 Director of the Coalition for Networked Information. And I'll be introducing this session and I'd like to welcome all of our attendees to it. You have reached a session, a project briefing that is part of the final day of week four of the fall 2020 CNI virtual member meeting. Week four, just to remind you, deals with aspects of the current crisis and emerging issues. And certainly this will be a very relevant presentation that's part of those themes. I also wanna note that we have made available some prerecorded videos to complement the synchronous sessions that are part of week four and please avail yourself of those as your time permits. We are recording the session. It will be publicly available subsequently. There is closed captioning available. Please use that if it's helpful. We have a chat box and I'd encourage you to use that as we go along during the session. There's also a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. You can use that to queue up questions at any point. We will address the questions after we've heard both presenters speak. Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will be moderating that Q&A discussion. And with that, let me turn to the presentation itself. Presentation itself. We have with us today Brad Warren and Laurie Harris both from the University of Cincinnati Libraries. They are going to talk about how to develop a genuinely resilient culture of collaboration when facing the kinds of global challenges that our institutions are facing today. And I think that word resilient is enormously relevant here because I think we're gonna need resilient cultures not just in the current emergency but going forward for quite a long time to come. So with that, let me welcome Laurie and Brad and I'll turn it over to Brad to start the presentation. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much Cliff. And as part of resilience, it's banned within a house of six people using the internet at the same time. So I'm going to not have live video which is why you'll see me go dark here. So we're going to use our experience with the COVID crisis to sort of illustrate how to build resiliency into sort of collaborative decision making especially as we're looking to facing other challenges into the future. I think that was a very astute observation from Cliff. And in particular, we do want to spend some time on what our approach was like as it's illustrating these concepts but also to really talk about how that applies to the future and hopefully generate some conversation. A lot of this are things that we all need to remind ourselves that are part of just normal planning that helps wrap your head around what appears to be a really complex process. Just in relation to our own libraries very quickly, the University of Cincinnati libraries has a history of autonomy and decentralization with 10 locations. And I would just say the hallmark of most multi-branch ARL libraries. This does also extend to the college governance structure as well. Within that our complexity is that we're also part of a multi-jurisdictional system which means that there's three other libraries that we share some things in common with but report to other deans. And we also have three bargaining units with AAUP tenure track library faculty, SEIU and AFSCME staff, non-represented staff and also student workers. So to be honest, nothing is simple. Previous to the pandemic, most large projects about the library strategic directions and big problems were done collaboratively through representation, but often with the understanding that the dean decides. And while everybody shares a lot in common across the locations, there is a reason why there are 13 libraries with their various constituencies. And if you weren't aware, also University of Cincinnati is an old institution celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2019. Now on to the problem. So hi, good afternoon everyone and thank you for having us participate here today at CNI this year. So Brad shared with you a little bit of our history, some of the complexities inherent in a multi-jurisdictional system and some of the UCL's practices pre-pandemic as it relates to the way matters were decided. So today I'm going to highlight some of our practices that shifted throughout the pandemic period beginning in mid-March. So one of our primary things for us as we move forward was we wanted to focus on our people. So people as they were migrating into their homes, we wanted to ensure that everyone was up to speed in terms of the technology. Yes, we had some of our faculty and staff who really weren't connected. And so that was a primary focus to bring everyone up to speed. We developed a consistent message that I believe was organic and Brad and I just sort of carried this through which was health and safety of our UCL staff, our faculty and our students was the guiding principle in our decision-making. The further we moved into working from home, this message became not only pervasive throughout our different libraries but throughout the university department. So we even during this paradigm shift, we were really mindful that we wanted to locate and provide opportunities for people within our organization who up to that point didn't necessarily, they weren't involved in decision-making or they may have had a seat at the table but they were very quiet at that table. So we encouraged people to step up in leadership roles. We supported them to grow and develop in ways that would enable them to participate and really just sort of shine as these new sort of voices and new decision-makers. We were also able to really rethink and retool rules that previously had slowed or prevented movement within our organization. So a prime example of that is, we decided very quickly that we wanted our student workers to be paid in the spring during the shutdown and Brad had a discussion with our dean. The dean moved very quickly and I wanna say that was implemented within a 24-hour period. And so just an example of how things moved very quickly in this paradigm, but it allowed us to really make some quick and important decisions. One of the areas power in the hands of the new decision-makers. So our primary group was the RTC group, returned to campus group and Brad is gonna talk about that later. This group had a direct pipeline to our UCL senior leadership and departments heads and that made it so much easier for the group to make recommendations in real time and implement changes immediately. There wasn't a hierarchy when we received information that needed to be shared whether up or down, we shared it immediately. I thought that as an organization we did a really good job listening and taking into consideration concerns from all members of our organization. That took a lot of time. It took a lot of patience, a lot of patience and a lot of listening skills. So not only did we develop policies and procedures to shift staff and faculty spaces while again focusing on everyone's health as a priority, we also work to align and adhere to the state of Ohio's and the university's policies and procedures as well. So juggling simultaneously. Last but not least, there were as you can imagine different perspectives and needs that were put on the table. So we had to balance the safety and needs again. I can't say this enough of our faculty, staff and students, that was just a consistent message. We had to balance the wishes and needs of the president and provost. And as you can imagine, sometimes there was a little conflict because what the president and provost sort of wanted at times didn't necessarily align with where we were. We had to balance the wishes and needs of a faculty. Initially many of UC faculty, they were not open to returning to in-person teaching. And so we had to negotiate those nuances. And then lastly, again, each library because we have a variety of libraries with their own culture had different perspectives and needs and I'll turn it over to Brad. Thank you, Laurie. So all of this was turning into a balancing act. And once again, I still want to harken that these issues I think transcend this particular crisis but they're important to keep in mind when looking at our future crises. So we're balancing this personal safety and the business needs of whatever it is that we're doing. So the work needed to be intentional but it had a level of importance that felt different from other discussions that may have had sort of academic or philosophical importance. The task at hand felt monumental and in order to deal with that, we had to break things down into pieces and chunks which is essentially project management, something I think many of us have experienced with but it's important to realize that when faced with something in which there are no answers and you're coming up with solutions in parallel to an organization that you're a part of or an industry, you need to break it down into smaller pieces so that it's digestible and you can actually move forward. And also the process was extraordinarily slow initially because it was an important aspect of building trust, collaboration and teamwork in an organization that was not, it was drawing upon some of the strengths of how we went about decision-making but doing it in a new way. And within that resilience, it really was emotional intelligence, putting yourself in others people's shoes over and over again. And this is not only the coworkers but the community that you're serving, the administrators that you're having to answer questions to and guide and then also obviously the public. It's okay not to know the answers but also have to have faith in the people's ability to figure out these answers as time goes on. And I can't stress enough that taking the time to build trust is a key component to creating a resilient group. So within the decision-making structure which I think was also unique in something I can't say enough in favor of a strategy for dealing with large problems. This task force is made up of 12 faculty and staff and only one of those people was a department head. Everybody else were more on the ground and not in roles of normally having to make decisions but the group had the authority to make decisions and recommendations directly to the dean, is it related to the approach, policy and process for how we handled all sort of operations and facility reopenings. The managers were then interested with implementing within this structure. So in a sense it was sort of flipping the decision-making on its head and putting the powers to speak to the people and then managers were working within that. And everything that we decided to change was discussed with the group no matter what it was. And that had some pretty difficult conversations in which you're expressed, I can't believe X, Y or Z is thinking this and that person could be anybody within the government within the university structure or even just within the library. It also required getting buy-in from various stakeholders. Library administration was the conduit between these internal groups and the external stakeholders such as the provost, public safety, the president's office, student government, faculty, Senate and also had to then communicate to these external stakeholders whenever we had to deal with pressure that was being placed. Because there was this normalization and health and safety as a way of approaching our process it enabled us to handle external pressures especially as the semester was approaching and we were definitely getting some concerns from upper administration in relation to just their own concerns about a fall semester that was looking extraordinarily different than anybody wanted. And so this happened to critical moments over and over again during the semester and I think it helped with being able to answer questions concretely because of the thought that had been put into the process. On the safety issue, by approaching it from personal safety approach that normalized responses across an extraordinarily diverse workforce and library system where I had personal conversations that range from people who were afraid to leave the house to thinking that COVID was a hoax. So having a process that works through something that's so politicized and also feels so overwhelming was extraordinarily important in being able to work through tackling big problems that were larger than just a difference of opinion. It also, as I mentioned, handled external stressors from our community. On to you, Lori. Hey, thanks, Brett. And so the question is, how did we work and thrive in sort of this pandemic paradigm? Well, one of the things that we did early and often is that we borrowed from our colleagues. So we have partnered in the past with other libraries in the city of Cincinnati but primarily Cincinnati Public Library. Cincinnati Public, I have to tell you they were on point from day one. And I don't know if I'm gonna get this correct but I think they, Brad, did they open back up in April or May? They began their curbside services pretty quickly and then had a sort of phased approach to opening up their facilities but their documentation for that for 40 different branches was produced by mid-April. It was quite phenomenal. It was phenomenal. I wanna say it was maybe in a hard copy. Their master plan was like 60 pages. They focused on sustainability and resiliency which we've heard a lot of. And so we really, we talked with them. We had conversations with them. We didn't model 100% but it really helped us to look to and reach out to our colleagues that were sort of in front of us and doing that thing already. We also became leaders as it relates to change externally. Part of the colleagues that we contacted were from ARL, OSL, NIH NLM, Library of Congress. And so when you're working at this level and you're so everything is just so high level and intense, you tend not to recognize like all that you're doing, all the work that you're doing but reaching out to our colleagues and all of these organizations and they reached out to us to say, hey, what are you all doing at UCL? And then to hear from them like, oh, wait a minute, you guys are kind of way down the path and you're doing this already. We're just kind of shutting down and we're not doing anything. So people were moving at a different pace. Some had just shut down and were barely managing to maintain operations online. Others were in sort of this hybrid mode but it was really enlightening and positive reinforcement that other colleagues were sort of reaching out to us to get our input to share ideals and et cetera. So that was just a lot of collaboration that I thought was really important. Lastly, I think one of the ways in which we were able to thrive and be progressive was to come up with methods to respond to real-time challenges. So for example, when we were asked to implement changes on matters that weren't under our umbrella, we were very comfortable saying, no, we wanna sort of bounce that back to the department that you should talk to. I have an instance if we have time, I'll share with you about the College of Medicine but I won't go into it now. How to negotiate and work collaboratively with the president and provost. I said that earlier, they saw our libraries opening at a different time in a different way and so having that sort of discussion. And lastly, we were mindful of leading from a place of compassion, honesty and safety but also balancing that with the economic realities of our university, working to accommodate returning students, students working from home. I'm over at the College of Medicine so our M3s and M4 medical students, they were doing research and needed to do in-person rounds at the hospital. So trying to balance everything required developing these comprehensive strategies to address a diversity of issues and concerns but also working in tandem with our director of communication, Melissa Norris. I can't say enough about her. She was on point. She pushed out appropriate messaging. We were in front of the eight fall so I'm gonna turn it over to Brad. Okay, so we've given examples from our experience through the COVID crisis and that's something all of us have done. And so I think really the thought now is how do you take some of the successes and also learning from some things that didn't go as well and then apply them to a similar kind of big problems into the future? And so some concrete things, at least I would think of that we've been learning from the pandemic, how we've been working from home, we cannot go back to the way it was before no matter what. I spent especially as it relates to climate change and sustainability, we've demonstrated quite easily that we can be productive in many ways. But I also have to recognize that there's a huge amount of fatigue with the current situation. So I think there's gotta be something that sits in between doing all your work at a location that is an office and a library and all of it at home. There's gotta be something that sits in between but it cannot be going back to before. I also think the rules of effective group size are gone. I used to always joke about the pizza rule that no committee should be any bigger than you can feed with two pizzas, which I think came from Jeff Bezos. Throw that out the window. I've been sort of shocked with our ability to have 50 people on a call and to work through big problems quickly and make decisions. That's been kind of a shock. And so I think that the way in which we've worked with each other and the nuance of this online world has I think thrown some of the ways in which we do work effectively out the window or have given us new ways of doing it. Offering such as the internet archives, emergency library and the HathiTrust emergency access, I think there needs to be some real work and to find a way to make these a more permanent thing. So to speak rather than something that's just in relation to the pandemic but I also recognize that is a huge issue but providing access, removing barriers to access I think is a hallmark of what we really need to be focusing on into the future and it's more than based on loan periods and fines for physical items that really has to do with removing those barriers for electronic materials. And then I love the idea that crowd sourcing information, discovery, access and delivery to our collective faculty, staff and students. We've all been talking to each other a lot, sharing information, learning from each other. We have essentially been crowdsourcing quite a bit and doing it virtually. And so I just wonder how in the world as we as collectors, purveyors, disseminators of information can do, what can we do to help sort of enable this type of activity? I will admit I don't know what that looks like but it is something I found really interesting that's come out of this as a positive. Something especially when it comes to global challenges is that we have to change our practices with an eye for sustainability. And Lori mentioned the public library and I think that I continue to look at the public library as inspirational for how to do things and to do them differently and to really be looking towards the future. And so strangely enough, the American library's issue for September, October had article on public libraries participating in citywide climate action plans. And as we've learned from bringing up university campuses, we are a city within a city or a town. And I think that we need to be actively taking the lead and are partnering with existing efforts within our academic institutions with that type of sustainability and plans and reducing our impact. This is the timeframe in which I think that we can really begin to take a giant leap forward in relation to climate change and sustainability because we have already had to make huge changes to the way we do things. If we can do this, we can do more. In all cases, however, we really need to be able to work with partners that have to take these principles into account for how we approach these big problems for ensuring sustainability and built-in resiliency. And I really think that key piece is the workforce and the decision-making and how you communicate and deal with these changes that happen quickly. And so I think that whether it's happening at a local level within your campus or partnering at the state, national or international levels requires this empowerment. And it's a different kind of empowerment. You're empowering, it's not a grassroots kind of empowerment. It's actually empowering people who are on the front lines in one example who can help influence the system in which you are implementing your solutions. And I think that concept is a really interesting one. It's a different type of collaboration and one that I hope that our own library can continue into the future. And something that I think is much more in the immediacy and not to end on a down note, but I've been thinking about this is that if you thought that the shutdown in the planning for the fall semester was tough, you've got nothing on fall 21. Right now, I think we'd have to have an expectation that there is a desire for it to look like fall 19 and that we're, quote, back to normal for fall of 21. And I think that the work that is necessary in order to navigate through that successfully is entirely dependent on this resilient culture and decision-making and empowerment. It's the only way in which we're going to do it successfully, but it is going to be tough and it is gonna happen in the next few months. Thanks, we have some time for questions. Thank you, Brad. Thank you, Laurie, was a really interesting presentation. Lots of food for thought, very inspiring and thought-provoking, particularly with your comments there at the end, Brad. So the floor is now open for questions and I know Laurie and Brad would love to have a conversation with our attendees here today. So if you have comments or personal experiences with your own organization, questions about their process, please type it into the Q&A or raise your hand. I can turn on your microphone and you can join the conversation with us here. We really would be interested in hearing your perspective about this. I personally, as we wait for folks to think about what you've just shared with us, personally, I really appreciated your talking about all the different communities that you brought into your process and it made me wonder if one of the big things that folks have talked about throughout the last nine months is the big hit that morale has taken for our staff. It strikes me that the kind of process that you shifted to might help mitigate some of that and I wondered if it's not the kind of thing you could necessarily measure, but can you speak to that at all? Do you have any comments about general morale and how your process might have impacted that? I know for me personally, all you had to do was look at the, what is it, the library think tank on Facebook and all of the horror stories and my thought was, I was very much driven by it. I don't want that to be our experience. So, but I'm not going to claim that we don't have a morale issue at our library because we're tired. And I think that, you know, coupling this with this over boiling of systemic racism in the country in the summer, facing severe budget cuts as well. You know, you feel that you're just, you know, everything is just sliding out from under your feet left and right. I would like to think that as it comes to the work that this group did and that for a very long period of time, I can't claim the entire semester, but I mean, the fact that we didn't have a single person in our library staff or faculty test positive for COVID and that we didn't have any kind of infection issues was something that we're really, really proud of. And so, well, you know, you can't say that this, you know, dealt with all of the serious morale problems and concerns that all of us are facing. I think that I would hope at least when it came to how we're doing our work within this, the pandemic crisis that people felt as confident as they could be that this was being done the best that it possibly could. And I'll just add a little bit and sort of piggyback the other confluences of different things happening at once was really a lot. But I think one of the things that I was appreciative of is that, you know, Brad, because he sort of sits next to the dean in terms of hierarchy, he really advocated strongly that for the rest of this year that our library faculty and staff not be tasked with other big, large projects that we really needed this space and time, you know, just to breathe, just to kind of get back to normal or return phone calls and whatever. Because, you know, of course every library has like, okay, and this is next and this is next, but he really advocated strongly and said, listen, you know, and I think that's important to, when you're listening to your people, they're telling you exactly what it is that they need and what they want. And so I was really appreciative that he was able to advocate for that. I think everybody now can take a breath and be ready again to start again in the new year. Empowering and allowing people to be heard. Well, thank you both so much. I appreciate your response to my question about that. And I see that we're a couple of minutes past time here, so I wanna be respectful of your time, of our attendees' time. So I'll go ahead and shut down the public portion and close down the recording and just invite any attendees if they wanna stick around and ask some questions. Please feel free to do so. But thank you so much, Laurie and Brad, for being here and hope to see you back at CNI soon. Take care, bye-bye. Thanks a lot, Diane. Thanks, Cliff, so much. Thank you.