 So, our first speaker is Professor Martin Eve who's going to describe to us a new funding model for Open Access Monographs. Martin is very familiar to many of us in the library community and the open access world. He's a professor of literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, the University of London, and he's the co-founder of the Open Library of the Humanities. He's deeply interested in open access and has spoken and written very widely on those issues with particular focus on the impact on the humanities. So, Martin, I will hand over to you. Thank you very much for attending today and for this opportunity to speak to you. I'm going to talk today about open access books and collective funding models to enable them. But I wanted first to back up a little bit and think a little bit about what the last year has shown us in terms of access to scholarship and research. And it strikes me that the pandemic, certainly from where I'm sitting in the same place I've sat for the last year, not inside a library. The pandemic has really exposed the fact that our access to scholarship being dependent upon subscription or print purchases in libraries is simply not doing justice to the world in which we live. There's a place for those collections and print certainly has a continued role in the world. But the fact was that the second the pandemic hit many publishers instantly lowered their paywalls, acknowledging that the current system was simply not serving their researcher demographics. At the same time, then as highlighting the perhaps need for open access to scholarship, the pandemic has, I understand, done terrible damage to library budgetary prospects. And I think we're in a particularly fragile point at the moment where we potentially have a clear sight of a goal of open access, even while the budgets that could help us to achieve this are being ripped out. I also note though that much progress is being made in the scientific disciplines toward access to say natural scientific research medical research and so on and obviously that is commendable. But it feels to me as they were moving slightly towards a world in which the natural sciences have all of their work available openly to read while the humanities and particularly long form outputs fall behind. And a long standing sort of mine has been that that would be a great shame for subjects that claim to specialize in the subjects of humanity that humanity is not able to access their work as easily as they can for the natural sciences. So as part of the coping project of which I'm a co lead, I've been working over the past year and a half so far to try to come up with models that would enable existing university presses to transition to open access models in ways that are affordable for libraries that distribute costs fairly the pose relatively low risk to the presses which are often not hugely profitable at that tier and that could get us closer to a goal of open access monographs being the norm. And this has emerged really alongside two other types of model giving us a total of three strands of what looks like the emerging landscape for how we fund open access monographs. We've had just in the past fortnight the announcement from the MIT press of their very exciting direct to open initiative, which is a subscription type model with access to their backlist that when they hit a certain threshold, if they hit a certain threshold. They will make their front list for that year open access as well. And that proves a great initiative for presses at that scale, those very big very prestigious well known academic presses that are in the slim minority of academic presses who really do bring in money for their host institutions, and can therefore be more adventurous and bold perhaps in what they tried to do for their transformations. They have some degree of financial autonomy. There's been a whole raft of small to medium sized academic presses. University presses usually that really do not have huge resources at their disposal, often do not have expertise in open digital publishing and are coming from a very traditional print background. We did a new low risk model that would now enable them gradually to transition to open access as budgetary spending move from monograph purchasing to open access funding. And the model I'm going to talk about in more detail today opening the future is aimed at this huge distributed group of small to medium sized academic presses who are not in the mega category. And finally, I just want to say that there have already been pioneering efforts at these types of membership models for access book publishing among the skull led born open access presses. Open book publishers punctum books and others open humanities press have membership schemes to which libraries can already subscribe to sustain those publishers. And so really I think that the landscape at the moment is evolving into these three strata that all need supporting in parallel if we'd see a systemic transformation to long form open access scholarship. So what are we trying to do. There's a huge problem with book processing charges again something I've described in detail quite a few times before, but it's essentially this. When you have several hundred people buying a book, each of them needs to pay less than the total cost in order to gain the book because as a whole, the money when pulled centrally will cover the presses costs in publishing it. When we come up with a book processing charge model, we put that cost at one particular point in the system, and it is concentrated. The single point of payment when you're taking a book processing charge must cover the entire cost of the book, any surplus and so on. So we go from purchasing prices of books moving from 60 pounds up to 6000 to 11,000 pounds or so. You can see the affordability challenge there. Certainly in our departmental budget in the English department where I work our book purchasing budget would not cover a single book processing charge at the highest end that spectrum. What we need are ways of distributing funding between many libraries at an affordable rate membership models for open access like LH like archive, a little bit like knowledge unlatched have shown that there is some appetite for that. But we've still found that we're only reaching about 250 to 300 libraries worldwide and huge thanks to those 300 libraries in Italy. What's clear is that we haven't shifted from a purchasing economy into an OA funding economy. And there are swathes of libraries out there who do not have scholarly communications librarians who do not have open access specialists who are still used particularly in the US only to purchasing books on demand of their faculty. And the idea of proactively supporting an open access initiative has not crossed their threshold before. So we wanted a model that could actually appeal to both of these camps we wanted to build something that would be accessible to those who have supported open access initiatives before and who want to see a transition in their spending that move from collecting to connecting that's been been put out before. We also wanted a model that could bring in librarians who are still thinking about building their own collection and used to purchasing to get them in under the premise of a subscription that is rivalrous to their institution and unique to them. But once they're in showing them the benefit of the books being open access and what that achieves for their constituents as well as the broader community of readers. And so the model we came up with is called opening the future. And it works a little bit like this. So libraries subscribe to a package of non open access books offered by the publisher. So in the pilot case study we're running at the moment there are three different packages each containing 50 books. And a library that subscribes to those gets exclusive access to those through project news those are not open access books so when you participate in this scheme. You get a package of 50 books you're subscribing to the clever part is that we use the revenue that comes in on that subscription to fund the front list at the press every year to be open access to produce books that are open to everyone. And this means that we have an ongoing revenue stream to support on a subscription basis the front list every year becoming openly accessible. So project news at delivering the titles in both cases in the pilot that we're running solid metadata provision from them with mark and k bar records counter compliant stats and so on. But we've come up with a pricing tier for this for a subscription for 50 books that essentially is half the price of a single article processing charge at the major publishers. So using banding some lyricists and just the smallest libraries are paying just 350 euros while the largest just 1200. And if we can get to the library threshold we need to be publishing 250 a titles per year that works out at 11 euros per book per institution, which turns out to be a pretty good rate in my books. This model works in the same way as other collective models in that if you can get past your threshold for participation, the costs for libraries actually come down per title. So the more libraries that participate the more fun do you have pulled centrally and therefore because the costs are transparently disclosed in advance. Should we hit 250 libraries participating in this subsequent subscriptions each year will be cheaper than the subscriptions a year before. Or there will be more books but essentially there's transparency in the model with the idea that we can keep these costs under control and not let them spiral. And the first of two pilots that we're running this with is a central European University Press. We have a second UK University Press hopefully coming on board next week. We've got provisional yes on that. But essentially there will be two presses that we're running as a pilot for this model with the idea being to publish everything we do as a blueprint plan for what university presses can do to transition to open access membership models. So this is a press that's 30 years old with 450 backlist titles. So one of the most common objections is that, well, what happens when you run out of backlist titles. Well, we've got actually enough backlist titles that we could run this for a decade, funding open access books and not have run out of those titles. We're running libraries by the way, perpetual access after three years DRM free access the whole time so really this becomes a model where the titles are owned eventually by the press by the libraries. But really what prompted this press to come in was that during the pandemic they made 279 titles open access, and they saw their figures for readership go through the roof. They went from very conventional humanities usage figures up to 350,000 downloads from 129 countries in just a couple of months. Interestingly, the backlist was among the most used of the titles there seven of the top 10 downloads were over 10 years old. And this backlist really specialised in post Soviet reconstruction of Eastern Europe's there's a subject specialism focus here that actually is quite helpful when libraries think about their investment in different areas. So we're aiming with this scheme to be able to publish 25 new monographs per year which is the output of the Central European University Press in an open access format under open licenses. Those will be available via news and open. But we can only do that if we get the library members to come on board for this scheme. So as with most consortium members there are thresholds to where we hit certain possibilities. So we've already got to the threshold of being able to publish our first book openly. We've got enough members to do that. But essentially, when we get to 20 members, we have enough for a second open access book, and so on until we get to the point where the presses entire outputs can be made open access. This actually gives us a graduated transition towards 100%. I do not think it's realistic to say that by tomorrow we have to have due to policy constraints 100% open access. We all know we're not going to get there. So actually what we need and what we've tried to develop here is a model for university presses that lets them incrementally move towards more and more of their titles being open access. And if we don't hit the threshold title simply go into the traditional sales channel. I should say also that we're selecting the titles to be open access well in advance so they're not being put out for sale and then change suddenly to open access so there's no risk of libraries buying a book that they thought they were going to have to purchase then being made open access. There's no risk of that double dipping in there. There are several usual objections we get to this type of model that I'd just like to briefly cover to preempt those questions. One of those is isn't this just a blank check for the press. To some extent this is a difference between journal purchasing and book purchasing models. It's quite interesting to me when people say this about book publishing because in the journal world, people are quite happy to give a blank check to a journal and not knowing what they're going to publish article wise in the next year. Subscribe on the basis of their proven past success. And I think that's what we need to think about with university presses is how they could be thought more of as infrastructure as part of the humanities publishing and research ecology that needs supporting once a press has proven itself, giving them sustainability and and the route to open access. What about the cases where the libraries already have all the books. Well, that's fantastic. But to my mind that only gives a stronger rationale for why a subscription model would be even better. If you're buying all the books every year, then essentially you're already giving that funding to the press and those books will come out more expensive buying them all individually, then it would be support through this membership model that will lead to open access. So that strikes me as an important rationale. Why this press our first case study. One of the reasons is that they were willing to experiment and to try it. Many university presses have proved strangely intractable to the idea of experimentation. And I hope that we'll be able to reward this press for attempting to change their ways and to find routes that are affordable to open access. And lastly, is this model too expensive. This will obviously vary from university to university and it's hardly the best time to making appeals to university library budgets at 11 euros per book though I think the value is pretty good. That doesn't mean in absolute terms it might not be affordable for everyone. But if we don't try to get this down to an affordable level and try to offer routes forward then I don't think we're we're ever going to get that. I should also say this is my I think penultimate slide before I wrap up and we turn over to questions that the goal of what we're doing here is to provide something that can be reused by other publishers. It's all very well if our two pilots work, but if it goes no further than that, then we're still in the same position we've been for the last two decades of wanting open access but not moving towards it. So this model is relatively low risk for a press they don't put things into an open access ecology until the money has been contributed which is helpful for those who don't have that financial leeway of the big presses. We're publishing everything we do we've already released the software sign up system so that presses can take it and build their own membership models. We're also writing a toolkit of what we did step by step. You might not believe or maybe some of you would believe the amount of work that goes in behind the scenes, ensuring access control mechanisms for the backlist the metadata provision subscription management and so it's a huge amount of work, even marketing and outreach. So really we're trying to provide a blueprint other presses can use to gauge how much work would be involved, how they could do it what resources they'll have to allocate and what they can expect that to look like on a day by day basis. And so that's where I'm going to close up our conversation with jisk is almost at the final stage now so that this will be opened UK libraries with a national level agreement, although we're quite happy to work individually with libraries until that's in place. We all know how busy just go but we hope that will be ready soon. Our website for this is opening the future.net where you can find out more about the model. And obviously, you can email me at any point if you'd like to know more about it. That's what I've been doing for my pandemic period so far trying to find ways to get more open access monographs out there, working for all of us. And thank you and I welcome any questions. Thank you very much, Martin. I think that's a very worthwhile activity to be undertaking during during a pandemic. A question of a category question, first of all, is one about I mean you've been talking a lot about humanities publishing. The question was whether that also extends out through to the social sciences. If you think the same model would be applicable there. Absolutely sorry, I mean, at some end of the social sciences there is more project specific funding available. And book processing charges can work where you have a big fund like welcome, say, working on sociology of medicine or history of medicine and there are monographic outputs there. Of course, if they're willing to pay a book processing charge that's incredibly helpful. And I should say in this model we've proposed any book that's funded by a book processing charge will not be getting funding from the membership program so that we're separating out those streams. The challenge is that so much research in the humanities is not funded by those project routes, it's just funded by ongoing time contributions. I know that I actually co-authored an article with David a few years ago, mapping out the costs that it would take for research England if they wanted all ref monographs to be away on a book processing charge model. And we just concluded that the affordability crisis lies in the concentration and the fact that this humanities research doesn't come with the project specific funding and social science research as well. It expands those disciplines and it's because their funding conditions are so different to the natural sciences, and their output types are so much more expensive that we've got this this real crisis of transition that we haven't yet pushed through. Yeah, you mentioned that it seems surprisingly difficult to get engagement with some of the university presses. Do you think that there's a there's an issue with what we think university presses are for, or perhaps more specifically what some university administrators think that university presses are for. I mean, first thing, first thing I'll say is, Central European University Press is an interesting case study because people often say why should we support another university's university press to exist on this type of model. CUP actually receives a subsidy from its host institution. It's not expected to break even it is paid by the host institution but it is expected to bring in some revenue to cover its cost they're not they can't just subsidize it. And I think this is the challenge is that many university presses are expected by administrators to be revenue centers to bring in money to the university. There are so few university presses where that's really pulled off though. This is another really good example of seeing the host institution give great subsidy to a press in order for it to exist, although their subsidy is specific to their university and their academics publishing so quite tricky in some ways there. But this whole mid tier of university press at which this model is is aimed at those who are basically not really breaking even they're receiving subsidy from their host institution, but they require collective support to plug that gap. So I think you're right, David, it would be much better. Well, I'm taking implication from what you said that it would be much better if university presses could be treated as as outlay and cost as part of an infrastructural contribution, a network of these receiving subsidy from a host institution. But I think we can cement them much better in a network when we see subsidy from both sides so from a host institution and from a collaborative library community seeing the value and recognizing it. And that you know this is a this is a problem that I think is now becoming better recognized with lots of new university presses cropping up next generation, and somebody will sit down in those institutions and say, you do know this isn't going to bring in loads of money for the university. Well, I hope they're saying that because if they're not then the minister is going to get a nasty shock in five years time. Yeah, that's that's the financial situation and the the ideologies behind this that we're trying to to work towards. And final question we wanted to ask was, I mean, you mentioned the MIT model. You also, you know, through the open libraries of humanity you have another model there. He feels at the moment that we're in the sort of let the thousand flowers bloom sort of phase. But is there is a danger that with all of these different models which are slightly different. There's sort of that then becomes almost like an administrative burden upon the libraries on funders and such like that you need to know what each one is and fit them all together and work a lot is a you know, is that limiting take up do you think I think there is a challenge of proliferation and overload. But I know that people in libraries are incredibly busy and and it's challenging. I suppose what I'd say is that we receive quite difficult feedback on this. So on the one hand when we've spoken to the library community they say well really we don't want to have to get bogged down the details and have lots of choice, because it's we just don't have time to take everything in. But on the other hand we're also told in almost the same breath that we need to be able to see what we're spending on and control that and have options. I guess what I'd say is that as we've existed to this point, libraries have purchased from a wide range of vendors to support a wide range of presses at different price points with different contractual engagements for free books for instance, there has been a plurality until now. There's never going to be one model for open access books and we do need to see support for a range of things so there is going to be some level of engagement. I do think though that probably in the next two years or so some models are going to come to the fore they're going to prove workable and others are going to prove less sustainable. So we're going to continue through this process of trying models out side by side, seeing what gets some library support what has interest that we're going to work out what those are. So it could be a temporary pain point but I also think it is intrinsic that plurality will continue to exist. And unfortunately that will involve some differences and a little bit of overhead and we'll just try to explain it as clearly as we can so there's not too much cognitive burden in putting these things side by side. Thank you. I've already seen a comment in Twitter that listening to you talk about open access monographs gives gives the person hope. This rather intractable problem may have some solutions and moving us towards solutions so that's that's much appreciated. Just quickly respond to that I spent a decade trying to do this in my academic career it's something I really believe to be hugely important so thank you thank you for your time and listening and I hope we can make this work. I'm sure that some of our colleagues will be will be will be in touch after that so to engage further with the model so Martin thank you very much indeed. We're now going to move on to our second speaker, who is Mark Mattson who is the head of global engagement initiatives and international partnerships librarian at Penn State University. In that role he works to bridge bill to build bridges between libraries at Penn State and international partner institutions and also supports the internationalization and global engagement efforts at Penn State. He's interested he has a wide range of interest including comparative and international librarianship, the contribution of academic libraries to campus internationalization and librarianship in service of global priorities and goals. Along those lines of that alignment with between institutional and global goals that he's going to speak with us today. So, Mark, I shall hand over to you. Thank you so much. It is an honor to be able to have the opportunity to speak with you today about the Penn State Libraries experiences and establishing a new global engagement program. In my presentation, I'll be providing a bit of information about how we went about initiating and developing the program, and I'll discuss some of the resulting projects, services and programs that were developed. Before we go into too much detail about each of the aspects of the program due to time constraints. I do have my email and my Twitter here available on the screen, and I'd be more than happy to talk about anything that you might find of interest later on as well. But before I did get into things I did want to provide just a bit of context for the development of our program at Penn State, just so that you have a better understanding of kind of where we're where we're coming from. So I'm not going to read through this slide, but for context, Penn State University is a very large research intensive land grant university that's located in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. We do have 24 campuses that are spread across the Commonwealth, and we enroll somewhere around 100,000 students each year depending on enrollment fluctuations. And that does include also our online students at our world campus. Likewise mirroring our institution, the Penn State University Libraries is a very large organization in its own right. There's 26 libraries across the Commonwealth. Again somewhere around 550 total FTE, depending on the on the timeframe. But the important part to know about the Penn State Libraries is while we are spread across a great distance. We function as one library geographically dispersed. So we all report up through to the same Dean, and our collections are considered one, you know, one collection. So in any every way we really do function as a single library we are not a library system. So what brought the Penn State Libraries to focus on global engagement. Well the impetus for creating the position that I currently hold, and later the development of the global engagement initiatives department lies in the strategic goals of the university, which had and continue to have a strong focus on internationalization and global engagement. Again, I'm not going to read through this. These are some of the excerpts from the university level strategic plan, as well as the strategic goals of the Office of Global Programs. The initial conceptualization of the position was accomplished through a partnership between the university libraries and the Dean at that time. The Office of Global Programs and the Vice Provost for Global Programs and the Provost Office, and the funding for both the position itself and the operations budget for the first three years was collaboratively funded as well. So with this concept kind of sketched out between the three partners. The work began with a mission to apply the library's expertise resources and services for the advancement of towards the advancement of Penn State's global engagement goals through the long relationships with both internal and external stakeholders, and the development of new programming and initiative. The scope was at the time and continues to be really anything international anywhere at Penn State, which is quite a quite a large scope. But before we could begin to develop programs services. We first needed to analyze the globally focused landscape of the university, as you can imagine with a university as large as Penn State. There are a lot of different initiatives and and stakeholders and groups that are doing this work. So we did this by creating an inventory of all of the international or globally focused aspects of the university, and then doing outreach with those stakeholders. So we looked at all of our formal academic programs things like degrees in international affairs or international education. We looked at university wide initiatives and organizations so things like the English for professional purposes intercultural center. And of course, the Office of Global Programs itself which had many kind of subgroups. I, in my role I was actually the official liaison to the Office of Global Programs, which, you know, helped to open some of the doors with with other groups as well. We looked at campus specific institutes and groups so these are our groups or projects that are focused on a single Penn State campus. We also did a lot of outreach and and looking into international student associations across our campuses, and then also because we are a large library with a lot of different campuses and a lot of different parts. We had quite a bit going on internally as well in terms of global engagement and internationalization. Past and present library activities as well. So after getting a good understanding of the landscape, we were able to plot our course and begin the process of developing program services and projects, some of which I'll be discussing now. For the sake of organization I divided initiatives into two main facets, ones that are more inward facing and ones that were more outward focused. There is of course a lot of interaction and overlap between these two kind of areas, but it helps me to keep my own planning organized to kind of think of things in in these ways. I also mentioned that in developing these initiatives that I'm going to be sharing we did also rely heavily on benchmarking and looking into relevant literature in addition to the landscape analysis of the institution. And any one of these areas could be a several hour talk in and of itself. We did did look at what other institutions have done in different areas as well. So maybe, you know one institution did a really good job with outreach and services international populations for example, we were looking at what they were doing we would look at the literature. When we were developing our program. So, we did. I'm going to talk about kind of five different areas of focus and again this isn't the full program but for the sake of time. This is what will will focus on. So the first one that I want to talk about is outreach and services to international populations. And we do have a very large international student presence on our campuses, as well as visiting scholars and international faculty as well. This mostly has been so far on international students. And before we went forward and put together a program and outreach for those students. We did want to make sure we understood who we were doing this outreach for. So we did several different assessments. One of them was using data from the Ithaca SNR survey of undergraduates in which we were able to pull out international students as a subpopulation. We did targeted international student focus groups and some of my colleagues provided some data there. And then we did a survey of library staff to understand kind of where, what kind of interactions and perceptions we had internally in terms of international students and the libraries. And it provided us with a really good background in moving forward. We found things that we were doing really well. There was a sense of pride that international students had in their use of the libraries, they saw it as kind of their space. But there were things that we could improve on as well. Library jargon seems to be particularly confusing for this population as well. And after doing the assessments we then moved into formalizing some of our services and programs. A couple of these services and programs include things like an international student personal librarian program. That was just started this year during the pandemic. We have a lot of our international students who are not only just continuing their academic studies at Penn State from abroad, but we have a whole cohort that are starting out online from their home countries. And the international student personal librarian program is run by our international student liaison librarians across our campuses, and provides them with us another avenue to get libraries help. In addition to our regular reference and other services. We also put together a libraries welcome guide for international students that is on our webpage. And we started an international student oral history project with the university archives. And we're doing outreach to international student groups for that project. The idea behind this is that we would capture what the experiences of international students are, not just now, but throughout Penn States history so we are going back to international alumni as well. We want to make sure that our international students feel welcome and feel seen in our collections in our, in our programs and in the history of Penn State. One of the things that has been very effective and is not all that intense to put together is signage and visibility. In the previous slide, I had shown one of the graphics that we use on our digital signage in our different libraries. And we have gotten a really great response to that where students have said, you know, coming in and seeing that has been something that has really made me feel welcome and seen at the university. Another area that seems to get a lot of, I guess, attention from international students is our international newspaper display area, where students can see the front page of newspapers in their home country displayed, and then also access those both digitally and in in print. Here's a just a quick shot of our personal library and for international students program page in our canvas, which is our course software. The second one that I want to talk about in terms of those internal facing programs is promoting global citizenship and learning across the university. So not just for our international students are domestic students, but also for our local communities and our faculty and staff at the university as well. So things that we've, we have done in this area are things like globally focused outreach and learning events, globally focused exhibits, internationalization of collections and supporting curriculum internationalization. I'm going to show a slide here in a moment about some of those more event kind of things but I did want to talk about quickly, an example of internationalization of collections. So one of the collections that we have at our university park campus is a leisure viewing collection. And these are popular films. And, and TV shows on DVD that we, we lend out. And a couple of years ago, one of our librarians who, who manages that collection started purchasing international films with part of that budget, and they have had a tremendous success in numbers of checkouts. And we see this as a way of not only welcoming international students who see their, their culture on display and available, but it is also a learning opportunity for others. So if I am not very familiar with a certain country or culture, and I want to, you know, get a better sense of that through popular film, I'm able to check out those materials that might not be available on, you know, streaming Netflix or, or something else, or if I don't have access to those. We are currently working on support for internationalization of curriculum. One of the big projects that has come out of, well it's accelerated through the pandemic is a coil model at Penn State is called Edge, where two different classrooms at two different institutions at different parts of the world get together and work on a project. And it supports both of the curriculum for both partners, but it adds in an international collaboration element. And we're currently working with the team that is heading that up at Penn State to figure out ways that the libraries can support their, their goals. We're, we've done several different globally focused outreach and learning events. I'm showing you here an event that was focused on intercultural communication. So, some of the things that we have done were international student and domestic student conversation partner projects for ESL learners. And after they've met, then they've given poster presentations that we've held in the libraries and invited the campus to, to join and learn about their experiences. We've also partnered with international student groups for some of this so we partnered with the Iranian Student Association to provide document which was a monthly screening of Iranian documentaries. And the idea behind this, this program was to bring Americans and Iranians together and talk about, you know, popular culture and, and get dialogue going. We've also done some globally focused exhibits. This is a some photos from an exhibit that we did called academic libraries around the world where we talked a little bit about how academic libraries function in different cultural contexts. And we did have some materials from some of our partner libraries, which I will be talking about as well. And the final point on that inward facing side that I want to mention here is the development of intercultural and international capabilities within the libraries itself. Some of the things that we've done for that is international name pronunciation workshops for our, our staff. So that when we are interacting with students coming from different cultures in different places, we feel more come a little bit more confident in pronouncing their names and hopefully by being able to pronounce names correctly, we may add to that welcoming in atmosphere of the university libraries. We've also started this year an international film discussion group where libraries, faculty and staff can get together and talk about an international film that we've all watched. Things things like intercultural development and learning workshops, how to work with international patrons and those kinds of things. And then we are starting an international colleague partnership program, which I'm going to talk about now. So moving to the outward facing side of our internationalization efforts. We have started a international international sister library partnership program. Currently, we have seven international library partnerships in development. And they are all part of the larger Penn State global engagement network, which are institutional partnerships. They are designed to be flexible based on common interests, and again, most importantly supportive of the wider partnership. Some of the things that we are working on with these partners are things like no fee interlibrary loan. This was kind of the main thing that everybody asked me about is when I started the position was, oh, it's great that the libraries are getting involved with this. When will we have access to all of their databases and when will they have access to all of our materials. And I had to be like, hold on a second that that's more complicated than, then you might realize. So we're not a consortium at this point. But one of the ways that we've tried to kind of meet that need in a feasible way is to put together no fee interlibrary loan for electronic materials. So that within our research collaborations and our teaching collaborations across institutions, we can grant access a little bit more to some of our resources across our partnerships. We've done things like knowledge and practice sharing joint research and publications. We currently have a group of faculty at the libraries who are working with some of partners in the University of Split in Croatia to look at library and education and continuing education in the two contexts and comparing those and they're they're working on a research project in that area. We're doing things like staff and faculty exchanges and joint programming. And some of the things that we have done in terms of, you know, sharing our local practices and and expertise are things like international or I'm sorry, not international instructional design for libraries. How do we teach in the classroom at a for library purposes. And we've done some workshops in that area. We've also done a joint project that is looking at data research data management in team science and international collaboration. And how libraries can provide services and support for researchers in that area, and a whole host of other things that I unfortunately don't have time to get into. So we have a master library program which is kind of our main outward facing side. We are doing things like hosting international visiting scholars librarians in in Penn State libraries we've had a visiting scholar from Jordan and Brazil so far that have been with us for academic years. We're looking at trying to increase participation in governing bodies at an international level so looking at if la as kind of a main focus. We are very, very active in the American Library Association, and I'd like to be able to increase our participation in international level things. And then, because this is kind of a unique program within an academic library, we do want to contribute to the larger conversation around international librarianship through research conference participation, like I am doing now with you, and publishing. In future directions, we did hire this summer another position in the department, a global engagement strategic support librarian who is looking at benchmarking for different parts of the initiative, and looking at standards for international library programs, as well as developing standards for these kinds of things. And we have a lot of institutional change right now we have a new vice provost for global programs that was just hired. We have a new strategic plan for global initiatives that's going to be coming out at a university level. And we have a new dean in our university libraries. So I would imagine in the future will be kind of shifting things as as the university moves in this this area as well. So thank you so much for your time. I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you very much Mark. There's already been a comment in the chat talking about him how outstanding people find found them what you were talking about and the work that you're doing. You'll recall that, unfortunately, we had to cancel our conference this time last year and you were scheduled to speak and we wanted to invite you here again. I was just wondering how much you think what you've spoken about has changed in light of the last year. And is the presentation you've given us significantly different to what you might have given us this time last year or have you have the fundamentals of what you're trying to achieve. Yeah, so the the answer is yes. The presentation is basically the same. But the for me personally this year has has shifted quite a bit more focused on the international student and more focused on the here and now at Penn State side. We are still doing quite a bit with our international partners, but a lot of the the travel and the the projects had to kind of take a backseat to everybody trying to scramble and get all of their their stuff online and and serving their institutions during a pandemic. So that made that very, very challenging. But it did provide an opportunity to kind of refocus on providing services to international students who would be facing a very difficult time. Being either stuck here away from family, or stuck somewhere else away from here and doing courses and classes at 2am their time to try to to keep up with things. So there there definitely has been a shift. But not as much as I would have imagined in terms of what we can do. A lot of what my work has been has been on zoom anyway. So so it really hasn't been all that challenging. I am looking forward to being able to get some mobility back and forth because there really is no substitute for in person visits to build relationships between colleagues in these international partnerships so I think that's very, very true. And we look forward to welcoming you at some point in the UK. We had a couple of questions about how this program relates or to either to equality diversity and inclusion strategies, or to decolonization strategies. Is that something you could maybe say a few words on. Sure, yes, they're they're very, very closely tied. So, I didn't really mention it, because I was focused on the global aspects but another very strong focus for the university is the DEI component. And so when we are putting together initiatives or services. It is very easy to say we should be doing this not only because it fits into our global goals, but the, the internationalization efforts the global engagement efforts are a sub component of some of the DEI work as well and it fits in very nicely with that. So we're currently looking at the possibility of doing some intercultural development inventory work within the libraries, which has been used, not only for international intercultural communication but also culture is culture everywhere so this is another program that we're currently looking at that fits both within the DEI framework and also within internationalization and global engagement. In terms of the decolonization aspect. Yes, that is that also is a part of this as well. So one of the things that I mentioned was our international student oral history project. Our special collections library and archives have really been looking over the last several years at kind of a decolonialization of our collections and diversification. And this project fits into that by saying, hey, our international students have not been a big part of that institutional record up until this point. How can we get not just them represented but their own voices heard in this space. So, yes, there are those, all three of those things have been very closely tied and a focus of the program. That's really interesting. Another another question is around whether how much do you think the libraries will be doing this activity. If it wasn't, there wasn't that institutional wider institutional drive to do this we've been talking about alignment is you know is this being driven by the institution is it been driven by the library is it a coincidence that everything's coming together. So there was, there was, there was a good amount of work being done in the libraries already, you know, but it was siloed for different campuses and different projects. The, the main driving factor was the the university's focus at a strategic level. My position was put together in in a line with several other positions that were also focused on other strategic areas of the university so student engagement was one and there was a student engagement library and position that was put together at the around the same time that that my position was. And online learning was another one that there was a position put together. So, it was very, it was very deliberate that the library was putting this together in line with the university strategic plan, because it does, there is a cost associated with this work. And it would be more challenging to make a case for a lot of this work. If it wasn't a strategic priority of the university at the kind of the highest level so I have found that to be incredibly useful. And I do think that that is an important aspect that it is valued at an institutional level. I've got a final question here which I think might have an ulterior motive which is really saying about how exciting the program is and asking how you choose your international partner libraries they may be looking to work with you. Sure. So we are very, very careful in how we structure that all of our international partnership libraries within like our official ones are within a higher network of Penn State. Partnerships. So we work under the MOUs of the institutional partnership. And that is not to say that we can't work with other libraries internationally, but those ones that we're having a strategic partnership with are focused on and state strategic partnerships so that we are able to get the most value for our efforts in supporting the research agenda between those two institutions, the teaching and learning agenda between those institutions. So it's kind of focused on utility in that sense. But that is to say we do do a lot of work and partnerships with other institutions, but kind of on a smaller scale or on a project scale, because we're kind of forced to work under those MOUs of the institution. That makes perfect sense, but I think that you may have as a result of this afternoon or this morning for you, you may have some initiatives and conversations. I welcome that. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. So we now move to our third and final speaker in this session. And that's Katrina Cannon, who is the current deputy librarian and keeper of collections at the Bodling Libraries of the University of Oxford. There she has leadership and management accountability for libraries and learning spaces for special collections, the public engagement program information skills, information skills training and liaison with the academic community. I say the current deputy librarian, because as of last week it was announced that Katrina is going to be the new librarian at Senate House Libraries. So very many congratulations on that move. It actually marks a return to London as Katrina has previously worked at the libraries at both King's College where I think I met her for the first time, and the Warburg Institution. So Katrina is going to be our guide as she takes a long walk through the fog, looking at leadership for uncertain times. Thank you. Yes. Thank you, David. And hi everybody is really great to be here. Like Mark, I was due to appear at the R and UK conference in 2020 and I wrote this paper in 2019 actually at the end. And when the pandemic hit, you know, a week beforehand, before, you know, when the, when the conference was cancelled at the last minute, unfortunately had to be. I thought to myself, oh my goodness, this is going to kick off a whole new way of managing and this is going to be irrelevant. And actually, it quickly became apparent to me that the pandemic made it only more timely. So I'm really happy in one way that that this is relevant to the pandemic, but it's also something else has happened that has made this more relevant. I think in the meantime, from a point of view of RL UK, which is that RL UK launched its digital shift manifesto in May last year as has been previously mentioned. I should say also having heard Charis and Massoud presentations this morning that there's quite a lot of echoes, not duplication I'm happy to say but there are a few things where I'll be kind of able to allude to what they said this morning as well. So I was first, I first started to think about this question in 2018, following an article that was published by the director of Sacramento State University Librarian, a friend of mine, Amy Kautzman. She was looking at change the changes ahead that will affect libraries and she was putting the case for uncomfortable conversations and she put it with library staff, letting them know how at risk their positions are encouraging them to focus on developing new roles and skills. And that started me thinking, I was to start to think about the changes that were coming that we're going to transform our workforce our collections our services, and more and more I believe that to embrace those changes and come out stronger. We need to adopt a leadership model which is suited to uncertain change at the uncertain times. So, I really wanted to start a discussion on this topic and actually that discussion started this morning in fact. And so it's really timely for me. So I wanted to share more widely my own experience but also to hear other people's using experience I'm going to talk in three parts. What are the changes, firstly. So, how have we cooked up to now and then to propose a new leadership paradigm. And of course the world pre pandemic was was very uncertain, and it's even more so now. And my focus like Amy's article actually today is technological developments. It's set to cause greater disruption than anything seen so far. And you can see here on the screen I'm showing the successive waves of study about the effect of technology on the workforce. The, the big study that started all this off was in 2013 with a focus on AI by Freya Nosborne and they said first of all that 47% of roles would be at risk in the next 15 years and that was in the US. And there have been a survey of reports that I'm putting on the screen here since then, and they vary by percentage and the country or country surveyed from 10% to 50%. But if you think about it, even 10% is very high. So what sort of roles did they think were likely to be affected. Well the 2013 study Freya Nosborne one also found that there was a higher than 90% probability that library assistant jobs will disappear in the next five to 15 years. I think it was Missou to say this morning that the librarian posts are also seen as coming off. We are, we are used to the automation of routine tasks, but it's also becoming apparent that it's not just about the automation of routine tasks. This is Georgios Petropoulos in 2018. And what he's saying, basically the his quote here, which is about high skill and possibly non routine tasks so that's potentially our entire workforce as has been said this morning. So historically when jobs were lost through technology. Employment was generated in other areas so it balanced out. But artificial intelligence is different to anything we've seen before so predictions and guarantees are really impossible. And McKinsey in an article in 2017 I'm quoting here, saying, you know, the change, the change is happening in, you know, so much faster and it's, it's really very difficult to predict. So we don't know what roles will be needed, and it is hard to picture and predict our workplaces and workforces. And, and because of that to prepare for them. So one thing is clear that if things continue to develop in the same direction there won't be jobs for everyone. And we know from past experience of change management that not everyone wants to retrain or be redeployed. Some will retire some will change direction and some will change sector. So moving on to my second point, given the scale of change and uncertainty are research library professions able to cope. And what's our record on this in the past libraries have accommodated a lot of change since the automation of the 1970s. We were early adopters within universities who are also early adopters, particularly around catalogs information serving, searching and retrieval circulation and the automation of workflows. Recently we've adapted to changing circumstances we've shown entrepreneurial spirit we've initiated changes. We've learned from other professions and we've integrated them into our libraries and our teams. We've anticipated and responded to changing the changing needs of the unit community, music communities. For example, we've got new roles to anticipate and address development and open science and scholarship and digital humanities. We've organized the importance of assessing and evaluating services and resources rather than just collecting detailed quantitative information and this was the ground baking report on that area that I'm showing on screen now. We've increased our focus and effort on communications we have a much more professional approach, and that's been really positively received in our organizations. We've repurposed roles and we've retrained the workforce, and we continue to focus strongly as a sector on skills development. And we've been right to do so so I'm showing this report that I was really pleased to see was in the suits presentation as well. This report on adult education published in November of 2019. It's a very, very important part of what we do. We do that side by side with that we find it difficult to stop doing things as a sector. So side by side with the new initiatives and teams we end up with additional parallel workflows flows tied to history. Can we honestly say that all our resources and energies are devoted to areas where they'll benefit the greatest numbers of researchers and students. There's visible pressures to focus on more influential user groups within our organizations. There's inertia. There's the difficulty of introducing unpopular and disruptive changes, especially in a university environment. And they do often hold us back from doing the right thing. So we've seen this addition and these quotes that I've shown this this slide on the next one. We've seen, we've seen these quote these sorts of expressions for quite a long time from our users now but they show us that we are late adopters of some core technology. So, unlike the 70s we're being passed out in our own sector by people like Google, and I don't really need to dwell too much on that we know it very well. Given our experience of coping with change historically. How can we then moving on to my third point how can we ensure that we're equipped for whatever is coming. Well, I found this really useful model from Eddie O'Beng, and he's a writer mainly about project management and this is actually about managing projects so he classes for different types of projects. The way they're classified is according to whether you know what you're doing or not, and whether you know how you're doing it or not so, you know, on one side you've got the how and the what and the other side you've got the what. And when you don't know what you're doing or how you're going to do it you're walking in the fog. When you're walking in the fog you need in terms of projects you need people who are focused on teamwork they want to work and learn together. And you have to proceed with caution or there's a big risk you'll deliver nothing at all. And when I was first introduced to this way of thinking about project management, I felt this could equally be applied to leadership more widely, not just projects and it really felt like, you know something that was very helpful to me in my own job. So for example, if you think about another type of project where you know what you're doing but not how going on a quest. That's the kind of technology related project we in libraries are really used to. And that requires team, a team of self motivated people nights, as they're called, who work tirelessly to seek out and then deliver the solution. But for me the context of leadership in higher education and research libraries is more and more walking in the fog. So the bottom left hand side of the quadrant quadrant. So what's the best leadership style for that context. Well, to answer that I'm going to share my own experience and then I'm going to say how I've come to my views on that question. I've always been a management and leadership junkie. And I've always wrestled with the best approach. I've always, you know enjoyed reading books like the ones I'm showing here, but I have always wrestled with the best approach I've always been attracted to the coaching style the creative style, but I'm also very focused on getting things done, and I'm usually working in very hierarchical structures. And up until the job that I currently hold, hold, I was working mainly in process departments so retro contact services. And in those departments people I found wanted direction and they wanted structure. Five years ago I took on my own different very different role involving leadership of customer service liaison with the academic community special collections and public engagement, as David said. And the team have very different expectations from me as a head of department, they're more independent, they're more autonomous their problem solvers and they don't actually want or need direction they know what they're doing. And so the department manage management team works differently to management teams that I've led before. I have more direct reports and I have flatter management structure which was enough for me before I started this job, very, very different to my views up to then. We, we have largely consensus driven approach, we refer to the university and library strategic plan a lot. We focus on what we as a team can and should achieve together and that's the hardest bit, and that's the most necessary. So, my own recent experience, plus the context that research libraries are operating in have convinced me that we need to change our approach to leadership, we have we need a new paradigm for the changing world. But there are no easy answers, because, after all, we're walking in the farm. But when I was preparing for this talk, I found a very useful concept that captures the leadership style that we that that's needed, leading from behind and actually, in answer to a question Keras actually described this she didn't call it leading from behind but that's what she was talking about. I'm aware that if you're walking in the fog and leading from behind, it sounds like an almost impossible challenge, but maybe that's a good metaphor for where we are at the moment, it originated with man, Nelson Mandela. It talks about being empowering and delegative, these are easy words to say, and many of us aspire to them, but they're not easy and comfortable to implement consistently. It's about true empowering that's giving people the power the authority and the responsibility to do what they're employed and rewarded to do. We often give one without the other, or we give power to take it back when we're in a hurry or under pressure and delegating rather than abrogating responsibility takes time and work. People need the tools and the learning and the confidence to do the job. It's something that doesn't always bear fruit immediately. It's much more tempting to do it yourself, and it's quicker and easier in the short term. It also needs attention, attention and judgment, monitoring and progress and knowing when to get involved in a way that supports people, not heroic leadership, galloping in and out or worse lighting fires in order to have the satisfaction of putting them out. That makes us feel needed to echo again what something Kerry said this morning, but actually, you know, if we love to feel, you know, really needed and expert problem solvers but actually it disempowers our colleagues when we do that. We talk a lot about allowing people to fail, and we talk that usually in the context of digital or technological innovation. But how often do we allow people to fail, make mistakes or overlook something outside that narrow context. I was listening this is something I added in since last year into my presentation is something I heard on radio three during during lockdown. I had an old interview that they replayed on radio three with the conductor Nicholas our non core, and he talked about security and beauty not being compatible. So you have to take things to the risk of catastrophe that was his word, and then beauty occurs. And that means for him as a conductor, if a player takes that risk and fails technically it's still worth it. The same mistake repeatedly occurring is clearly a problem, but we should be more forgiving I would argue to occasional lapses than we currently probably are people who feel under pressure to be perfect or not relaxed and so they're not as creative or as productive as they need to be. And that leads me to the need for an innovative organization and how leading from behind enables that, and this quote here from from the Harvard Business Review from back in 2010 but it's still relevant here I think. One of the characteristics of strong strong leaders is is their ability to affect positive and lasting change. And the ability to innovate successfully is key to this. But what does innovation mean. As far as it feels to me as if in libraries we have a very narrow understanding of innovation and not just libraries actually universities as well is linked to technology it's limited to senior expert staff. But I think innovation should apply to all aspects of our book of our operations and at all levels of the organization. And this Peter Drucker definition of innovation still is my favorite one. Earlier we've often adapted well where it involved bringing in new teams and new services, but sometimes that's in parallel with our existing ones so that over time, we accrete many layers rooted in a particular era. And that doesn't always make up a coherent efficient or cost effective home. And in some areas we've been left behind as I said earlier, maybe because we haven't had the resource in the right place. We need to apply the same level of creativity and passion to reevaluating and reshaping our existing provision as to identifying and introducing new services. The two are inextricably linked and should be done together, and it needs all the workforce behind it. Literature podcasts and talks on leadership at the moment highlight the importance of values in an environment that's uncertain and unpredictable. There's a lot of politics in higher education, government and cultural heritage in all three of those sectors. And of course, ensuring that the right people are aware and supportive of what we do is essential and it's important part of our role. But I would say we also need to prioritize values, among others, honesty, courage and openness, courage for the honest conversations with colleagues that make them aware of the context and implications for us as a workforce, to face up to the fact that we may need to stop doing more things, even if we've been doing them for a long time and our feelings of self work are bound up with them. Honesty but not brutality. So we need to spend time thinking about how we can tell the truth in a way that's most helpful to people. Similarly, I think we could be a lot more transparent than we are, as long as we do it in a way that's sensitive to individuals and the reputation of our organizations. We could share financial and management information with colleagues who could expose decisions to that we've made to them and why much more than we currently do. It takes time to do it in a responsible way, but the trust is engenders justifies the time and effort, and it gives a shared sense of responsibility which comes with the sharing of information, which is of course as we all know our. So, I mean, in summary, I would say, our UK is made up of the most powerful and the best resourced libraries in the country, and it has behind it that those libraries have behind them. Some of the most high performing higher education system in the world so even if it doesn't feel like it. We actually do have quite a lot of power to affect change in this area. But at the beginning, I really want to start a discussion in this area so what I really want to hear from the questions and answers and comments is the Q&A period and the comments and all is actually have I got it right because these are my thoughts that I'm throwing out there. Thanks very much. That was really thoughtful, considered and challenging and hopefully there'll be a response from the participants at the conference, either now or over the next days and weeks. I mean, one of the things that I'm always intrigued are because you know, our UK as an organization is a small organization and we have an executive force so we're very, very different type of beast, but it always intrigues me about the, and we talked about alignment earlier but that potential mismatch between some of the things and the styles that you're talking about within the library, which is in most of our UK members is embedded in a wider organization and that wide organization may not have the same leadership styles. It may not have exactly the same set of values and how you operate as a, as a, you know, within a library with one set of values and styles in a bigger organization that does may not necessarily align with that and, you know, is there attention there. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think libraries are actually very, they are a good reflection a lot of the time of the institutions in which they work even though the institutions don't always see it that way. And I would say that there are things that there are qualities of the culture of higher education that libraries share. I mean, one of those things is prioritizing technological and technical skills over leadership skills. And I think that libraries are better at this and the whole than the institutions that they're part of universities being the ones I know best. And, but I would say they share they share those, they share those characteristics and I guess does that answer your question David I'm not sure was that was some more remind me if there's a bit that I didn't answer. And I don't think so I think, you know, I, I, I, you know, I've heard quite a lot about you know, sort of the ideas of innovation and allowing people to fail. And quite often, especially public bodies and organizations or pseudo public bodies like universities aren't that keen on, on letting people fail. And they're not as perhaps not as tolerant of that as the rhetoric might imply. And that, and again is, is there a tension there. You know, between the, you know, the rhetoric of innovation and, and, and failure, and, and that freedom to experiment with some quite constrained areas of operation. Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of our institutions certainly the University of Oxford, there's great autonomy within research teams. So nobody is going to mess with a, you know, with an AI lab. And so they are able to fail because they've got nice small units. And that's where that that's tolerated. I think it's when you get into the big, you know, the big libraries whether they're managed by a provost chancellor by the university secretary. They are they do count as part of the administration really because they're big central departments with large amounts of staff. And that's where, yeah, I think you get the kind of pressure that you're talking about. I did want to say, actually, and I really didn't want to redo my photographs because I had carefully done them. I'm still in the office, but I have been reading a really interesting book also which I'm going to add to my list of photographs from earlier and it's, it's by one of the authors that Karen's talked about earlier, Gary Hamel, but it's a collaboration with Anna Zanini and it's called humanocracy and is talking about the fact that if you, if you actually make people more accountable for, for, for everything within their organization and I think either Keras or Masoud answered the question, one of the questions earlier about this, if you give people more responsibility for more of what they're doing. It allows for that kind of individual environment and that continuous change and the kind of accountability because it gives people authority. You know, they get a choice about whether, for example, they, they buy their services from a central department. So, you know, I mean in that kind of world, the university could be composed of, a library that didn't have to take central HR services or HR, you know, the department in the university that didn't have to take the library they could go out and get their own library services so, you know, very interesting thoughts and I don't really know. I'm only a third of the way through the book so we'll see how it ends. Yeah, I think that ties in very nicely to a question, which is about the specifics of what's what we've seen happening over the last year so you know you're talking about the book suggesting that we should give more power to individuals so there's been a bit of a move over the last year as for senior management to take a command and call approach, you know, as, as government rules and regulations change on a daily basis which then implements influences what what what the university wants to do, which then means that the library has to react so, you know, library directors have to do stuff quickly and get stuff, get things done. So have we moved, you know, are we in danger as a result as a reaction to the last year of so shifting our thinking into a more command and control and sort of almost, you know, that might become the new normal, even as the pandemic fades away. And that is kind of when I was, you know, when you said, oh, when you have to send a reluctant message out saying, you know, we're going to have to cancel next week. I did like I said at the beginning I looked at my presentation and thought this is going to be totally irrelevant is it all going to be command and control. And I think that, you know, obviously there's always going to be a place for command and control and, and I think it's Daniel Goldman who talks about the different types of leadership and the models and the different times that call for different things. I think command and control there is a place for that, but it should be used sparingly. I think that's one of the things that is very clear in terms of motivating people. And, you know, clearly, I think that, you know, the time of the pandemic when you have to shut your buildings and send everybody home or keep your libraries open. There's a certain amount of command and control that needs to happen, you know, if there's a fire in the building command and control is the leadership model that you probably need to use. But I think it's, I think it's making sure that you, you don't keep that up. And I think there is a danger. I mean, at societal level, I think, you know, you know, that there is just no doubt about it that we have been living in that model, and it is a threat to democracy. I don't think there's any getting away from that. And that's why I think it's really important that those of us who do have power within our organization stand out for this kind of more, you know, well, you know, if I use, I don't like Gary Hamill's word of humanocracy, but I suppose it does kind of express what I mean to say. I mean, to end on what is probably the impossible question that's just popped in, which is, you know, is there a number one takeaway that you've got from the last year from, you know, what is the number one thing that the pandemic has taught you about leadership? Okay, I can answer that really easily. Trust your instinct. There were two things that I did this year, in terms of standing out for something I felt really passionately, where, in one instance, I was the only person that felt this way. And it was very hard. And in another instance, I had a group of people that agreed with me, but I had to really, really, really fight to get what I wanted. And I just trusted my instinct. And, and I think the pandemic, ironically, has given me the confidence to do that. I suppose it's just surviving. You know, you kind of look back at your lead novels that are based in the Second World War, and you think how could they have survived this and I'm not comparing the pandemic to a war, I don't like that metaphor. But I think it has been a testing time. And I suppose, you know, you get through the day and you patch yourself on the back and it gives you more confidence. So I suppose from that's a very personal answer that for me as a leader, I want striving for authenticity. Yeah, I think trusting my instinct. It's taught me to believe in that. Brilliant. I thought I thought I was throwing you a difficult hard question, but you answered beautifully and with with great eloquence.