 I think this is going to be a really fascinating presentation so let's get on to it. I'm Cliff Lynch, I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information and I'm going to be introducing this session. I welcome you to one of the project briefings for week four of the CNI 2020 fall virtual member meeting. To refresh your memory week four deals with responses to the current crises facing our community. And I also want to mention that along with the synchronous sessions will be doing this week. We also have a few pre recorded videos that are part of this week's material. I invite you to have a look at those. I'm recording the session closed captioning is available please make use of it if it's helpful. We do have a chat and feel free to use that as the session goes along. I also know the Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. After we hear from our two presenters. We will address questions. Diane Goldenberg Hart will moderate the Q&A session at the end. We have questions using that Q&A tool at any time as they occur you. So please do that as we go along. Now let me introduce the session we have two speakers both from the UCLA library and both well known to our community. I'm going to be talking to Rebecca Blunger and Todd Grappone. And I believe that we have had briefings on both of the projects they're going to be updating us on today at CNI. One is this wonderful. project that they have been running for a number of years now. And the other a very different kind of project involves digitizing manuscripts in the Sinai desert, working with a monastery there if I recall correctly. So what we're going to discuss about is how they have sustained and continued those collaborations and partnerships in the face of a global pandemic. And with that, I welcome Rachel and Todd back to CNI. I'm very grateful for the update on this. And I turn it over to you two. Thanks a lot. And yeah, we both Rachel and I have talked at CNI about these projects before it's been quite a impactful year for remote digitization projects such as ours and we're here to walk you through just some aspects of what we've been doing and how we've been adjusting and how we've been talking to our partners and our funders about it. And hopefully you'll find it stimulating and we'll garner some questions here. There's Rachel and me. Nice to see you all. So today, you know, we're going to break this session into four sections. We're going to talk about the library about the modern endangered archives program about the Sinai manuscripts project and then we're going to open it up for some questions. And today we're going to share our work that's focused on international digitization, offering some perspective from the UCLA library about these two programs. The last nine months have been quite disruptive across the globe. And we thought it might be interesting for the community to hear about how that's impacted two of our projects, the modern endangered archives program and the work ongoing work with St. Catherine's monastery in the Sinai. We're particularly interested in sharing some details about how the pandemic has affected our work and our teams around the world and we'll leave plenty of time for some Q&A. So Rachel. Yeah, let's go on. Thank you. I'm going to start off by recognizing that while the UCLA library has doing this work for a long time. It's not a normal year. This is your which many of aspects of our life have been upended. When we have all perhaps been forced to grapple with what's important, and what we stand for what we will stand up for, and why we do what we do. Before we get into some of the details of our work, Rachel and I wanted to start by recognizing the importance of the work that we do and hope that these values match the program descriptions that follow. So, really, the COVID pandemic has really only articulated, I'm sorry, brought into focus and widened the gap between the haves and have nots across the world. And we in taking that into account we've been focused more and more on amplifying some of the voices that we are working with some of the partners that we are working with across the globe. Those connections and relationships. I wanted to just mention real quick that what you'll see here are relationships that the library has built over the years, founded in trust and really the trust that we've built with our partners helps us work through these issues with our project partners, some of which we've been working with for well over a decade. Next slide please. So the library priorities are really a reflection of the UCLA mission. It's, and these projects align superbly with the library priorities. It's a reflection of our work to create open content and share knowledge from across the globe. It's really about knowledge preservation knowledge sharing a diversity of voices, sharing resources, and we're focused on collections that serve a number of these goals is really why we do the work we're doing. We have a lot of experience working across the globe. It's an endangered archives program. The precursor to that was this thing called the International digital ephemera project which was a partnership model where the UCLA library partnered with institutions across the globe to create sort of a hub and spoke where we would train institutions in various industries in order to empower them to provide their own training and their own empowering their own communities around them, where UCLA provided digital preservation and broad publishing for their content. And we've built that built upon those models for the modern endangered archives program. To build a newer, a newer model a newer kind of program but still an international program focused on empowering partners to do work that they would like to do. Our work has always been driven collaboratively and in discussion with our partners. We recognize that not all the partners have the same missions as we do. And we strive to focus on partnerships where mission alignment is clear. We're building community partner capacity, and that defines the work from the UCLA library. Next slide please. So, we recognize that the work we do is uniquely suitable to the current moment. Researchers are sitting at home without access to the kinds of materials they would normally use. Students in particular shaped so much of their graduate career around their year to do field work to go and meet face to face with community members to sit and savor the archival materials. These experiences have been canceled or delayed, but the scholars are still limited by research timelines. The most, well, in our discussions on campus we've recognized that graduate students are the most at risk students, and they're facing deadlines. And most can't travel or access the collections they need to finish their academic work. This is where programs like ours really come into play. We provide access to some of those remote collections in ways for our graduate students to continue to do their research. We are mindful of the short term impact of the COVID pandemic and that's what we're talking about today. We hope that the work that we're doing also may offer some models for long term impact. And we don't really know what the long term impact of the COVID pandemic is going to be on academic budgets, how that will impact things like travel, the work scholars will expect to be doing changes and teaching practices. So we're hoping to continue to do the work and that it will have a bigger and bigger impact as we go forward. So just to kind of narrow down those big ideas that Todd kind of offered up this question of where is the budget and the field of higher ed going and how can we help kind of help our users and help researchers kind of navigate that new landscape. These are some slides from a recent presentation I gave that is a continuation of my work as a clear postdoc at UC Santa Cruz, helping researchers think about using digital tools in their research practice in their analysis. And I recently met with a number of graduate students trying to help them figure out how to use digital tools to organize their research questions. And their research materials of course the question was shifted in this recent landscape and to how can they adapt the fundamental questions of and work that they were planning to do for this moment. How can they ask new questions, how can they develop new methodologies, many of these graduate students and many of the faculty who are trying to advise them did not have experience navigating online archives they didn't know where to look they didn't know necessarily how to kind of assess and how to think about the metadata as part of the information that they might use to do their research. And so it's really kind of a new, a new approach and it helped me think a lot about the work that we're doing through the modern program but also from the digital library program at the UCLA library in general, not necessarily as responding to research questions that faculty or researchers have right this moment but really where those questions might go as people start to reshape and rethink what research looks like in this landscape, and really in the unknown budgetary circumstances ahead. And so, even if the pandemic eases in the next few months which of course we all hope it does. We don't know what climate change, what kinds of budget cuts will bring to travel, how committed people will be to traveling around the world to do this kind of research and so by enabling access to small archives by creating access to these voices that are otherwise accessible we hope that we can help shape some of those questions as people move forward with with this new research landscape. So, I'm the director of the modern endangered archives program and as Cliff said we did give a project briefing on this program just a few months ago here at CNI. Here's a quick overview, the modern endangered archives program is a new granting program, we are currently in our third year of granting is part of the Arcadia fund family of re granting programs focus on at risk cultural heritage material. We give planning and project grants to fund the documentation and digitization of 20th and 21st century materials so that's kind of a range of media. We're looking to fund projects that are working with archival documents and audio and video and foreign digital and really all of the kind of archival records that remain from the 20th century and the 20 and into our current moment. So all of these materials including any planning grant reports or finding it that are created, get published online on our new website which I'll show you in just one second. And we seek to fund projects you can see here, the funding where funding has gone for cohorts one and two for the modern endangered archives program, and we're really committed to sharing our resources and areas of the of the globe where they don't have resources or infrastructure to support digital cultural heritage preservation so part of our work from the beginning has been to fund projects in the global south and areas where cultural heritage has not received the kind of funding that it needs to preserve in particular contemporary history and contemporary culture. What we've seen is that in the pandemic, even organizations and institutions that did have national funding that did have areas from support are losing that support that the funding is already diminishing for organizations and we're finding that the need the data is growing for this kind of intervention, this kind of support. We have launched a new website and modern endangered archives program. And just last week we published our very first archival collection. And I can come back to that but most of the work was done during the pandemic. The first collection we have published is from Barbados. This is the material from the 1960s and beyond that really traces a moment of independence for Barbados. And it's really exciting to see that material, even while the team was working within COVID protocols. The organization had to be individually in the archival, in the archive. All the metadata was done at their homes instead of all together so there's been a shift in how the work is done but we've been really surprised to see how many of our project teams have been able to continue this work. The reason that we have found that there's been some success and really some seamlessness amongst our work and amongst the project team is that we had a lot of materials ready. We were kind of prepared to be remote first. First of all, we are running a global program so we were already connecting with all of our project teams on Zoom. And then because of the IDEP project that Todd talked about before, we have a very robust documentation toolkit that all of our project teams have had access to. So even as their local options for training might have shifted or disappeared, they had materials that we were able to provide them that walked them through all the stages of digitization from which equipment to purchase to how to set it up to how to navigate the metadata but how to connect their hardware to their software and really how to kind of work through the full lifecycle of the project. And one of the values and the goals of this documentation had always been to empower projects and to expand the capacity on the ground. And what we found right now is that this kind of documentation is really filling a gap because people cannot gather together to really do training that they might have planned. And this is something that I'll come back to in a little bit that we found to be a real gap for our project teams right now. So one of the things that we've noticed is that we are a program built to address risk, right. It's part of what we're doing. We are identifying at risk collections, and we are working with project teams around the world to help them capture and document that material. So we are built to intervene in risky situations and that said we couldn't possibly have anticipated that a global pandemic would be the risk that we were navigating. But what's interesting is that many of our project teams are already used to navigating risky circumstances so they have a kind of deep resilience and commitment to working with these collections. And many of them have been able to mitigate all of the necessary protocols and kind of set up a situation where they can work successfully. What's been interesting as well is that we anticipated a certain number of changes. So we anticipated that projects would have to delay as our private libraries around the world closed. We anticipated that we would need to provide extensions for many of our projects and we have been able to do that and really thanks to the support of Arcadia our funder to really approach each project team with empathy and compassion and ensure that they were doing work only when it was safe for them and their team to do so. We also anticipated that there would be travel restrictions. So one of the budget items we allow our project teams to submit is for travel related to training. So either they were planning to bring someone in to train their team or they were planning to send someone from their team to some sort of planning opportunity. And of course that that travel moment that travel opportunity has been lost in this moment. And that was one of the things we identified as a potential problem what we didn't really anticipate was the procurement issues that most of our teams have have faced. So in fact the travel restrictions have been a limitation but most of our teams have been able to navigate that they've created opportunities for virtual training, or they actually used the time when they were all separated in their own homes to do more robust training they would all meet weekly. We have one team that's documenting their kind of ongoing training opportunities because they've been home and they can't access the material. They've been doing more work putting into the documentation and the training. And we've also been trying to fill that gap creating more documentation, working with our preservation and AD teams to create some project documentation that wasn't in the IDEP toolkit. But we didn't anticipate how hard it would be for just global trade routes to get cameras and scanners and asset free folders all around the world. We couldn't anticipate that airports would be closed and materials that were on their way to Lebanon or Egypt would be rerouted. We also didn't quite think through the impact of US or UK based researchers who are planning to bring equipment with them to the project team, or the kind of easy ability for project teams to send us hard drives back and forth. And so it was really this procurement issue that has become more of a challenge than we could have anticipated. So one of the things that we have done and we implemented in April 2020 was really kind of a set of flexible opportunities for all of our project teams and really our program at each stage. So we've given all of our current project teams the opportunity to delay their project for up to a year. Some of them are trying to do work. It's just going to take them longer because only one person can be in the archive at a time. Some of them have just delayed. They're not going to start until next year and hope that that works out. And we'll kind of, we'll keep this flexibility ongoing. The second round of material when things closed down, we were in the middle of reviewing our second round of applications. And in May 2020, we still met with our board. You can see here our virtual board meeting. We assessed and analyzed all the applications that had been submitted and recommended a group of 23 applications to be funded rather than fund them right away. We required each project team to submit a feasibility report. So we gave them the opportunity to brainstorm with us how they could navigate the current local restrictions. We could reimagine their budget and their timelines that the work could still be successful, even in the COVID landscape. And all but one of the projects was able to do so successfully and we're now moving forward funding 22 projects from our second cohort. And we also opened our third cohort for application in September and just close with 93 applications from 54 countries around the world. We're really excited that we've been able to keep the program going at all of the stages, including publishing our first collection, which I mentioned. So what are some of the takeaways. So the first is that there was really no solution for each project team. And, you know, we'd already been aware of the need for a kind of local approach we through our work with IDEP. So what we realized was that it was really a hyper local situation. Some of our project teams were trying to negotiate where neighborhoods have lower numbers and could they get an archivist into that neighborhood to start digitization on one site of the project. Where might things be closed, and then really recognizing the different public health directive so we have a team in Kenya that asked for budgetary funds to use for plexiglass setup and hand washing stations because that allowed them to go back to work. And we were able to do that for them, whereas some project teams, for example, a team in Lebanon. They had full access to their archive, but because of energy issues and COVID restrictions. Even numbered license plates could only drive on every other day so the preservation has to needed to go and do the first stage of the work could only access the archive every other day and it slowed down their work dramatically so each kind of local site had its own different set of challenges to navigate. And that, you know, what it requires from us is really a sense of flexibility and an opportunity to reflect and revise with all project teams. And I just want to mention kind of one last takeaway from this work is that it's been actually quite inspiring while we're all sitting at home and kind of maybe flailing around for some inspiration I have found a lot of kind of joy and solidarity and meeting teams around the world really like kitchen to kitchen my kids yelling in the background their kids yelling in the background realizing how much we're all in this situation together. And really seeing the passion and commitment of our project teams is more than one project team had taken their archival materials home with them because they wanted to make sure they were safe and they wanted to be able to continue this work as soon as they had the hardware to do so so I think it's helped remind me about why we do this work and really what the value of it is not just for the researchers that will be able to access this content once it's digitized but for the communities themselves to really see this work come to fruition after so many years or really generations of stewarding these collections. Thanks Rachel. Very interesting. Can we go to the next slide please. Now for something completely different we not only do we work a lot with partners on very modern content but we also work with partners on some medieval content and one of the project partners we have. It's not the modern Endangered Archives program but it's a project we've been doing for about eight years and one of the oldest continually operating libraries in the world at St. Catherine's monastery in the south Sinai in Egypt. We've been for the last several years digitizing the monasteries collection of Arabic and Syriac manuscripts. And as a couple of things to know as we go into the discussion about how COVID has impacted this project is just a little bit about monastic life. It's not nearly as exciting as it sounds. These are folks who live sort of a lonely isolated life at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt. The monks are for the most part very old. Most of them are over 80 years old. It's really important to recognize some of these fragilities. The last thing in the world we wanted going into this COVID crisis was this digitization project to cause be the reason why this monastery closed. So we were very cautious about how we approach the digitization in this project because of the fragility of the place. The other thing I think that's important to recognize is the monastery itself. The monastery itself is a quite a tourist destination for the South Sinai so there's a lot of attention to the monastery and whether it's open or closed by the Egyptian government. And those things sometimes come into play for for us with our project. Next slide please. As I mentioned, we're digitizing the Syriac and Arabic collections. We have a four person digitization team that goes to St. Catherine's for month long digitization sessions for the last four years. Since the quarantine, since the COVID crisis, we've been taking precautions to protect members of our team. We keep our team safe from transmitting the virus to the monks. As I mentioned, we're doing month long digitization sessions. And so for the first 14 days on site, the team implements strict social distancing from the monks they go directly to the digitization room from the a living quarters just outside the monastery. They don't attend liturgies, they don't really eat with the monks. And otherwise they avoid socializing. You know, as I mentioned, the monastery itself is sort of isolated so when these our digitization team shows up, the monks really want to talk to them. They just, you know, they've been isolated. There hasn't there. And it's been a real adjustment on both sides. But we're doing strict social distancing. We have a one of our the librarian at the monastery places the manuscripts for digitization and the separate trays so that team can retrieve what's to be digitized without interacting. So we've had to, in addition to conservation and computer equipment really supply up on things like masks, gloves, sanitation wipes, etc. After about two weeks, we've allowed the team to get back and be a little more social with the monks. And due to sort of the ups and downs of the pandemic we've been able to do one session over the course of the last nine months, typically we'd have had three. So, as I mentioned, we're the St. Catherine's monastery is a tourist attraction that when our digit digitizers had gone to the monastery it's caused a little bit of attention from the Egyptian government. And we've had to sort of go back and renegotiate some of the agreements in place for that allowed us to kind of travel back and forth and do that work between the Egyptian government and the monastery. And we have at this point digitized about 373 manuscripts which is close to about 770,000 pages. We're scheduled to do about 100,000 more pages on our site in January. But I want to say here real quick I think we're running out of time. That has been really great to work with our funder they've been very understanding they've allowed us to do some gap funding to help us keep our digitizers employed back in Athens doing some data management work. And we've been working with them to push deadlines back a few months. Hopefully we'll get the project done I think we are on track to, but it's just going to take a lot longer it's been wonderful working with our funder they've been quite understanding about all these, the global pandemic and the impacts it's had on our projects. Next slide please. Next one if you wouldn't mind. I just want to say that this work we sort of view this work as essential and the pandemic has exposed the fragility of the cultural of cultural heritage around the world. And it's really caused us to widen the scope of what we consider to be at risk. The global impact on some of our most fragile institutions of this pandemic. We really can't measure yet. These things are not very well funded in the best of times. Here we are sort of in the worst of times and we feel like this work is more important than ever. And I think that's about all we have time for Rachel if you want to just go to the next slide, open it up for questions. Thanks. Thank you so much Todd and thank you Rachel. As always really fascinating work and of course, extremely important work we really appreciate you coming back to me and I give us that update. We are a little we are a little bit past time. We'll be happy to share any questions we might have from our audience. I don't see any in the Q&A box at this time. So I'm so I'm going to go ahead and propose that I just bring the public portion of this session to a close I'll stop the recording, invite our attendees to stay with us if you have time. And Rachel have agreed to give us a little extra time here at the end for some chatting after we turn off the recording and we invite you to join us for that. So with that I'll just thank Todd and Rachel one last time for this wonderful presentation and thank you to all of our attendees. We hope to see you back at CNI soon. Thanks. Bye bye.