 Thanks for joining us today. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information and I will be moderating the session. The session is one of the plenary panels that is part of the CNI Spring 2021 virtual meeting. We'll be doing plenary sessions for the next two days and I hope you'll be able to join us for many of them. These will conclude the meeting which began last week with the release of a lot of pre-recorded project briefings and also a number of synchronous project briefing sessions. Like all of our sessions at this meeting, this is being recorded and it will subsequently be available to the public when the meeting is over. There are a couple of mechanical things I'll just mention. We're going to do this as a panel. I have a number of questions to ask our panelists who I'll introduce in a moment. We have a Q&A tool and please feel free to add your own questions using that or using the chat as the conversation goes along. For about the last 15 minutes of the session, I will open it up to questions from the audience and we will try and answer those that come in via the Q&A or the chat. I can also, if you want to ask a complicated question by voice, make that happen as well if you let me know or raise your hand. I should also mention that there is closed captioning available and do please turn that on if it's helpful to you. So we have a wonderful panel today that is going to be helping us to understand various aspects of a very striking recent announcement. The Big Ten Academic Alliance has an organization of major universities with a long rich history of collaboration. They made an announcement not too long ago that they were going to sort of take the next step on this and start thinking about how to manage their library collections as a big unified collection. There are a number of aspects of this that are really fascinating. I didn't want to spend all of our time reviewing the announcement and the strategy, but really to try and get at these aspects. I do want to note that Morris York, one of our panelists today and the director of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, has prepared a on-demand video that is part of the collection of on-demand videos we released, which will bring you up to date on this. I hope many of you who were not otherwise familiar with this have had the opportunity to view that video or read some of the material at the BTAA website. Joining Morris are Claire Stewart from the University of Nebraska, Chris Ellen Maloney from Rutgers, John Wilkin from the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana, and Joe Salem from Michigan State University, who are all part of the Alliance leadership and Brain Trust that are making this project happen. I think what I'd like to do is maybe not spend a lot of time on the physical collection as a place to start, because in some sense that feels to me, and I'd actually welcome either pushback or agreement on this, this feels to me as a bit of an extension of something we've, as a community, been moving towards in increments for some years in shared storage facilities, in reciprocal expedited ILL agreements. If you look at the University of California, they came up with these regional storage facilities back in the, those were conceptualized at the end of the 1970s. So we have a lot of history of this with physical collections, although you've certainly I would say been more aggressive than most. What really is striking to me is that you're trying to do this not just with physical collections, but with the digital collections that are going to be key to our future. Does that seem like a fair framing? I see them nodding. Good. Okay, so I'm not totally off base. And maybe the place I'd be interested in starting is with e-juris. Eternal licenses are amazingly complicated to write even for a single institution, a large single institution, just figuring out who they apply to and who they don't. The terms of access, all of that can be very protracted and tire some negotiation. How are you thinking about managing this for the entire alliance? And what's your mechanism for getting it done? There are so many cuts at this. I hope my colleagues will jump in, particularly Morris, but let me start with a little bit. So I think on e-journals, we've often seen this as a sort of a buying cooperative aspect of our work. I should say, I'm John Wilkin at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. And we've done that in the BTAA. We've done that buying cooperative sort of thing. But this seems to us less compelling in some ways than what we might do in the future when we start thinking about our collective impact as a group of institutions. So for example, the publishing that happens across the BTAA is with some of the STEM publishers comparable to the publishing in the entirety of Germany. So there's a great deal of clout there. And so moving beyond the buying cooperative and what we might do and say a deal with Wiley, which we've done in the past for most of our institutions, are the things we can do in the realm of transformative agreements, we start leveraging that collective strength of our institutions to begin to transform the landscape, to move to transformative agreements that advance open access more significantly, that help to change the economics of the landscape. So I think we will continue to do the buying cooperative sort of thing. But we'll look at possibility of what we might do with our clout as a group of institutions to try to help the scholarly landscape more generally by beginning to change some things. Morris, is it anything you want to add there? I think that it's just an incredibly important, just strategically is that direction you're laying out there, John, to say it's a pivot from what we have been able to do in the past, which is focus on a wide variety of complex things. But if we were to boil it down, it may be oversimplified to say, how can we get the best deal for each of our institutions? And the pivot, the shift here in strategic thinking, I think we're going to extend this to the big collection as a whole, is what strategic benefit can we join together to create for the alliance as a whole for the common good of all institutions, rather than distinct individual advantage for each one, which becomes incredibly important in the journal licensing, because then we say, what's the strategic contingent? Do we say, are we trying to create a sustainable and scalable ecosystem for open knowledge and open scholarship for the big 10? That becomes a different question. And we say, how might we join together to achieve that? And it doesn't preclude or necessarily set aside any of our strategies for how we join together in our licensing agreements and how we get good deal. All of that is still incredibly important. But also, as we add to that, what's that central strategy that we can create that strengthens those individual strategies, but takes a new look at it and says, we're trying to achieve something different. And how might we join together in order to achieve that? And it presents a different question that we can hold in front of us. I would only add that one of the potentials here, we have to do some discovery, right? But one of the potentials here is that even that buying club approach may change. Licensing has to change. I mean, we have to have a real coordinated approach to what this could look like. But right now, our model is to have duplicated collections across the big 10 in a buying club, even for digital content. It might be an ultimate analysis of that is the most efficient way to go for those things that we have to license. But we might move to a model where we're able to get more rights to license and share digital content and kind of divvy up more of the publications and across the big 10 have wider coverage or share those resources more efficiently. So I think the potential is there to be able to supplement move from a duplicated model to a much more of a supplemental model. And I think that's pretty exciting as well. Yeah, I want to come back and explore that sort of efficient sharing versus duplication issue. But before, because I think that's really key, and it's been very hard to achieve in the digital world, you know, the license agreements have tended to militate against it. But before we go there. So obviously, transformative agreements are on the agenda here. And, you know, I think that's wonderful. It turns out or it seems to me to be the case that there is not universal agreement about what the goals of those transformative agreements should be. And in fact, I've seen recently a fair amount of debate about that. I wonder if one of you could share what you see as the key goals that the Alliance is trying to pursue in those transformative agreements. Well, I think that's absolutely right, Cliff. And if for those who have had time to take a look at the video that Morris produced, I think the innovation model that we have centered with this really is important when it comes to looking at transforming journal licensing, transforming digital monograph licensing for that matter. And I think we're we're sort of omnivorous and exogenous when we think about how to approach this, it's not just one model, and it can't be just one model. So so at the same time that we're thinking about this knowledge commons and what it means to license digital journals, we also want to make sure that we're continuing our investment in open publishing infrastructure. So I think not to completely dodge your question, but it isn't so much about what we're trying to get out of that one subset of activities, but really what we're trying to achieve through the combination and the synergy amongst all of them. So we're working with the California Digital Library on some of the data analysis around transformative agreements. But I think the partnership also that through the Association of Research Libraries, where we have a much larger focus on some of the major, I mean, we've just talked about the limiting factors that we have with electronic licenses, that's a box that we're all in that is always going to be a huge limitation. So part of this also has to be engaging with that, those kind of legislative solutions and really looking beyond like trying to think about a future where maybe we are not giving up our digital rights as we sign these licenses and trying to plan the things that we're doing now so that when we get to that point, you know, we're all pistons firing and really ready to go fast. And I might add to that as well that I think the question is a perfect one and particularly one to reflect deeply on for each group, each alliance, each consortia, each individual institution that enters into this to say, what are our goals? What are we forwarding? What are our values? And how might we manifest those in the agreements? Because it is more complex than just getting a good economic deal, right? And a certain set of transformative agreements happened in Europe, that gave a certain cast to even just the phrase, is that what we're trying to achieve? Does it have a negative or a positive connotation for our stakeholders? And how might we want to rephrase that? Another phrase we've started using is sustainable publishing, you know, and how do we hold that up against transformative agreements? And how do those two things interact? And how might we forward that definition? What the BTA is going to do is not what Germany did. It's not what CDL is doing right now. It's a distinct strategic direction that really fits our context and our goals. And some of the deep reflection we've done over the just frankly the last six months is in that very question is what are the things that we're trying to bring forward and what are we trying to manifest in those agreements so that we can do it with great intention. And so we can communicate with publishers about what's really important to us and what we'd like to see coming our way as well. Now, my recollection is that you have already announced one of these agreements? Yes, we've announced an agreement with PLOS as part of their community action program. We announced an agreement with Cambridge University Press and there was a related, so this may be one aspect of your question, a related component. So there was investments in open access agreements as well as open infrastructure. So we also announced collective action agreement with the director of open access journals, all 15 of the alliance supporting DOAJ as well. So there's a combination of moves that are sort of their strategic, they're not throwing off random events. They're sort of, we're intentionally building a strategy that moves across several different irritants. Wonderful. I guess while we're on these kinds of strategy areas, certainly I believe that a number of your members in the alliance have either substantial university presses who are doing interesting digital things or possibly in addition library publishing programs that are doing interesting things. Are there plans to try and coordinate those more closely as part of this effort? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there are some interesting conversations already taking place between the libraries and the presses and as you said in some cases, those have the same Dean and the director overseeing both. I think it's really much too early to say where that's going to take us, but I think it's a great example of what Morris was talking about. This isn't one thing or the other. This is a yes and it's both, and it's about deepening and connecting those investments in a really intentional way. Interesting. I look forward to seeing the developments there. I mean, one of the things that is perpetually striking to me is that there feel like there should be a lot more economies of scale around university presses, but the way they've sort of propagated has been very resistant to that. And I think one of the opportunities we have not only with so many of the presses in the Big Ten either reporting to or having library publishing in the libraries and the relationships there is bringing them to the table. I think this is a really great opportunity for us. And so it's still early days and what that looks like. And I think the pandemic has been interesting for presses. It's actually bought a little bit of time seemingly for most presses to not have to, they're having a little bit of a boom from what I can tell. At least ours is locally at MSU, and I don't think that's unique to MSU. And so they may delay some of that conversation, but I think we're all having the same shift a bit underneath us. And so bringing them to the table, I think it could be a good model for more library and press partnership, even beyond the Big Ten. So can you say a little bit about how you're thinking about dealing with e-books as opposed to journals? And maybe as part of that, cycle back a little bit to that sharing versus duplication theme. And I might just jump in quickly on Cliff then. And Chris Allen, I think it just has, I have relied greatly on you for your insight into this area. Just to connect to your earlier question, Cliff, of the things that we've been exploring and agreements that we've announced, and one of those that we talked about the journal agreements, one of those that the Big Ten started together well over a year ago with Oxford Unity Press and looking at prospective publishing and accessibility to e-books and the output of Oxford Unity Press as an example to say, how might we start to see these kind of agreements to find what works and then to be able to take those to scale, which is really what the Big Ten Academic Alliance does really well is scale. So we're very much starting those explorations as an incredibly important component. But Chris, you've been watching this closely. Well, yeah, and that kind of feeds into sort of the broader fulfillment issues that we're facing and how we're thinking about that. And it's actually what we're trying to do. And it is about scale. We're trying to look at what would it take to make architectures that would allow us to do this? It's not going to be one single architecture. So we all have to work together. And what we're looking at now are the pinch points. And as we start working through the issues that we're facing, we're finding out with working with our folks in ILL and others and with the licensing folks, what works and what doesn't and where we need to build additional infrastructure. So we're being very deliberate about what we think we need to do, what kind of services we may need to expose and how we might be able to. And licenses, of course, are the big deal here. How do we all know what each other have licensed? And we've been all negotiating great licenses that allow for sharing, but we haven't really been able to operationalize that sharing because the people who are doing the work actually don't have the access to everything that they need to have access to. I do want to circle back to that whole issue of infrastructure in a couple of minutes because that, I mean, when I read the announcement on this, that was one of the things I started thinking about and my head started to hurt. The scale of the infrastructure challenge here is quite impressive. But before we get off of content, I want to ask about two other things. One is audiovisual material and what your thinking is about how to deal with that and whether you have any optimism, we can get to sane agreements on some of this. I mean, this certainly in the pandemic has emerged as a massive pain point. And depending on your strategy for sharing it, it may continue to be. So I was curious whether anybody wanted to add anything on that. Yeah, so in an earlier life, I was a media librarian and this has always been a terribly messy area. I mean, you didn't even have to get into digital before you had a huge mess in this area, the way distribution agreements were written and the very, very large community of distributors and producers and the rights complexity. I don't think we obviously have any specific solutions. This is a great example of where both because it's enormously expensive to, I mean, you could not, you probably could not pick a more at risk collection than the things that we have, particularly that magnetic media. So it's ripe for collective action and collective investment, just if we wanted to address the physical and we've got one of the best of the best in the country within the Big Ten at Indiana with a major digital preservation initiative, which is, I think, a huge leg up for us. But I think that whole patchwork of licensing is just another great example of we just can't wait for the solution to come or to assume that we will be able to negotiate a license that will fix this. I think we also think about the solution coming outside of licensing and maybe asserting our rights in a different way. And again, pandemic and there are a lot of research libraries that have been doing this in ways big and small, not always very publicly. And but we are kind of having our moment now with the pandemic and the way that we've responded to making that, you know, taking a different approach to providing access to the digital surrogates of our print collection. We may be poised to do something similar, I think, with audio visual material, but I personally just don't think we're going to buy or license our way out of that. If anything, it's getting more dysfunctional and complicated. It would sure be a wonderful thing if you could blaze a trail forward for the research library community in this area, because I really think your analysis, Claire, is unfortunately all too accurate. Can someone, I guess I would presume that you are also talking about how to capitalize on some of that expertise in digital preservation around this kind of material in a unified way as well. I mean, you have got some of the major, you know, centers in the country. Yeah, it hasn't been a key focus just within the last year. But I don't know, Morris, if you want to talk about kind of where we are with encouraging pilot projects, because I really think, you know, nothing has been set in stone at this point in terms of what we're going to be working on in the immediate. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, to that point, we're going to start to be able to, you know, Cliff, as you started this, we're sort of just beginning of moving into action on this and announcing the steps and we'll see a number over the over the coming months in the course of the year, announcements of the pilots and where we're starting. And we do have to have a certain focus with some of the major key challenges. And then we start to expand the set of pilots and move I in a certain way come out of digital preservation most recently. So it's near and dear to my heart. We do have an incredible opportunity and particularly with the pandemic, rapidly accelerating the thinking about action that connects across many of these different fields. So with digital preservation, for example, how does that connect to the fulfillment question and when scholars can't actually reach the archives and when the stacks are closed, and we're creating on demand surrogates of our collections and when those are the special collections and distinctive and unique collections, and we creating those digital surrogates, are we doing it in a way that produces high quality, high resolution, long term archival versions of those. And then where do we store those? Are we each having to produce our own digital preservation infrastructure? Or is there some infrastructure that we can create collectively? And then workloads that are feeding in those relationships between on demand fulfillment, deep scholarship and research, long term preservation, the expansions of our collections. I think what the big collection as a strategic direction gives us is the opportunity to look across many of these areas that could be seen as distinct or needing development in each one and really say how did they connect and what are those threads that we can build in from the front and not that we have to make a solution to all of it all at once. But if we enter into it with intention and working on these parallel trajectories that we can intentionally weave them together as we go and start to create things where we say, ah, we might not be working on digital preservation up front, right? We might not have a thing that says, wow, we're going to do for digital preservation. But as we're doing these other ones, we start to weave them in and then six months a year down year and a half down the road, we say, oh yeah, we were working on that all the time. We were building the basics into every move that we made so that it was ready. One of the things I would add is obviously there's a huge infrastructure piece there for digital preservation, but I think one of the real benefits of thinking at this scale across the Big Ten is there's obviously policy and service aspects of things like digital preservation. And so more that we're tapping into and leveraging the expertise across these institutions, we're all on a different part of the spectrum as far as where we are on our own digital preservation strategies and infrastructure. But there's a lot of expertise and a lot of experience here. And so being able to do that at scale across the Big Ten is where I think the real benefit of working in this way is. It's a slight tangent in a way, but I think it's worth mentioning that the BTAA were really leaders in developing the principles and protocols for interlibrary loan of special collections materials. So this isn't necessarily preservation, but this is big infrastructure when you start thinking about how do you get people to make agreements so that they can take the things that are most cherished to them and figure out ways that they can share them. So I think not looking at technical infrastructure, just looking at the way that the BTAA approaches these things is really important. Yeah, and that special collections sharing thing was really a landmark. I was really excited when I saw that. Let's talk about infrastructure, though, a little bit systems kinds of things. Now, I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure that not all of your members are running the same platforms. No, no, not at all. I mean, I think we all talked a little bit or you talked a little bit about how complex jaw dropping or overwhelming it is. And people might have watched Morris's video, but just a little bit more context. The BTAA is a big research enterprise. It has over $10 billion in combined research expenditures. And I'm going to drop some names here, but it's important that exceeds the research expenditures of the University of California System and the Ivy League combined. And so collectively, the BTAA produces 15% of the research publications in the United States. In addition to the research for a big educational enterprise, more than half a million students are enrolled right now. So that's three times the number that are enrolled at UC. So it sounds like I'm trying to compete with UC. But what we've seen is the real transformation the UC system has been able to make because of successful negotiation with Elsevier. And it demonstrates the influence that the size when you have this kind of size they could have in attempting to change or establish a new infrastructure. Even if we don't agree, everybody agrees specifically with what happened with UC and Elsevier. I think we can all agree that it was a sea change and that it's going to really change what goes on in the future. So when you look at the BTAA and realize that's only part of the story, because our system you borrow, that's the resource sharing platform that we all share. It accounts for less than 50% of all of the ILL activity within the BTAA. So you have that complexity. Well, adding to that, so and because of that, and what that is is most BTAA members are large state schools, often the flagship of the ship of the state, and each has multiple adjacent networks like Ohio Link for Ohio State, Minotech for Minnesota, Pal C for both Penn State and Rutgers and so on. So these are networks where partner institutions may have different goals and priorities related to research and even a different emphasis on how they think about education, liberal education versus career preparation. So, you know, the issue is more than the BTAA, it's there. The full issue is the size of the BTAA itself, schools with mostly similar characteristics, and then all of these adjacent heterogeneous networks that we also have to serve as part of our mission. So, like we already said today, the size and complexity provide an environment where we can work at scale. Hopefully, like California, with enough critical mass to establish and strengthen standards, set best practices for the market, and hopefully, you know, our partners are the market for library systems that are for profit and not for profit, and also with open source development. You know, Morris says we couldn't issue an RFP, and we couldn't even build a solution that would satisfy the requirements that we face, and even if we could, we wouldn't want to. We don't want to create a big, giant BTAA silo. The vision of the collective collection is to pursue purposeful strategies of interdependence that will allow us to advance the missions of our universities, really advance public education at large. So, our approach is really to integrate existing platforms and tools, produce a modular architecture, or as Morris says, a kit of parts, focusing on key integration points, use standards-based interfaces, establish, perhaps develop a set of common services to link systems. So, you asked about the systems that we use. If we look just at fulfillment research sharing alone, we're talking about ex-leavers, cersei, folio, world cat, relay, rapido, Iliad. So, our goal is to really create in that iterative fashion an environment that allows us to expand choices by taking open approach that allows for system integration rather than just buying a big, another silo. So, that's our current, that's our approach to the architecture. We have multiple different pilot programs going on right now to kind of stretch where we are in that area. That's really helpful to understand. You're not just saying you're going to converge everybody to a common giant platform in the sky. Total non-starter. That will never happen. But we do have the opportunity and now we've seen it. Now I feel just empowered because we've seen what working together can do. We've seen that with what happened with UC, like I said, it may not be what we all want to do, but that changed what's going on with how we acquire our content forever. If we could make some of those changes too with the infrastructure that we can all get behind. Even if it's a commercial provider of a system, if those interfaces are so clear that we can interoperate, then commercial solutions may be appropriate and open source may be appropriate. I would just add that even watching another kind of outside the libraries, but adjacent to them and Claire could speak to this with more experience because she's added units in school. I can't remember which ones are, but the units and models moving more in this direction too. They've just added a second learning management system to their portfolio and for a long time it was canvas only for those institutions that were in units and then they're moving to be not as platform-specific. I think this is the it's good to see that elsewhere because as we were looking at models early on, that was a question to us. Do we move in and kind of go more of a units and type model where we all have shared infrastructure? We made that decision early on and I think that was the right decision, but it's also good to see that that decision kind of playing out elsewhere that single platform consortia and models just not going to work for these big institutions. That's really interesting. The last two sets of comments sort of foreshadowed two questions I was going to ask. One was for many of your institutions, you also play this flagship role within your state for the public institutions and that sets up a really interesting set of, I don't want to call them competing demands, but objectives that need to be balanced in some fashion. I think you called it adjacent networks, which maybe is a very good term for it. It was just to give credit for credits, do it comes from the OCLC report that so that's when they did the analysis and we really came to understand how large there are adjacent networks or I mean how much a part of what we did was within those adjacent networks. One of the hopes though is that some of the innovation that we see overall as part of what we're doing with the big collection will, even from a content perspective, especially I think some of the work we're seeing on transformative models, they don't work with some of our regional schools. Michigan State's in a regional consortium on CLS and if we go in on a transformative deal we kind of blow it up for everyone, so we don't necessarily want to do that unless it's strategic and we're helping them from that perspective, but as we go further along some of the infrastructure and some of the kind of innovation on interoperability may be something that benefits those networks as well. So we're hoping to be able to contribute in a couple of different directions even if it's not necessarily from a content perspective. So then the other one I was going to touch on was you, a number of your members I believe are involved with Unison and several of them are not and I'm wondering how you see, I mean Unison has its own sort of strategies for cooperation inside the Unison membership. How do you see those two, what you're doing and what the Unison consortium is doing playing off against each other? Well I think there's a, you know as Joe said, there's a lot of similarities in the model and the approach and we're happy to see more of them coming from the Unison side with you know commitments to multiple platforms, but the idea behind Unison I think was always to have a little bit more control and maybe even ownership in the educational space and to learn from some of the things that we, the painful lessons that we had learned on the research side of things and for that reason I think libraries are, have always been and I should say from the very beginning with Unison, the members of the library groups were getting together and talking about you know content relay was what we called it at the time. How are we going to make sure that as you're building this extremely powerful academy owned and controlled environment for supporting educational innovation and that you're also connecting to this massive investment that we've made in content and you know I would give Unison sort of mixed marks on that. I think they always recognized the libraries were a really important critical partner but the attention was often kind of drawn drawn elsewhere. On the other hand there's a fantastic press books you know open OER publishing platform through Unison. I think the thing that's always been frustrating for libraries is our inability to communicate that what we are seeing with the inclusive access model is very much the same thing we were seeing with evolution of big deals and journal publishing on on the you know the research material side and that there's reason to be very very cautious about that model and to be investing as vigorously in the alternatives and making sure that you don't get you know five years down the road and what was a really great sweet intro deal now that they've achieved lock-in the prices go up. So I think there's been I think recently renewed conversation between the Unison and the library community which I'm really excited about and I think that there's an order tool you know that's built to kind of be faculty facing the place where they acquire and assemble their content. I think we probably still have a lot to learn about how faculty actually really do do that but to the extent that there's a place where that activity happens I think there's recognition that the library and the you know millions and millions of dollars that we're spending that content needs to be very well represented and centered too. So as for you know some of us are Unison and some of us aren't Unison it's it's kind of the same theme that we've been going over regardless of who participates in the immediate we all learn something and it always adds to and kind of advanced sort of like leapfrogging your infrastructure right. It might be Unison that spurs this little thing that then becomes part of the common infrastructure that then advances something else in another location so it doesn't always have to be all 15 institutions as active participants. That's that's that's a very helpful way of thinking about it I think. Gosh I have a million more questions but I think in fairness to our audience we should call for some questions from them. So the floor is open please use either the Q&A tool or the chat or raise a hand if you prefer that. And while we're waiting for questions Cliff I might just say just build on what your excellent framing of Unison there Claire and this question about also our adjacent networks and things like that. The the beautiful thing about the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the institutions we have they do not exist in a vacuum we don't get to all 15 you say well what will the 15 of us like to do we're all deeply involved in many different initiatives sometimes it's a few of us very rarely it's actually all of us you know except for things like HathiTrust and you know and even HathiTrust we point to John I see the poster behind you there so I also but that that in a certain way was born out of the Big Ten but it was never a BTA project you know two of our institutions got together and ceded that now to something that has grown to incredible world-changing scale and well over 150 institutions and these are the ways that we can take collective action and to focus our efforts and to say what are the different things we can see and to forward our priorities and our collective interests and the common good of all the institutions that we work with to say is it Unison that we can enter into and join the scale is it HathiTrust is it a variety of other open initiatives where we join to scale and we find ways to really forward those goals on on behalf of a much broader alliance and ours as well right our institutions and the priorities for our alliance so Unison is just a wonderful example of a similar theme okay we have a question in and we have we have one of these pesky ambiguous acronyms um the question what other concrete ways are you working with cdl wouldn't that be a massive scale what's the biggest risk to this direction that you are accounting for in your planning and what's the biggest risk that you can't account for and I am guessing cdl there means controlled digital lending not the california digital library but um please correct us um if that's not right so they're really sort of two questions oh cal california thank you okay so it's not so it's it's cdl so so those really those really are two separate questions then so the first question is what what are you doing with california digital library or if you want to talk about the data analysis uh piece that we're doing with them is it um yeah I think that and this goes to one of the ways you started the this great conversation cliff is with what are we doing in in e-journals and what we pick up as the bta and so forth we've been working for some time now with california digital library which has been um really innovating uh the question of how do we create a scalable oa strategy for north america and as well of course they're focused on california and how to start those conversations with journal publishers we talked about el severe that's been one of the great outcomes of that they've been working on this for some time and um seeing following their lead to a certain extent their their expertise in this area their real thought leadership would say how can we adapt and incorporate uh somewhat cal the model california has been innovating what can we pick up from uh germany and what wiley has done in germany and so forth and start to combine these and form a bta focus strategy and we've been working closely with um cdl on that over uh i'd say the last i don't know how long john well over a year at this point probably yeah um to set as real thought partners both in their expertise with data analysis and how to dive into it the kinds of questions they know about how to ask the kind of probing they know how to do and then present some of our perspectives and and what we'd like to explore and have them say okay and how about this as well so real thought partners and analysis partners and also strategic partners and and how we join together to to work in in that space in particular yeah it's just a all I had and this is really not a substantive addition uh a very very deep dive into the data and I think a lot of what we do in this space when we're looking at publishing and uh and publishers tends to be superficial and knee jerk and we want to make sure that we have a sound grounding and in uh in that and in that it would help us to extrapolate models and they've been great great partners in that um if I may I'd like to just uh because because there was the possibility of controlled digital lending uh uh just uh uh force a small digression and and bring in the Hottie trust piece and and to say that you know for us you know across it wasn't just the two institutions the whole bta is along with california as a founder this is a proto big collection effort the way we think of ourselves together and and um we're going to give props to to Hottie trust for what it did with with the emergency temporary access service but it it does help us to stimulate thinking right so we are now accessing millions of volumes at each or many of our institutions but can we then start thinking about the way that we can use resource sharing within the consortium to give up lending to another institution to do some load balancing to take advantage of that infrastructure obviously that's not in the cards right now because this is just a moment in time with the pandemic but but it does allow us to think uh more creatively about that um that deep investment that we hold together and that we can see as a platform for understanding our collections and leveraging them ditto on uh shared print so as you said at the beginning uh cliff um it is a sort of backward looking but but my you know we have not done anything with uh with print monograph uh print book uh storage and could we uh leverage really firm commitments that we uh that we coordinate around that digital collection in a way that that begins to advance our interests in the shared book storage arena where we've got a lot of waste and and underserved population so can we can we do a lot more there and we believe particularly in the bta that we can and we'd like to see some more action in in that direction so sorry to force that digression no no that's a very that's a very useful digression and i really did not want to give short shrift to the print aspects of this but i thought that it would be better to focus on the electronic one simply because they are a lot more novel and less well explored um why don't we take that question about risk what what what's the big risk you're trying to plan for and what's the you know sort of biggest risk you can't account for in your planning very well i'll i'll start with one that i think we're trying to account for but i think top of mind especially for consortia right now and that is the financial situation we're all in so we're we're making commitments um based on some constraints in our own staffing and and although we anticipate overall efficiencies down the line this is not really a cost-saving measure this is we're really thinking in terms of uh impact and and um scale across the the big 10 i mean there will be hopefully some efficiencies and that's how you can raise the impact level i think the risk that we're trying to mitigate is is moving right away through this idea that this is going to solve any of our financial constraints in the short term and and socializing it at our own institutions from that perspective at least in my institution some of the concern is oh well this is how we work across the big tender deal with our own budget decision and we have to kind of accommodate that in some of our planning and it's a hard way to to get a big initiative like this started in this kind of environment might also create the opportunity for innovation but it's a hard environment to do that i think the you know the thing that's related and i think it's partially what you said jeff i mean jeff joe and you know and but it has to do with the cultural change so you know that sharing is already in the dna of the big 10 so we did you know sharing special collection that's a huge thing but still the rapid you know who when you talk about risk we're living through a pandemic so the rapid cultural change that's coming with the pandemic and and how do we how do we really quickly reorient our our folks to see all of this you know in the same way that we that we all see it you know that the leadership sees it that a good portion of the library see it so i think we've taken really strong steps to mitigate that risk by having a lot of presentation since morris has come we've really we're pushing out a lot more information about what's really happening the scope the nature of what's happening but it is this is rapid change for higher education it's something we've been planning it's something that would have taken place those circles around would have gone at a certain pace they're really going to be fast now and how do we get our organizations not getting dizzy seeing that go around like that i think it's such a wonderful i'd love to chris that the pandemic just changes everything right even just the notion that we could plan for a specific risk and say that we're resilient against it i mean something will happen that nobody ever could have predicted and hey maybe something that started over a decade ago with no knowledge of something like a pandemic and all like hotty trust might step in with the perfect at the perfect moment with just the right you know and nobody would have planned it that way so that this is you know cost is one kind of risk it's incredibly important right now we have to be able to plan for it incorporate it but a public health crisis infrastructure collapse the political upheaval climate crisis and there's so many elements that at a certain point it is just really hard to know what the variables are which ones are interacting on each other and to say can we plan for each combination and i think the stance we're taking with the big collection to say well what collective action does is it prepares us and sets us on a pathway to be more resilient against an unpredictable future and if we start to take that approach and then when those events happen we can say we not necessarily plan for it or solve it but we prepared ourselves and we have the solutions to something that crisis and the answers will emerge from what we've been collectively creating together and and and whether that works or not i will give the testimony of all history perhaps to say whether or not but that's what we're going to lean into and i think that's the direction is is sort of the beauty of the what the the big collection is is a commitment to pursue that direction and to discover it together that's a wonderful way to tie this this together and to deal with those unknown risks i mean enumerating them all in detail is unmanageable um uh probably hopeless but this effort to you know create a pool of resilience um uh is is i think a very promising one and that in a very real sense is what this is about um we we are getting very close to time um i've got i've got two more questions here um one one maybe has a quick answer which is that you know right now we're seeing um licensed content being dealt with increasingly on a sort of consortial scale um what what would be the next step up for that i mean in fact we're seeing it done on a national scale in some countries certainly in the uk there's a lot of content licensing that goes on on a national basis for example some of that's being done in canada as well um does does this ever move to you know literally an international kind of a scope thing it might just i i think we clicked it does the the quick touch on that would be i almost and i love the question dale but it's like this is global you know and i think the global movement towards oa we can sort of this almost described the arc of it over the last 20 years and to see how this movement has been i mean for the btaa one of the insights we get in diving into the data is that fully half of the content published across btaa is open now is it the kind of open that we want do we want to do we want to shift it in a direction what do we want to do with intention as we move into that incredibly important questions but i think it's been able to achieve that level because of this global movement and because of different regions of the globe different countries different areas are taking different strategies towards that and it's an excellent question to ask is like how do we assemble all of those regional strategies into a global movement and a cohesive step forward and there are wonderful organizations that are taking that up at a very deep level to say how do we start to join those together into something that coherently joins these pieces together at a global scale and to really move the the dial in a significant way so we are at time in fact a little past time and i just want to give our panelists the opportunity to say a last few words if they wish to well something that hasn't come up in the questions cliff is to really just to mention that this is something that we are in conversation with our provosts about and we have the support of our provosts and i think there's a lot of faculty excitement and interest about this too so we are here representing the libraries but we don't see this as a library project exclusively and i think some of the the conversation we had about about transforming scholarship really depends on working with the date with our fellow deans working with our provosts and i think we're seeing very promising signals about you know shifting that whole conversation from being about buying and licensing stuff to okay how are we going to invest in this research enterprise and what does it look like in the future maybe that's a wonderful place to weave it um and i'm i'm so glad you stressed that because there really is a whole um you know big conversation to be had about how how does this connect up with faculty with the collective research enterprise um indeed maybe even with instruction and moving instruction into a you know community mode more and less of a every institution doing the same thing over and over again um john yeah i um i want to be careful not to leave our audience with the the sense that we're building a fortress uh in the bta and i think you've heard this from just about everybody on the panel we think of ourselves in a larger context and and so just to to remind everybody deal asky's question toward the end is is very helpful and morris's response is is right on target we're we're not trying to to build a moat around the bta a but really to see ourselves as citizens in the world and try to find some extensible strategies that that that tie us into that infrastructure and we believe that we can do it by building in uh on top of what we've committed with each other so thank you that's it what what a great pair of bookends to the panel we would thank you all so much for doing this and for making us all a bit more informed about the great stuff what you're doing and i really hope we can get you all back um at some point in the future to see how this is evolving going forward so many many thanks for a great panel folks and with that i'll conclude the first day of plenary sessions and i hope to see many of you tomorrow at uh two o'clock eastern have a good evening all and thanks for joining us