 The session is looking ahead library workforce. The sessions today look really fascinating, looking at some really essential work that's being done to support all of our innovative library developments. It's our library teams that underpin everything we can do. I'm really looking forward to hearing more about the initiatives that they're involved in. Without further ado, I'll introduce the first set of speakers. We've got William J. Nixon, assistant director from the University of Glasgow, I'm Fiona Courage, Assistant Director for the University of Sussex, and they're going to be talking to us about revolution. So, are we ready for this revolution? They're going to be discussing the digital workforce development strategy, which, if you've all had a look through the RLUK strategy, I've got it well scribbled over there. I'm really looking forward to this, I think, as we're all coming out of the pandemic and developing our digital services, it's really important to think about our workforce and teams. So, I will hand over to William Fiona. Thank you very much, Nancy, and really appreciate that introduction. So, I'm delighted to be here with Fiona today with our... I guess we should be managing your expectations with our title, Ready for the Revolution, Realising a Digital Workforce Development Strategy. And I think what we really wanted to do was to... We convened a small group starting to look at how we can provide a model for RLUK member libraries to look ahead to think about managing their digital workforce development or long kind of complementary strands for both existing staff and also for upscaling those existing staff, but also looking at the group and feeding into the RLUK strategy. And I think the strategy itself supports the digital shift manifesto as well by proposing that we look at digital shift skills audit to enable the members to benchmark their existing digital skills and capabilities. So, I just wanted to say a couple of words just about the associate director's networks for anyone who may not be either part of RLUK or not part of our network. It's the professional network for RLUK members in an activity librarian or an associate director role, and it's a forum for discussing and sharing experience and the opportunity to participate in the business of RLUK and support succession planning. And I'm delighted that I have the opportunity to convene with Fiona Courage from the University of Sussex. And Fiona and I have been working for the last year with colleagues in a small group around the ADN, as well as some of the broader work which we've done. The three key strands of ADN activity are leadership development, peer network, and that wider RLUK support. And I think these strands all cut across into the workforce development work that we've been doing as well as the digital shift activities which RLUK have really led the vanguard around. That focus around to professional development, training and leadership sessions and also some safe space. So hopefully that gives you some context as to where the ADN kind of sat and why we became the network which did some initial focus around this activity. I'm going to hand over to Fioda now who has going to talk a little bit more about the context and the model. Thank you, William. So why do we need a strategy at this moment for our workforce? Why is it now? I think it's basically reflecting the rapid change that we've seen in the adoption of digital technologies in our work, in our lives and also an adoption of a digital attitude to life. And of course I hate to have to bring Covid into it but Covid as well. So alongside these I think we also need to recognise that there's a new generation coming into our workforce and that's a generation that has a possibly a different attitude towards careers than those that many of us may have had. They will be looking more to remote working, they'll be able to increase their geographical opportunities to work in places that they don't necessarily live in and they may also expect more career changes through their lives rather than the traditional route of a single career. So looking to change skills or to use their skills in new sectors. So all of these changes have sort of been recognised within RLUK and more broadly. And in terms of recognising this shift towards digital, the new RLUK strategy really recognises the transformative effect that digital technology has on research libraries and that this is a transformation that affects spaces, it affects practices and it affects people. And in addition, the work of our colleagues in the Digital Shift Network, no sorry, Digital Scholarship Network. Yes, Digital Scholarship Network, apologies. I know that it kept changing. But the work that they've been doing is highlighted through the Excellent Digital Shift Forum series, which is sort of telling us more and more about how we need to adapt to a new world. Whilst RLUK's broader Digital Shift Manifesto also looks to deliver opportunities to lead and influence how our digital technologies are exploited within our institutions. And of course, Covid, it's really necessitated our adoption of much more agile working practices. And in this adoption, we've kind of seen how digital has really infiltrated our lives in terms of not only the technology that we use to work and to live, but also our practice and our mindset. So this agility is something that we're obviously going to continue to use as we adopt hybrid working, as we adopt more hybrid learning for our students and our research practices as well. So we're also witnessing changes in our practices, as well as acknowledging them. And we can see that many of our traditional library processes have become increasingly automated. And in response to this, there's therefore a need for a different set of skills to deal with automated systems. And these are often revolve around problem solving, around critical thinking and around analysis. Really interesting how it's sort of in some ways we talk about having single workforces and so forth and being agile, but we're also looking towards specialisation much more. Maybe a talk for another day. But the wider changes in our institution as well, particularly around digital scholarship, open research and publishing, means that we're also increasingly being seen as collaborators and institutional leads in new areas rather than just a support service. So how does this impact on the shape of our workforce? Well, it means we do need to seek out new types of skill sets often specialised and from areas that may not be traditional to the library sector such as gaming. We need to support this through developing our existing workforce and looking for our new workforces as well. So if we're looking to train our existing workforces, we need to look at the implications on how we approach professional development. We need to look at recruiting from new sectors, which in itself has implications on how we recruit. And I know that yesterday in the last session there were some really interesting discussions about how we might want to change the way that we recruit to increase and be a more inclusive employers. So the nature of digital really means that these changes can be sector wide and we've got these opportunities for collaboration across networks that already exist, but also to create new networks. So taking all of these three areas together, we decided to look at developing a more coordinated approach to the change and that came out in our strategy. William, could you produce them? So what we've come up with is this model, which William will go into slightly more detail shortly, but basically taking three different strands, a strand of understanding and then undertaking and then delivering in order to develop our existing workforce and to recruit our future workforce, altogether leading into a digital skills framework. So I'll pass back on to William now. Thank you very much, Fiona. So I just want to give everyone a flavour of each of these three strands and then leading into that because today is a really exciting day for us since we are actually formally launching the strategy. The text and the link is there in the chat so colleagues can drill down to that. And I think the important thing around this is it's a catalyst, it's a springboard for some discussion, but what we have focused on is around these three, first of which is understanding, is really starting to pull together as part of that strategic umbrella for the RLUK strategy. A number of the existing practices, initiatives and research around the work which has already been going on. There's been lots of exciting work done. Obviously, we're looking forward to our next speakers as well. We're going to focus on the research library's PD bank, the development of digital competencies, the digital scholarship networks rise of the transatlantic skills forum around skills and knowledge exchange, the digital shift webinars which have been incredibly popular and provided some real opportunities for wider staff engagement. Lots of professional practice initiatives, particularly around HRC and TNA, and also the rebooting and the restart of the space programme. And as Fiona commented, obviously some of this for us is set against that kind of context of coming out of the pandemic, kind of COVID-19, the acceleration around hybrid working, that blend and that shift, that's really driving a lot of technological and cultural changes. But I think it's also incredibly critical for us as a strategy here to recognise that RLUK members are also at different stages with their workforce. So one of the things that build into that framework is that maturity can continue and where various institutions are sitting. A critical part around the undertaking strand is the audit of skills. And I don't want to dwell too much on the position description back here, but I think there is some really exciting opportunities to do some work there around the development of new competencies, looking at trends, looking at other work, being able to pull in tools and other technologies, such as just digital capabilities tools, not only for our own staff, but also potentially looking at some of that around our students and our wider community, focusing around some of our working cultures and also taking cognisance of the international and national networks. And I think some of that came through in the session that we had yesterday, the round table session, being able to feed into and to take advantage of building into those networks and those relationships and being proactive and coordinated across our entire sector. The third and I think really challenging element is around the delivery. So there's three elements here. There's a training and development framework element and evolving work cultures framework and an advocate and then advocacy and change element. So again here, just to pick and mix a couple of these elements, there's recognising the diverse skills and workforce, looking at embedding some of these flexible and agile skills. The fact that there is an ongoing digital skills journey, we're never actually going to be finished. I think if we were all to reflect on where both we were personally and where some of our staff were with some of our digital skills, you know, even two years ago, I think you'll see there's been quite a journey around that. But also as well, one of the things that came out as part of the research and work that we had done as a group is also the importance of what may be traditionally referred to as the softer skills. We can't just focus wholly on digital. There needs to be that balance around those. And in terms of evolving working cultures, looking at how we nurture talent, that succession planning, looking at where we can continue to develop that. In the previous session, there was a comment around one of the challenges around recruitment, around that and also, you know, our workforce, our skills, our staff are one of the richest and most important kind of resources and key elements of how we can deliver, you know, the world-class research library services which we want to do. So we also need to leverage some of that technology, looking at how we can work with more geographically remote partners, more geographically remote workers and some of our digital skills gap. And I think critically for us as within the Associate Directors Network, but also working with the other networks within RLUK, is looking at how we can advocate at that senior level institutionally for that support, for that ongoing development and upskilling for all those new staff and being able to actually empirically identify some of the data and some of the evidence around that, which can help facilitate and support some of what we actually need to do. I just wanted to hand back to Fiona now just to talk a little bit about where this then coalesces around a digital skills framework. You've muted Fiona. So there you go. We've all got to develop our digital skills and this new agile working and I still can't remember to take the mute off. In terms of this digital skills framework, we're looking to lead it as part of our ADN and to bring together a smaller group working within that in order to lead into that. And we're looking to engage across all of the RLUK networks that already exist in particular the digital shift, but also to, as you can see from the previous slides, there are things such as advocacy and so forth. Also to think about where else we might need to focus in groups that might not be there and that could be subgroups that we develop in the ADN, for example, to look at training, to look at recruitment and to share our skills and experiences across our network. So the idea is to provide this refreshed 21st century post pandemic baseline of digital skills and we will do that again within the ADN. We're looking to create a smaller group to look at digital skills, audits and we hope that it will be underpinned by strategic investment. And again, there were interesting discussions yesterday in the long table about needing to have strategic investment both resource wise, but also psychologically to ensure that people do have the space to be able to develop their skills to undertake professional development and so forth. Part of today we are delighted to launch this and really take start that discussion within the wider community and open our doors in terms of that engagement which we will be looking at doing reaching out to co-conveners and the broader co-conveners of all the networks during April but also litig into discussions with our own ADN colleagues as well and really sort of moving this forward around these various strands and working collectively and collaboratively, I think to really look at addressing a key challenge I think which we can scale up in a better together approach within all of our RLUK libraries. So I think we're really delighted, we're really excited to be ready for this revolution around our digital workforce strategy. And just in case you missed it in the chat, here's the URL which we would like to thank our RLUK colleagues for making available but also like to take the opportunity to thank all the members of our ADN strategy workforce. This isn't just Fiona and I, this has been a collective effort and it's been really, really satisfying to do that work around that. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, that was really interesting. Thanks to William and Fiona and I love being given presents at the end of a presentation where we've got a link, we can all go out straight away after the session and have a look at that strategy. I was thinking of questions throughout that and I hope all the people are as well, so please do post them in the Q&A but we're going to move on to our next set of speakers now. So for this one we've now got Matt Greenhall, Deputy Executive Director of RLUK and Laurie Taylor, Senior Director for Library Technology and Digital Strategies from the University of Florida and tying in really nicely to William and Fiona's talk. We've got Matt and Laurie talking about the position description bank. So this is their session on position descriptions over the pond, the experience and early results of the RLUKs onboarding into the ARLBD bank. So I'll take it away. Thanks so much for the introduction and it's lovely how well these two presentations fit together. We're really excited to be here today. I'm Laurie Taylor and I'm here with Matt Greenhall. So what we're going to do today, we're going to talk for about 15 minutes about the experience and early results of the RLUKs onboarding into the PD bank. So we're going to start by introducing the PD bank and cover a little bit about its origins and purpose. Then we'll provide an overview of RLUK joining this resource and we'll talk about similarities and differences revealed by the onboarding of your RLUK members. And finally, we'll provide an overview of the early results of RLUK members joining this resource and uploading their job descriptions into the PD bank. So we'll divide the talk between us, talk for about 15 minutes and then we look forward to questions afterwards. So to get started on the brief history, to give you a sense overall, the research library's position description bank or the PD bank is a collection of position descriptions for major academic and research libraries. The PD bank fosters the sharing of information through a browsable and searchable database that provides access to the collection or bank of PDs throughout Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The PD bank supports a management of PDs for individual institutions providing an effective organizational method and system that supports findability as well as archiving for long-term digital preservation. And it was developed based on specifications determined by library personnel officers through focus groups and other feedback channels. The PD bank provides a more useful source for current PDs and depicts the evolution of positions and library functions and services as reflected over time in the PDs. So why was this created? Perhaps the most common collaboration between personnel officers from different academic libraries is the sharing of position descriptions. This was usually initiated by a request for samples of an electronic mailing list. The responses are hit and miss and not often distributed to the whole list and neither responses nor the requests are archived. Additionally, library human resources management staff extends a considerable amount of time and effort managing, archiving, locating, retrieving and distributing position descriptions. These documents serve as an important as important elements of effective human resources management and are only useful if maintained, organized and accessible. Techniques for and effectiveness in managing these documents can vary from institution to institution. So on the slide, the need and value is really for sharing the position descriptions, tracking trends over time, projecting for the future and new opportunities from greater understanding of positions, competencies and ways of working. The prehistory of this from 2006 to 2011, everyone needed to do this and so management was at the local level with these shadow internal systems at UF. Our internal system was called Green Monster, colorfully named for its time. But by 2012, a planning began in 2013, the PD Bank launched soon after the onboarding of different consortia starting with the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries and then in 2014, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. So the PD Bank emerged at a time when we could share data in a centralized and consistent manner and we acutely needed it with changes in the digital age, librarianship and research with new positions. Like data management, digital scholarship, exhibits and more. So shown here are UF's first data management librarian, Dr. Plato Smith and UF's first exhibits coordinator who's now exhibits director, Lorda Santamaria Wheeler. These positions are within the last decade or so. So I've been at the University of Florida for 15 years and both of these positions are new in my time here. So as we look at position descriptions, we can inform changes locally and across the profession. And just a note on that, I was looking at a different report earlier and saw that it was in 2004 that the Association of Research Libraries in the US approved digital as a means for preservation. So if we think about the span of time, how many people do we know who do digital preservation, digital collections, data management, all of these things that are really deeply interconnected and all of these positions that are really relatively new in the overall scheme of things. So with that, I will turn it over to Matt. Thanks so much, Laurie. So I'm going to talk through the process of REUK joining the PD Bank. I'm going to give a bit of context of the process we went through and I think most significantly some of the things that we've learnt along the way and in particular some of the things we've learnt from REUK members uploading content into the PD Bank. So REUK's journey to join this really exciting and fantastic resource began back in October 2019 and it came from quite a specific place. It emerged from a discussion that was held at an international symposium which was convened by REUK's Digital Scholarship Network which was held at the British Library. This symposium explored the changing skills requirements and competencies around digital scholarship services within research libraries and it was during these discussions and this event that colleagues from the ARL first introduced the PD Bank to us as a potential way of understanding those shifting and changing competencies and skills requirements within our libraries. From this event we then began a series of lengthy conversations with the ARL in the United States and also our colleagues at the University of Florida regarding REUK joining this resource. This included the collation and sharing of job descriptions from across the REUK membership convened and collated by members of the DSN and also involved some comments and review of some of the metadata fields of the PD Bank to make it more accessible and appropriate to REUK positions. And a big thank you to members of the DSN for supporting this process and advising on this from the outset. Following these discussions we were then delighted to commit resource and support the onboarding of REUK into the PD Bank from January 2021, a little delayed because of the COVID crisis. The changes that were made to the system by University of Florida colleagues and resulted in the launch of the PD Bank for REUK members in June of last year. And we were delighted by the response from the REUK community to the opportunity of joining this resource. Since this launch event in June, 23 REUK member libraries have signed up to participate in this project. They have attended training and webinars, received guidance and support both from the REUK executive, but particularly from colleagues at the University of Florida. And we were delighted to see that in November 2021, the first position description was uploaded from an REUK member. There's now over 230 position descriptions in the PD Bank from REUK members or from five libraries in particular. And we hope that this number will continue to grow over the coming weeks and months. This process, the discussions we held with colleagues in Florida and at the ARL, the conversations that we've had through some of the training sessions and the onboarding of REUK members into this resource has revealed some similarities and differences in the experiences between both UK and Irish North American research libraries. There were some obvious differences which we noted from the outset in terms of the terminology used for contract types, for example, and different areas of library skills and competencies, variations in acronyms and the use of terms or use of the same terms which maybe have slightly different meanings on both sides of the Atlantic. What we did note, however, were many similarities in the current experiences of research libraries on both sides of the Atlantic. Both UK, US and Canadian research libraries have been undergoing a significant period of restructure as their role and remit grows and diversifies over time. We've seen research libraries change their structures and organisational alignment. This is something we've also witnessed intensifying during COVID and post COVID. In part, this has reflected some of the wider changes within the recruitment landscape, particularly the great resignation, something witnessed on both sides of the pond in response to COVID-19. As individuals have left our organisations, particularly at very senior levels, this has provided opportunities for research libraries to look at their structures and their alignments and their teams. And this is something we've seen on both sides. We've also seen, and Fiona noted this in the previous presentation, the growth in both experience and expectation around flexible working and remote working on behalf of individuals within our organisations and particularly those seeking to join our organisations. As we explored briefly yesterday, there's been a real focus and an urgency around EDI or DEI as it's often referred to in North America in making organisations more inclusive and diverse, particularly during the recruitment process. Reference to EDI is something we see within many of the job descriptions which are being uploaded by REUK members into the PD Bank. We've also been exploring the representation of these issues within North America and in particular, the creation of very senior roles at director or associate director level around diversity and inclusion. So very senior posts being created within North American research libraries to really drive change around EDI. We've also seen and reflected on the importance of agility as one of the reflections from the COVID experience but also as cited by William and Fiona a moment ago and as featuring within REUK's digital shift manifesto. The ability to deploy skills and competencies quickly across organisations in response to challenge or new processes or new responsibilities. The ability to move skills and move individuals and deploy them where they're needed in real time. We've also noted and there'll be an event exploring this through IALA in a few months time issues around the talent crunch and the fact that research libraries are involved and are placed with an incredibly competitive recruitment landscape which can make both attracting and retaining staff and talent difficult where not only research libraries sometimes can't compete on salary but they're also increasing expectations of our flexibility. So these are some of the headlines that we've explored through some of the training and some of the conversations we've had. I'll now briefly talk through some of the headline results from the uploading of position descriptions into the PD Bank by REUK members. As I mentioned at the outset we've now had over 230 job descriptions uploaded into the PD Bank. These come from positions right across our organisations from very senior posts and associate director roles to more junior roles such as library assistants. So colleagues and REUK members really are uploading a wide variety of roles into this resource. There is however a senior bias to those which exist currently within the PD Bank. We've had 54 library archives and learning assistant roles but increasing numbers of head of units or department roles manager roles and as I mentioned associate director roles also. So there is a great wealth of positions being uploaded but there is a senior bias collectively in some of those currently being entered into the PD Bank. The majority of roles as you can see are full time and the vast majority are permanent appointments. What's really interesting though and is something we'll explore in greater detail is the requirement of professional qualifications within some of these positions. We see that's around 30% or 30% just under a third of the roles uploaded into the PD Bank request a professional librarian or equivalent qualification. Just under 30% seek a professional qualification of one sort or another. Whereas just over 40% don't require any specific qualification to be held in order to apply for that role. This is something we'll delve into a little deeper particularly as we get more and more position descriptions uploaded into this resource. What's really exciting as well about those that have been uploaded is really contemporary. You can see that the vast majority of roles were created in 2021 at 73% and a growing portion of the roles within the PD Bank uploaded by RUK members were created this year. So this is a really contemporary and a living resource which we hope that RUK members will be able to utilise in the months and years to come. And you can see here represented some of the very early sort of statistical analysis and representation we can do with the data with this word cloud of words contained within job titles of those positions uploaded by RUK members. When a position description is uploaded into the PD Bank the person uploading it is requested to assign it to a number of functional roles. What areas within the library does this role relate to? And you can see here with some bit more of a detailed breakdown we can start to do analysis between those areas that RUK positions relate to whether it's around branch unit or department management or access services how the portion of the these functional areas within RUK uploads reflect and relate to those within North America. So you can see currently there is a significant bias within RUK entries within the position description bank around branch unit and department management significantly more roles relate to these areas within the UK submissions than in North America. The relative importance of subject specialisms as you can see this from fairly similar percentages amongst those uploaded from RUK and those in North America. And also some of the import similar importance around access services within UK where these aren't seen as quite as significant in terms of the uploads from North America. This has a big caveat. It only relates to just over 230 roles that we have within the position description bank. These roles have only been uploaded so far by five RUK members. We start to get a sense just from this very early data of the sort of analysis that we can do not only looking at our own institutional skills and competencies and how they're changing not only see how these relate to the wider RUK consortium but then be able to place us as a consortium within this wider international context. And after all, we are recruiting from an international job market. This is a very quick illustration of the sort of analysis that we can start to do with this data seeing the relative importance of functional areas between RUK and Canadian equivalent. Carl start to make this comparison and this can be done across a wide variety of functional areas. And as we've just discussed and as I just outlined the PD bank contains submissions relating to a wide variety of functional roles within our institutions. We would firstly really like to thank University of Florida and the ARL for all of their support with onboarding RUK members but also to thank all of those colleagues who've made submissions and have attended training and attended these discussions to the guests where we are now. The PD bank will become more useful and more relevant to our RUK members and more of us who are involved and the more job descriptions that are uploaded. So if your RUK member is not yet a member of this project please don't hesitate to email Christina or myself and we can guide you through the process of joining the PD bank. It's free to join as an RUK member. It requires a very brief agreement to be signed and then some training to be attended and other than that you can then get access to the PD bank. It's data and upload your own. And on that note I will hand back over to Laurie who will pose a question. So we really wanted to close with an opening. We wanted everyone to think with us about what collaborative opportunities exist between research libraries to further explore the sharing of competencies. So some of the specificity for questions on this what will the next new roles be? Who are the people for these roles? Are they already in our institutions? Or where are we going to find them? Will some of these be shared roles? And how will we compete to hire? Access to an international data source of these PDs helps us to understand where we are now and to plot the future trajectory. RLUK just released the new strategy for 2022 to 2025 which deals heavily with EDI and the digital shift as well as the overall transformation of libraries. RLUK and AHRC have also just released a new research engagement program and professional practice fellowship scheme for academic and research libraries. As the new strategy and programs begin resources like the PD bank afford opportunities to understand and thus help to shape the transformation of our individual roles, institution and profession overall. We're excited to work with others in the sharing of PDs and using the PD bank as a shared data source and to fully engage with the PD bank as a data source for our community of practice focused on our collective future. And we wanted to thank everyone for your time today. We're really excited for the Q&A. Thank you so much Laurie and Matt. That was really really interesting to see all that sort of really good detail and analysis you've done so far of PD bank. I know that colleagues of mine have already used it to start fleshing out kind of roles that we're developing. So it's really nice to hear a bit more and also to be challenged with that question at the end. I think as you know big theme about the talks today is coming out of the pandemic. You know a lot of the digital services that we're developing have kind of accelerated because of COVID and we are you know almost playing catch-up with a lot of that in terms of sort of now being able to develop new roles to support all of those developments that's really interesting to hear all of this and we've got a few questions in the Q&A so I'll just open that up. Start the talk. We've got a couple from a colleague of mine here LSE Hannah but this is a question for William and Fiona. This is a question about the IRL UK strategy. It's been developed to answer specific questions around new skills gaps and changes and recruitment practice. It sounds like early career librarians at IRL UK libraries will be impacted by this strategy. Given the members of the ADM network are senior staff what will you do to ensure that the voices and needs of early career librarians are heard? I'm happy to start off on that one William if you want to come in at any point. Those voices are really important and what we were what we are hoping to do is to essentially start off with an audit of what skills there are and also what may not be there. And I think some of the most important voices in informing that will be people who have just finished their qualifications who are new in the profession who will bring new and fresh ideas that those of us who have been in a profession for sort of 20, 30 years who did our masters 20 years ago will be able to inform us about what is needed. I think there's there's the the potential for people to worry about this in this sort of senses well does this mean that my my existing skills aren't right are they not valued but what we need to see is that all of our careers all of our professions are an evolution of skills and we are constantly learning and there was a lot of reference to this yesterday about librarianship being a learning profession and therefore it should be seen as this. This is a really lovely way of being able to develop our skills develop our skills sets as individuals and as a sector and I think it's really exciting really exciting. I would absolutely completely agree there with Fiona and I think this possibly leans into with a bit of foreshadowing possibly the next question but also I think actually Hannah I think clearly as a co-founder of an early careers kind of research librarian and kind of group and so on in London I think you're somebody we should be talking to as well it is absolutely not you know just you know I think you want to think of the the ADN as the you know as the the sort of the kind of you know task with the the delivery and the the focus around this but it absolutely not you know intended to be a senior staff echo chamber or in any way shape or form you know not be wide open to all the the kind of bread from range that the colleagues in the in the profession and in our institutions have to offer Thank you thanks for that I think that that definitely reflect a you know experience that I've had in recruitment it's not just about new roles and that it's actually looking at you know reviewing job descriptions developing people that's one of the things that's really important to think about when you're looking at the overview of all the you know teams you have in a library and there are skills that are you know here the two sort of untapped in people that you can start surface and bring out suddenly people find they're very excited about something and they'll you know will put them on some training and and suddenly they've got new kind of area that they're they're you know working with so and I think that's that was a really good point that the hand is making though about sort of being involved I want to follow on with her next question yes about look outside the traditional fields what are the implications of that for traditional library qualifications and you see these qualifications of diminishing and important in future recruitment I think that's a really interesting question and actually I think that the absolutely aren't diminishing I think actually even if you know we think about you know that engagement that we had around table yesterday I think there's there is perhaps some kind of re redefining of kind of librarianship or some kind of pushing around some of the edws but I think those qualifications and they touched on yesterday some of those underlying principles of librarianship some of those kind of core activities core roles the values around kind of trust and authenticity and so on I think actually are going to increase because you know that is you know very much kind of recognised as you know part of that that qualification in those roles so I think I see those again is a sort of very complementary we're going to be just matching you know the right staff for you know the right the right roles looking at all of those but I certainly do not see any diminishment around that in my professional opinion certainly I don't find a way to do that It's on piano sorry I was just going to say to abs about I think we'll use the word evolution again that you know all courses in the same way that our own personal professional development needs to evolve so to these should evolve and we should all be involved in enabling them to develop and to make sure the skills are relevant but it will change and it's changing so quickly at the moment that you know certainly of course that I did 20 odd years ago is very different to the one that you know Hannah and colleagues will have done more recently so it's yeah and I think there's a role for a library school there I mean if we go back from what we need it's it's a classic thing of looking at how people are getting their qualifications and what those needs are when they're when they're learning definitely definitely okay we're going to go having a look in the the questions here and the question from this is another colleague in Fabby Matt Greenhall mentioned a senior management bias in a number of job descriptions at management level against assistant level it doesn't ratio managers assistant roles reflect the reality I just wondered if you wanted to make a comment about that in terms of how you feel it reflect the reality that you're aware of Yeah I think and thank you Fabby for that question and I think it may well do but what's interesting I think and why maybe add a little caution in terms of the job descriptions that have been uploaded to the PD Bank so far from RUK members a number of these members who've done so have gone through wholesale sort of restructures so there's been a at all levels so effectively there's been a flood of roles relating to many different positions simultaneously going in from right across the structure so that may not be reflective of the some more organic way that organisations recruit over longer periods of time so I think you could be right yep it could reflect actually that that is just a natural reflection of things I would say at the moment the the data that's coming in is a little skewed and also we're using quite a small data set so I think we'll be able to comment on that more as more more members join I'm sure that Laurie there's any reflections you'd offer from the US side No I mean it's it changes a lot based on need and so you will see things like when people are doing you know a re-work organization are restructuring and you'll see a time of updated position descriptions and sometimes people start from the top and so different processes the wealth of the the value of the data really increases over time because then these anomalies just become part of the larger scope of it yep thank you we've also had a question with Stuart Dempster about the openness of the PD Bank so he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said authentication layer excluding many from access to key resources in future could foundation funding be thought to open up the resource to allow others to benefit from this worthwhile endeavour perhaps absolutely but one of the reasons why it's closed right now is to make sure people can be onboarded and they understand the data source and the resource for it so anyone can contact if it's a consortia thing you can contact Matt Greenhall or whoever you know your consortia is but really we're trying to have people contact their own institutional leads when then their institution and and those people can set up a basically a researcher account so you just have you only access the reason we want to do this is it really is a community of practice and we want people to be in conversation with each other and we also want to know what you're finding what obstacles you're coming into with a PD bank so we can have a virtuous process more improving it but some of it if you're not an HR professional already and a long-term one some of the terminology it it's just not the way you think and then when you're dealing with an international data source obviously that the terms have been updated that's been some of the great work with our all UK but it doesn't always make sense and so like so many data banks you do have to register for an account and be in contact with folks to make sure that you're most supported for using the data but that's been the approach to date that doesn't mean that that is the correct approach you know launched in 2013 and I normally say digital projects live in dog years it's a rapid evolution so this is something that comes from partners and that this is what folks want and that's great for us to know and then to plan on changes thank you thank you very much for that just quickly add to that and so just so if you if your member is so is participating in the PD bank process you will have an institutional lead who is sort of the named individual responsible for your in for your institution and they can provide access to the PD bank so you can get access via your institutional lead if you're participating the other thing I'd very briefly mention is as Laurie just cited you can get and there can be researcher access given to the PD bank and we've been exploring the opportunity of using the data set and providing access to some of the students doing master's dissertations in high schools for example as a really live data set around skills and competencies so we are looking at how we can share this data so in a controlled way we applaud openness. Thank you that's really useful to know I think that's something else you just touched on which is a question I had about comment about seeing how roles actually develop over time so it'd be interesting perhaps in the future once you know new roles sort of new versions of roles get added to it see how different roles actually evolve you know the same role but different different skills of a question from Martin Reed is the ADN going to use to carry out the intent skills audit you know for William and Fiona so thank you for my Martin I think there's a range of options there and one of the things that we really is part of what we were looking at were the just digital skills the just digital capability so that's something which actually University of Glasgow has recently subscribed to so we're really interested as a potential framework that's around building capacity and capability around both kind of staff and students as an initial framework but I think also as part of our kind of outreach and our engagement we're interested in anything that we might have missed so there is this as part of our kind of undertaking element there's some really interesting crowdsourcing opportunities as well there since we possibly might not have all the answers and I think it was really useful you know at yesterday's kind of writing table which was a really good example of some of the kind of events which we want to look at kind of hosting to further engage the community going forward around this strategy. Okay thank you. Next question from Ellie Cope which says lots of talk about early career professionals but what thinking is being done about supporting mid career professionals who might not be interested in moving into management but who do want to develop their skills. So I'm assuming that once for William Fiona as well. Thank you. So a huge part of the frame of the digital tools strategy is to look at developing our existing workforce as well as how we recruit a new workforce and in terms of mid career professionals you know that that's the relevant part and I think things like the audit skills and any additional sort of focus group work that we may do reaching out to the wider community that we will do we'll start to fill in what those requirements may be and we can start to look maybe as a network and as a sort of a broader sector in terms of whether there are a sort of a sort of a very specific but widely required things that could be supported and looked to ways to support them in order to the resource burden of that or about developing competencies within institutions and sharing those as well so this is very much not just about new professionals it's about mid career it's about managers as well and the skills that are required there as well as looking at new people coming into the profession before they've even taken those qualifications. Okay, that's great. Thank you. Next question. We're back to Matt and Laurie Oh, second it says I wonder if the PD bank is a general trend for shorter job descriptions aiming to divine more standardised skills borrowed from other sectors e.g. product manager data scientist UX UI specialist or are there no discernible trends in the style of the descriptions yet. We're all for all libraries to date there's not really a discernible single style and we do have some things that come in automatically from the job posting system for the Association of Research Libraries. Those are shorter but they're not short and then a bunch of us use this as our a replacement for our shadow system. And so our full position descriptions like for the University of Florida are loaded and we we also upload revisions over time. So some of them are pretty giant. You know they tell you about the University of Florida about the libraries about the city of Gainesville of Florida. You know they have all of that additional information on it. Matt I don't know if you've seen a trend. It's too early. I think it's it's too early to tell for our UK other than just echoing what Laurie said. Some of the length of the descriptions are not are not short. These these are quite detailed descriptions in terms of what it's been sort for and the type of individual and the placement of the organisation and its current strategic focus. So they are very detailed. There are some shorter ones but I'd say that length that Laurie just describes correlates with what we're starting to see in our UK members as well. Thank you. We've got another question about the PD Bank here from Paola Marcioni from JISC. Is there any intention to include also non-research libraries in the PD Bank? That hasn't been the conversation that I've been involved in debate but that doesn't mean that it can't be. Just when you look at different different fields, professions and different ways to slice and what terminology what's most useful for the situated the designated community, the community of practice for it. So the conversations have been on an Australian research library group perhaps looking once we also go outside of English I mean we're already operating in multiple versions of English and so it that adds complication. It's open for discussion and Matt you've been more involved in some of those conversations I think. So I think yes there is that potential I think at the moment really encouraging that diversity of roles from research libraries which may not traditionally be associated with research libraries as a real focus I know our colleagues in the special collections and heritage network and the work with university museums and galleries and really trying to encourage the inclusion of those roles outside a library sort of traditional description encouraging those roles to appear within the PD Bank will be important as well but I agree with Larry that there is great value in having a similarity and a comparability ability to compare between different institutions and obviously the why do you get the more difficult it might be to make that comparison but certainly always open to explore those opportunities Great Thank you I think we've got time for one more question because this one might be slightly more longer slightly longer on because this is from Michael Williams more interested here about the skills audit that Fiona and William mentioned we're starting an audit in my area collections exactly two years ago which store for obvious reasons and we're now in a very different world even though we retain significance on print collection different ways to digital so could you say a bit more about how the skills audit might work please we've got two minutes left by that place So Fiona and I very quick answer is I yes I've sort of already mentioned I think there's a couple of elements there one is that just digital skills digital capability element but I think another really important dimension it's something we're also having to look at the the digital shift manifesto and looking kind of strategy looking at the various dimensions around that around scholarship and skills and space and so on and I think that's incredibly valuable for helping to to frame and have a look at some of those skills audits so I think what Fiona and I will probably be taking away from this without putting words into Coors Mouth is these are these are some really great questions and it's really to see some of that um catalysing and uh ongoing discussion which the uh the throwing the strategy out there now has really really generated so our challenge is now to look at how we take that forward and actually feedback in with some of these uh these these colleagues around that because the strategy is an evolving and ongoing piece of activity um as well.