 I'm David Prosser, I'm the Executive Director of Research Libraries UK and as I say it's my great pleasure to be chairing this session today. Issues around our capacity to make positive change within research libraries and the importance of partnership to increase capacity have been themes over the past two days of the conference and so it really feels right that we're addressing capacity partnership and the foundational issue of skills in this session this morning. So our first speaker is Beth Montague-Helland who will be speaking on new library roles existing library skills. Beth is the new, I think for about four or five months now, the new head of library and information services at the Francis Crick Institute in London in the UK. Before that she was at Nottingham University and it was there in 2020 that she was a co-winner of the prestigious Royal Society Athena Prize. Beth came to libraries from a biological sciences research background and this has led her to both championing unusual paths into library and encouraging library staff to explore new roles within research support. This places her in an ideal position to think about how we can leverage existing strengths within the library community to fulfil these new emerging roles. So Beth, if I can hand over to you. Thanks very much David. Yes, so thanks for having me this morning everyone. I've been at the Francis Crick since November now so it's still quite new for me and as part of what I'm doing, moving into this new role, we're hiring at least one new person. So this kind of issue about who we get into libraries, what skills they need, what the roles are that we actually kind of need to be building within library teams is really on my mind at the moment so it's very nice to be able to come and talk to you about this. Those of you who are on Twitter may have seen me tweeting lots earlier in the conference. My handle is there at PhD Geek. It's a legacy thing from being a PhD student so feel free to tag me into anything that you'd like to. So within libraries, I always hear a lot of talk about skills gap. I've been lots of papers about it, lots of things out of the high school. Lots of people talking about how there aren't necessarily these existing skills within libraries around things like data management, experience of having conducted research, coding. I certainly teach quite a lot of library carpentry sessions, introducing librarians to coding and data skills and that goes into quite a lot of detail but as we go through this process, go through the talk this morning you'll see that actually I don't believe that we need that kind of level of skills. I think that what we've got within libraries already is actually the building blocks for all of these jobs and that it's very small amount of additional learning which we're great at in libraries that can actually bring us to the point where we can really fill all these roles. We also talk a lot about changing cultures, changing identities in libraries but that is nothing new in libraries and you'll see on the next slide that this has been going on forever. So the things that librarians are really good at but I want us to think about and think about how we can build on these things in order to move into new roles are we're great at details. Librarians like details, you know metadata, looking at where we can improve descriptions of things, make things more findable, make people understand what they are more. That's really important for all these kind of data roles. Talking to students and researchers that is by far the biggest part of every academic librarian's role really is talking to the patrons, finding out what they need, finding out how we can help them. Often they don't know what they need, you're having a conversation with a researcher, you get 10 minutes in and you discover that actually what they thought they wanted, it's not what they wanted at all and librarians are great at weaseling that out. And then I think learning new things. I learn things pretty much every day I'm sure like me most people have learned a lot over the last two days of this conference but I think just even in our everyday working lives we learn new things all the time, things about new topics, things about new techniques, new systems, new resources, we're learning all the time. So academic libraries have been through a lot. I started this slide here, 600 BC is according to the internet, probably the earliest university library. That's before Alexandria, Alexandria is not until sort of 300ish BC. But we don't have to go back that far to kind of see how things have changed. Even in the last sort of 20 years there's been enormous change in libraries. I first went to university in 2000 and I barely used the internet during my degree. We had, you know, computer rooms on campus that we'd go to people didn't have their own laptops. All of that has changed enormously. So we're moving all the time in libraries, things change all the time. I don't think that's something that we should be scared of. Even if the change is something that maybe we didn't expect to happen. So the other bit that's changing all the time is resources. We go back to the 1960s, you get what a lot of people out in the kind of real world think of with libraries. We have books, we have hard copy journals, probably micro fish. I never learned how to use that machine. But I'm sure that many people who are watching at the moment have had experiences with those things. That's what you kind of expected in a university library back then. We moved forward to the 1990s. The way knowledge is represented, the way information is stored within our libraries has expanded enormously. We suddenly get things like tapes and videos, CD ROMs. I loved my copy of In Carter on a CD ROM. That was great. It really felt like the future having encyclopedias on a computer. We start to get the internet. 1990s we start to get the internet. That really changed everything for most people. In the 1990s, if you were an academic librarian, the internet probably felt scary and new and difficult. Like a really big barrier to what was coming next. Nowadays it's part of our everyday practice. I think the things that we're finding difficult now in 20 years time, that may well be part of people's everyday practice. We'll look back at now and think, wow, why did we find that so difficult? If we look at now, we've still got books. Books aren't going anywhere. But we have e-books as well. The internet is a huge thing in everybody's everyday life. We have online journals now mostly. Certainly I don't have any paper copies in my library. There may be a few floating around in yours. But mostly everything's online. We're starting to get things like micro publications who come across octopus. They're encouraging people to do things like publish your hypothesis separately from your journal article. Publish the impact after your journal article. There's all sorts of new ways of sharing knowledge and information with the rest of the world. And then data sets. So I've put data sets as just one thing here. But like in the 1990s where we had all this different multimedia stuff, tapes, CDs, videos, DVDs, data sets are really like that. A lot of the time, particularly people who aren't very familiar with data, they might think of data as one thing. Oh, I don't know that much about data. But data is enormous. There are thousands of different file types, different ways of organizing data. So actually, people probably know quite a lot about certain types of data. If you've got an undergraduate degree, you will have learned about some types of data within whatever field that your undergraduate degree was in. I know a lot about biological data because I was a biologist. I don't really know anything at all about physics data. But I can kind of see the shape of it. I can talk to the researchers about how they're storing things, what's important for them, and then extrapolate things. And I always say that, you know, I don't understand everything about every different type of data. But in the same way, I can help people make a journal article open access. But I don't necessarily understand all of their arguments if they're, say, a history professor. I don't know an awful lot about the renaissance. But I can understand the kind of shape of a journal article, keywords, where to put it, how to make that discoverable. And I think it's a similar sort of mindset we need to get into with data. A load of change, lots of things change, things change all the time in libraries. But actually, an awful lot stays the same throughout our whole thread. Essentially, the end of the day, we're about access to knowledge. The way that knowledge is stored, and the way our patrons want to access that knowledge changes. In the 1960s, people wanted to find a book, or they wanted to find a journal, or come into the building and have you point to where things were. Now, it's almost certainly that they want to find something on the internet. But we're good at that as well. We have search engines. We know how to formulate really good queries to find exactly what people want. We know how to use facets in a system. Support for patrons is another key cornerstone of libraries, which for most of us, it's going to be researchers and it's going to be students. And that doesn't change. Again, they might be looking for slightly different things. It might be that actually a lot of our patrons now are looking for help making their outputs available. Rather than trying to bring things in. I'm sure a lot of you will have come across the thing where you talk to an academic researcher and they say, Oh, I'll never use the library. Don't use the library because all the papers I need are already online. And they don't realise that they're online because we've provided access to them. But a lot of the time, you know, they do still need help making their papers open access or sharing data sets. Expertise in searching for information. You know, librarians are good at that. If that's data, it just involves different search engines. It involves thinking about things in a slightly different way, but it's still searching for information. So all of these things, policies and rules. I spend a lot of time talking about policies and rules. Creating and checking metadata. Metadata just describes a thing. It might be data. It might be a journal article. It might be a book. It's just a different set of fields. And then increasing and supporting discovery. If you're someone who cares about discovery, data is where you want to be because we're awful at it. It is so hard to discover the open data sets that are out there. They're spread across everywhere. Different databases. There's no unified searching system. There's no, well, there are many versions of kind of metadata schemes. It's a mess. So if you're a librarian who's interested in increasing and supporting discovery, then data is actually where you should be looking to go, in my opinion. So okay, there are new things. There are lots of new things. And maybe we don't have all of the knowledge to get us to this kind of solid place in these new roles. We have quite a lot of those bits. So I found this image and I quite liked it. We want to get from one side of this river to the other side. And there's a lovely big bridge. Great solid bridge. Okay, we've got everything we need if we're crossing that bridge. If that bridge falls down, it gets hit by lightning, something like that. There's also these stepping stones just next to the bridge. And maybe those stepping stones are enough to get us from one side to the other. And I think those stepping stones are the existing library skills that we have. They are expertise in searching, in talking to researchers, in finding information, helping other people find information in whatever form that is. So I'm going to talk a little bit about this role that I've been trying to hire for in my team. I don't think I've necessarily done the right things when I've been writing this job ad. I've learned quite a lot while I've been doing it. So hopefully I might be able to share some of those learning points with you today. We have just done interviews and we are going to a point. So that's a relief. But one of the things that I found was very few librarians applied for this job. It's a job in a library team. It's a library team within IT. And I don't know whether maybe that put people off a little bit. It's not called a librarian job. Everyone in my team is an information specialist for historical reasons. And so maybe that was an issue with it. Maybe we weren't paying enough for people to move to London. I understand that totally. But also maybe there's these other reasons. So maybe the responsibilities didn't feel to be what librarians were looking for. Maybe they were looking for a different type of job. Maybe the qualifications and experience we were asking for weren't there. I don't think that's true. But maybe they weren't. And maybe librarians didn't really feel they had the confidence to apply for it. We often find that people feel that they can't apply for a job unless they can take every single desirable and essential criteria. And maybe there was one or two things that were kind of putting people off there. So this is what the key responsibilities looked like. That first one I think could look a little bit intimidating. Overseeing and implementing an archiving system, the data underlying Crip publications and research. It's not that far away from repositories. It's similar to doing an open access repository or a data repository. It's looking at organization and looking at metadata. But you know, maybe I didn't make that clear. So I'm going to hold my hand up on that one. I think that one wasn't wasn't great. And then the next one, promoting open research and fair data. There's not much we can do about that. It's a data role. But maybe people feel that they don't have enough knowledge there. And that might be something that actually, you know, we could build on, we could provide more training and opportunities for people to learn about those things. The rest of those things, I think are core librarian skills, training, policies, advising on good research practice, liaising with people, and then a bit about organizing external events. And that's just shoved in because, you know, I like a conference. We looked at the qualifications and experience. And here I had a little bit of argy bargy, shall we say, with the stakeholders in the science sections of my Institute, they were really keen on getting someone in with a science PhD. And I thought this was absolutely the wrong way to go, because I wanted a librarian in this role. I think that, you know, that detail, that expertise on organization and discovery and finding things, that was what we wanted, whereas they were looking for someone with a scientific knowledge, knowing in detail about that data, but not necessarily knowing what to do with the data. So I talked to them down a bit. But it does mean that we have a bit about kind of scientific background, postgraduate qualifications in STEM. I sort of shoved on the end, the kind of library equivalents of them. But even talking to someone who I knew was a great candidate for this, they didn't feel that they necessarily hit that top one with experience supporting scientific researcher. And again, maybe that's because I see it as in one way, but actually other people are seeing it in a different way. And I think really, all we're looking for in those sorts of things are working in a repository, academic liaison for a science field. But you know, I think the language we use can put people off, or it can encourage people. And I'm certainly learning about that. The skills we need for these jobs, we've mostly got those green ones are the ones we need. The ones at the bottom in red, people can learn those, you don't have to have them, you can learn them. But I think maybe I certainly and other academic leaders need to do more of more work in helping people to understand that. So just coming to the end of the talk here. And the things I'd like you to kind of take away from this is, you know, things change all the time, but library jobs, library skills, library strengths, really transferable. The things we're good at, they're great for these new jobs that are coming in. And the most important part of almost every job is talking to the researchers, finding out what they want. And then we can go away and learn how to do that. We just need to find out what it is that they need. So if you see one of these jobs coming up, I would like to encourage you to think seriously about whether your skills could make that job brilliant, because I think librarians are what we need going forward in research integrity, all sorts of areas of research support. So please do think about it if you see one of those jobs coming up. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. It's really good to be reminded of the fact that we have seen change. The chain change has been a constant for quite a long time now. And that message of not being afraid of it is it's a very good one. There are also some of the issues around language in recruiting and and how we see ourselves within the library sector are really interesting. And we might, I hope, come back to some of those in the discussion. So thank you so much. Our next speaker is Kate Pretherbridge, who is going to talk to us about White Rose Library's very productive partnership. As White Rose Library's executive manager, Kate works with the library directors in Leeds, Sheffield and York to take forward areas of formal collaboration between the three university partners. White Rose libraries has recently finalised its strategy for the next five years, shaping the next phase of activity for the partnership. And having proven itself a highly productive partnership over the past few years, it will be fascinating to see what's next for this Yorkshire powerhouse. So Kate, over to you. Thank you. I wanted to start off by saying thank you very much for letting me come to speak to you today. I want to take the opportunity to update you on what we're currently working on together, but also to talk about how we're doing it. We have had a history of working together in a really productive way. And some things now have changed around how collaboration can and should work, I think. So looking at what we're doing to operate slightly differently than we perhaps have in the past is quite interesting for me. And hopefully for you guys too. So just to build on what David was saying, we are the formal collaboration between the university libraries of Leeds, Sheffield and York. It's where we come together to work on formally agreed points of shared focus, really. And my role is to lead and support this collaborative working and also to work with colleagues to explore new potential opportunities that working together can bring. We are obviously not alone as a collaboration. We're just one of many different collaborations, some of the people who are represented here. I will not have got everybody, but just as a representation of the different sorts of collaborations you see across this sector. We're a sector that really does recognise the value of collaboration and partnership evidenced by the theme of this conference, really. Collaborations are of different scales with different timers, different areas of focus. And you can be membership members of a range of different collaborations without that causing any kind of issue. So all members of White Rose libraries are also RLUK members, for example. Activities happen above campus levels for different reasons and in many different areas. And we're all really familiar with the benefits that this can bring. But where do we sit, then, as White Rose libraries in this context of multiple strands of a cross-sector collaboration? What do we offer at White Rose libraries level that makes us a value to the three partners and also might not be as achievable at a different level of collaboration that's also available? What do we offer? And I think, for me, White Rose libraries is a really practical collaboration. And this is where we add a value in terms of capacity and skills and connection in a way that other collaborations can do in part, but not potentially in such detailed areas of focus. So we're a very small scale compared to others. And that makes us quite agile. And we can deliver concrete outcomes with an immediate and ongoing value to the work of our partners. And the sharing of resources does help with maximising capacity and free capacity to do things that perhaps couldn't be achieved as individual institutions. And the partners are different institutions with different individual strengths, but they also have really significant common areas of focus. And we can align our strategic priorities across wider areas, perhaps more easily than large and multifaceted collaborations with a different range of membership. And also our geographic closeness means that we can bring people together in a variety of different ways as suits the activity. And so as a small collaboration used to delivering practical outcomes, we can act very much as a test bed as well for work that we would like to see as being scalable for deliveries to different above campus level. And it's this practical and productive focus. It's from the real joys of working at White Rose Libraries and seeing the outcomes come to fruition. And this is reflected, I think, in our next stage of development and strategy. We've taken time to pause from review after pandemic. And we've benefited from that in terms of placing our new strategy sort of firmly in line with those of our parent institutions and libraries. In their new strategies, all three libraries have explicit commitments to the work done at White Rose Libraries level as part of the key collaborations that they see as delivering the value and the services that they offer as institutions. So for our new strategy, I'm not going to read this to you, but please to hear. Our vision and mission really reinforce our drive to use the collective voice and experience to support the work of our three institutions, as well as pushing boundaries in new areas and looking for new ways to work together to add value, to drive discussion and develop both locally and in this institutional and White Rose Libraries level, but also in terms of discussing with the wide sector as well. We have three strands of focus in our strategy. Strategy set by our White Rose Libraries executive board, which is three library directors and myself. And each of our strands of focus has a strategic group that leads the work in that area. And these groups fed into our strategy and provided key results that are designed to deliver the strategic objectives in each strand. And underneath those strategic groups, we have project teams, operational groups, task and finish groups as needed to take forward the practical work in those areas that we're really focusing on. So in terms of the areas White Rose University Press, it's a really exciting point in the development of the press. There's increasing focus on support and development of offer. We delivered a really successful first phase, and we're looking to move it into the next level in terms of output and profile. And it's a really exciting point for us to add resource and to work with the management board and the editorial boards to further the development of this. And we're really pleased to see the focus on that. In terms of our impository stand, it's also a really exciting point of development. We're in the middle of a project to renew our infrastructure and move to our next deterioration of support for these really important services. I was looking at the opportunities this will bring in terms of what we can offer to our users and our institutions, and we're also engaging with key audiences across the libraries and the wider institutions to make sure we deliver what's needed in these areas. Our third strand is in some ways the most interesting in terms of this context. However, this is where we've seen a real change in focus from our previous strategy and way of operating. Previously, we had a focus on innovation and we were looking at what we could do together next. We were looking at areas of interest and we were looking at what we could do to support the activities of the institution as a collaboration. But in reviewing and looking at what we're trying to achieve, what we've realised is that we also need to include a focus on the mechanisms of collaboration themselves. So as well as looking at what we want to explore together, we're now looking explicitly, probably for the first time really, how we can work together to be the most effective we can be. Putting more in place to foster a real culture of collaboration across all our silos, institutional and beyond, to empower colleagues to consider how collaboration can enhance the work that they're doing. So in that way, we're refocusing the group that leads in this area to include a greater range of colleagues from across different levels in the libraries. And we're looking to be much more visible in terms of the work that White Rose libraries are doing, both internally and externally, to show greater engagement and achieve greater engagement with what we currently do and potential new areas of focus as well. And what we're really looking to do is to increase connections. This is the goal to bring people together in new and effective ways that lead to new and exciting things. And in part, this is a response to the new ways of working that have emerged from the pandemic. In the past, there were much greater possibilities for collaboration to evolve organically. Ideas shared on trains on the way to meetings or in coffee breaks, or connection made at events that we attend, you know, over dinner or between sessions when you're talking about what's been said. And while we do a lot to do these things virtually now, in some ways, what we what we've lack lost is that kind of serendipity and the things that lead to further discussions that lead to formal collaborations. And I think that it's worth reflecting that for collaboration to be effective, it does need to be explicitly supported. And so that's what we've been looking to do. And one example of this is in in the innovation collaboration standard, we're really looking to support much more networking in key areas of focus. So we've we've already got an open research network, a network around the work on Elbrun Primo is all three libraries use those. And we're we're exploring putting together an open educational resources network off the back of a project that we've been doing in that area. So as an example, the open educational sorry, the open research network, we brought that together. There were people that were already connected and talking together to each other. But we thought by formalizing this, we might help create that in a stronger way, encourage sharing a breath practice. And we saw it probably as being a knowledge sharing initiative. But in fact, by formalizing it, we've empowered the guys who have been brought together to really work on things that they want to do. So they've delivered some really effective shared events around open research hybrid events, bringing together academics and library colleagues to discuss things from different perspectives and you get from a single institution. The open educational resources network that's emerging out of the project that colleagues, Helen and Maria from Sheffield discussed in their session on day one of this conference is another really good example of how bringing people together can create that capacity to discuss things in a way that perhaps you can't do in a smaller team in a single institution. So this is a real area of focus for us. And hopefully by bringing these people together and creating a shared knowledge, we can then contribute more effectively into a discussion in the sector in different areas to show how different perspectives can really enhance discussion. We're also looking for practical outcomes from our projects as well. So our open educational resource project resulted in a toolkit that's aimed to support both academics and library colleagues in exploring all areas of areas. And it's a really good practical example of a White Rose library's project. There's the tool kits that there's further work that's going to come from it. And there's also a network being created to underpin our conversations as a White Rose library's open educational resources business as usual activity. So another area of focus for us is on digital skills and we're running a White Rose libraries library carpentry event in next month, which should grow capabilities and help people engage with areas where they want to gain more skills, but also again, build a supportive community of practice and a network around those skills. So people have that group and the capacity to talk to each other beyond their initial team where they may be the only person dealing in a particular area. So these are some of the ways where we're really focusing not just on what we're doing, but on how we're doing it as well. And looking to the future, we really hope that this increased focus on the methods of collaboration will position us so we can be effective in exploring new directions, but also new ways to deliver what we want to deliver as a productive partnership moving forward. Thank you very much. OK, thank you so much. Really interesting. I mean, as as the executive director of a member organization, I'm always interested in those questions about scale and how we take projects forward and what the right scale to do that is. And I think you touching on that was was really interesting. The other thing that took out was that question about or the recommendation that if you want to see partnership work, you have to explicitly support it and create space for that to to to to work. We often talk about partnerships. We often see that as something admirable and to aim for, but not not always is that is that explicit support for it and space for it to grow given so that's great. And that's maybe something that will again will pick up on on the discussions. So thank you so much for that. Finally, we're going to turn to a triumphant of experts in the field of digital innovation within research libraries. We have Lizzie Gray, who's the deputy director for digital initiatives at Cambridge University Libraries, Tom Shaw, who's associate director for digital innovation and open research at Lancaster University and Lorraine Beard, who's the associate director for research and Digital Horizons at the University of Manchester Library. They pre-recorded their presentation and they're going to show us how if you want to go for go together. In 2010, Cambridge University Library started development of a digital library platform to showcase our unique and special collections that have been digitised to make them available to users beyond the confines of a physical exhibition space or an onsite special collections reading room. The first phase of the work from 2010 to 2014 was made possible with funding by Dr. Leonard Polonski and the library was able to develop its technical infrastructure and create significant content in the areas of faith and science, which are strengths within our collections. The Cambridge Digital Library, or Cuddle, as it is fondly known and its digital content has continued to develop and grow and now includes more than 800,000 images in over 30 top level collections. In 2018, following discussion and expressions of interest from a number of colleagues in other university libraries about our digital library platform, we held a number of workshops to discuss opportunities for working together and making the code available, as well as the potential for shared development and future visioning for the digital library platform. This resulted in partnerships with Manchester and Lancaster, who implemented their digital collections platform in 2020 and 2021. Following the work with Manchester and Lancaster, the code was released under open source license on GitHub in 2022. The decision to work together in a partnership around the digital collection platforms was the next step. The aspirations and commitments to this partnership approach for the for the development is supported and reflected in the alignment of our library strategic priorities from each institution, our collections for research and engagement, partnership and collaboration and innovation in development and delivery of digital capabilities to support our strategic goals. So I'm going to talk a little bit now about our work at Lancaster with Lancaster digital collections and how that has enabled us to develop partnerships with researchers. So in 2021, we launched our vision for Lancaster University Library, the library towards 2025. A key aspiration of the vision is to go beyond providing just a service and just a building and to embrace the role of partner and collaborator. Lancaster digital collections is integral to how we're increasingly working as a partner and collaborator with our research community. It's allowing us to play a key role in research projects, providing a long term, high profile and sustainable home for visual research outputs. But more than that, it's helping us to really embed the library within research teams and within the research process. It's also allowing us to play an even more central role in Lancaster University's vibrant digital humanities community. In short, it's really allowing us to live and achieve a key part of the library's vision. So I'm just going to look at a few cases now of where we've been able to do this with some of our collections. So the first of those is the Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive, which is an AHRC funded project based around previous research from the 1990s and early 2000s that explored people's experience of cinema going in the 1930s. It comprises a very varied range of media, such as the picture goer postcards that you can see on the screen just there, as well as oral history recordings for which we're developing the platform to be able to handle audio visual material. So the project is very much driving the development of the platform and it's very unlikely that this is something that we would have been able to do otherwise without this project. The Ordnance Serving Namebooks, the next collection is a British Academy and Leberhulme Trust funded project and comprises the first installment of the Digitized Ordnance Survey Original Namebooks for Cumberland and Westmoreland. These books date to the 1850s and 1860s and they provide a really exceptional documentary record of the processes by which regional identity was redefined by cartography during the later Victorian era. The project opened up a really important role for us as a key partner on the project, playing a role that we wouldn't have had the opportunity to do without Lancaster Digital Collections. We're currently working with the primary investigator on a further AHRC bid to digitize and work with the remaining OS Namebooks in that collection, all 220 of them. And this final example is a sneak peek of a new collection coming to Lancaster Digital Collections very soon. So this is an AHRC funded project to digitize and transcribe the notebooks of the early 19th century chemist Humphrey Davy, most of which are held at the Royal Institution in London. As you can see through this example on the screen, Davy was in fact a poet as well as a scientist and the project explores the interplay between art and science that is present in the notebooks. The transcriptions have been crowdsourced via the Citizen Science platforms universe and the project has very considerably deepened our role as a collaborator so that we're really integral as part of the project team and it's really enhancing our expertise in this area. So I'm going to be talking about an example of a collection within Manchester Digital Collections, which is the digital edition of the Mary Hamilton papers. This is a three year AHRC project, which exploits an almost untouched archive to answer important questions about reading, letter writing and everyday language in Georgian England and the contribution made by social networks to these significant cultural practices. It consisted of a multidisciplinary research team working in partnership with photography specialists, metadata specialists, curators and software developers drawn from teams right across the library. So who was Mary Hamilton? She was a courtier and diarist at the nexus of literary, royal, aristocratic and artistic circles in 18th century London and remained an important chronicler of her wide social circles when she married Lancashire Langdoner, John Dickinson in 1785 and moved to his estate close to Manchester. A key output of this project is an open access scholarly digital edition of the Mary Hamilton papers, which draws together around 3000 letters and diaries from the extensive archive of the John Rylons Research Institute and Library and 11 other repositories, including the Lewis Walpole Library at Princeton and the Houghton Library at Harvard and the Royal Archives. The focus was on producing a substantial corpus of transcribed text with detailed markup using TEI XML, a pioneering project for display and functionality on MDC. The digital edition launched in September 22 and now provides access to over 2,500 items via the MDC platform with the final release planned this year. The digital element of the scholarly edition allows enhanced accessibility, searchability, usability and computability, which enables the material and its associated research data to be visualised, explored and interrogated at scale in ways not possible in a printed edition. The core content of this edition is ultra-high quality images of the material, digitally encoded text and bibliographic metadata, linked by what is known as a manifest. Most of the items were photographed by the Rylons imaging team according to sector-leading standards, with some images provided from external institutions. Images delivered according to the International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF, which allows easier sharing, annotation and manipulation of digital images across different platforms. The manifests are the linking file between the images and the metadata, which allows enhanced navigation by enabling hyperlinks between the descriptive metadata and the image described. This also offers opportunities for restructuring physical items to allow new perspectives and context for the material. The use of the TEI or text encoding initiative framework to deeply mark up the transcribed text of the letters and diaries makes explicit the textural structures and semantic content. For example, persons and places mentioned, or textural categories such as abbreviations, annotations or corrections. This provides rich data for further analysis, but also allows different views of the text generated from the same source data. In this case, both diplomatic and normalized transcriptions are displayed and there are opportunities for further presentations of the same data. The editing of the TEI is collaborative and open-ended, offering possibilities for all knowledge on a particular document to be united into a single information source. The project allowed the library's digital development team to develop enhanced functionality for the display of transcriptions on MDC, all driven from the granular markup of the text in TEI XML, which is shown here in the circle on the right. Use of the correspond description element in TEI has enabled linking between items, according to particular chains of correspondence, offering a path of navigation that virtually reconstructs the conversation letter by letter, which using the previous and next buttons shown here top right, something not possible when consulting a physical archive dispersed across numerous repositories. We also use the digital library platform to showcase research undertaken by researchers in Cambridge and beyond our collections. But I would now like to talk about a few projects which make use of the data within the digital library. The digital library platform infrastructure is designed to provide access to data, not just for the digital collections platform, but also for scripts and computational methods or other platforms that may be considered by institutions. This is made possible by an API layer which sits above our resources and provides data in standard formats, so APIs for metadata, transcription and also IFF. I'll now talk about some of the projects which are using the data held in the digital library. Some of these projects make use of the combination of image, transcription and metadata to combine techniques from computer vision with quantitative approaches. Dating Isaac Newton's papers with watermarks is an AHRC funded project which is attempting to date Newton's manuscripts through multi-spectral images of watermarks. Spanish chat books from Cambridge University Library and the British Library were catalogued and digitized before the AHRC funded project between 2011 and 2014. A recent project funded by the Cambridge Humanities Research Grant uses visualised search to gain new insights into our collections of Spanish chat books using images from the digital library. This is an example of a project that focuses on metadata to produce social network visualisations of data sets such as this one in our casebooks data. The casebooks project was carried out by a team of scholars from the University of Cambridge led by Professor Lauren Cassell and funded by the Welcome Trust. They spent a decade studying the medical records of the astrologers Simon Forman and Richard Napier held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. We are also using investigative imaging techniques to uncover new information about the items in our collections such as this new transcription of the 8th century undertext of Codex secanthus or transcriptions made from these 3D models of our Chinese Oracle burns. This has been just a very brief look at some of the data-driven research that is facilitated by our open and standard approach to collect our collections data. Through our close partnership with Cambridge Digital Humanities, more projects are coming along all the time. So do watch the space. So why are we here today? As you saw in the timeline that was presented earlier, we have established a working partnership as adopters of the Cambridge Digital Library platform. The slide indicates the governance that we have set up to allow us to work together to lead, manage the vision and the future development of the platform. By bringing together and developing communities of practice with specialists such as developers, curators and metadata specialists within our teams, we hope to advance and continue development and engagement with our users to investigate options for bringing our digital collections together through use of common infrastructure and metadata and image standards and to explore new opportunities for research across our collections and across our institutional boundaries. And so we've recently launched a manifesto to really bring together our thinking around this partnership and act as something that will hopefully help to encourage other institutions who are out there who may be interested in what we're doing to hopefully come aboard and join us. So as you can see on the screen there, these are just some of the things that really help to illustrate our our thinking and our common interests in this area. So and I'm just going to hand over to Lorraine now who's going to go through some of the further elements of our manifesto. So last year we held an in-person workshop at Manchester where the three teams worked together on a set of principles that would underpin our manifesto and this is a word cloud. Primarily we said it was really important that the platform is collections focused. We wanted the platform to be a showcase of some of the unique and wonderful collections that we have. It was very important to us that the platform was meeting research and teaching needs across our institutions and very importantly that we work together in a very open way so that our collections are openly available. The software itself is available as Leslie said on GitHub. So it's very much about sharing both our collections and the infrastructure underpinning it across the community. If you would like to find out more about the partnership there is a website available for you to go and have a look and to have a look at some of the collections that are available as well. And if you'd like to find out more please do contact myself Leslie or Tom. I'm delighted to discuss it with you further. We're very much welcome other partners coming on board with us. Thank you. Thank you all for that fascinating to see and to see the way in which that underlying technology and piece of infrastructure is now allowing such a wide variety of really diverse projects. It's also really interesting to see the way in which you know thinking back to the best presentation the way that new science is coming through and being able to be used in the library world from everything from network analyses all the way through to multispectral analysis. So that's really fascinating to see how these new tools come in and work. I'm going to invite all of our speakers to come back into into the panel. So if you'd like to switch on your videos and your microphones so that we can have a discussion, please do put any questions into the Q&A and we can pick those up. I really wanted to start by thinking about some of these skills issues. And I think that it's although Beth, you you you've so formally presented some of those things. I think they were underlying all of the presentations and I think it'd be interesting to have views from everybody on this. There is a specific question that we've received and it is first to you, to Beth, but I am going to ask it of everybody. The question is, do you think that we should be doing more to train and nurture their staff and to give them the skills for some of these emerging roles that you were you were discussing? Um, yeah, I I think it's not necessarily about training because I think that seems like a kind of a very formal this is the path I want to go down. But what I'd really like to see is a lot more exposure because I think people are a bit nervous of things they don't know and often within libraries, the people who do data and stuff, they're over there, you know, they're not with the rest of the library. And I think if we can bring them much more into the centre, then that just becomes another library role that people are used to and and have experience of. So I think there is some some more training we can do, but I think it's about exposure. I think we just need to make sure that it's it's a core thing that we do. And then people don't see it as kind of scary some not sure. Yeah, do it. Does anybody else want to to pick up on that and with some additional thoughts? I'm just thinking about, for example, with the with the the platform that we have the digital collections. I mean, that a lot of the skills there to build that, develop that and such like our not traditional library skills. So can you say something about how you sort of went about, you know, the actual the actual building of it and how how that came about? Maybe perhaps Leslie is best place to say a little bit about that. Yes, well, we have a team of developed software developers that work in the library and they bring in a lot of them brought in the actual development skills, but then work very closely with colleagues who who work with digital collections as well. I think there's certainly something to be said. I think we're all aware of recruitment issues that we're facing across the sector and here in Cambridge with the university being in what is called Silicon Fenn, one would think that we might be. Developers might be relatively easy to recruit, but we found it really difficult. So one of the roots that we are exploring and we have had we have had one developer that's gone through is actually looking for somebody who at a junior development that junior developer level so that we can actually grow skills and the talent with within our own teams. That's not possible. That's not possible everywhere I know, but that's that's that's what what it what it has taken around when setting up the digital library all those years ago. We have grown a team around supporting the digital library in terms of metadata actually making our collections available, working with curators around TEI and developing TEI skills across across the across the piece. So that has given us the opportunity to build the skills over time. OK, right. And I came to thinking about skills. I mean, you're you white roses has is a press, you know, it's a lot of the skills are publishing skills. There's sometimes a perception that the the set of skills that librarians need and the set of skills that publishers need are very different. I'm not convinced that myself, but I'm interested in your views and how how easy it is to get those skills within within the library. So I don't think they are different skills because I am a librarian and I am also now a publisher. And there was a huge amount of segue between those two, if you see what I mean. And it goes back to what some of the things that Beth was saying around what people working in libraries do really well. So that attention to detail that building relationships that working towards a shared output goal and particularly the type of publishing that we do in white rose libraries, so white rose university presses and access, non for profit publisher, we do publishing as a service. So it's an extension of that scholarly comm support that we would want to be our academics have anyway. So I think in terms of that sort of thing, it is going down to those base skills and the base approaches that we share and the the things that we can build in into different contexts. As Beth says, there are lots of things that you need to learn about process, but we're good at that as well. You know, we've all had to learn new processes, new policies, then you procedures come out at different levels and we we learn how to best support people through that, including colleagues, academics and other other key audiences. So it is just about taking what we're good at and doing it in a different context, I think, I hope. I would agree with that completely. A very long time ago, I used to work in scholarly publishing and so that that sounds very familiar to me and that we which you pick up on those skills that Beth was talking about of, you know, especially the importance of the human skills, you know, the human interactions are absolutely vital. I wanted to develop this a little bit because one thing that interests me is the language that we use in recruitment and Beth, you spoke about that and gave us that greater example. But I also, you know, I know that all three of our last speakers have digital in their job title and know those skills that are needed when you're recruiting. So just wondering about language that we use in when we're recruiting new members of staff, how we target the right audiences and, you know, what more we need to be doing in those areas. I don't know if anyone has any thoughts on that. I'd throw it open. Just on that, I'd like to pick up on something Chris Middleton put in the chat. She put in the language that Nottingham are using now that I thought was really good and maybe I'll add it in next time I do it, which explicitly talks about not having to hit every single one of the things that people are asking for. I mean, it also kind of segues a little bit into EDI there where we know from research that people have done that women and people in minority groups are way less likely to apply for jobs if they don't hit every single one of those things. And so I think there's kind of two things we can be doing there, which is, you know, we're helping get librarians into those jobs across the board, but then equally, you know, that can help our efforts to kind of diversify our workforce at the same time. So yeah, I really liked that. And I'm going to stick that in next time I'm hiring. No, I think thanks to Chris for putting that into the chat. I think it's a really valuable note for us that, you know, the evidence is overwhelming, isn't it? About people who do and do not apply for jobs based on whether or not they think they can tick all the boxes or whether they feel that they can wing it a little bit. And there are certain parts of the community who are more confident of winging it than others. So that's always a very interesting. I, you know, as associate directors and deputy directors, Leslie, Tom, Lorraine, do you have thoughts on how to get the right people in the right positions at the right time? I think as well as external recruitment, I think it also applies to internal recruitment and promotions and people moving between teams. We're certainly doing more of that at Manchester at the moment. And projects like the Digital Collections Project are really nice examples of people from different teams with different skill sets contributing to a project. So I think that helps reduce some of the fear around working in the digital domain. So people are starting to move a lot more from different teams. We've got quite a few examples of staff that have moved between the teaching team to a research team and really flourish. So I think it applies both to external and internal recruitment. It's been a similar experience for us at Lancaster with artwork on the platform. So, you know, quite a lot of what we've done is around supporting and encouraging people to, you know, to really develop new skills or to, you know, to repurpose existing skills. So in some quite similar ways to some of the things that Beth described in the presentation, you know, a similar kind of journey that people have been on going from wanting in some cases have been quite traditional, cataloging roles, for instance, into areas of working on metadata in very new ways. So, you know, similar to what Lorraine has described, we've done similar things at Lancaster to support people in that kind of, you know, transitioning from one type of role to another. I think the point about language is really interesting there as well. And we've had similar to what Lethich has described, we've also had challenges around recruiting to some of our digital roles. And I think the challenge has been, you know, with some of the language is, you know, how specifically do you pitch it? So, you know, do you go for the kind of terminology or language that a librarian audience, you know, might identify with and resonate with that audience? Do you go more down the route of the IT industry and that sort of language? Or do you try to have something that will appeal to, you know, as great a diversity of different professional backgrounds, different groups as possible? And I think it's probably a bit of a balance. So I don't think there's a particularly easy solution to that one, but I think there's definitely a really key challenge in there. Yeah, I definitely agree with what Tom said there in that it's with digital jobs, it's really a balance as to getting the language in the right. You advertise for a software developer and people see it's in a library. I think that there are people who just wouldn't be interested. We have had some comments from people who have come from working in central IT to come and work in the library. Oh my goodness, I didn't even know the range and the scale at which you're working. So I think we all have a lot to learn about how to actually pitch those jobs. We don't need people that have worked in libraries, but it's actually how we make clear what we do and what the job actually entails in a library to bring in those transferable skills, which I actually think from other sectors and other industries are important in what we're doing in libraries now. Yeah, brilliant, thank you. I've got a specific question about the digital library platform. And one of the things I love about it is the way that you're bringing different collections together and showing that continuity. I think it was through some of the letters and so it's like, so you've got material all in one place that are from diverse and disparate collections and bringing them together to create that story. But the specific question is looking at cross-searching across all of the different projects that are hosted by the platform and looking at joint projects and their collections between different institutions. So maybe you could say something on that. Well, this is certainly something that we did discuss in our workshop and within the partnership. And we haven't quite got to the stage yet where we've started to bring our collections together, but there are opportunities. And we certainly do want to be able to look at how a researcher can search cross-out platforms from a single search and especially look at opportunities in how we can bring collections together across our three institutions. I don't know, Tom and Lorraine, if you wanted to say anything more about that, but that is certainly on our roadmap. Yeah, I think that would be a great development and really bring together that idea of a collaboration, that ability to cross-search. Again, this is fairly early days, but I know we've had those initial conversations around, is there a shared collection that we could put together in some way that brings together elements of collections from each of our institutions around a common theme? So, more thinking required on that, but I'd love us to be able to do that. I think, again, that would send a really powerful message in terms of us collaborating together. Oh, sorry, sorry, Lorraine. I totally agree, and I also think it would create an amazing research resource as well that would be really unique. So, yeah, absolutely would love to do that and also to bring other institutions on board to add further richness to a shared collection would be amazing. Yeah, one of the latest developments is that they are yet to meet, but is the plan for establishment and meeting of a curators forum in which the curators from within the partnership can actually get together and talk about this to present them back to the developers about how we should take this forward. Right, thank you. I want to segue a little bit to talk about partnerships and scale and thinking about what it is that makes a good partnership between different institutions. I thought it was interesting to get you were talking about the importance of physical meetings and getting together and being close to one another. I mean, for people who don't know the geography that the White Rose libraries are at most about 50 or 60 miles apart from each other, but then comparing that with the digital platform, I mean, Cambridge to Lancaster, for those who don't know the geography, it's a lot further and a lot harder to make that journey. So, I mean, obviously there are questions about physical proximity, but what did you think the key factors around building successful partnerships are? I was going to say whoever wants to pick that up, I think Kate, I think you were about to say something, sir. So, I think that what's important is using the right media for the right context, if you see what I mean. So, we do, and we've always done pre-pandemic, we did a huge amount of our business as White Rose libraries remotely and in virtual meetings, but we found since in that period where face-to-face meetings weren't possible that that created challenges that we perhaps weren't expecting, we found the switch to digital online fairly painless as White Rose libraries because we were already used to doing it, but over time, I think it's become clear that lacking any face-to-face contact, it does have a detrimental effect on relationship buildings and integrating new people into conversations and there are certain things that benefit from being in a room and brainstorming in a different way that you can do it in a digital meeting. But at the root of everything really, for me, as someone who kind of oversees the effectiveness of a partnership, I think collaborative motivation and approach is really important. I think that people coming together to achieve whatever it is you're coming together need to have that collaborative approach in their mindsets from the start. It can't just be a results-driven activity, there needs to be some sort of collaborative element to the methodology as well, there's a value through the collaboration of itself. And as part of that, we need to make sure there's open and honest frank communication. Sometimes the message isn't going to be the message you want it to be, but how you deal with that and move forward as a collaboration, if something hasn't worked, what do you learn from that anyway? How do you build that into the next iteration of whatever it is you're trying to achieve? You can't shy away from things not going well and you have to engage with the positives of every situation if you see what to mean and take from it everything that you can. And part of that is trust as well, so that when things, however things turn out, you can trust the people that you're working with to have that collaborative approach and to move forward together in a space that you have created for that collaborative activity. So again, it goes back to that empowerment of colleagues to take the time to work with people so if you're not necessarily involved in a project, people may wonder why you're working with people outside the normal silo that you would work in and it's having that confidence that this is part of what we do. So those are the elements that for me support good collaboration, that kind of open, honest, trusting collaborative mindset to take things forward and to learn from what you do together. That could almost be the perfect checklist for a good partnership, that brilliant, thank you. I mean, I don't know if Thomas, Leslie, Lorraine if you have anything to add to that or to nuance or Beth as well, I mean, no? Well, I'm quite interested in all these collaborations that are going on because having just moved to the correct, people probably don't know how the correct functions is very weird. We actually have relationships with three different universities and all our PhD students are at one of those universities. And so actually from a library point of view lots of people have access to they might have access to the UCL collection or they might have access to the Imperial collection. And so I'm looking at all these collaborations with great interest and thinking what should we be doing? And I think that's probably something that most of us can think even if we're not in a weird situation like the CREC where all our people have access to different things. Yeah, I just think everyone's got somewhere close to them. There's usually more than one place in a city and often the universities in the same city have very different approaches to things. And actually we can probably learn an awful lot by really pulling those collaborations together and networking a hell of a lot more than we do. It's hard to add it onto the day job, isn't it? But I just think we can learn so much from it. Just to come in on the points of collaboration, I think for us at Lancaster certainly the collaborative nature of the partnership is really central. If I'm honest it's just as important as the actual platform itself is the opportunity that's given us to work so closely with Cambridge and with Manchester in this area. And we probably could have built something similar along the lines of the platform ourselves in-house using, in-house resource. But I think that would have really, really lacked all the benefits that we've had from the working together and from the collaboration and the way that it's kind of created something greater than the sum of its parts that I think if we were each of our own institutions doing very similar things but just doing those in isolation in these atomised little units. And I don't think we'd see the benefits of that at all. So for us it's been absolutely central. The geography is a challenge sometimes but we've made it work and I think we've got as much as we possibly can out of remote working particularly. So a lot of the work that we did happen during the pandemic and actually we were, despite the challenges we were able to make it work and to take it forward. So yeah, it's been absolutely at the heart of things. Great, thanks. Yeah, Leslie. Yes, I think it's been, I think, I know everything's almost all been said. I think as well, it's a great opportunity. It's a learning opportunity and one that challenges each institution within a partnership as well because we know it in principle about what is happening in other institutions, what other people are doing. But when you work in partnership, you have very different kinds of discussions. You find out a lot more about how things are done in other institutions. And I think it's definitely, we are learning a lot about digital library collections, digital library viewers, different institutions, applications. And I think that's of great benefit to us as an organisation. And I think down the line will be to our users of the platform as well, as we bring in experience and expertise that we can use from other institutions that are working in the same environment. We're very interested in some of the work that Lancaster are doing and the engagement and outreach that they're doing through their collections, which is a slightly different focus to the way we're using them. And for Manchester, they also have different integrations and touch points within their institution. So it's more than the sum of its parts. Yeah, that's really interesting. And that really speaks to that power of the partnerships. So that's brilliant. I want to take us back a little bit to some of the skills issues because we have a question that's come through and that idea about bringing existing members of staff on in terms of upskilling them if you like. And the question is about how we spot abilities in existing team members and actively coach and support them into areas that they may not have considered. Is that something that people have been doing? Do they have some thoughts on that or maybe some advice on how the best way to handle that would be? I have a couple of things that I tend to do with people that might be of interest to people. There's two kinds of things that I do mostly. You can do these kind of grids where you put tasks in different things according to how important it is or something like that. So I tend to do this grid where you do how important is it to you, not to the team and how much do you enjoy it? And I get people to put their tasks in those and see kind of how their role currently fits with what they're actually interested in doing and what they prioritize. And I think that can be a great way for sort of saying, oh, okay, you've got all this stuff in here. Actually, have you thought about going, you know, this team, they do a lot of that sort of thing? So I do that. And the other thing that I ask the people who work for me to think about is if you're at a conference in five years time and you overhear some people talking about you, what do you want them to be saying? And I really like that as a kind of a way to get into people's kind of values and what they think is important and where they want to be going. And from that conversation, you can kind of look at their development and think, okay, well, have you thought about this? Have you thought about this other thing? So those are two things that I quite like doing with stuff. I think they kind of help broaden out people's minds. Yeah, a little bit. And Manchester, we have quite a project orientated culture. So I think a key thing is offering opportunities to people to get involved in projects that are outside their day job because I'm a big believer in learning through doing things. So I think just offering people the opportunities to get involved in something different and being exposed to the thinking, the technologies, et cetera. It is really quite powerful. Yeah. I think a thing that's really helped us is the relationships that we have with our colleagues across the library and particularly the relationships that the line managers have with their teams that has, I can think of many examples around our work on the digital collections platform where those relationships have been, they've been the starting point for encouraging people to look at things in a different way, to look at the opportunities, to repert the skills or to move into new areas and part of those positive relationships have helped people to kind of work together to develop their confidence. I think there've been some real challenges over, again similar to some of the themes in Beth's presentation, but some real challenges over, if you look at things in a really objective way, these people have absolutely got those skills that are required, but they don't see it in themselves and there's definite issues around their confidence and their belief in their own skills. So I think those relationships have been a really key part of that as well, to be able to have those conversations to help to boost people's confidence and to encourage them to think differently and more positively about the skills that they do have. I think one of the things that we found from the collaboration is that just exposing people to other institutions and other cultures, institutional cultures and structures, it really opens their eyes to where there's overlap, perhaps with their role, but where it would be done differently somewhere else and different skills would be incorporated into that. And so people have really seen that as an interest. And one of the things that I do as a manager that I've always done in different roles is, if I think something's interesting, I talk to people about it. So it doesn't necessarily have to be core to what they are doing, but if I think this is something that we are doing as an institutional that we are doing as a team or as a department, that is a really cool thing. And talking to everybody about it is really good because people can't be interested in some ways in what they don't know about. So the first thing that we need to do is to talk about what we're doing that is interesting, that is new or emerging or different that there's an opportunity there. And then if people engage, or if you see that people have skills that map to that and you can perhaps target conversations a bit more. But the first thing we need to do is to talk about what we do more, I think, beyond the silos of somebody's job. I keep thinking about that first keynote we had where we're talking about task-led teams in libraries or goal-led teams in libraries. And I keep thinking that, if you're a task-led department, then probably those skills mean a lot to you. Like, I've got to do this task and it involves these skills. If instead we're thinking about our kind of goals and our values, then you're pointing towards that, you're moving towards that and you're just bringing in what you need at the time. You learn the things that you need to get there. And I think that's kind of where I'm trying to drive my teams towards. Think about that end goal and then as you need things, learn the skills, bring things in or talk to someone who does have the skills. Network, find out those people that you can bring in rather than at the beginning thinking, okay, well, there's this task and they need to do this and they need to know this and maybe I don't have that yet. And I think that might be a helpful way of thinking about these things. I think that's a really good point. It doesn't have to be that skills drive what you're interested in, what you're interested in, can drive the skills you want to develop. And we need to be clear about that, I think. That's a really good point. And I think sort of ties in with something that somebody has put as a question, but it sort of isn't really a question, but a suggestion that it's them, perhaps job adverts should stop saying things are essential. Well, partly if they're not really essential, then we shouldn't be saying that they are. But then also that idea of being able to disentangle the fundamental skills and we touched upon those and then the things that can be learned. And then people may not have those attributes just yet, but they could face quickly after taking post. And so that is something that perhaps could again, broaden out the potential pool of people who would be involved. Thank you all. That was a really rich discussion with a lot of insights. And so I'm very grateful to you all for that. I think we've come to the end of the questions that were sent in, but it is a subject that we could continue on. And I think that we will continue on in future events for RUK. We're very interested in these issues around skills and we're clearly very interested in issues around partnership and collaboration. So I really want to thank our speakers today. I'll gratitude you go out to Beth, to Kate, Leslie, Thomas and to Lorraine for the fabulous presentations and for that discussion afterwards. I think that the things that I'll take away is that we shouldn't be scared. We have the core skills to move forward and that there is power in partnerships. And I think it's been a very valuable set of takeaways for me.