat box at any time. In addition, after the formal one hour session is over, we'll open the mics in case some of you wish to verbally ask questions of the speakers if they're able to remain online. The chat box is also available to communicate with each other or with me or our technical lead, Beth Seacrest. During the presentations, all participants will be muted. For this fourth session, we'll learn about staffing related to digital scholarship programs, a critical issue for all types of institutions. I thought it would be useful to have both administrative and frontline perspectives for this session. And I'm pleased to welcome our presenters today, Robert McDonald, Dean of University Libraries, Senior Vice Provost of Online and Extended Education and Professor at University of Colorado at Boulder and Zoe Borowski, Librarian for Digital Research and Scholarship at UCLA. Their bios are on the webinar site and I won't take any more time with introductions in order to give our speakers more time. So over to you, Robert. Thanks so much, Joan. I hope everybody can hear me okay. Maybe give me a thumbs up if it's going all right. And we've got my slides going. I'm Robert McDonald. I'm at the University of Colorado Boulder where I'm the Dean of Libraries and Senior Vice Provost for Online Education. And what I wanted to give today was kind of a high level overview of how our Center for Research, Data and Digital Scholarship works, which is our main center for working on digital scholarship initiatives. And it's a pretty collaborative component. And let me get to my next slide here. Just a little bit about our libraries. We just came up with a brand new strategic plan in the last year. We worked with Athenaeum21 to really get a values-based strategic plan going. And now we've got our nice, really succinct mission of an information-empowered world. And our vision is to be a knowledge catalyst to spark inquiry, discovery, collaboration, creation and the dissemination of knowledge. And we welcome everyone wherever they are on their educational journey. And I think you'll see from our slides and our CRDDS Center, how we do that there for digital scholarship. Just a little bit about our library, to give you some sense. We've got about seven and a half million volumes and 900,000 eBooks, 374,000 eJournals, 1.8 million visits, about 35,000 students. And this is our short version of our strategic plan. Our values are include, empower, connect, learn and inspire. And then I just went through our vision and mission with you. But one of the things I'm gonna talk a little bit about is the reorganization structure that we've been implementing in our libraries in the last six to eight months that goes along with our new strategic plan. And the reason I'm gonna do that is because I think it'll give you a sense of how our digital scholarship center works. So for our new rework, we're moving into a much more agile kind of methodology with how we're running things. And we're breaking everything into these larger groups called chapters that then have teams and then have sections. And really the whole method is based on the sections area, which is the smallest component of a structure within the whole libraries. And those are really broken down by the areas they serve. And so if you think about this from a typical research library or the chapter is at the level of an associate dean and then those teams each have a lead underneath the associate dean that work on different functions. And then those are broken into sections which are generally no more than six people because what we're looking for is a real team-based approach to how we do things. If you take another look here, and I know it's a little hard to read the way the image sized, but what this shows you is one particular breakdown where with the dean of the top level, then you have the chapter, the team and the section. And you'll see previously, we had kind of mirrored our staff that are part of the Center for Research, Data and Digital Scholarship into a library type of organizational structure. But as I'll tell you more, they are actually a chartered research center under our vice chancellor for research and it's a much larger structure. And it really fits in with the context of our campus here at University of Colorado Boulder. And so what we did when we reorg was we moved them to work just like a research center. So they have a line to me, they have a line to the CIO who pays for part of the center as well. And then there's another line into the research enterprise that's part of their charter as a research center. So what we've done is entrusted the center with several key functions that they run for us like they are the product owner for our institutional repository and they work on some of the pieces of our CU expert system that is our faculty current research information system. And they run those for us as a library but then they also function as a research center. And there's a whole lot of research that goes on there with research grants that are intertwined with the groups that make up the center itself. So I just wanted to give you that kind of high level overview of it so we could dive a little deeper into how this kind of came about. Our center in particular has been around about four or five years. I've been here for about two years in my current role as team of libraries. And so what we've been working on there is deeper collaboration both within the center but also with other functions of campus as well as working on the context. And so next up you'll see a picture of the current group although it's changed just a tad bit since the picture was taken but you're looking at a mix of people from the libraries from areas of scholarly communication from research computing and other areas of IT. And the whole point here is to bring them together so that they can collaborate with other areas of campus on different areas of consultation, teaching, training, education, data management, infrastructure provision. And I'll get to some of the infrastructure that we have available because we have an interesting partnership there. But I think the whole thing here for me in terms of staffing is the context, right? What drives your campus? And this is the part where I'm going to tell you a little of the uniqueness to my campus. When this all came together, the libraries were looking at building a digital scholarship type center. And the research computing group was looking to see how they could take what they were already doing with data infrastructure and have better outreach training, kind of development for grad students to get them interested in using that infrastructure. And so they came together and formed this group to kind of figure out what they wanted to do in terms of those broad outlines. And so far, I think it's worked really well. I think at this point they've been working together long enough. They know how to communicate well across their different disciplines. And I think they understand each other pretty well and they've worked on some successful grant funded projects. And that always helps. But from our campus perspective, we have some unique things called research institutes. And the institutes here actually all focus on very different areas. One of the key ones that works with our Center for Research data is the Institute for Cognitive Science. And they run a big MRI instrument that creates lots and lots and lots and lots of data. And those institutes all get tenure track lines to hire but then they have to place them within the colleges. So it's a partnership between the institutes and the various colleges and schools where the faculty have their tenure. And so it's pretty interesting that they kind of function in some ways like a college and many ways not because most of what they do is very focused on the research angle. And to somewhat the teaching and learning angle for their grad students but not the same way that typical college works at an R1 campus. So if you think about that kind of angle, that's the type of collaborative angle and lens that I think we've taken with how we've gone to develop our program in the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship. And one of the key pieces to that was we had already started the center and it kind of came along that there were several groups across a couple of colleges that wanted to do a humanities, digital humanities certificate. We were perfectly placed to help with that. And one of our co-directors, the Alenquist had already been teaching some things in that area. And so what we did was it was help build that. The libraries out of CRDDS runs this and we teach the intro course to that every year. And it's been really helpful, not only for building out that certificate and for getting more involved with the schools and colleges involved which are some areas of A&S, some areas of business, some areas of communications, but also being kind of a neutral space where people can come for support. We started doing lots of trainings and cross kind of group trainings where we would even pull in people from our statistical centers and other areas who used the research computing infrastructure but didn't always have a space to do the consultation in that was convenient for people like when we were in our main library. At this point, everything moved online pretty quickly because they had done lots of online training previously on and off, but they were one of the first groups in the libraries to move all their training online. And that's been really awesome for the continuity that we needed this year. But it really is about collaboration. But what I wanted to say about the certificate is it's attracted lots of students who are very interested in digital humanities and that's kind of driven different things both from a collaborative agreement we have with the graduate school for a teaching assistantship every year that we co-fund with them. And that's driven more interest and more dissertations that are utilizing these tool sets and new ways for the campus and more interest in the Humanities Certificate. We also have a partnership with the grad school around that and that's leading to real interest in a new master's of science and data science degree that we're launching relatively soon. And they want our team from CRDDS to be around the table for that because it's an interdisciplinary data science degree. They really wanna have tracks eventually in areas of social sciences and humanities as well as in computer science and applied math who were kind of the core group who came together looking to build the degree. But then we've also got interest from our school of business because they already had a data analytics master's and they're interested in how that could be retooled as a possible track within the larger data science framework. So if you look at this, it's really about the teaching activity in addition to the research support that's driven a lot of our context. And if you look at a lot of the partners we have like the laboratory for statistical analysis, that's another group that works with people on statistics packages and our trainings and tropins have been real helpful to them for driving business for their support model. We've recently inaugurated a faculty fellowship with the Center for Humanities in the Arts. I think that will further drive those involved in the Digital Humanities Certificate and possibly a certificate that I know they're thinking about from the social sciences and ANS. But you see the various groups that we've been working with over a long period of time, that's just driven a lot of the context of what we've been doing. But at the heart of it all, really is the work around research data and open accessibility for that data as well as working with the various faculty groups that are key to this. Next up, I do have the obligatory picture of infrastructure, but I think what's key there and as you tease that out from looking at it is our big petal library storage system which really comes into play around the data sets that we've been collecting, especially for groups like some of our institutes like the Institute for Cognitive Science. But then as you'll see there, we've been working with hybrid cloud options as well as with a pretty large summit supercomputer that is available to everybody through the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium which ties us to places like the University of Utah, University of Wyoming, and so there as well as Colorado State University and there's been a lot of collaboration around that piece for both data consults on providing data management plans as well as on actual grants that we just received a pretty large one along with the College of Engineering here called NeuroNEX. And the whole point there was to use CRDDS as a research data management resource for helping consult on how they're going to collect their data, how they're gonna store their data and how they're going to make the public parts accessible for their data. So that will be yet another growth opportunity for how we're doing our center within the context of our campus. And I think my advice on this for anyone that's looking to develop the talent is that it exists in so many different ways like when we first started the center it was just a few of the librarians working on it in the kind of work streams of the center but we've since tried to expand that out to many of our subject librarians who are working in digital humanities areas who both wanna help support some of the teaching and outreach in that but also are doing things with their own faculty to support them with other types of data sets. And I think that's one of the areas we've really enjoyed seeing all the interest in. We've started working with the ARL digital scholarship initiative and pulled more librarians in on that so that we could share the workload on supporting some of the areas of teaching that we're gonna go along with that. And that got paused this year but we're looking into some other options for next year for possibly some online versions of that or other things is still kind of in the planning process but that was really exciting as well as being working so closely with the group starting the data science degree. Our first version of that will be completely online through Coursera and then we're also developing our own in-house online version as well as an in-person version. And I think by tying that into the center and some of the TA ships and fellowships we have available for faculty that's going to drive more in the way of spotting talent. The other area that I've been focused on there is when I came into the picture I saw that most of the librarians working in our research center were tenure track and that was great but what I did see was a need for some more instructor type faculty, those are the class of librarians that are non-tenure track that we have and they have a different workload, percentage workload schedule and we've been successful in hiring a few more librarians to help with some of the workload in that area that are non-tenure track. And I think some of those folks are coming from areas like clear fellows programs as well as looking at other talent that we've seen from the research computing side of things as well as from some of the multidisciplinary efforts we've seen from other colleges and schools. We also think our faculty fellowship and our provost fellowship program for grad students will continue to bring in new talent that we would like to see look for careers in this type of research support center because I think the model strong and what we're seeing from the actual research grants that we're starting to get from having this cognate together for a while is really impressive and I think it can help fund more of these over time and really drive this, it's still gonna be a part of the library it's still going to be part of what we do overall but from an angle of the services they run for us that's a great thing that they're still able to do that and use some of the infrastructure that we have on our campus to help us with that especially for say publishing data sets as well as the other publishing work that we do that's related to the center whether it's journals whether it's institutional repository type publishing but it's all key to what we've built but that was really based first on the mapped out context of our campus and then it's been expanded and I think enhanced by following that map a little bit further as we've built the collaboration and have been able to work together over longer periods of time and for sustained periods of time so that was what I had to bring today and with that I think I'm going to now turn it over to Zoe for her part of the presentation Thank you so much Robert we do have some time for questions before we turn to Zoe if you're ready Robert That sounds great I would urge our participants to type their questions in the chat I'll start out with one I'm curious about whether you generally have formal MOUs or other types of agreements with your partners and if you have concerns say if they're for a year or two that with the pandemic and all of the funds tightening up on many campuses that those partnerships could be in jeopardy in terms of joint funding That's a great question and the context here is that usually groups that are doing this kind of work together for long periods of time have MOUs because there's a long history here of having those types of agreements with some of the federal entities in town that some of the institutes work with and for us that's what we've been doing with OIT now our research center itself is under a five year charter with the Vice Chancellor for Research's office and that's renewable every five years that's how all of our research centers work so that piece and the piece from IT are all pretty secure from that angle some of the other things like they just ask about the fellows piece and the continuity and the funding all of those are under three to five year type agreements and that's pretty secure right now I would worry about that if I were starting one of these up just to do something for a year or two it really needs to be three to five if you're gonna get the real benefits out of it for each partner so the one we just signed with our Center for Humanities and Arts it's a three year one and I think their idea is to make it and renew it after three years now they'll be one of the groups that may have a few more hits on it from COVID depending on what happens but that's one of those things where sometimes you pick up a little more of the tab when times are hard for some of your partners and sometimes they help you out in other ways but I do think the MOUs are the safe way to go especially for a longer term kinds of initiatives like this one in particular and I know some places have used their College of Arts and Sciences and their libraries and some possibly IT or research as some of the backbones for setting up this kind of an operation but all of them really would benefit even if it's just a very simple MOU laying out the amount of funding you're putting into it for the sustained period of time. Thank you and I think you saw the question in the chat about maintaining the continuity and answered it more in the financial side I think there can also be a question of losing skills or losing someone who is steeped in a particular project or projects and then having them leave and this happens with lots of staff not just fellows but how do you create some stability or continuity among all of the staff? Well, around the current staff there's probably about 10 to 12 people involved depending on how you slice it between research computing and libraries that are the main kind of full-time staff around it and I think the big piece there is when we were working with a fellow it's usually project-based so there's a beginning, middle end and so when that's over with we're hopeful that they'll have plenty to take with them to continue developing in their own research but it's usually not something that's set up as a service for everybody unless it can be like the diagram I showed where we're starting to use some of our hybrid cloud structure with Jupyter notebooks that started out with a particular faculty in history who was doing some work on that and then we tried it as a demonstration project for teaching and learning where you could get those the Jupyter Hub stuff set up for teaching a class so like one of our Geoscience librarians has done it for that kind of work and then there's plenty of other examples of that in A&S and a few other places where they're using this but the service we set up is run through the group that runs the rest of research computing so it really is a service much like any other research computing service it's not five nines but it does go down occasionally for maintenance but at the same time it's a real IT service and not something that's just been set up and then someone leaves and you can't maintain it. Thank you, another question I realize this may be complicated but what were the main reasons for working on the library reorganization plan? Well, the big piece there was around the values-based strategic plan that we developed over the course of, you know, it would have kicked off a summer ago when we started working on that and what I heard from the many, many town halls because we did it in a way where many people could show up for many different types of input sessions over the course of three, four months. What I was hearing was a lot of the older structures weren't working so well, our former structure while it's similar to one where you would have a dean and the deputy librarian and associate dean and, you know, at least one other associate dean but it had been mirrored on our College of Arts and Sciences in a way that was pretty artificial and there were a lot of parts that in those town halls people told me were not working well and since our College of Arts and Sciences is embarking on a reorg, I was like, well, then why are we mirroring arts and sciences when they're about to change completely? So we took a hard look at that and looked at what the input told us and decided it would be a good time to reorg to work on this strategic plan so we could execute on that and so that's what we've been doing. Now COVID, you know, happened right in the middle of it and, you know, I've got a lot of folks who are still asking, well, why do we move ahead with it? Well, because ANS is moving ahead with their reorg and if we're not moving ahead in a way that's agile and can face what's coming to us right now, we're not gonna be ready for anything. Now it's tough, has plenty of stuff paused, has deadlines been missed and we've given people plenty of time to hit those with their new teams, yes, and they will continue to do so, I imagine, for the next six months but at the same time we'll be in a much better position and we already are. We've had to pivot our operations five or six times since we developed our restart plan over the course of the spring and the summer and we're able to do that in about a day and a half now depending on which area it's affecting. We did a model of completely closed stacks so that we could continue to have emergency access to the Hottie Trust as well as having contactless pickup for all of our faculty, staff and students and then we've been operating public services out of branch libraries kind of like they did when Apollo 13 had its problems, right? And then we've been doing some classroom support so we've divided our main library which you see behind me into the stacks part and the classroom support part and been keeping those completely isolated. So all of that was done in a pretty short timeframe and we're continuing to work in agile fashion and I see that these, by basically creating this structure that's based on that section area with the smallest grouping there of six, it's really enabled us to move a lot quicker in a lot different ways and I think it'll continue that. Thank you. Ask one final question before we get to Zoe and actually, Robert, maybe you'll stop your screen, Sharon will give- Yeah, go ahead and do that. To put her slides up. My question is that you mentioned in one of your slides how subject librarians and others are getting involved in digital scholarship activities or eScience or data science activities. Do you envision at some point in the near future by that, I mean, let's say in the next three years that the majority of librarians or professional staff in your organization will be involved in some way? Do you see the balance shifting in how that works? I think so, because we're starting to see the balance shifting in how all of our departments are thinking about it more and I do think the teaching piece around the certificates and the new data science program are going to drive that. We're still setting up the advisory committee for that data science set of programs and I'm pretty certain we'll have one of our people around the table and if that is the case, then I'm gonna go out there and say that we're gonna have a lot more interest in creating different tracks and data science and that's gonna drive the use of the data and the use of the computation, especially as our head of research computing, Thomas Hauser, he's really thinking ahead to that hybrid model where you still need a supercomputer for some things because it's just not feasible in the cloud yet, although Google's getting close with their New York operations piece with the latency and at some point you're going to pivot to that and that's gonna be more widely available for everybody and then they're gonna have the data needs that you see more in some of the science areas now and engineering areas, but we already see a lot of data management plans coming through for all the different agencies that aren't in the sciences because they know it makes it more competitive for their grant area and if they can take advantage of what we have available in our petal library infrastructure, it's definitely cheaper than they're probably gonna get it anywhere else with good support and maintenance for it. Well, Robert, this has really been fascinating and I have a feeling some people are listening and watching and thinking maybe this is the future of my own institution, but I don't think too many are as kind of advanced in this process as you are. It's been really fascinating to hear what you're doing at University of Colorado Boulder. Thank you so much. Over to you, Zoe. Thanks, Joan. Thanks, Joan and many thanks for inviting me to speak with you today about digital scholarship planning in this 2020 webinar series. Can everyone see my slides, I hope? Yes, thumbs up, great. So the title of the talk is building partnerships towards digital scholarship in the library and Joan asked me to talk about how UCLA library has developed a stronger interaction among various sectors of the library with digital scholarship initiatives. So as she describes the challenge that many of us face, there are often informal barriers between digital scholarship staff and other library units. She hoped I could provide some examples of how those interactions and partnerships developed and how I started them. So as I prepared for the talk, I found of course an article that nicely sums up much of what I had planned to say today. The article is called Inclusive Infrastructure. It appeared very recently in June 7th in Purdue's EPUB series. It's a study of 15 digital scholarship centers located in libraries. So I'll share a brief summary of that article and using the UCLA library as an example, I will highlight some examples of how I have worked to solve what I'll call the partnership paradox. So the authors of the Purdue study on Inclusive Infrastructure are Matthew Hanna, Erla Haynes, I think they're both from Purdue, Rick Mulligan from Carnegie Mellon. They surveyed 15 academic libraries with digital scholarship centers. They formulate the paradox in the abstract. While imagine, this is quote, while imagines as collaborative library spaces, such centers often remain siloed from the subject specialists who work with departments to build collections, assess critical needs, and collaborate with faculty and students. So in this article, the authors argue that quote, such a silo effect contributes to a sense of separation, skepticism, and even resentment towards digital scholarship initiative, and fails to utilize the full expertise of the academic research library, end quote. So of the contributing factors that they found in these interviews of 15 library directors, and this speaks to Jones' observation of the informal barriers, was that only four of the 15 libraries had an organizational structure where the digital humanities or digital scholarship programs reported to the same associate dean as the liaisons. The authors make a series of recommendation for ways to solve this paragraph, negotiating these silos, and gaining expert knowledge about digital humanities research. And while I heartily agree with their recommendation, I will be honest in saying that for UCLA library, this is an ongoing challenge. I do not pretend to have the best answers or ideas. I hope our discussion today can be a step in generating some new ideas and building on work that the inclusive infrastructures team has done. I'll use UCLA's digital scholarship initiatives to illustrate several findings that resonated with me. Then I'll expand on a thread that runs through the article. I'll try to use that thread to kind of shift the focus of their recommendation in hopes that by reframing them, we can expand on them. At UCLA, the org chart of the UCLA library, this shows, this is from 2016 and it's changed a bit. It shows how digital expertise was and is divided into distinct reporting structures. So my position, the librarian for digital research and scholarship was conceived as a hybrid role. I'm both a liaison with subject responsibilities to anthropology and archeology and UCLA's digital humanities program. My direct colleagues are subject specialists, history, English, geography, economics, political science, et cetera. We report to a separate AUL in charge of public services now called user engagement. So that's separate from my colleagues on the digital library team. And the cataloging and metadata team reports up to the AUL for collections. So to answer Joan's question, how did you develop partnerships and interactions between these units? I'm going to have to take you back in time a bit to 2015 when a program I developed began and I'll use this kind of ecosystem metaphor to show how this program evolved in the UCLA library. We named the program Dress Up, Digital Research Startup Partnerships. We wanted to address those informal barriers that separated those of us working on digital scholarship projects in the library. So similar to inclusive infrastructure, our vision was also three pronged. We envisioned Dress Up mostly as demonstrating how we can demonstrate that full expertise of the academic research library. So I reached out to my colleagues, UCLA's director of metadata services and our academic programmer who was situated in a digital library program. The three of us had previously worked on digital scholarship projects. We had presented at NEH sponsored summer institutes on network analysis and spatial mapping. We had built over the years solid bonds of trust and some really great projects. What I did not realize at the time is that this type of grassroots effort is rare in the UCLA library. Assignments, especially ones that involve more than one unit typically come from the top down. The three of us simply wrote a proposal for Dress Up. We were used to writing grant proposals. We ran it past our supervisors and AULs and got permission from the university librarian to run a five week summer program focused on UCLA's graduate student projects. Now the article inclusive infrastructures calls this type of activity building a community of practice in the library. They provide three examples, in-house year-long projects, integrated instruction, pairing a subject liaison and functional experts and integrated practice, subject liaisons participating in open project consultations. For Dress Up, we put out a call for projects and we found six eager and slightly skeptical grad students. We and they had a blast. We knew the graduate students outside of the digital humanities program lacked support to do digital scholarship. And we saw that as an opportunity for the library to partner with them. We had limited resources, but our university librarian provided $4,000 to hire a grad student assistant. She had a background in design and technical skills. She was key to helping us prepare workshops, work with the students. What evolved was sort of a framework based on their proposed projects. We held an all day kickoff session and would devise together a series of workshops that followed the research lifecycle. The first week we focused on collecting the second week, refining the third week, analyzing the fourth week, publishing and visualizing. The last two weeks had more of a project focused work where we could pull in some outside experts, troubleshoot, et cetera. So the goal was not a final project, but to realize the full impact of the academic research library from the inception throughout the research lifecycle. Dress Up as community building worked really well for us and the grad students. Students were amazed at the breadth and depth of knowledge and expertise. Librarians learned from each other and the students, how to engage deeply with their projects while sneaking in some best practices like data management, file naming, et cetera. We took up residence in the library's scholarly innovation lab and having that physical space was key to success. Outside of workshop hours, students had a dedicated space to work on their projects together. We put project plans on the wall and staff would drop by and leave little post-it notes, giving them hints and tips. Virtual spaces really worked well too. Notes were shared over Slack and Google Docs. Dress Up emphasized process over product or tools. We encouraged the participants to focus on generating prototypes using data sets curated to their research question. In this way, we are teaching research as a process, a framework that can be generated and adapted to other research areas including grant writing, non-digital research methods and professional activities. So picture here is an example of the brainstorming process that we use at the beginning of Dress Up. We invite librarians and library staff to attend these kickoff presentations. And then at the end of the seminar, we have a final showcase, kind of a low-key event where the grad students present their work informally. The showcases were really well attended, very popular among librarians, grad students and the DH community. Having demonstrated our vision, we began in 2016 developing training programs for other librarians and library staff. We applied for a small UC-wide librarian grant to extend the program to include both librarians with their own projects and librarians who wish to develop their own skills. We offered weekly workshops during the spring work to identify opportunities for those who had participated in the training for the summer. One participant with a wealth of expertise in pedagogy, for example, she worked with UCLA city lab program for undergrads and she reworked our workshop materials for the undergraduates in that program. So this phase of the train-to-trainer program corresponds to both recommendations, one in inclusive infrastructure that is developing and maintaining literacy and part two, a tiered competency framework for assessment and professional development planning. To be frank, the weight of running both was emerging and while trying to protect the time that librarians from other units were contributing my tasks, even with these small grants, exceeded my own capacity. Reducing my workload within my home department was perceived as a conflict of priorities. I didn't fully realize how important the notion of dividing up reference depth shifts, everyone doing their fair share was among subject librarians. So while colleagues in metadata and digital library teams have these more project-based workflows, subject librarians divide up their work almost on a daily basis, adjusting shifts to cover on the spot demands. Well, to me, the rewards of this utilizing the full expertise of the academic research library was really compelling. It did not in the evaluation of my immediate colleagues outweigh the importance of supporting the division of labor, responding to requests with everyone taking an equal fair share in my home department. As a response to this feedback, which was more implied than avert, we attempted to expand our offerings to one-shot workshops during the academic year, kind of a low-touch compliment to the high-touch summer. In 2017, the library underwent a reorganization, bringing all liaison librarians under one AUL. Our initiative, now called Research Partnerships, was institutionalized as a functional team along with several other functional teams. So I think we had five teams in all. Research Partnerships was the one functional team within this matrix that included members outside of user engagement, that one reporting line, including our colleagues, even outside the library, Idri, the Center for Digital Humanities and other campus entities like the Coxson Institute for Archaeology. For us, this was really designed to expand and extend our community of practice across campus. Dress up grad students, return to teach some of those academic workshops alongside librarians, and we saw this third phase as a completion of our ecosystem, designed to show how to scale our high-touch efforts to a broader community. Our partners outside the library, UCLA's Central IT Research Support, launched a website that helped us aggregate all research workshops across UCLA. We designed our offerings, promoted and taught our workshops together, generating quarterly flyers that would blast by email across campus. In retrospect, I think that matrix structure adopted just by one AUL for user engagement drove the divide between the library's reporting lines even deeper. The Data Science Center emerged in the library, but under the lead of the AUL for IT services in the same reporting structure as the Digital Library. What was not openly discussed was how data science relates to digital humanities and digital scholarship. And so while the Digital Humanities program, the main users of the library's digital humanities and digital scholarship services, they embraced the dress-up incubator, our high-touch, low-enrollment approach, the Data Science Center embraced software carpentries workshops as their model. The carpentries have a much more scalable model, and while we have used and benefited from their tutorials, we found that our grad students drawn from social sciences and humanities much more engaged with materials from programming, historian, and that often includes tools in the context of their discipline. So dress-up proceeds from the students' projects. The difference with other DH centers is that we don't do the projects for the students, we just expand their skillset, empowering them to continue their work. For example, we don't teach command-line tools to a grad student like Nina here who was finishing up her dissertation and already working in Atlas TI. We taught her how to export her data, and then she spent her time working on visualizations of timelines that gave her a broader overview and the ability to zoom in on the details in Tableau. So we really make an effort to meet students where they are and focus on their data set and their process. However, with a short run of just two years, the research partnerships functional team was merged, except for dress-up, into the matrix and succeeded in establishing this community of practice. Students and faculty rely upon the library to offer more than just EndNote and Zotero now, and librarians in user engagement are inventing their own series, refining and systematizing the workflow of the email blasts and flyers that our little team established. In addition, with the DH faculty and Idri support of dress-up, we've launched UCLA's Digital Research Consortium, and so this is a campus-wide initiative with the library as one of the main players alongside Idri. So within the library, we're still struggling across reporting lines, debating how to measure impact and whose approach is appropriate in which circumstance. But rather than force a solution with the support of the DH program, we have moved the incubator, dress-up, the high-touch approach to the Digital Research Consortium. So with the addition of DH programming staff, Idri and the DRC, I believe we can reconstitute some of these activities that inclusive infrastructures mentioned without overtaxing the staff who are already supporting students and faculty project. It's definitely a balancing act, demonstrating impact versus building capacity, that internal training to meet demand. The main challenge in our public services unit is justifying training time for librarians. There's pressure to keep the reference desk transactions high, and that leads to a focus on undergrads whose needs can be met without a lot of deep disciplinary expertise. So as inclusive infrastructure others point out, developing digital scholarship expertise is like learning a language. It's not something one can learn in a week-long intensive workshop and immediately start teaching. I do believe that when I was hired, my librarian colleagues thought it would be like hiring a Western European, Slavic, or Middle Eastern librarian, one person who learned that language expertise somewhere else and who could be the sole expert. And that would be sufficient for our library. Devising a training program where all librarians can become somewhat proficient in a foreign language and cultural heritage is much more complex, especially when they bulk at the notion of skilling up and even the words data and text mining are problematic. So while I hardly agree with the need for inclusive infrastructure, I want to underscore their findings to help others avoid this tendency I have had to curb. And that's framing the initiative as fixing the subject librarians when really what we have to do is an invent an inclusive infrastructure that enhances that expertise, that starts with their role as liaisons, as embedded in their disciplines and expands that to include working with digital content and methods that are appropriate in their work. So while discussing this balancing act, the article makes a really strong statement. However, and this is their quote, such an initiative would require, would also require extensive and sustained negotiation between digital scholarship units and liaison units regarding workload and assessment for liaison duties. The authors believe that isolating liaisons from digital scholarship constitutes a failure on the part of high level leadership, not liaisons or center directors, end quote. And as my colleagues have bluntly asked, why would we skill up if no one lets us do anything anyway? So I think dress up and research partnerships was most effective when it ignited that desire in the area of studies and subject librarians in my home department. When the director of metadata showed them a project that she worked on using metadata from the library and open refine. It was sort of the precursor to collections as data. The grad students in the program helped her create this interactive visualization and she learned along with them. So the inclusive infrastructure article provides us with so much good, but the recommendations need to be flipped. Liaisons don't need fixing as much as the environment does. I think focusing on the community of practice within and outside the library so liaisons can do this work alongside the functional specialist, whether they are inside or outside that library has promise. So from this perspective, perhaps we should shift attention to how library leaders are trained, where they focus, how might we organize work in ways other than dividing up tasks between front end and back end? How can we leverage our partnerships outside the library, referring our users to appropriate expertise but keeping the libraries in the loop? How should we measure and reward success? We need more attention to right scaling and a more flexible approach to reporting lines, peer review and retention. I'll add just a few more examples to illustrate about just building cross training into grant proposals and conference participation. When working on a grant proposal, it's tempting for the sake of expediency and efficiency to work in just one reporting line. Identify a subject librarian whose time could be bought out and whose professional development could be enhanced and disciplinary relationships could be strengthened. How about travel and conference attendance? We know that travel funds are now restricted but consider the payoff and communication between units by pairing subject expertise with IT units, giving them some time to work on a presentation or proposal. And I would think hosting summer institutes and in-reach training opportunities are another great example. Find ways to buy out the time of people so that they can attend the whole workshop. Hattie Trust, for example, came for a two-day workshop. Four of us attended, we formed a work group and then followed up with a shorter program for our colleagues. And that's the conclusion of my presentation. Thank you, Zoe. You've given us so much food for thought. I could ask myself, I could ask you so many questions but we have a few in the chat. We'll start with one very straightforward one asking you to share the URL of the workshops at UCLA website. If you aren't able to do that right away, maybe as we wind down, you can do that. Sure. And I'll tell you the next question if you can listen along while you're searching for the URL. Don't the subject librarians need or want to gain these skills because their departmental constituents are evolving into these areas as well. Yes, I think that's true. But I believe that, you know, this divide between the front end and back end means that they would rather refer them to someone else if that other person is not as busy as they are. So they're oftentimes working with really limited IT resources and their tendency is because they're novices, they would rather refer them to someone who has expertise. So I think, you know, approaching that through the discipline and that was one of the benefits of Dress Up was that they actually had those people working in the library, they really saw what they were doing as opposed to previously they would sort of, okay, find them a dataset, the student would disappear and maybe you'd hear back from them, you know, but you wouldn't see them working and using the tools. It was just, you know, get them the content and that was the end of it. Another participant also agreed with that question and noted that he's not sure all folks want to expand in anything digital, especially in humanities and he loves the learning language metaphor for digital skills learning. And another comment, love your exhortation to flip the narrative from fixing the liaisons to fixing the environment. And I would say also your exhortation to upper level administration to kind of set the priorities and the vision and make that part of the environment more hospitable for these kinds of digital initiatives. Yeah, I think it really does take a village and liaisons are used to dividing things up and so if they can't fulfill the entire, if they can't sort of visualize themselves with the skills to do the entire operation or support, I think they're very hesitant and they pull back. And what I love about Dress Up and these workshops sort of code teaching is that they get the sense that there's another approach, right? That this kind of team-based approach where they can see within the life cycle that they might have skills for one aspect but then someone else can fill in the other is really great so that we can provide some of the content and some of the contextual expertise have a conversation with the GIS functional specialist and it enhances both of our work. And I really think that sort of taking more of that life cycle support, setting the stage has this effect on making subject librarians feel much more connected to the other specialists in the library. It's really a great way of demonstrating and sort of enacting in a little microcosm the expertise that's available, the breadth of expertise that's available. Another comment, another participant noted that she appreciated your comments about thinking about the performance aspects in terms of supervisors' perceptions of the different components of a liaison librarian's work. I think so much of my lessons learned have to do with communication and especially communicating up and communicating out. And I think that was the hardest part when I became so busy was trying to sort of communicate what we were doing to so many different parties and making sure that supervisors who were contributing their people to the project knew what the contribution of their colleagues were. And I think that's the other thing that we noticed is that the library development and everything is kind of views things through this tunnel effort that if it's not all my unit producing it I can't take credit for it. How do you take credit for something that's a team-based initiative that draws on all these different people? And I think supervisors are hesitant to reward or even evaluate the contributions of something that's so intertwined and almost holistic. And I think that that's an important thing for supervisors to really consider is that the team needs feedback, not the individual and getting them to contribute feedback to us about what their expectations are and debriefing with us about what can we learn from this? It's really like a deep dive kind of focus group and can't be measured in the same way that sort of the workshops during the academic year can be measured. Thank you, Zoe. Thank you to both of our wonderful speakers today and thank you to our participants for their questions and comments. Our next webinar is on this Thursday, September 24th and our speakers will discuss supporting research. We heard a lot about that today as well. We will now end the recording.