 We're here. So welcome. This is the role of next generation libraries in enhancing multidisciplinary research. So is that what you're expecting? I hope so. So I'm Tom Hickerson. I'm vice provost and university librarian at the University of Calgary. And this session this morning is principally a report on a planning study, multidisciplinary research infrastructure, the role of 21st century libraries. Conducted at the University of Calgary. And the actual workshops were conducted in November. And then we'll talk about implications of our findings. And this is a project generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and we certainly appreciate that support. So talking about what we wanted to do. The principal purpose of this project was to ensure that 21st century libraries are strategically positioned and prepared to support current multidisciplinary research. Today's research libraries are increasingly well positioned to partner in the development and support of a framework of services, technologies, information resources, and expertise critical and efficiently enabling multidisciplinary research. In order to discern the most important requirements necessary to support such research, the project conducted multi-day workshops to provide a means for direct participation by scholars actively involved in related areas of research focus to collectively articulate their primary research support needs. These related focus areas were characterized as research clusters and three clusters were chosen as the focus of the planning project. Project planners envisioned that their findings would allow libraries and university research services to better understand where multidisciplinary cluster research needs align with our current service support infrastructure and allow us to project the future and to infer where we have strengths to develop additional services both independently and in alignment with our universities and across the world. So this is the outline of the presentation and you've heard the introduction. I'm going to be followed by Catherine Ruddick who was a project manager. After that, Shauna Sadler will speak from the perspective of a facilitator and then Joan Lippincott will speak from the perspective of the lead facilitator and then I will finish with implications from our findings. So Tom gave us a good introduction about what this project was about. I think that I'll just quickly sum up our project goal was to find out and explore the extent to which 21st century libraries are strategically positioned and prepared to support current multidisciplinary research. We weren't looking to explore specific projects but really just get to the core of what those core research platform needs are for our researchers and position ourselves so we can explore specific projects in the future. For us, this project was a lot about the process for getting this information. So I'm going to go through a quick timeline of what this project looked like for us. We started in fall 2014 actually where Tom created this concept of what is a research platform, what can we do to contribute to a research platform and conducted meetings in Calgary with Ed McCauley, our vice president for research and Don Waters, the senior program officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation where they identified three multidisciplinary research clusters that are of unique strengths and priority areas for us at the University of Calgary. Focusing on a strategic research theme that we have at the University of Calgary, human dynamics in a changing world. Those were Arctic studies, smart cities and visual analytics. We also identified leads in those areas and in February of 2015, March 2015, we conducted some initial planning meetings with some of the leads and some researchers in those areas to get some preliminary information about how they think this could happen. How could we get the best information from you about what your research needs are? We created a plan for gathering this information, submitted a grant application and were successful in June 2015. So then we really started going in the summer of 2015 where we put together a project team of internal and external stakeholders for starting with some cluster leads within each one of those cluster areas to help scope the cluster. So how big do we want this to be? What types of disciplines need to be covered to champion the study within and recruit potential participants and to recommend outside experts for us to consult with? Mary Beth Murray, the Executive Director of the Arctic Institute of North America and Brian Moorman, Associate Dean for Research, Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary, were Arctic Studies co-leads. Nancy Pollack-Ellwin, Dean of the Faculty of Environmental and Design Studies was our lead for smart cities and Sheila Carpendale, Canadian Research Chair in Information Visualization and the Department of Computer and Science at University of Calgary was our visual analytics lead. We also selected some outside facilitators to help moderate these multi-day workshops. Two of them are on the stage with us today. Joan Lippincott, the Associate Executive Director of the Coalition for Network and Information was our team lead for our facilitator group. Kathleen Shearer, the Executive Director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories and a consultant with the Association of Research Libraries and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries and Research Data Canada was our facilitator for Arctic Studies. Kristen Antleman, University Librarian for California Institute of Technology was our lead for smart cities and Shod and Sadler was the lead facilitator for visual analytics. We also identified a team of 10 people from within libraries and cultural resources to participate on this project team to help us plan the event itself from key areas that we thought would be of importance in our research platform. So we got our associate university librarians together, the head for spatial and numeric data services, our data and visualization coordinator, our head of metadata services, the head for our digital media commons, our grants coordinator and myself, the manager for digitization repository services. We also recruited from our research services office to get them involved in the project team. So we had three members from the research services office participating and then we recruited participation from a range of disciplines at the University of Calgary that covered over 20 disciplines so that each cluster was really multidisciplinary in its nature. And finally we selected and recruited participation by external experts from the University of Calgary identified by those cluster leads. And John Danahy from the University of Toronto was our external expert for smart cities. Stefan Gruber from Carleton University and Scott Lamarro from Queens University were our external experts for Arctic studies. In fall of 2015, that's when we actually got to start doing the things that we were planning all this time. We held some pre-workshop mixers to ensure that our workshop participants had a primer on the purpose of the study, met other participants, including the research services office staff, the LCR project team. And they had a good overview of our services. We did tours. We did an overview of those areas that we thought were going to be of importance for a research platform. This helped to enhance the conversation at the workshops and between our spring planning meetings and the mixers, it gave us some initial ideas for areas of focus at the workshops in the fall. November 18th through 20th, 2015, we had four hour sessions each day, initially focused on cluster specific discussions, external expert presentations and prioritization of research support needs within the clusters, followed by prioritization and consolidation of needs across all of the clusters. Attendance and participation was really good with an average of 40 attendees each day, focused discourse, a collaborative style, strong presentations and participation by those external experts. As I said, we had a range of disciplines represented from anthropology to the arts, environmental design, geology, geography, civil engineering, military and strategic studies. We had a huge range of disciplines that are attended. And then we conducted post session surveys with our research participants and after action reviews with our project team to get feedback on the method of inquiry and what they thought of the outcomes themselves. And finally, that brings us to 2016 where we're doing our data analysis, we're doing our initial dissemination of results and we're planning for our next steps. So in terms of the outcomes, for us, this was a pretty new way to think about how to get this information. It's not just a one off survey. It's not just one meeting and you're done. We really did do this process over a year and built upon our findings throughout the year. So we really wanted to reflect on what worked about this method of inquiry, the strengths and challenges of it. We had a surprising level of consensus over those three days across the clusters. And we thought we had a good amount of evidence that the needs were shared across projects and disciplines, and that the scholars consider the library to be well positioned to be an integral research support component. In terms of the format, some of the strengths was with those structured breakout sessions where they're able to meet in small groups with their facilitators and then coming out and sharing those needs across all of the clusters. It fostered a really collegial atmosphere. People were very open and honest with us, which we were surprised and really happy with. The external experts themselves added a richness to the discussions that we didn't originally envision. They helped elucidate concepts, brought a focus outside from the local research so we could generalize some of these findings or stretch them a bit into the broader picture. And really they became a part of the project team, which we didn't envision in the beginning as well. And again, with the external facilitators, they helped bring some new ideas external to Calgary, helped make results more generalizable in general, and helped not put the focus on the library staff themselves. They were thinking external, they were thinking broader than just what can the library do. In terms of some of the challenges that we had, recruitment was a major one. We conducted the sessions four hours each day from three to seven, which is not a perfect time for a lot of people. But hosting over those three days meant that we didn't get consecutive attendance, but people did try to attend at least one session, whoever was invited, if they could. And so we thought that this allowed us to get more participation in general. And for us, it just meant that we had to be really flexible in our scheduling and our planning. Every day we were meeting and we were adjusting that schedule to make sure that we could include new people, that we weren't losing ideas as we went along. Recruitment over the summer itself was very challenging when we started our recruitment. You can imagine working with like the Arctic Studies cluster, where nobody's on campus, they're all in the Arctic during that time. We did not hear it from anybody until maybe the second week of September. So maybe like two days before the actual November workshops, we were still getting recruitment in. And the other thing about one of the challenges was the scope of this project was really just to get some fixed ideas on what those research components for a research platform needs are. And it wasn't to move into specific projects. And again, you can imagine, in an academic setting, people are focused on results, they want to get down into the weeds into a specific project. And so we really did try to keep that conversation more general, so we have the best information going forward. Our discussions weren't designed to go into specifics. So we didn't meet that outcome, which was something that they wanted, but we have positioned ourselves well to go into that next phase. In terms of the actual common research support needs identified, here are the six that we ended up with. In terms of data and data repositories, data repository infrastructure needs included support for data curation, assistance with data management planning, data stewardship and preservation, capacity to store large data transfers from elsewhere, and the ability to make data accessible and shareable. Digitization, in terms of research, they were thinking about it as a data collection method, the need to convert analog information into digital so they can actually pull that with their born digital information to analyze. And also to clear permissions to get copyright clearance to use that information and whatever research question methodology they had. In terms of expertise, this was actually a need to go to somebody for consultations, for service based expertise, including knowledge of licensing, metadata development, data cleaning, visualization, statistics and scholarly dissemination, survey development, which we found a little bit surprising, rights management, GIS and mapping. Space, this was the need for a centralized, interdisciplinary, collaborative space with up to date technologies. In terms of skills training, this was the need for them themselves to train up in certain areas where as expertise was to go to somebody to get that service. In terms of skills training, we're talking about the importance of developing cross disciplinary skills, focusing on data management, open access publishing, GIS techniques, and guidance and meeting requirements for sponsored funding. And finally, in terms of collaboration, funding for collaborations, participants discussed the need for funding that values and rewards collaborative interdisciplinary partnerships, as well as partnerships with other organizations. And now we're going to hear from Shauna to talk about some of the facilitators perspectives. Thank you, Catherine. I'm going to speak very pragmatically as a facilitator and representant the perspective of the facilitators at the workshop. First and foremost, we thought it was so helpful that the UC gave us a list of participants ahead of time. So we were able to look into their work, become familiar with their terminology, the technologies they used in their research. So it helped us prepare for the session to enable better dialogue. And that was incredibly helpful. And second, the participants themselves were very well prepared to come to the workshop. We expected to do warm up sessions with them, but it was very clear that we didn't have to. And I think that's in large part to what Catherine mentioned was the mixers that they held in the library. And I think that was more valuable than we had ever expected. The workshop project managers put together a really strong structure for the workshop, which we really appreciated. It helped us get started and help get people moving. But all the facilitators took a really flexible approach to the day. We had a lot of supplies that really helped the conversations. And we just enabled positive strong dialogue throughout the day. And that was really helpful. And then overall, the facilitators, we were genuinely surprised that there was such commonality amongst the findings across all three groups. And my group, in particular, the visual analytics, I think it was interesting, they, they were asking for guns for hire at time of need. They really wanted the library skill set available to them to help them, because they saw great value in the library knowledge. And they wanted it when they needed it, not at our convenience, but of course, at their convenience. That was certainly a strong finding. Some lessons learned. Kristen Antelman from Caltech contributed this. Smart Cities Group had inconsistency of attendance, and she found that really impacted the discussions and negatively. So her recommendation is maybe not to host the workshop over three days, possibly over a single day. But when you're thinking about scheduling, consistent attendance would help with the structure of the dialogue of the groups. Second, that Kristen found incredible value with that external facilitator that Catherine mentioned. Her external facilitator was so strong that after the first session, she asked him to transition his status from an active participant to a co-facilitator. And she found that the two of them together were able to really create a dynamic dialogue through the group and had really strong findings. So that was a great lesson learned. And myself, we had incredibly fruitful discussions over the three days. And as a summary exercise, I asked the participants, or we put the topics that we discussed on individual poster papers, and I asked them each to rate them as high, medium, or low in priority for their work, just with posted notes, different colors. And I was astonished that the topics that received the most amount of discussion were ranked the lowest. It's not what I expected. And so we asked them, what happened? Why did we spend all this time? And they said, well, that's why we need you. These are the topics we don't know anything about. We can't speak to them, but they're important. We don't know what to say. But the things that we know about, we can talk about. Well, I guess that makes sense. So my lesson learned is maybe to do a summary exercise at the end of each session, just to help clarify what the priorities really are. I think we could have maybe used our time a little bit better. Let's pass it on to Joan Lippincott. Hi. It was really both a challenge and a pleasure working on this project. And I want to be clear that there was an enormous amount of planning involved. So if you're thinking of undertaking such an endeavor, you need time. As a lead facilitator, I didn't dream up what we would be doing throughout the three day process. Tom Hickerson and his team had already scoped that out in their proposal to the Mellon Foundation. And I followed that very closely as I outlined the first iteration of how the schedule would go and what the various activities would be. And then we refined that over a series of many conference calls among all of the facilitators sometimes always including Catherine and sometimes including Tom. And we literally ended up with a almost a scripted agenda for the facilitators for each of the three days, sometimes down to the, you know, each segment down to the 15 minute segment. On the other hand, we were also very flexible. We met each morning to modify what we might do that day, depending on how things had gone. So lots of planning but flexibility. I do think that communicating the purpose and the goals to the participants was very effective in this project and in this process. And I'd like to emphasize that there was lots of written meaning email communication to the potential participants and the deans and the coordinators and whatever. But Tom also worked very closely with deans and department heads, so personally reaching out to those people and then had these mixers in the library beforehand where people could come because Calgary already has an active GIS program already has a data visualization studio. But a lot of people, of course, we all know on our campuses there are many, many faculty of no idea of some of the capabilities that exist in the library. So it raised the level of discussion by having those mixers. As others have mentioned, scheduling the workshop was a major challenge. And if you want to do something like this, you just need to think very carefully about and really talk to your potential attendees about what makes the most sense. Time of year, time of day, how many days, all of that. And think about incentives. So I don't mean offering them an Amazon card to come, but rather it was a real incentive for some of these groups to be able to say, I would like to bring in this expert from University of Toronto to join our group and give a talk and just in effect hang out with us for three days. They considered that a real perk. And I would never have thought of that, but I thought it was a great idea. And then I think this is really important, have some confidence that you, your staff, your library, or with your partners on your campus could actually do something as a result of your findings. If you're in the stage of saying we have no money, our staff don't have really up to date skills or can't move into new areas, I don't see the point of doing this. Getting people all involved and intrigued and excited and then saying, yeah, maybe not. So from my perspective, some of the successes were the enthusiasm of the faculty who participated. They were really engaged and credit, some credit goes to the facilitators, but really it mostly goes to the faculty themselves. I'll echo the sentiment that we did not expect so much commonality between the groups. I want to just paint a picture for you that in Arctic studies, we had faculty members from studying like the oil fields in the Arctic to people who collect legends from First Nation tribes. So this is like a huge range of disciplines that were present in that group, in the smart cities, in the data visualization. So even within the groups, we didn't expect such commonalities. The role of the external experts, not only was it a perk, but they gave fabulous talks and their talks focused on how they were gathering, managing and using information in their work. So they were just totally on target. And then the use of the outside facilitators, I do think it was helpful to have people who were neutral to the faculty. And it helped the faculty not focus on the library this and the library that they focused instead on their own research perspectives. So I have some suggestions for those of you that might want to consider doing a similar event on your own campus. Tom was very strategic in how he approached this in addressing the priorities of the provost and the vice president for research and the CIO. This wasn't just a library idea or initiative. This was very much within the mission of where the university is going right at this moment. And then think about which departments, programs and schools to involve, especially identifying a dean or department chair or someone who will help you coordinate and get the right faculty on board. And then finally, think about the readiness of your library to actually act on the findings from the workshop. And now Tom. So thank you, all three of you. It was quite an experience and most of the time we loved it, even though we didn't know exactly what was going to happen when. But that meant that we were involved as well. We weren't just directing the production. So turning to the implications, you've seen the six principal items. We drew those both from the prioritizing that happened in the group. And then we also had a verbatim, a record of the of the conference. So we were able to go back and review all of the particulars along the way. And who said what? And so it wasn't just a cumulative result. It was actually an incremental development. In this title, I immediately said that should be reversed. This is implications for universities and their libraries. Because I think you'll see in my comments that this is is really about the university as a whole. So part of this grew out of some early thinking. In the 21st century libraries, designing libraries conference that we do with North Carolina State, and I'll mention we're doing another one in September in Calgary. So we're always prepared. So actually Don Waters had raised the question. Okay, so you've developed a new library environment with new technologies. And that's great. And we've been adding technologies for a long time in libraries. But how does it matter? You know, why does it matter? And a sort of so what? So we were really addressing the question of what is the new role for libraries? Not just to the campus, but with the campus. So I explained to Brian Mormon one day about how we practice in the library today and how that is developed. You know, when the web came along in 1995, we learned we had to do it all differently. And I think in many ways what we're doing today is an evolution of that. And I'll speak later in my implications about where that has led us to at this point in time. And so when I I said to this to him about our traditional services, traditional as in libraries, always the last five years, you know, he looked up and said very matter of factly, but we don't do it that way anymore. And and that is the truth. And we all know it. But it's very hard to adapt to it and to put ourselves in the infrastructure with those researchers. We did not focus on any existing services of the library in these discussions. But it is notable that almost none of our core services, as we see them, were mentioned by any of the researchers. We should listen to that. What they talked about, some of them were things that we're involved in. But they're actually services like, say digitization, where we had envisioned it as building collections, and they're envisioning it as creating digital information to incorporate into existing research. So even our traditional services are being envisioned in a different fashion. So this this the support they need is functional in nature rather than disciplinary and individualized. And by this, I mean, while each individual researcher will have an interest in access to certain functionality, such functionality can be generalized across multiple disciplines and fields of research. What we need are research platforms capable of creating capacity to be employed by a diverse range of researchers and in a variety of fields. And in fact, structuring this capacity as an element in a common platform benefits and stimulates the kind of multidisciplinary work that is occurring more frequently today. And one of the most important aspects of this approach to our for our universities and for academic research generally is that research support infrastructure does not have to be newly crafted for each researcher, but can be employed across the spectrum. So I've been thinking for several years about this question of research platforms. I was particularly impressed when our visualization studio came up into regular use. And I saw researchers working with medieval manuscripts, researchers working with anatomical research, our climatology data, all using the same device, and and just with a lot of commonality and in fact for very different purposes. So I immediately started thinking about well, how do we do this? How do we bring a set of services together that provides an infrastructure across a spectrum of research? I was just delighted when I went in, I mentioned that the human dynamics and changing world is on end of our six research themes. One of the other research themes is is on brain and mental health research. And so when the person presenting that and the general faculties council talked about the fact that they had multiple research areas ranging from brain and behavior research to neural injury and repair to healthy brain aging. And then he immediately said and there's this research platform across that supports all three of them equally well. And I said, oh gosh, Sam Weiss was right. I said, Sam, you got it. I'm sure he was delighted. So but the other thing that they that they spoke to was the degree of long term support that we need for this. And so we need this kind of infrastructure for social sciences, arts, humanities, environmental sciences, urban design, some of our professional schools. So why the library? Workshop participants saw the library as a potential site for such development. And I say potential. They really, you know, they don't know that much about our capacity in these areas. We should be concerned about that. And so so they were looking at us just straight out on a level playing field regarding whether we were the answer. We drew we have the strength of a trust in the library as being responsive to their needs over time. Our spatial numeric data services is the one unit that many of them had an existing relationship with. And as geospatial techniques become a standard for analysis and many fields, this will only grow. They saw that in the library, we were developing new capabilities. They also felt that we were had a degree of neutrality and that we were not supportive of a specific discipline. We don't support. We don't support anyone. We support everyone. And so that we could provide a level playing field for both rich and poor disciplines. So and the last one, of course, is, is that we are committed to common standards, which they really need. But it's a repositioned library. And so in considering the criteria for instantiating this partnership, I'm convinced that what must be a partnership between the library, research management, obviously our campus it, but also active research leaders themselves. We included participants from the university research services office. And I have a good active partnerships with the people in research services. I co direct the research data management stewardship committee campus wide with the associate vice president research. And so we're well positioned, but we don't really we're not really working together in a way that allows us to employ common planning across the university as a whole and seeking to. So looking at possible models. And there are a lot of different models. And so these are presented to you to convey to you what I think is most important. So one is to create an institute or center that in fact could could be a source of interaction with the with all the parties that we can have common ownership. We need to be willing to share that ownership. And we want to place the table, but we also want have to be willing to accept, share decision making. And not not exclusive of the first one is the possibility of the university librarians serving as as an associate vice president research. There's certainly ways that we can organize the the library in in ways that would better address bring the spectrum of services that we potentially have together to address these needs. And so at this point in time we're looking at those at how that organization should be. What are the priorities for that research platform? How do we instantiate it in a fashion that is sustainable over time? Because researchers have to believe in the credibility of this capacity. So these are the big questions for us today. But I would like to finish by mentioning that while this is specifically about research, everything I've talked about is going to be a part of undergraduate instruction tomorrow. I was very impressed the last night I heard that a new faculty member in urban planning had specifically been hired to teach geospatial techniques to undergraduates. So when 19 year olds know geospatial techniques, we have a different instructional and research environment. We'll take questions now and I would ask that you please go to the mics. Thank you.