 Welcome. Thank you for your interest in our talk, Snapshots of Effort, Institutionalizing Digital Scholarship within a Library Organization. We are here to share with you efforts we have made at the Ohio State University Libraries related to institutionalizing digital scholarship. First, let me introduce who you'll be hearing from today. I am Maris Longmeyer, Head of Research Services, and with me is Dr. Lee Bonds, our Digital Humanities Librarian, and Dan Noonan, the Digital Preservation Librarian. Today, we will orient you to the Ohio State University and its library system. Next, we will talk about the first snapshot, a professional development program for librarians. Then Dan will cover the second snapshot, documenting current library processes. And I will follow with the third snapshot, a broader library wide discussion and prioritization process for additional support. In the next three, begin to provide a picture of what we're doing at Ohio State to institutionalize scalable digital scholarship support across the library organization. We will be using a scripted presentation for the sake of future clarity, as well as observing our commitment to use our limited amount of time most effectively. We are gathered on the unceded land of indigenous people who have been coming to what is now the state of Ohio for thousands of years. In the series of large scale geometric boundary and effigy earthworks still visible in central and southern Ohio, bear witness to this region's historical importance as a center of economic, spiritual, artistic, and intellectual endeavor and exchange. We acknowledge central Ohio is the traditional homeland of the Shawnee, Miami, Hopewell, Wyandotte, and other indigenous nations who have strong ties to these lands. Today, individuals from a broad range of indigenous backgrounds call Columbus and central Ohio home. Ohio State University is a research intensive land grant institution located in central Ohio with over 60,000 undergraduate graduate and postdoctoral students spread across 15 colleges. University Libraries is a top 10 ARL library with 13 departmental libraries on the Columbus campus in many distinctive and specialized collections. Additionally, it's worth noting the university has a new president and we're currently conducting searches for both a provost and a chief information officer. So there is a lot of change afoot. At this time across the university, there is not a centralized resource center or advocate for digital scholarship produced by faculty or graduate students. Providing support for digital scholarship is both a new and long standing process for university libraries. For years we have further scholarly products by digitizing materials, licensing resources, and highlighting expertise for collaboration. Some of our newer support from 2014 to 2016 we hired some specific expertise to address areas of data management, digital humanities, and geospatial information and created a space, the research commons specifically to address emerging areas of research support, especially in the humanities and social sciences. In other libraries, the amount and type of support a researcher could get was variable and often depended on who would advocate on your behalf. This approach meant that the support provided was not consistent and gaps were not always apparent. It was an unintended result that grew up from this treat every question as a case by case. Why do we choose to address it now. This current case by case model is not sustainable and could not scale. Also, there's been a growing interest both in the libraries and on campus for digital scholarship support. We will now cover the first snapshot of our efforts to institutionalize digital scholarship within university libraries. Thanks, Maris. In spring 2019, our libraries took a major step towards institutionalizing digital scholarship in the way Dan Cohen spoke about at the 2017 CNI ARL digital scholarship planning workshop. His ideas of normalizing and routinizing digital scholarship, along with Merriam Posner's earlier call to commit to DH people, not DH projects, were in mind when I designed a program to provide librarians opportunities to learn digital scholarship methods and tools. Minimally, these learning opportunities could prepare librarians to identify researchers projects or instructors course assignments that could be enhanced by using digital research methods and tools. At most, they could prepare librarians to collaborate with researchers on projects collaborate with instructors to integrate digital scholarship projects and instruction into their courses, and or develop their own digital projects slide. The library's executive committee approved funding for a pilot of that program with a stipulation that it focus on digital humanities. So I seated the first cohort with librarians in the arts and humanities cohorts, special collections and area studies who'd expressed interest in DH, offering them funding to attend a workshop that provided a general overview of DH methods and tools. A specific overview of methods and tools or intensive training on a specific method tool or topic. Each participant was asked to develop at least one annual goal related to DH, join the campus DH slack, and be a panelist at the library's digital scholarship form. They were also offered to attend conferences focused on or with sessions focusing on DH research pedagogy or specific subject areas slide. The first cohort of six librarians attended a range of workshops that summer taught by noted practitioners and at established institutes as listed on this slide. The digital scholarship forum held that fall, each discussed their experiences, providing an overview of the course they took and sharing how their learning would impact their librarianship and research. One remarked how immersive and experienced DHS I was, and another found ARL's digital scholarship Institute, an opportunity to learn a wonderful buffet of tools. It was a spirit of collaboration and support at their workshop overwhelming and another found it empowering to make something. Another felt she now has things to suggest to researchers consulting with her about this work and can give them information on how to get what they need. Another cohort experience so helpful in the workshops they attended. They recreated it by forming a DH working group and setting time aside every other Friday afternoon to get together and discuss project ideas, get help with specific platforms or share resources. The following spring, after everyone completed their annual reviews. I worked with them to compile a report on the success of the pilot. Maris replied, he was pleased to see how the participants frame their engagement as growth for themselves professionally and for their interactions with disciplinary faculty and students slide. Encouraged by the success. Maris and I propose continuing the program for two additional years, expanding it to include the social sciences and sciences and making conference attendance and expectation. Then an option as it was in the pilot. Subsequent cohorts would be selected based on their expressions of interest, which require them to explain how the training will inform their librarianship or research. Of course, participants in previous cohorts wanting additional training were encouraged to submit. The second cohort was selected in December 2019 with four from the first cohort person participating again, and kicked off in January 2020, only to be postponed soon thereafter until workshop offerings resume, likely in summer 2022. However, the working group continued to meet and a few members of the first cohort collaborated with me to propose a panel for the 2020 DLF for. And when I finally finished my DH lab guide in April, we met to review it and discuss how discipline specific DH resources could be incorporated into their own subject guides. In the fall, the group expanded into a community of interest with broader staff and faculty participation from across the libraries, including acquisitions and publishing and repository services. A little more formal than the working group participants were provided articles or webinars to prepare for the facilitated discussion sessions focused on a variety of specific topics, like teaching collaborations project collaborations data and analytics. Research team partnerships and aspirations for digital scholarship at university libraries. Over the last year, several members of the first cohort have continued their development, building their own projects, working with students on digital projects, attending DH and digital scholarship webinars, or becoming collaborators on projects with departmental faculty. All progress towards our aim of building support capacity and institutionalizing digital scholarship at university libraries. As the digital preservation librarian throughout 2019 as I participated in the university libraries discussions regarding providing additional support for digital scholarship. I was also conducting a review of our digital initiatives and preservation documentation to examine our successes and continuing challenges and the years since we had minted our digital preservation policy framework. This was an effort to better articulate a digital preservation ethos for the university libraries at Ohio State. It was clear from my investigation and analysis that the goals that I'm envisioning cannot be accomplished single handedly by department of one. Therefore, I successfully lobbied for the creation of a cross functional group to develop monitor and manage consistent strategies, processes and procedures for a born digital acquisitions, as well as our digitally converted materials. Hence was born the digital preservation and access work group, or DP and a. One of the goals of this group is to provide a single point of access to discover and manage this institutional knowledge in regards to the aforementioned strategies, processes and procedures, as well as the standards and guidelines that support these efforts. In the long run, we expect the DP and a to have a role in defining refining and clarifying roles and responsibilities in regards to processing preserving and curating and providing access to our digital materials. The DP and a will strive to enable the standardization of accessioning and processing of born digital materials, the digital digitization for at risk materials, establishing digitization and processing prioritizations for providing online access to collections and implementing best practices for digital collection life cycle management. Further, the DP and a will work to ensure consistent implementation of metadata profiles, both minimum and robust standards and guidelines. Finally, the DP and a will seek to develop and provide in a transparent manner decision making rubrics and methods regarding priorities guidelines and standards that the libraries adopts in these areas. We also engage in continuous evaluation process of the university library's current capabilities and making recommendations with input from all stakeholders around the evolution of services. The work of this group is being documented and tracked through the goal link on this slide. The initial charge from the sponsoring associate deans that is meant to eventually achieve the aforementioned loftier goals is somewhat much more basic. Our existing workflows that affect born digital acquisitions and processing digitization, providing access to digital materials and the preservation there of answering the question, what are the intersections gaps redundancies and areas for improvement To accomplish the goal of documenting our workflow processes, we are utilizing techniques from the realm process improvement with roots and total quality management that continue to be used in lean and six Sigma programs, Cypoc, racy and brain writing. Along with my colleagues who back this I along with my colleagues who back discussed this project at length at the fall CNI 2020 meeting. So I won't go into an in depth discussion here. You can view that presentation at the first goal link on this slide. We have made progress to the point where we are visualizing the workflows like in this diagram. As we can see it is a complicated and messy process. And this is just one for workflows for this particular unit. We have nearly 30 in one stage of progress or another, and at least 10 we have yet to start to examine. But why am I bringing this into the discussion regarding the university library support of digital scholarship. On the one hand, there are definite outcomes of these workflows we are analyzing that impact and benefit our campus researchers and their digital scholarship. The libraries could be providing them with digitized a born digital content from our collections, or acquiring and providing access to digital data sets, or developing a program to advise faculty on personal digital archiving activities. However, there is another aspect of this activity that is providing additional insights into the university library's processes as a whole. A significant gap that exists in our digital stewardship activities is a systemic way of approaching the prioritization of our work and a governance framework to accurately manage it. Too often priorities are set within the silo of one's unit or their individual role without understanding the impact of those actions on other activities within the libraries. Further, there is a lack of transparency in how those prioritization decisions are made. Therefore, in November, we spun up a project called planning for sustainable change university libraries digital content policy and governance utilizing a subgroup of the dp and a with additional representation from our special collections units to begin to tackle this issue from a change management perspective. The subgroup defined a problem statement, examined our current state and envisioned a future state. From there we defined the change we seek and the benefits it will provide. Those were the easy parts, relatively speaking, the real work has been in working through the process phase, where we try to answer the questions. How will we go about doing this, who will do the work. What is the timeline and time required. What resources are needed to be successful and what expertise and or experience will we need. The dialogue and activity of this group has produced some of the richest and most open honest discussions we have had within the libraries, all while working on that very first question, how will we go about doing this. And the issue is, how do we take the tacit and implicit knowledge, we all bring to bear and decision making, and make it explicit knowledge that the university libraries can leverage to work more efficiently, effectively, equitably, transparently and systemically across the organization to be able to conduct our digital stewardship activities, we have to be able to balance our desires with our available resources in an equitable and transparent manner. Similarly, as we go about our deliberations around how the university library supports digital scholarship. We are examining how we balance competing priorities and desires with our available resources in an equitable and open manner. Off to you, Maris. I will now cover the library wide discussions about institutionalizing digital scholarship built off of the work Dan was doing and the groundwork we laid in professional development. For context, management committee is a group of more than 30 representatives from across the libraries that meets by monthly to discuss and decide on strategic priorities. They do not have budget authority for any of those decisions. So when the profession, the proposal for a professional development program that Lee spoke about came before this group. There was robust conversation about what this training program would create in terms of other support needs in the area of digital scholarship for the libraries, and what additional resources would be needed. The program called for volunteers for a subgroup, and it had representation from many areas around the library from research support to special collections and archives to library it to reformatting to acquisitions. The process of that subgroup was iterative. We had a few brainstorming sessions and a proposal was made to management committee asking for statement from the libraries about digital scholarship support. The subgroups audit needed an official endorsement as a priority from the libraries to then figure out how to implement digital scholarship support across the libraries. The management committee disagreed and asked the subcommittee to come up with use cases for support and needed a more tangible ask. As often happens when trying to make changes in a large organization, it takes time. We had a pandemic hit. We paused our work until July 2020 and then resume the discussions to capture both current support offered and gaps for both the libraries and on campus. We also tracked what the ideal level of support would be. We chose to map support areas to the research lifecycle planning conducting publishing and examining impact of research. In total, there were 81 distinct support areas noted. Then we shared this spreadsheet widely across the organization for feedback, additions, and hopefully to generate buy-in. The working group is now going through a prioritization process that captures both the impact of the support and the amount of effort involves to offer support. We are preparing a recommendation document that will go back to management committee in April 2021, which will highlight both what is needed as well as why the library should be the ones to provide it. One of the first steps that the working group took after our pause was to settle on some shared principles for base foundational support for digital scholarship provided by university libraries. They are shared here. We decided that the library's support of digital scholarship should be equitable, sustainable and scalable when possible. Digital scholarship services that are offered should be available with consistency and transparency across the library, even if they're only available in one unit. In other words, no special treatment based on who you talk to across the libraries. We also recognize there are services we provide for the libraries that we don't provide for broader campus since we have faculty researchers in our own unit. At Ohio State, we are tenure track librarians, so for a digital project, there are additional services we would offer for libraries that would not be available elsewhere on campus. For all of the work involved in getting to this point, these principles were fairly easy to arrive at and immediately oriented our work and discussions. While they may be straightforward, it was key to articulate them before we started detailing the support process, as well as the recommendations that will be coming forward. For all three snapshots, you will have noticed that we've learned some lessons, as with any project there are challenges and benefits that we can identify as we progress. Some of the challenges we've encountered through this process include the fact that due to the pandemic, we had to change our approach in the past year, as we are working through this in a virtual environment. As such, we found it hard to brainstorm, have the same rich discussions that we would have in a face to face environment. When we've shared back with the broader University Libraries community, some folks get stuck in the details or they have different definitions for what we're talking about. But at the same time, and we recognize that the campus is changing its approach to which creates further challenges for us. Overall, it's been a circular process where we discuss, reflect, learn, discuss, share, reflect, process, adapt, evolve, share, discuss, learn, reflect, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. While there have been challenges, there's also been benefits, including a campus pause, which has allowed us to think more holistically. We've been able to approach the process with a systems thinking methodology as well. We have gaps that we sensed were there, but now we can see and document them. We have been able to pivot and consolidate documentation revisiting our assumptions. We recognize that at Ohio State, digital scholarship varies by discipline both in terms of services offered and needs expressed. It is our intent that this activity leads to reaffirming organizational priorities and looking at what specifically the libraries needs to do to provide in terms of digital scholarship support for campus. Finally, as the targets keep moving, we've learned that it's not too late to take actions and that we can pivot to engage a challenge and not be stopped by an obstacle. The cumulative effect of these programs and conversations has resulted in deeper engagement around the topic of digital scholarship in a way that we have not seen previously at university libraries. Namely as library wide efforts to think about holistic support for institutionalizing digital scholarship across the organization. Thank you for your time and interest. And if you have questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. Here is our contact information.