 It gives me great pleasure to be able to introduce this first panel session of the RLUK conference where we're going to be looking at libraries as partners in research. I am enormously grateful to Amina because I think already we saw in the presentation this morning some really great examples of how partners particularly the National Library of Scotland are partnering and developing partnering opportunities for researchers and some really interesting examples highlighted in our presentation and I think it gives us a really good grounding for our session which we're going to go on to today. I think those of you who've worked in libraries for some time they'll be aware that whole question of how we partner with researchers is something which has changed. I can go back long enough to remember the days of the scholar librarian and that person we employed to actually do research decades back and it's interesting to see now how we're beginning to rethink in the very different landscape and environment we're in as to how we can be that partner to research and help to develop those research partnerships. Those of us who've been working within the RLUK space will know that RLUK have been looking very closely at this issue and that's both helping us to think about it but also putting some practical examples on the ground to support it through funding, through working with partner organisations in the UK to help help libraries to think and support this whole area as libraries as partners in research. And today I think I'm looking forward to hearing a variety of presentations which will look at this issue will help us to understand this what the opportunities are a little bit more deeply. To invite our first presenter Emily Roper whose research facilitator at Cambridge University Library to give her talk and the title of her talk is going to be research collaboration at Cambridge University Library's partnerships, pioneers and pitfalls. And we've asked Emily to speak because Cambridge University Library has a growing portfolio of research projects of different sizes and this paper will consider how investment in research facilitation has contributed to the growth of this portfolio. So Emily over to you and I can confirm your slides are looking beautiful on screen so thank you. Excellent thank you. Good morning everyone it's a pleasure to be here today and to open this session on libraries as partners in research. When I was preparing this proposal last November I realised that it was almost exactly two years since I had started as research facilitator at Cambridge University Library's. This prompted me to reflect. I was attracted to the role because it was an unusual one. I'd come across research facilitation in university research offices and in independent research organisations and I was already doing a similar job at the British Library but I'd never seen anything of this kind embedded in a university library. Why have this post as far as I can tell a pioneering one in a UK University Library setting being created? Maybe you are also wondering the same thing. Today I will consider how this area of work has evolved in Cambridge University libraries to produce a growing portfolio of collaborative research projects. I will begin by providing some context on what research collaboration is and how a research facilitator supports this area of activity. Then I will hopefully bring the theory to life by discussing three case studies and finally I will offer some reflections that will connect research in libraries with the broader conference theme of mapping the new open. To get us started I will explore what I mean by research collaboration or to put it another way collaborative research. By research collaboration I mean a research project that can only be undertaken with involvement from library staff that goes above and beyond the standard range of reading room and inquiry and other services. It is a project where an extra level of intervention or input is needed drawing on library expertise in a sustained way and often but not exclusively relating to the collections. Partnerships lie at the heart of collaborative research. Even for a fellowship involving just one individual an application to a research fund normally involves at least some element of collaborative working. Partnerships rest on the pursuit of a common goal. Normally a research question or a collection or technical development of shared interest and research collaborations involve funding be that from existing budgets within the library or external sources. In my role I deal mainly with applications to research funders ranging from as little as a thousand pounds to multimillion pound bids. A research facilitator can contribute to all of these areas. They help to build the partnerships needed to bring the project to fruition. They advise on the nuts and bolts of the application process and they support the research lead to ensure all partners are working towards shared objectives. Cambridge's research portfolio illustrates the scope of this activity. As you can see from the chart on the left this currently comprises 22 projects with a current further five waiting to start nine submitted to funders for assessment and 12 in preparation. The table of the right hopefully gives you a flavour of the breadth of these projects. Some such as Arabic poetry in the Kyrogonisa and the Darwin correspondence are part of the university library's two embedded research units. Others such as IGI in primary care and the African poetry digital portal involve staff in our faculty and departmental libraries. Some such as Gerald Revealed are firmly rooted in the collections whilst others such as digital approaches to watermarks and the archive of tomorrow involve technical expertise alongside collections. We play a variety of roles in research projects currently we lead for our co-investigator on seven project partner on six and have a smaller role such as an advisory board member on five. Together the projects that we are currently involved with have attracted a funding of just over nine million pounds with 1.6 million of that coming to the University of Cambridge and about 600 000 pounds of that to the university libraries. Current and historic projects have involved a range of partners both in the UK and further afield. In addition it's worth noting that even when applications are unsuccessful the partnerships that are built during the application process are often often go on to be used in other contexts. Strategic support lies at the heart of building a research portfolio. A portfolio can only develop if there is high level commitment to involvement in research and to providing the resources needed to support it. I've also noted some other elements that I think are important when building a research portfolio. Funding streams like towards a national collection have highlighted the role of the GLAM sector in collections based research and certainly collections form the basis of a lot of our collaborative research projects. But it's important to note that staff expertise is vital too and that this expertise is not always directly related to the collections. It can be technical expertise for example imaging or software development or expertise relating to conservation. Research facilitation skills are also key. A research facilitator will guide library staff and other partners in shaping an idea into a competitive application and assist with project management and reporting once funding is awarded. Another essential building block is an accurate costing tool. Costing can be complicated especially when trying to factor inflation and salary increments into a multi-year project. Equally important are governance and record keeping. You need robust governance so that the applications you are submitting are the competitive ones that align with your strategic priorities and where everyone who would be involved in delivering the project has been consulted and is happy with what has been agreed. Record keeping sits alongside governance. You need a central place where you store information about applications and record any nuances that may set outside the application itself. And last but by no means least, project management skills come in handy not just in terms of managing projects but the application process as well. We will now see these building blocks in action in the context of three different research projects. The first is the Cambridge Heritage Science Hub, Cherish. A consortium of five departments including the library which was awarded £3 million from the AHRC for heritage science equipment and refurbishment of associated spaces. Just over £700,000 of the award came to the library which we used for state-of-the-art imaging equipment, digital storage and refurbishment of the digital content unit, that's our imaging department. And the photo here shows the installation of our new mega vision multi-spectral imaging system. So what did we learn from our involvement with this project? Well above all we learned that undertaking a £3 million project in seven months at the height of a global pandemic is very challenging. It was challenging for us personally and professionally and these challenges were compounded by our dependents on external suppliers and other university departments for project delivery who were also facing stresses and strains. What was particularly interesting about this application was the consortium approach we took. Although this was challenging in some respects, working with other areas of the university enabled us to produce a more competitive application and ultimately to deliver a much more innovative project than we could have done alone. It's also worth noting that our ability to apply as a consortium was enabled by University Seed Funding. This meant that the five partners had been able to work together before the call was launched so we were not starting completely from scratch. In addition, now that the project is complete and we've had a little bit of time to reflect, we are finding that the ongoing benefits are as much about the stronger partnerships and joint ways of working that we have developed as the actual equipment. I'm now going to turn to the second case study, the Stern Digital Library, a project in which we were a project partner. I picked this one because I think our involvement here is fairly typical of a university library with special collections. We provided curatorial advice on Lawrence Stern items in our collection as an in-kind contribution and the project provided funding for digitisation. By working in partnership we were able to generate new lineage on our collections as well as obtaining additional digitised content. It's also worth noting a few practical points that underpinned this partnership and made it work for us. The first is that the cost of digitisation was included in the project budget. There is sometimes a misconception that as a project partner you cannot draw on the project budget. This is not the case. Although some in-kind contributions are expected, you can include minor directly incurred costs, that is, costs that you incur directly from the activities of the project, in this case the digitisation. Secondly, when you are a project partner, although you may have a smaller role in the project overall, it's always a good idea to spec out your contributions and try to put figures to everything, including anything that you might be doing in kind. This really helps to be clarity to what you are committing to and will help if a letter of support is required. And thirdly, one thing that can be challenging is that the AHRC generally only funds 80% of the full economic cost, so in other words 80% of what you ask for in your application. So for example, if you've costed in £1,000 for digitisation, the AHR will award you £800. This obviously can leave you with a shortfall and there are a variety of ways of dealing with this. Too long-winded to go into now, but it's worth being aware of this potential pitfall. And last but by no means least, curious cures. This is a two-year Cambridge-led project on medieval medical recipes that we are due to start next month. It has been made possible, thanks to half a million pounds worth of funding from the welcomes now unfortunately defunct research resources in the humanities and social science scheme. This was one of the few schemes that you could actually apply to for cataloging conservation and digitisation support. So it's a great shame that it's now closed. As we haven't started the research yet, our learning so far on curious cures centres around the process of applying and setting up the project. I think the most important thing that we learned from the application process is not to be put off by an unsuccessful application. We were rejected the first time around and it was only on our second attempt that we succeeded. We were able to get feedback from the funder. This isn't always the case for all schemes and for all funders, but fortunately, this particular welcome scheme did offer feedback and we didn't hesitate to follow up on this and to carry on asking questions as they arose. Typically, funding schemes have success rates of between one in seven and one in ten. So unfortunately, rejection of very competitive and worthwhile applications is common. However, applications often improve at the second or third attempt as I can help you to articulate the research questions more clearly and understand what is important or unique about your project. The other thing that is worth sharing, I think, is the sheer amount of time that it can take to craft a competitive application of this scale. I would suggest it can take at least six months, bearing in mind that staff are unlikely to be able to work on it full time. Also, creating a budget for any research project, but especially one of this size, can be quite complex. Using a professional costing tool or failing that, working closely with your finance team, is therefore really important. The other thing that's worth bearing in mind is that, unlike the AHRC, welcome fund 100% of the budget you request. However, it slightly swings around about in that respect, because unlike the AHRC and UKRI more widely, they do not pay overheads. So recovery on a full economic costing basis is not possible. So it's important to go into any applications with an awareness of this. And finally, this project involves recruiting five new posts. This is time consuming, especially if HR teams are not used to roles linked to research funding. And it's something that's really important to factor in when planning the start date. So having looked at those three case studies, I'd now like to conclude with some broader reflections. Alongside the challenges, some of which we've covered here and others of which may be teased out in the questions. I hope this presentation has demonstrated that well managed research collaborations can bring many benefits to libraries. New knowledge on the collections, capitalising on the skills and knowledge of library staff, diversifying income streams, and benefiting from external expertise, technology and perspectives to name but a few. But research collaboration also touches on questions relating to skills, space and openness that are fundamental to the running of libraries, and all of which are coming up as beans later in the conference. With this in mind, my challenge to you, both as the conference proceeds and when you return to your libraries, is to consider how research collaboration may weave into and inform these broader areas of professional practice. Thank you. Okay, thanks very much, Emily. Obviously hugely grateful to you for your presentation, and it's great to have that insight, that really practical insight and what it means to take on a range of projects with your examples there. I think it comes through also, interestingly already, that whole point about partnership and the importance of partnership within your institution, as well as those wider partnerships outside, and how important they are, both to allow us to develop new skills, but also for our research bits to be successful. And although clearly also I could see it came through that doing this kind of work is challenging, there are, as you say at the end, some real rewards there for us to get to make the most of. So thank you. Colleagues, if you do have questions, just a reminder, please do post those in the Q&A spot, and you can post those at any time before we, and actually during the panel session as well, but if I can encourage you to start putting those in, I'll be very grateful for that. Okay, if we could then move on to our second presentation, and that's going to be given by Sophie Forcadelle, who's librarian in charge of Open Science at Sciences Po Library, and Helen Porter, research support manager at the LSE. And the title of their talk is The Role of Libraries in European Universities, the case of open science development in the Civica Alliance. So a number of us are involved in the European alliances, including the University of Edinburgh, and we know that it does provide a really great space for cooperation, collaboration, and some interesting opportunities for libraries. So this presentation is going to look about how they can be a fertile ground for cooperation with libraries and scientific communities, and it's going to explore some of the challenges involved in working with a community of eight universities from across Europe. So Sophie, I guess you're going to speak first, so please take away your presentation. Thank you. Thank you and hello everyone. I hope you can hear me okay. Thank you for inviting us to the conference. So my name is Sophie Forcadelle, and I work at the Sciences Po Library in Paris, and with Helen Porter from the LSE Library. We are going to present the work we are currently doing with the Civica European Alliance project, and specifically within the Civica Research Project. As far as I am concerned, I also work with a colleague in Paris at Sciences Po Library Cecilia Tutu. So our presentation is about the role of librarians on open science and as part of this European University project. So as a reminder, European universities, as you already told, are transnational alliances of higher education institutions from across the EU that join forces with the financial support of the Erasmus Plus, Horizon 2020, and Horizon Europe programs. So they aim to enhance the quality, the inclusion, and the attractiveness of European higher education. So currently, 41 alliances have been established involving almost 300 European institutions. And as you can see on the slide, there are eight founding partners of this Civica Alliance, and two new universities from Spain and Poland are likely to join the Alliance within a year. So Civica has Erasmus Plus funding until September 2022, and is currently applying for further funding until 2028. In addition, and to strengthen the research activity, Horizon 2020 funding has been added for a period of three years, so from 2021 to 2023. And this is the Civica Research Project. So very quickly, overall, the Civica Alliance now represents 50,000 students and 10,000 academics. Like many alliances, four major things constitute the pillars of the university. And the pillars drive both joint courses and collaborative research activities. So the Civica Research Project aims to lay the foundations for a collective and concerted vision of research activities within the Alliance. It consists of seven work packages, and libraries are actually involved in two of them, the WP3 and WP4. So we will talk specifically about WP4, dedicated to open science, because it has been initiated by the libraries, and it is led by the libraries. So this WP4 aims, again, to lay the foundations for the principles of openness in research within Civica, and to effectively promote this cultural change. So the cultural change is really our keyword there. And it is a question of community building, of course, which is of primary importance, but not only. So now, maybe more specifically, we are working on a network of open science reference, and we are working to build a community. But we are also working on the specificities of Civica's disciplines in social sciences, and their impact on open practices, especially data. We are going to work on the indicators showing the openness of the results of the research carried out within the Alliance, and their possible inclusion in the evaluation of the researchers. And finally, we are trying to have a pooled training activity for researchers, specifically young researchers, and which would also be as inclusive as possible, for example, by including the support staff, among which libraries, of course. So libraries are, therefore, key partners in the implementation of the whole work package. However, it soon became clear to us that the working groups we created at the beginning of the project needed to be extended and hybridized with the other research-related professions, so not only the libraries. So a big part of our work is, as I told before, to build this inclusive community. So to do this, we have identified an initial list of 24 open science contact points among our partners. But it turned out that, as you can see, the librarians are again in the majority. So we have put this community and hopefully hybrid community into the whole process of this cultural change. So we really need to create this community, because it is one of the drivers for cultural change, as you can see on this pyramid. So by the way, this pyramid was created by Brian Nose, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and he is also the director of the COS, Center for Open Science. So at first, this pyramid shows that cultural change is, well, I mean, difficult to implement, of course, and that the communities play a significant role in the process, but not only. It also shows that even if you know that individuals, that researchers, are motivated to apply a common vision on open science and, of course, have the ability to be open and have their research reproducible and so on, it is not sufficient to succeed. So we really, as librarians and as leaders of this work package, we really need to pursue a comprehensive change strategy. And this requires these five levels of intervention represented by this pyramid. So these levels are progressive. They reflect the fact also that successful implementation of higher levels depend on successful implementation of lower levels. So infrastructure is the base of the pyramid, making behavior change possible. And then there are the user interfaces and experiences, which need to be easy and integrate with researchers, existing workflows, of course. Then there are the communities themselves, which work to increase the uptake of open science practices. So they have to meet with each other, they have to pass on the information about on their own networks, and so on. And then comes the incentives and the policies, which need to be aligned. So to start on a common vision of our cultural exchange, we organize two events, a webinar and a specific meeting. Maybe Helen can talk about that later on. So now regarding the policy and also the infrastructure levels, so the top and the first level, we have initiated a barometer to measure the commitment to open science among each partners. So the aim was to see how well equipped the partners were in terms of infrastructure and institutional or national support at the beginning of the project. And then to conduct, to rerun, twice this barometer during and at the end of the project to see the evolution on this pyramid. So the first responses show an average and evolving level. I won't go into details here, but we added a slide with the overall results of this first round. But what is important is that in the next round, we will add reflective questions on the changes observed between the two rounds. So on this cultural change process, and in particular, we will ask what barriers and obstacles have been identified that would have prevented progress on certain items regarding these infrastructures, tools, policies and so on, because barriers can arise at a national, at an international or institutional level. So we will also address the issue of needs to overcome the difficulties identified. So these are basically all the levels of intervention for us libraries, and I will now hand over to Helen for more maybe technical details. Thank you Sophie. Sophie has spoken about two of the project deliverables, which are well underway. For the remainder of the project, we are now moving on to tasks relating to data interoperability, open science indicators and training of researchers, particularly young researchers. However, I wanted to step back a little bit and look at open science principles and the overall approach we wanted to take on this project. The team who designed the project plan had identified important areas of work, however, as a collaborative team looking at open science from various perspectives, we soon identified we needed something overarching to bring this all together and ensure the various work was cohesive. As you will be aware, several principles already exist from the European Commission, funders and institutions, and a set of principles seemed a sensible way to go. Our regular meetings that included all colleagues across the eight civic institutions working on open science was the place that we have been working on these issues. So key debates have included do existing principles work for the social sciences? How can a set of principles work across institutions with very different levels of engagement with open science and also different national frameworks? How can the principles be flexible enough for institutions to engage with them without conflicting with existing policies? We're still finalizing these principles, but a key approach has already emerged that for civica at this stage, the principles should focus on the activities and needs for of the social science researchers rather than wider institutional structures and policies, although we still recognize these are important and still fall within our work. The three priority areas identified are open access publishing, open data and citizen science or participatory research. Sophie, could you move on to the next slide please? Thank you. We hope that this overarching approach and the principles identified will enable us to start to point towards that cultural change that Sophie's already mentioned in the social science across civic institutions. As a common thread, our institutions is our specialization in social sciences. Professor Patrick Dunleavy, Editor-in-Chief of LSE Pref, is a co-leader on some of the open science deliverables and is particularly interested in the gaps in skills and guidance for qualitative researchers. Civica has also built in plans to look very closely at disciplinary opportunities and challenges in open science across the breadth of social sciences offered at our institutions. Although civica research is a project centered around research support and infrastructure, civica has also funded a set of research projects being run by academics across the eight institutions based on the themes that Sophie mentioned before. So this gives an opportunity to really partner and consult with those projects, test our ideas and the work that we have produced as well as undertake our own investigations relating to open science on those projects. We very much hope that the project outputs will provide something new and we are reviewing existing research and guidance to ensure we don't reinvent the wheel. Initial findings will be published as project reports over the next 21 months or so. We also hope to build on these reports with the open access publication of a dedicated handbook for open science for the social sciences. One of our key deliverables involves experimenting and signing training in open science for social sciences and scientists sorry especially young researchers. Colleagues are currently doing an audit of existing training across in civica institutions and elsewhere and again we hope to present something new very practical training materials that equip researchers with the skills to build open science into their research practice. So again speaking to that ambition to start to affect cultural change. Much of the work we've been doing has been exploratory and we're aware there are limits to the amount we can achieve across eight institutions in such a short space of time. However as Sophie mentioned civica is already planning further funding applications and project design into which the work that we're doing is being built so we very much hope our work on open science can continue in the civica. There's lots of information about civica and its various projects on the website and social media platforms and we already have an open science event on the civica youtube channel. So we'll be posting more about our open science work and as the project develops on this civica resources. So thank you very much. Thank you Sophie and Helen it's really good to in the context of research partnerships to hear about this important area where we as libraries can clearly get involved, can partner, can lead and can help shape the the agenda in this space so it's good to hear your experience rather than that. So thank you for that. I'm sure your presentation will generate a lot of questions around about that. So thank you. Okay our final presentation is going to be given by Phil Cheeseman associate director of academic services at Lancaster University and Thomas Shaw associate director of digital innovation and research services also from Lancaster and they're going to be looking at the issue of Lancaster. The title of their talk is Lancaster digital collections making our library vision a reality and they're going to explore in the presentation the Lancaster University's development and future plans for Lancaster digital collections particularly in the context of their new strategy. So Phil and Thomas over to you. Thank you. So we're going to talk about our work with Lancaster digital collections and how this is an example of making our library vision the library towards 2025 a reality. So firstly we'd just like to introduce Lancaster University so we're a medium-sized research-intensive university in the northwest of England and we're part of the NA group of research-intensive universities and as a library we really thrive on challenging traditional notions of what a library is and what a library does going beyond providing just a service and beyond thinking about the library just in terms of books and the building and developing partnerships and collaborations beyond the library is a really key part of our DNA and you can you can see the teeth illustrated on the screen here with some of the perhaps the more playful activities that have taken place recently in the library space. So in the top right that's the traces art workshop with university cleaning staff the bottom right is a mending station session with sewing cafe Lancaster one of our community projects and then off and left that's our library director Andrew Barker and yes he really is playing records in the library and I'm guessing that's something you probably not usually associate with a library or indeed with a library director for that matter. So as a library in 2020 we started to work on a new vision the library towards 2025 and that was launched in April 2021 and it's a vision that seeks to capture and articulate our ethos and ambition that I've just described. We took a deliberately collaborative approach to this and we didn't want to just lock ourselves away in a room and write what we thought the library should be and do. We worked with stakeholders across the institution to really combine their voice and our voice together and we used a variety of innovative approaches to do this and such as provocations and these were a range of deliberately provocative statements so for example the libraries to get rid of all of its print books and so these are not necessarily things we would actually do of course or do to their their full extent but they were very much designed to start a conversation to be provocative and to really to push at the limits of what people think a library is and a real headline emerged out of that work. We connect, we innovate, we include and that headline is articulated across the five themes that you can see on the screen which Phil will explore later in the presentation. So alongside developing the vision at the same time we started a major initiative to develop Lancaster Digital Collections a platform for hosting high quality image collections. Lancaster Digital Collections or LDC for short is our instance of the Cambridge Digital Library Platform which has been developed by the University of Cambridge since 2010. The University of Manchester worked with Cambridge to develop Manchester Digital Collections which was launched in Jeremy 2020 and we're now the third institution to join and we launched Lancaster Digital Collections in September 2021 and we really see this as it's a true partnership with Cambridge and we work with them on a collaborative project at the outset to containerize the code base for the platform and this was a really significant step towards it now being fully open source. So we could have just built of course our own platform in house we could have just done our own thing but we really saw the benefits of working in collaboration with Cambridge and with Manchester and developing really strong relationships with them and we hope that that will happen with other institutions too as part of the recently launched Cambridge Digital Collections platform consortium. So we launched the LDC with five collections initially. Firstly the Satterthwaite Letter Books, the John Welch Letters and the Glass Lantern Slides Collection and these are all collections from a local region which are held in our library special collections. Alongside those collections are the outputs from an AHRC funded project entitled Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive and these are digitized outputs about the experience of cinema going in the 1930s. And then we have perhaps my personal favorite we have a vast collection of really beautiful Edwardian postcards curated by a professor of literacy studies at Lancaster University. In addition to these we also have a really exciting pipeline of new collections coming in including an AHRC funded citizen science project to transcribe the notebooks of the 19th century chemist Humphrey Davy and that's a really significant national collection held at the Royal Institution. And we also have in the pipeline a British Academy and Leather Hume Trust project exploring the historic Ordnance Survey name books from the from the local region. And we have arranged really bold ambitions for how we want the LDC to develop in the future. Although it has a really central role as an image platform we want to go beyond it just being that and the LDC will help us to enable research it will really enhance the library's role as a partner across the research life cycle. Hosting content that is open and inclusive and really helping to drive public engagement and impact with that research. And these are some of our key future developments. So firstly integrating the Ohms or oral history metadata synchronizer player into the platform to play audio content with dynamic synced transcriptions. We also want to make the LDC a laboratory for primary research and digital scholarship through text and data mining approaches and we're already exploring this with a reader in linguistics at Lancaster who's piloting the satisfied letter books for corpus linguistic approaches. The Humphrey Davy project is already using the citizen science platform Zooniverse to crowdsource transcriptions and two days for this but we'd really love to be able to import Zooniverse data directly into the platform for analysis and preparation then again really help to make the LDC a tool for primary research. And we don't just see the LDC as a standalone platform it's its real potential will come alive when it's integrated into the wider digital research and innovation ecosystem through for instance integration with Zooniverse with a digital preservation system and integration with other instances of the platform at other institutions to create an interconnected network of scholarship. And finally and perhaps most importantly we really see the LDC as the basis for ambitious partnerships beyond Lancaster University and this is a theme which Phil is going to go on and explore further. So at this point I'm going to hand over to Phil and he's going to examine this work further through the lens of our library vision. Thanks Tom and apologies for not being here to come on screen earlier and my screen took just the wrong moment to freeze for me. So I'm going to talk just a little bit about how LDC Lancaster digital collections connects with our vision. So just first of all returning to our library vision. The five themes that you you see here really outline our ambitions and commitments as a library and when developing them it was really important for us that we didn't just describe what we do but also the kind of library we would be and the behaviors we demonstrate. And to operationalize that we've mapped all of our forthcoming priorities against the five themes in our vision developing a five-year roadmap that you can see on the on the right hand side here. We have some 27 29 vision outcomes of which Lancaster digital digital collections is just one. So looking at the the first of our themes which is on digital and physical libraries. Our vision is very much to position the library so there's no separation between digital and physical environments and inhabit and engage across both spaces. It's very much our ambition for digital collections as well. And the public launch of LDC coincided with a two-day library festival that we held in September last year to celebrate the opening of our new extension and showcase some of the creative spaces it holds. Now at that time many staff were on the cusp of transition from homeworking to getting back onto campus. Some restrictions were still in place and there was lots of conversation about hybrid approaches. So we were able to lead the way and demonstrate the power of truly blending the digital and physical environments extending our reach and providing a truly inclusive experience. The Saturday evening event that was our showcase streamed was streamed over YouTube and has had some 67 000 views. And for Lancaster digital collections this meant we were able to showcase the digital collections alongside a physical exhibition in our new space and to launch the event where presenters and audience participated either in person or online. I think we even had a member of the one of the presenters present from from Greece. So our second theme talks to the role we play as a library connecting with others and bringing communities together. Tom's already outlined the benefits of our partnership with Cambridge and Manchester during the implementation of LDC and our commitment to the consortium that will drive future development. Equally important for us were the partnerships we developed with our research communities and others groups such as Lancaster Digital Humanities Hub. Our work with them not only established the initial collections but also led to some early opportunities for engagement. Just one example illustrated in this slide we used the the Sattweight Letter Books and other library collections. We used to support a project to explore the historic role of Lancaster in transatlantic slave trade. This community project led by the Lancaster Black History Group involved us in partnership with academic staff from Lancaster from the University of Central Lancashire together with the City Museums, local schools and the Lancaster based sewing cafe. It culminated in a hybrid conference held in in the library last November. So moving on to the theme that sits at the heart of our vision our third theme is the commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion. For us this is not just about providing inclusive and supportive spaces and services or opening up our collections it's about celebrating diversity and recognising the value it contributes to our distinctiveness. Lancaster Digital Collections democratises access to the collections beyond those able to travel and see them in person. Our open and inclusive approach to developing new collections will ensure the diversity of the material it holds. The platform is key to realising our open science ambitions including facilitating citizen science and allowing the public to be empowered actors of research. Alongside other initiatives such as introducing community collections and free community cards for public access, LDC contributes to our ambition to be an open library at the heart of all our communities. So our fourth theme talks to the lasting change we'll bring through disruptive innovation. Lancaster Digital Collections has innovation at its heart and is a hub for new research and engagement, public engagement, not simply an image repository. It ensures sustainability of physical artifacts and digital objects for the future. It's also inspired us to think more boldly about the value in our special collections and archives as well as the potential for hosting collections created by others. On this slide three early examples of innovations in LDC. We're working with an academic colleague to develop a short course where students will create digital editions for a literary extract titled My Owl. We're also exploring the use of 3D scanning to open up access for schools to items held in our special collections and archives as well as those in the city museums. And we're continuing our work with the Lancaster Black History Group on the Slavery Family Trees project to create an augmented reality Lancaster City tour. And our final theme articulates our commitment to act in a global context and at a local level. LDC connects our local communities in the northwest of England by hosting collections originating locally, including collections owned by other local organizations. Yet it has a global reach opening up opportunities for engagement and partnerships internationally. Working with local communities and groups we'll continue to develop collections that document the rich culture and heritage of the region as illustrated in this example from our glass lantern slides collection that you can see on the left. We'll also use LDC as a platform for engaging with global issues such as climate change, environmental impact and sustainability. We're in the early stages of gathering content for an archive of the development of Eden North in Morgan Bay. So to conclude in this presentation we've drawn on just one example the the development of Lancaster digital collections to illustrate how our vision is transforming the library at Lancaster helping us to realize our ambitions to be a library at the heart of our community's local and global to connect to innovate and to include. Thank you. Thanks very much Phil and Tom. I think it was great to have that really important part of our work with digital space which clearly provides many opportunities for partnerships. I think it was interesting also that you highlighted that in order to have true partnership we do need to be very open but you've clearly been also prepared to take risk and I think if we want to to think more widely about how partnerships can develop that's something we need to consider. So I very much appreciate your talk and it's good to have that aspect of those kind of areas of opportunities covered this morning. So I'd now like to invite our presenters to turn back on their cameras and open up their mics and we'll move into the panel session to do the the Q&A. So thank you colleagues for doing that and that will so what I'll do first of all is just ask take some some individual questions to you first to warm things up and then we'll move on to questions from the audience. So first of all Amelie just to ask obviously I picked up and that your role is probably quite unusual in terms of these roles in libraries at the moment although of course you did mention that you worked at the British Library before. I wonder if you could say a little bit about where you came from and how you transitioned into this role and what kind of skills or changes you felt you had to make to to make yourself effective in your current role. Yeah so I suppose I first became involved in research projects sort of on a practical level when I was working as a curator at the British Library and quite by accident when I joined the BL as digital music curator one of the things that landed on my plate was working on on an AHRC funded project which we were a project partner on so I began to learn about I suppose the the nuts and bolts of how things worked and see the see the benefits but also some of the challenges of working in that way and became sort of really really interested in in how you can build bring together research to fulfill strategic priorities and how you can craft applications to really meet the needs of libraries and then fortunately a post came up at the British Library so I was in in their research development team which is quite quite well established where I was able to kind of get the job because I'd had some practical experience of working on a research project which had just come about by chance and and then sort of learn learn the craft the sort of the research of the research administration but I think it really does help having a background in libraries because it means that you know where the pinch points might be you know where the challenges might be when you're putting together applications which can make a make a little difference I think. I mean would you say there's anything particular kind of yeah obviously be as open as comfortable you are but in terms that you found particularly challenging about the other things you've really had to say perhaps pick up from scratch or things which have been a little bit more foreign to you perhaps in some other aspects of the world. I think probably the hardest thing is costing because costing is so important and costing even when you're not in in the budget costing out your input kind contributions there's so many ways of doing it there are so many things that you can get wrong there can be exchange rates there can be salary improvements there can be inflation and I think that's the thing that I really had to had to work out to learn but we're very fortunate that we have a costing tool that does all of that for us now it does a lot that for us you have to apply some common sense to make sure the system's working as it should but the British Library we had a spreadsheet and it was much harder to do that than with a proper costing tool. Yeah okay thank you very much for that so moving on to to Sophie and Helen again thank you for your talk I'm very conscious having had some involvement myself with some of our European alliances that it's been very heavily a lot of the work has been very heavily focused on the academic side and trying to get that library voice to be heard can often be a challenge I just wondered if you if you could reflect a bit on your you've clearly done some great work in the open science but did you get immediate acceptance that you were the people to lead where the conversations you have to have are there still areas where you could see you could do more but there's a bit of negotiation yet to be had to persuade people that you are able to do that I don't know which one of you might want to just think reflect on that first Hello Helen do you want to Yeah sure I can do this and yeah so I came to the CivicA project a little bit late but it was my impression that because this project was very much related on infrastructure research support that professional services on the whole were very very well represented and as a result librarians did have a lot of presence within the project plan we've got we've what we found is that at some institutions across the alliance there's different levels of staffing in libraries so some of us are better staffed than others and what that means is that some of us have very specific skills say at LSE and Sciences Po and then in other colleagues at other institutions have only got maybe one or two people that come to the same meetings and I think it's quite a lot of work for them but also they don't have necessarily developed the services yet so there can be an imbalance across the alliance but I feel very much that librarians have been supported to take the lead on this and Sophie maybe can add something because I know Sophie's really been integral to that from the start of the project design okay thank you yes Sophie yes thank you Eileen I totally agree and as with this project we really strive to move forward together as you said even if there are disparities and well because also we are libraries and we are not in such a competitive you know landscape so even if there are disparities in human resources and equipments as you just said we have to avoid thinking in terms of the lowest common denominator as we say in France but rather in terms of collective ambition and that might be a bit difficult we do not find it so difficult among and within libraries but as soon as you talk with academics it's another story of course because there there is a totally different landscape with totally different consequences and so on so can you say that you've seen examples where you've had conversations and you're saying these people on different levels and they once they've talked to you you can see them moving up and moving up to a higher level and understanding here you can see nods yeah great so what I'd say that's it's really encouraging to hear that because I know that this whole area is clearly something where we have a lot of opportunity to provide partnership and again obviously I was very grateful that you mentioned you're planning to to publish a lot of your outputs to make those very public so I'm sure a lot of us will want to follow that work so that's fantastic over to Tom and Phil and thank you again for for your presentation clearly you are people who like to explore new spaces which is great but that can sometimes come with a little bit of a sense that people think that you you may be moving into spaces either that you possibly shouldn't go into or they feel that there's a degree of ownership which is there already I wonder if you've had any of those challenges and again just to reflect on on that kind of experience which one of you wants to have go first I'll start first and Tom I don't know if you do come in so so yeah I guess it's something very we're very conscious of and and it was some I think it very much influenced the our approach to the work we do around our vision to start with so we began really by well we we undertook a sort of 360 analysis where we looked at our own perceptions of where the library was placed alongside those of people right across the institution and that then led to sort of that collaborative development that meant that we were partners from the beginning before we'd sort of set where the library was was positioning itself for the future which made it that much easier than to continue the conversation on so I think that was at the starting point of it it's I think we we have to acknowledge very much that we're in an experimenting phase so we are trying lots of new things but they're always instigated or they're always instigated with others if not by others so there's always that partnership from the outset and I think we've put put down a line that basically says we'll try anything that feels right provided we've got someone to partner with and ideally more than one group to partner with so that we're bringing people together thank you Thomas anything you wanted to add to that yeah I agree entirely with with all of that and I think as as Phil said I think the key thing is you know about approaching these as partnerships as collaborations so that it's it's not about the library you know trying to establish an empire that kind of ventures into into other areas it's it's much more about the you know the the expertise and the value that we can bring through those those partnerships and the way that we connect up with other people to to do that and certainly a Lancaster I think the you know the response to to all of this of the library moving into new and unexpected areas has been overwhelmingly positive from from the wider institution and perhaps a little bit of surprise sometimes but you know as a library that we're you know really interested in moving into these areas but certainly the response has been you know overwhelmingly a positive one. I think just to follow up on that I mean we've been having some interesting conversations locally about the how people perceive the concept of library and again it was interesting to talk this the talk this morning clearly saying as an idea it remains very strong but what people think that idea we find can sometimes be a barrier and I can hear you're very inner see lots of nods which is I'm kind of hoping you're going to tell me actually you've begun to be able to change that and I'll open this to everybody because you're all working in quite what might be described as slightly new or innovative spaces for libraries have you begun to see mindsets changing thinking okay library perhaps is something a bit different from what I remember 10 15 20 years ago again Tom perhaps because you lasted do you want to come in first and then I'll invite others to come. Sure I think we've seen that to a huge extent I think you know the the way in which you know for instance researchers will reach out to us now around areas like research data in a way where even just a few years ago they probably wouldn't have made that connection so readily between you know that field and the library you know I think things have you know certainly over the last decade have you know there's been a real kind of transformation I think in the way in which you know our users and our partners think about and conceive off of the library and still a lot more to do of course and you know I think as you know it's Phil and I talked about in the in the presentation that sense of the vision being you know both our voice and their voice combined I think that's the really powerful thing where it's not it's not just on the one hand us going out and you know saying you know and kind of talking about what the library should be without engaging with others and equally it's not about us just asking people what they want from the library and kind of you know in a more transactional way just doing whatever we're asked to do it's you know something much more powerful than that where you bring our knowledge and our expertise and the voice of our users as well to to get to push and shift and push the limits of what people think a library is. Helen I could see you nodding there as well but do you want to add? Yeah all of our project deliverables include I think researchers and it's been quite interesting to see that I think there's a perception that's been that that researchers are very much the experts in a particular domain and that the library may not have as much to offer and I don't know if Emily will see this but then when when we've shown what we have got to offer in the in the areas of open science research data management there's been a real shift in opinion and approach to the library and I think academics have really valued how much knowledge experience skills resources that we can bring there so that's been a really pleasing results of being involved in this project. I think yeah I don't know if Sophie you want to add anything about that. Thank you yeah Emily you was again you were also nodding when I asked the initial question. Yeah I think we're making really good progress in traditional academics I suppose you might say so it's the lecturers and so on across the university understanding what the library can bring to research projects beyond the kind of services that they walk in and they see deep collaborations that I would I was talking about. I think where we've still got to do more work at least in Cambridge is with our own central research office who often are still quite puzzled to see library staff being included as co-investigators and still sometimes get confused and think well the library's already included in this application because we're adding overheads to certain posts and that's the library that's the service and the more applications that we put in the more of those perceptions are beginning to change and things like the RLUK professional practice fellowship scheme which is specifically to enable staff to lead a small research project that's really helping us to challenge those perceptions that there is still work to do there. Okay thank you it's a very I was smiling it's a very familiar story the one you're telling about some of the conversations we've had with colleagues in research offices but it is possible to make progress. Okay so to move over to some of the questions from from the audience so first of all a question from Samuel Bellow around about funding I think this is for Emily I think you referenced quite a lot of UK funding opportunities and I think it's just suggesting are there have you come across wider opportunities which you've been able to make use of? Yeah so it's worth saying that so the major funders that we apply to are the UKRI ones so including the AHRC and they have to be led by a UK partner but you can cost in international collaborators that they're called that they can be co-investigators or researchers so it is possible and we are still able to apply to the various EU schemes as well so there's definitely it's definitely possible what I would say with the EU schemes what I'm finding and I think is that people are beginning to think when a project is being led by say Germany or Belgium or somewhere like that they're beginning to hesitate a bit more about UK partners because of perceived and some real barriers so it's getting a bit harder to build those partnerships but it is all technically still possible. Thank you very much for that. Helen and Sophie there's been a couple of questions from Hope Willard around about your self-assessment questionnaire and audit so first part of the question is will all project partners take the self-assessment questionnaire at the same time and how did you design it and then I think tied to that then there's a question about audit or auditing the work which has been done so auditing develop training for mid-career or senior researchers who started before open science appeared and I can feel where that question is coming from but so maybe those two parts would you like to answer those for us please thank you. Yes as for the self-assessment questionnaire yes all project partners took the questionnaire at the same time for the first round that was the last summer and how was the self-assessment questionnaire designed it was adapted from a template coming from open air so I can maybe paste the link on the chat device so here it is so it is an adaptation and we had because we work with a colleague from Sciences Po Cecile who is an expert in surveys she really helped us adapting this template to our needs so I'm sure Cecile will be happy to answer technical questions if necessary after this session and yes the facts that all the partners take the questionnaire at the same times that is because we created these working groups with at least one person from each university that was almost compulsory and this is really important so that each of these persons can refer to experts in their own university and they really have to have this questionnaire done by a certain time we think it is really important and this is what we were talking about before about this collective ambition also okay and then there was the question about audits of people who perhaps have come into this space before a lot of the questions around about open science open scholarship that have appeared so Helen I can see you nodding which are kind of I think that was the question was thinking about a range of researchers not just young I think I mentioned young early career researchers yeah that was something that came up actually in one of our very early events where we asked a panel of researchers to talk and reflect on their own open science practices and it was identified that really established academics could also do with some kind of way of reflecting on their practice also they mentioned that they learn a lot from their own early career researchers PhD researchers that they might be supervising in this area of work so I think what we're hoping to do is develop a model where a sort of train the trainer or that we have some ambassadors so possibly early career researchers that with that but not neglecting established researchers because we've identified it's established researchers can also really get behind open science but yeah that that's something that we're going to do and with regard to the audit we're still in the early days of that one one of our colleagues is doing that at the moment and again I hope maybe we can share that openly so people can see kind of what we've cataloged there that's fantastic thank you very much okay next question I have is for Phil and Tom so a very specific question about Zuniverse and how you've integrated that into Lancaster collections so that one is from Lindsay Gulliver so I don't know which one of you two might like to have a first crack at that I'm happy to have a go first with that one I guess the first thing to say about Zuniverse is that integrating it into the platform is very much a long-term aspiration rather than something that we've already done and it's very much aspirational at this stage so it's not yet something where we've been able to start to engage with the detail to look at whether there is technically possible even or to you know to kind of understand what that would look like and the the Humphrey Davy project that we spoke about is using Zuniverse but all of the work with Zuniverse is happening outside of the platform and then the the transcriptions from Zuniverse will be basically manually imported into into the platform so it's really just an idea at this stage but it's something that we would love to do and we'd love to work on as part of the consortium with Cambridge, Manchester and hopefully others you know if that's something of interest to to other institutions I mean it just feels like there's this real potential to do something that's more than just a platform of images and to you know to almost build a kind of research lab in the in the back end of the platform through those those kind of integrations. Phil I don't know if there's anything further you wanted to come in on on that one. No no no I think you're absolutely right I mean it's it is about making it more than an image repository but not trying to build all the functionality into one platform rather than looking at integrations. Yeah I would have thought I mean as a not being a particularly technical person myself but it looks like a really interesting piece of technology I would hope that through today you will actually attract a few other people who may be interested to talk to you about using that approach and see how that might develop within the UK. I've got a question here from William Nixon round about the platform and I agree it looks fantastic you're on the digital platform nice and clean very clear already draws you in when you were looking at what was there so a question around about a bit more detail about the technical resources and the funding you needed to to develop the platform. Okay right so well I think we'll probably say the same is that that actually we have a very small technical team at Lancaster. We just had a couple of individuals that were working on this from the technical perspective as part of a project team that also included staff from our other library staff. We benefited hugely from working with Cambridge and I think their aspiration from the start was to was through this partnership to develop something that would mean that other institutions with only limited technical support locally will be able to take it on board and that was what was also really interesting for us it's about going from something that was was designed bespoke to Cambridge to transitioning to that open source which is where they are now with the code base so that that our collective resource is what leads to future development. In terms of funding it was funded internally within the university it was recognised as a key priority for the university as well as the library in terms of being able to showcase not just image collections but also some of the great research outputs from the university so that was the impetus behind the project as much as anything. Tom is there anything you wanted to add to that? No I think that covers everything and as Will have said we've already had that small development team in the library and they've really been the key to having the resource to get the thing off the ground. I think that's great encouragement to all of us as you've said that you've done it relatively speaking with a small team but of course also used an open technology to develop that which fits very nicely into what we're talking about today. So the next question really is for I think probably Helen, Sophie and possibly Amelie. I did wonder whether they would get through without mentioning the Brexit word and the impact of funding. So there's one direct question from Gwen around about has Brexit affected UK universities working with European universities and especially on EU funded projects and I guess I would just add to that I'm guessing the answer is going to be yes but it would be good to get you to reflect but also then I guess to hear how you'll begin to think if that is going to be the case are there ways you can mitigate what you're looking at in terms of ongoing collaborations. So perhaps Helen and Sophie first and then Amelie you might want to comment on that thank you. Yeah I think LSE snuck in on Civic Alliance just before Brexit that's my understanding around that time and I think there has had to be some thinking around LSE's position but I know Sophie knows more about that so I'll pass over to you Sophie. Yeah well I think yes LSE is not part of the Erasmus plus any longer but LSE is still part of the H 2020 project and maybe Horizum Europe also so we hopefully LSE will be part of the next Civica research project we really hope that will be the case and I think we all think that European projects are so important in these times so really we have to do our utmost to enable LSE to push you and hopefully it will be the case. So Amelie did you want to to comment on have you had any reflections on the likely changes and challenges we might have with some of our European collaborations? Yeah so so far we haven't been too badly impacted we in a period of uncertainty I think the government had underwritten all of the European funding anyway and there hasn't been anything that we have wanted to apply to that we haven't. My slight fear is that as things progress it may be more difficult to build those partnerships with the UK and then there may be things that they get in the way of bringing researchers into the UK really easily in the way that was possible in the past so I think it could I'm sure that there's a strong will to continue collaborating but I fear it may become a little more difficult to to actually bring things to fruition. Okay thank you very much so I think we've got time we can run over a little bit today colleagues so I've got time for just a few more questions now there's a question around about resourcing but I want to leave that to the end because I think that's going to be a question for all of you. So another question for Tom or Phil could you say a bit more about your future plans for the platform and I think you have touched a little bit about other potential organisations which might get involved but maybe just say a little bit about what your next plans and ambitions are. Tom I'll let you take that one first. Sure so I think you know very much our next steps probably two-fold really so firstly looking at on the platform side some of the the technical developments so you know mentioned things in the presentation around Zooniverse for instance a more immediate priority for us is the integration of the the OMS player and that will allow us to be able to to host and manage audiovisual content and coming out of our AHRC funded Cinema Memory project a lot of the outputs from that project are basically digitised versions of oral history recordings from the 1990s that are on cassette and CD and that's a that's a more immediate priority for us is to have that functionality in the platform so that we can then ingest and host those types of recordings so we've got a number of things going on on the technical side of the platform itself and then over on the other side it's really about looking at the future of the content and the collections so we've got as we mentioned in the presentation a number of collections that are in the pipeline that are coming in but also continuing to have a variety of conversations you know with both people in the university who have collections that might have a home on the platform so particularly colleagues working in digital humanities who are producing as project outputs you know high quality images that would have potentially you know really a really suitable home in the platform but also the possibility of hosting collections on behalf of others where you know they've got the content but they don't necessarily have the resourcing or the of the digital expertise and infrastructure to be able to host those collections so I'll just hand over to to Phil at this point in case there's anything Phil you wanted to say further about the you know sort of hosting collections on behalf of others yeah I'll just point to to the comment in the chat from from Leslie which I think is very much appreciated it's our sort of collective vision I think really is that we could each do this individually and at Lancaster we could host regional collections but actually we gain benefits not just by working together to develop a tool that is of benefit for us all but but also through joining up connect collections really which you know is very much at the heart and though of the ROUK strategy it's only possible when we work together from the outset to a sort of common goal or make sure that we're aligned in that way and I think that's the real benefit for us here as much as having the platform which we're very proud of and get great value from it it's the wider opportunity to connect and to deliver something collaboratively. Thank you and in the context of a discussion we're having about partnerships and partnerships supporting research I think obviously this is a really great example of how libraries can partner together to support the research infrastructure so thank you. One quick question before we go on to the the prioritization one again for Phil and Tom just around about the licenses and the question here around about which licenses you apply to your digital collections and if you could try and a really quick one then as open as possible wherever possible the most open licenses you can apply certainly creating columns you know but zero wherever possible I think really. Just briefly are there any areas where that's been more challenging? Not with our existing collections I don't think. Perfect okay colleagues I'd just like to finish up on the question which is part of a question which was posed by Liz Waller around about prioritization and so she asked particularly around about academics speaking to academics and how you decide prioritizations for digitization but I think listening to all of you you all work in areas which have enormous possibilities and I suspect you must all come up against the challenge of resourcing where you prioritize so I wonder if you might like to all just as we finish up to reflect a bit more broadly about how you make those choices and I think the other challenge I would say is that you're all in quite new areas which makes prioritization even more difficult to decide what to pick so hopefully that's given you a few pointers to reflect on but perhaps Phil and Tom just if you want to start on the specific question about engaging with academics and prioritization of digitization and then thinking more generally about prioritization me being very aware in the areas of open scholarship I mean there are so many choices so how are you thinking about that prioritization question so please Well I guess a lot of how we've approached things up to now has been there's been a I guess a fairly organic element to that of you know developing relationships with with academics that has been you know given rise to opportunities where some of that has kind of naturally you know slotted into place in terms of priorities without too much trouble I think a really key thing for us is really looking at our strategic priorities as a library and as an institution and using that as a you know as a guide as a you know a compass for us so to speak in terms of you know what has the what has the best fit with both the library and the university's strategic priorities and you know prioritizing those things that have the kind of stronger strategic fit the the stronger potential for value and impact and you know kind of making those a priority. Phil is there anything on that you wanted to come in on? Only that I think you know what you say about the the library and university strategy is key to it really for us that's very much why we tie everything back to the vision that we've got which in itself aligns to the university strategy it keeps us on track that's what we have a five-year plan we can't do everything this year but we can sequence things and prioritize for the future as well as for today. Fantastic so Sophie and Helen from your perspective and that really difficult question of choices and prioritization anything you'd like to reflect on from your area of work? From LSE I guess what I'd like to say is that you know it's such a huge amount of work to be involved in a funded research project and the amount of deliverables the documentation the bureaucracy is just huge so it does it does raise questions of resourcing and prioritization it's entirely worth it and I think what this project's enabled us to do at LSE is think about an area that we would have got to but we're actually going to get to quicker so open science so I think what we're hoping to do is really take what we learn from the Civic Alliance but also adapt it to LSE and I expect the other institutions are doing that and I think that happily open science fits into a couple of the LSE's overall strategic project strategic aims so research for the world and also sustaining the social sciences so it's really been a great way to work with other social science institutions to really think about open science from that social science perspective so yeah I think that it's really being involved in this project I suppose has made sure that we're reprioritizing within LSE library and making sure that we make the most of this and build open science at LSE as much as we can thank you Sophie has anything you'd like to add well I think Helen you covered everything maybe something totally different is that I think we all agree to prioritize all actions that would enable us to address specificities in our disciplines so I think we currently lack expertise on how best to share data in specific disciplines which can vary enormously from one discipline to another so I think we are in the process of prioritizing all the actions which would bring more expertise in these fields thank you then Emily over to you I mean I couldn't help notice when you showed your love your fantastic project list but what a broad scope of things were included within that so you must face that question about what you pick and choose yeah and it's really tricky because you can do a certain amount of strategic thinking with research funding because you know that there are certain open calls that you can apply to at any time and certain things that will come up regularly but there are a lot of things that you can't predict so I think it's all always sort of three things that are jostling together when we're deciding whether we're going to go for something or not go for an application or not it will be how well does whatever is aligned with strategic priorities but there'll also be a very real question about capacity so if it won't bring in new resource can we do it within our existing resource even if it will bring in new resource have we got the space have we got the IT equipment have we got the HR capacity to recruit the new posts and then also the likelihood of success so if something wasn't a top priority but we thought actually we think we've got a really good chance of getting this then then things which it might shift and we would apply even even though you could argue that there's something more urgent than we want to do but there's no opportunity to fund it so it's it's very tricky you have to kind of balance space three elements as best you can