 So I have 10, 15, so we can get started. Thank you so much for coming to the session today. I'm really excited to be talking with you. First off, also happy Friday the 13th if that makes you excited. So I do think it's probably important for me to introduce myself to you a little bit and tell you a bit about what I do at NCSU Libraries. So you came to the right place. Shockingly, I am Jennifer Garrett. And currently, I am head of digital research, education, and training at NCSU Libraries. So in my role, I coordinate many of the elements of the library's workshop portfolio aimed at building digital research skills in emerging areas. So these are things like data science, data visualization. So basically, a lot of what I'm going to talk about today is what I do. So maybe that's a good thing. And I do have a goal link that you can actually access these slides to. It takes you to PDF. You definitely don't have to do that now, but should you want to, it's there. So this is the plan for the session today. It maybe doesn't look like a lot of bullet points, but I will be covering quite a bit. So I'm going to start off by giving some brief information background on NC State more broadly, and then NCSU Libraries more specifically. This will then set the stage for me talking about our library's workshops landscape that really have exploded in the last academic year. So starting in 2016. That will then lead me to talking about two projects I've been part of. The first one is our very popular DataViz workshops, which I helped co-create and still teach a decent amount of. And then the next project was directly informed by the first one. And that is a project we just kicked off this fall called the Peer Scholars Program. I'll wrap up then by kind of talking about future directions or current efforts to continue this stuff. And then of course leaving time at the end for your questions. I've never been a huge fan of being like a talking head in front of a crowd. So if at any time you have a strong urge to chime in, please feel free to do so. So NC State is a large public land grant institution focusing largely on the areas of STEM, so science, technology, engineering, and math. It breaks down into about we have a little over, or almost actually, 34,000 students that breaks down to be about 70% undergraduate, 30% graduate. NC State's also located in the Research Triangle, which means for those of you not familiar, we're really close to many other universities. So we do a lot of work and have a lot of partnerships with institutions like Duke and UNC Chapel Hill. Some of them are 20 to 40 minutes away. So we do a lot of collaborative collections and that kind of stuff there too. But if we look more closely at what student enrollment looks like at NC State, I think that the picture of our user population becomes more clear. So you can really tell here that the highest number of both graduate and undergraduate students we have at NC State is represented by the College of Engineering. But you will also notice we have a number of students in non-STEM areas like humanities and social sciences, management, education, and others. So interdisciplinary support, cross-departmental, cross-disciplinary collaboration is really a huge effort in NCSU Libraries and a big base for how we support our user population in pretty much everything that we do. So NCSU Libraries, what I really wanna talk about here is it's important for me to mention because a bulk of my talk is going to be about our data-vis workshops, which I do promise I will get to eventually, is that our efforts in supporting visualization services has been in place and started for some time now. And this was really evident with the opening of the James B. Hunt Junior Library in January of 2013. So what you see on the screen here are two images from some of our immersive visualization spaces. The one on the far right, so the one that looks a little purple, is from the Hunt Library and that's a 270 degree space. The other one is a space in our other main campus library called the D.H. Hill Library and that was 360 degrees. This is just a couple of examples. Aside from immersive spaces, we also have many large-scale visualization walls that oftentimes highlight student and faculty contributions, actually in Joan's talk yesterday she brought up one on the screen that you saw there. We invest in visualization technology available on many of our computing stations and then of course we offer things like classroom sessions, more in-depth one-on-one consultation support in these areas. So the reason why I say this is because when I talk about the vis workshops it's important to note that we did have an existing foundation in place when we started them. And speaking of workshops, I do think it's worth bringing up the library's strategic plan. This is our 2016-2020 strategic plan. We pulled this language directly from the university's plan which was released around the same time. And you can see that when we're talking about how we enhance student success, we create action goals around them to try to achieve this stuff. And we highlight and sponsor workshops specifically here. So you can see we mention workshops that'll benefit all disciplines in areas like DataViz, Digital Media Creation, Software Development. So this was one of our goals that we started with, with 2016. And so next I'm gonna show you a large table of what the workshops from 2016-2017 looked like, which really kind of highlight how those efforts materialized. So this is the table here. Again, this is from 2016-2017. And you will see that last year we offered over 430 workshops to over 6,000 students, faculty, and staff. Librarians taught the majority of these sessions, which has actually been really beneficial for us in developing this kind of cohort collective knowledge in many different areas and a variety of different levels of expertise that we can pull from as we continue to offer and explore new workshop programming. So it's really, really exploded. So now to talk about the Viz workshop specifically. So we kicked off these Viz workshops in January of 2016. And this project really came from me supervising a new NCSU Libraries Fellow named Allison Blaine. You can see her pictured on the screen there. She's the one who's not me. And for those of you not familiar with the Fellows Program, it is a two-year post-MLIS position. You're given full non-tenure track faculty, librarian status. So it's a little bit different than I think what sometimes folks think of when we say fellowship. But Allison and I's project, our beginning project was a little bit more broad, or I guess some folks might label it vague, in that we were really aiming at identifying or investigating the needs of the two and a half colleges. I was subject liaison to at the time. So those colleges were management, education, and the social sciences. We wanted to identify service gaps and then explore innovative programming solutions or service solutions that could stretch across disciplines. So that's largely where we were coming from when we started. I will say that we weren't necessarily sure what we were gonna find, but we started off by doing some interviews, in-person informal interviews with faculty. We targeted primarily undergraduate and graduate program directors. And we asked them a host of questions. But we focused a lot on what their students needed and then more specifically, how they thought the libraries could help support those needs. And the answers we got started to reveal a really obvious theme. So I just wanna share a couple of those with you now. So my students need to learn how to do visualizations. And this is interesting, but our department doesn't currently offer introductory courses in this area. Next, students give a lot of posters, often horrible quality. They were like too heavily on text and used too much of it. So show of hands for folks who've seen posters of horrible quality before. So what we read this comment as saying is really that what students needed help with was taking text and making it visual. Then the last two, analytics is the biggest area they need help with. It would be great if the library offered sessions on finding data, cleaning data, presenting it. Next, all things data. So not huge at all. But then they call it specifically tutorials on LaTeX and R. So again, you really start to see some of these themes emerge. Things like visualization, introducing core concepts in visualization or certain kinds of tools that they'd like training for. And so then these questions sort of led us to want to investigate what existing offerings were there on campus for students to explore or be exposed to many of these concepts. So we searched the university's course catalog and this was the complete result list we got from searching for courses that had visualization in the course description. So you could effectively assume that these courses would have a big portion of this as part of their of the coursework. So it's really not that many. And then when we dove more deeply into these courses we realized that universal access to this kind of introductory exposure was even more limited. So you see things like a whole lot of prerequisites or only open to certain majors or certain class levels. So computer science or graduate students, irregular course offerings, offered alternate even years only. I don't even know what that means sometimes. Or not even offered at all. So this course is not being scheduled at all. So what this really revealed to us was that there was a service and skills gap that existed everywhere on campus, existed across campus. So next you might be wondering why we the libraries should fill this gap. So I really like what Joan was saying in her opening session yesterday about the importance of libraries acknowledging that we can be universal access for many of our students. It's kind of like our invisible soapbox that we often stand on top of, right? But it's true, with the libraries we do not restrict access based on affiliation or level. So we knew that our students would be, all of our students and all of our faculty would be able to access this type of training. We thought that workshops would be an effective way to eliminate many or at least address many of the challenges and frustrations that we found our researchers and users experiencing. Also we have proven success of offering a service that was previously restricted. The Makerspace program is a great example of this. Prior to those spaces being open in the libraries, 3D printing was only available to people affiliated with certain colleges, I'd say the College of Design. Since we've offered them in the library spaces we've seen the number and the nature of the relationships we've had with courses just really, really explode. And then finally, NCSU Libraries has a long history of investing in technology and sharing it with our users. We have a really robust tech lending program. So our users are actually very accustomed to getting things from us that they previously couldn't get elsewhere. So offering these workshops really fell in line with what we perceived our role to be on campus and what others perceived our role to be. This also leads into the idea of visibility. One of the big goals of this program was to increase the visibility of our existing visualization spaces and services. And workshop provided an effective marketing and advertising platform in order to share that with a broader community. So we felt as though that was another strong strength for us exploring these services. So in terms of planning and implementation, how we went about doing this, we started planning for these workshops in fall semester. So that would be fall of 2015 since we went live in January of 2016. Again, we're really fortunate to be in the research triangle. So we had neighbors at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke and both of them, both of those libraries had offered some form of visualization instruction. Duke libraries actually has a really robust DataViz workshop program and we were actually physically able to go there, view their workshops, sometimes multiple times, talk with the librarians there and learn about what many of the challenges or questions that they faced were. Of course, Duke users are not NCSU users, but in many ways it helped us write the curriculum. We weren't reinventing the wheel from scratch. Also, we were able to participate in some internal training. So the picture here is from an internal training session that we had where area experts came and talked to us about many data science core principles. So again, we had a base level of exposure that we could really pull from when we were developing these workshops. We did pilot some sessions in fall. So this was really for us to gauge interest and to tweak content because you might think you have a really good presentation and then when you give it for a classroom you realize you need to change it. So we did pilot some sessions and that was really helpful. Here are some of the goals. So again, we drafted a one-pager. We oftentimes will draft one-pagers to establish scope but really why I wanna show this is because we did decide to focus on open source free tools when we were teaching these workshops. You might be able to guess why we did that but it was really that we did not want to teach tools to our students that they wouldn't have access to after they've graduated. Also, certain open source tools have strong name recognition. When we were talking with students and faculty about these ideas, one point of feedback that kept coming back was this would make them more competitive when they entered the job market. So again, we wanted to focus on things that we felt could help do that. Career readiness we're seeing is becoming more and more of a focus in certain library programings. So in terms of how we went about selecting workshop topics, the first one is really important to mention. So we wanted to be able to respond quickly. This is probably the most important bit. We discovered that the need existed right now. We didn't want to spend a whole lot of time training up to be able to teach them. It was fortunate that my colleague Allison, when she was in library school, worked at the research hub at UNC Libraries. So she actually had a strong level of experience in these areas. But we also did focus on, we framed topics at the introductory level. We made sure we build them as no prior experience required. This was really getting towards some of the feedback we got in our interviews and also was more in line with what our experience levels were at the time. We never build ourselves as the ultimate data vis expert when we were teaching these sessions. But we did make sure in them to connect them with folks who were or to connect them with materials where they could dive deeper and learn more. We had to make sure we chose stable tools. When you focus on open source tools, something to keep in mind is they change often. Sometimes they can go away. So we wanted to pick tools that had a history of existing and being stable. So things like Tableau or R. Other tools too that had strong help or tutorial materials in them or strong online communities of support. And then finally, we also focused on, all of our workshops had a hands-on element incorporated in them. So learn by doing, not just learn by listening to us talk. I actually brought a copy of one of our popular activity guides. If at the end you wanna come up and take a look. But something to keep in mind with a hands-on element is it really meant that it required two of us in the session. So what we'd often do is like Allison and I might co-teach the introductory portion of the workshop. Then one of us would lead the activity and then the other person would roam. And a roamer is really important because oftentimes you get questions that aren't worth stopping the entire workshop for. It's things like, I don't know where to click or I got behind on a step or my laptop's not loading. It's a lot of troubleshooting things that again aren't worth stopping the session for. And then here are some examples of some of the topics we've offered. Again, this process has been really iterative. What you see here isn't necessarily what we started with. And this isn't necessarily what we teach right now. But it's a good representation of many of the topics. When we went live in January of 2016, we started with five workshops. We offered them two times a week. Not all of them, just we went, we had two spots on one spot on Wednesday, one spot on Friday. And then we repeated through the end of the semester. When we released the press release to advertise these workshops, within the first day, they all but one registered full. So that really confirmed to us that this need was not being filled and was really desired. We share all of our materials via Google Drive. NC State is a Google campus. So we were not concerned with space limitations here. We also knew our users would be familiar with this kind of platform. And we also shared the workshop folders with go links, shortened links. So at NCSU we have these go.ncsulinks. And then we pick the end link to be something relevant to the workshop title. It just makes this stuff easier for folks to access. And we find sharing it this way works actually really well. And so if we look really quickly at the reach, again, these numbers are pulled from, this is 2016, 2017 numbers. You can see that what's listed here are department names. It's smaller than I thought it would be, but you can maybe see some of it. The top of the top 12 units represented, nine of those are from STEM fields and many of them fall in engineering. But I will say that in total, we had over 80 units represented in these workshops. That's colleges and departments represented. Also if you look at how the affiliation in terms of class level breaks down, it's heaviest in terms of graduate students and postdocs. So what these sessions were really appealing to as early career researchers was what we were hearing here. So I've talked a bit about some of the lessons learned, but just to highlight a few more, what we found with workshop links. So when we first started, all of the workshops were an hour. We hand out surveys at the end of these workshops and we found out without fail that everybody wanted more time. And what they wanted more time to do was to play. So they wanted to bring their data, throw it into the tool. They wanted to do the activity guide again. So in many of the sessions, we added an optional 30 minutes. We also found that Fridays worked really well. We think this is because our attendees were graduate students and postdocs. They tended not to teach or have classes on Fridays. In terms of software considerations, our teaching labs have living laptop carts in them. Some are Mac based, some are PC based. But certain tools don't work well on Macs or work at all. So some examples of this are making network graphs with Geffy. Geffy's not compatible with Mac. Our open refined data cleaning class, we actually had to use an older version of open refined in order for it to operate on a Mac. So it's just things to consider. We also found with open source tools, sometimes it felt as though we were updating them all the time. Tableau is especially great at wanting you to update it every two weeks. I see heads nodding, so it's true. And so when you're thinking about doing something like this, you have to kind of plan in for this administrative work of updating these tools. In terms of attendees, we found they tended to register for the entire Viz offerings. Which was great because you saw a lot of repeat faces and you built a lot of strong relationships. I talked about laptop carts, but most actually preferred to bring their own device. What this meant though was in the email reminders we sent out to folks, we needed to make sure we included links for them to download the tool before they came to the session. Because if everybody wanted to download Tableau once they got there, it slowed things down. Now you can probably guess that we don't have a 100% success rate in getting students to actually do this. So this is why oftentimes we end up giving people a laptop from the laptop cart anyway. And also many had advanced technical skills but they lacked tool exposure. So some could code really well, but they had no idea about Tableau. And Tableau for instance is not a very intuitive tool. So the introductory, intermediate-ish level workshops were not a deterrent for these students to actually come and participate. Another comment we got a lot of was that people wanted recordings. They either couldn't come to the workshop or they didn't wanna leave the lab and that's fine. So we created this repository of workshop materials. That includes all of the workshops we've offered, even ones we don't consistently offer anymore or maybe special one-off sessions we created. This includes our slide decks, our activity guides, the data sets you need to do the activity guides and in some cases videos. This is all shared under a Creative Commons license. So you can write this link down, you can access this page, you can use and adapt what you find here. So it's getting at sharing with our community but also sharing with the broader community who we learned so much from when we were developing this stuff. So it's been really rewarding watching the students be so excited about these workshops and watching this stuff take shape. Without fail, I feel like every single session I've taught, which has been a lot of them, at least one student comes up to me to say how happy they are that we're doing this. So when I'm saying that they're excited, they're really excited. I just really love this. I might be exaggerating a little though because we haven't had anybody throw and break anything but anything can happen, right? So it's been really exciting. But this project really demonstrated the need for scalability, many questions for more advanced content. So this is sort of where we're entering into discussing this peer scholars program. We had long, the YRBs long had partnerships with the Graduate School and the Postdoctoral Association for a variety of reasons, but because so many of our attendees were grad students and postdocs, we felt as though it was worth revisiting this relationship to come up with something that could be mutually beneficial for us all. And so, and another bit of feedback we got consistently from attendees. We did some interviews. We also have those survey results, was that many students actually requested ways that they could get more involved in these workshops. They said, I have experience and blank tool. Maybe this would appeal to people in my department. Or we heard comments about them wanting us to invite experts, they say from teaching faculty to come and lead more sessions. So this was really how the Peer Scholars Program was born. The Peer Scholars Program is aimed at the library acting as the hub, partnering with early career researchers to deliver in-demand content that they deal with in the wild. So it's peers teaching peers and them telling us what their researchers need. And so, shockingly, we also developed another project team. Pulling largely from our research engagement unit, we requested support from the library's peer-to-peer learning fund. This fund has been on the books for some time, but it wasn't really heavily utilized. The aim of the fund is really to pay for student work that engages student learning or learning activities of some kind. So we scoped it to fund small but competitive one-time stipends for our peer scholars. The planning process was kind of very similar to what we did in somewhat with the data-vis workshops. We share all of our materials again on Google Drive. That includes a repository that we're working on making more public of all of the Peer Scholars workshop content. We also, with Peer Scholars though, we meet with all of them before we accept them into the program. They go through what we call a consultation. And then they're paired with two library partners. And two is just because sometimes schedules are hard to line up with everybody. In the first semester, one person from the planning team was always one partner. And we did that for continuity issues. Because we just kicked off the program, we wanted to make sure that we as the planning team were hearing many of the comments, questions, concerns. One thing that's different about the Peer Scholars program from the Vis workshop though is we created a lot of checklists or documentation because we knew that many individuals were going to be participating in these workshops who had never taught a workshop in our spaces before. So we didn't want folks to have to try to figure out what, we wanted them to have one place to find the code to the laptop cart or where to access the electronic version of the survey sheet. So that's how we share many of that stuff there. We also needed to incentivize participation. It wasn't enough for us to say, this is going to be really awesome, you need to volunteer. While students wanted to get the experience, it really wasn't enough for them to just volunteer to do it. So we advertised it as you're getting teaching experience that you can use to grow your resume and make you more competitive when you get a job. That leads into opportunities to improve your communication skills. Exposure to classroom technologies in informal teaching settings. So they're teaching in a variety of library spaces. Peer-to-peer learning, collaboration opportunities. And then finally, of course, an honorarium. So we chose, we worked with the library's HR to determine these numbers. So they actually are competitive. So $150 per talk, 300 per workshop. So workshops more because usually those are longer and require a hands-on element. So here's some examples that kind of hit at how we also go about that incentivizing participation. So the screenshot from Kelly's page there is she was a peer scholar and you can actually see her linking to her work in her e-portfolio. She just got hired as an assistant professor in chemistry. So I'm not gonna credit the peer scholars program for all that, but it helped her e-portfolio work. We also gave them the opportunity to record their sessions. It's mutually beneficial because then we get the recordings that we can share, but then they get the recordings that they can share also. So some of the scholars told us that when they go out to interview for jobs, they're oftentimes asked, do you have examples of your teaching? And so these recordings can provide those for them. And then the small little screenshot here is actually from the library's website. This is what a workshop page looks like. If you were to scroll down, you'd see the link to register for it. When we were developing the template for this page, we wanted to include a paragraph that had the scholars bio in it. So again, it's another way to highlight much of their work. And another bit that's actually been really popular is, you'll see that the scholars pictures are listed here. We worked with our external relations department who agreed to take updated headshots for any scholars who wanted us to. And many have taken advantage of that. It helps us because we get a nice photo for the website, but they also can take that with them when they're going about to give presentations or apply for jobs. We had a loose application process. We just used Google Forms. We included this in all of our advertising materials. We wanted to collect standardized information from all the scholars, but we also wanted scholars to apply who were serious. So we had one field that asked for the name and contact information of their advisor. We never contacted the advisor, but it kind of helped weed out some folks who may not be taking it as seriously. But a lot of folks actually came from actual recommendations from faculty or library colleagues to specifically new people. And in that case, we didn't make them apply, but we used this form and we had our consultation with them. So what that ensured for us was that we were asking everybody the same questions and it was all going to the same place, which was the Google Sheet that this form sent to. So the form was a good idea, even though not everybody used it to actually apply for the program. Here are some examples of what some of these peer-searched workshops have turned out to be. This isn't all inclusive. It's just all that I could fit on the screen, but you'll see a kind of a good variety of topics here. So we do have some focusing on tools like Envivo or LaTac or GitHub, but then we also have some that don't focus on tools at all, like how to not give terrible presentations or how to do digital game design without knowing code. And so it's just been really interesting to see the kinds of proposals that we have the peer scholars presenting. Here are some of our peer scholars. Again, not all of them, but this really helps highlight the diversity of representation here. We've had scholars come from communications, design, international studies, electrical engineering, chemical engineering. So it's just been a really huge range of backgrounds. Some of them are postdocs, others are masters or PhD candidates. And then these are just a couple of examples of what scholars actually teaching in library spaces. I'm just going to scroll through these so you can see that they've had the opportunity to teach in a variety of different types of spaces in the library, which gets at one of those incentivizing features of letting them have that experience with classroom technologies. So the reach of the peer scholars program looks very similar to the reach of the DataViz workshops. Again, you see highest representation from the College of Engineering. And when in terms of affiliation level breakdown, it's heavy graduate students and postdocs. We have offered 24 peer scholar sessions this year and reached over 350 users. So it's been a really exciting project to be part of. And I do want to share this because I think this is interesting. So this is an example of the post-instruction surveys that we hand out at the end of every session. We scan these surveys and then we email them to the scholar. So this is how they get to see what their feedback is. Many of our scholars have actually offered the same session again after getting the feedback. And it's worth noting that they get paid every time they offer a session. But this one was especially interesting because when asked, how might the session been better? The student just told us what we needed to do next. So they're actually just telling us we need sessions on these. So I thought that one was a bit fun. And then here are a couple of testimonials from folks involved in the program. So Kurt is a peer scholar and he says, this program gives all attendees the opportunity to learn skills that are often not directly taught in courses are keys to success to be competitive. Jason Kramer is one of our partners who works in the grad school. And he says, this program helps to improve academic and career outcomes for the participants, the trainees. Folks who go through this will be more productive. Their academic experience will be more fulfilling. And again, they'll be more likely to obtain a job. So it's really been nice to see this confirmation come through. OK, so that really kind of sums up these two programs. So I want to talk next about some of where really briefly where we're continuing many of these efforts. So first off worth mentioning is kind of the next frontier with how we support these services. We are planning to update some spaces in the library. So this one you see here is an existing space in Hunt that's going to be repurposed to make a more public data science comments. We've also developed some new teams. So recently, the libraries developed a data and visualization services department. Before this department existed, folks were sort of spread out in different places in the library. This is bringing them together. And now it will allow them to more intentionally and effectively support data efforts across campus. We also convened what we call a learning programs working group because so many workshop instructors and stakeholders are stretched again across library departments. We wanted a place for all of us to come together and think about this programming more holistically, especially because the numbers are getting to be so big. We are still committed to training and assisting with the broader community exposure to these fields. So the data science and visualization institute for librarians, which I am currently director of, is in its third year. And we are still seeing a lot of librarians very interested in participating in an institute like this to learn core concepts and be exposed to these tools and then take back to their research community. And then finally, a sort of a footnote and really a confirmation of the work that we're doing in emerging digital skills workshops is important. On Tuesday, the ALA announced that the proposal we submitted for these workshops was awarded the Library of the Future Award. So that really confirms to us that a lot of this work is important and worth pursuing. So that's really it. I'm happy to take your questions after I take a drink of water.