 I'm just going to give you a little bit of background about the Digital Scholarship Network and also our sort of last symposium before I hand over to Eleonora who will be chairing the sort of first session. So the Digital Scholarship Network is a peer network of colleagues working right across the UK looking at the challenges and how we develop, deliver digital scholarship services within research libraries. And looking back I realized we were sort of it kicked off in 2018 I remember when it was first announced and the first meeting took place in 2019 and our first co-chairs were Beth Clark and one of my former colleagues from Edinburgh but since then we've had a vast range of events. So just looking back there have been, we're now onto our second set of co-conveners but we've had 18 network meetings, we've had a previous international symposium that I'll say a little bit about. We also put together one international funding bid, we've had a number of working groups, also undertook two surveys and published a report of set up the transatlantic skills directory and have also got a kind of communal resource within our website as well. And again through the network we've gradually grown and developed a kind of range of different activities, different workshops, also working in partnership very much within the US with clear developing and setting up joint sessions that we've been running over the last couple of years and that kind of kicked off in sort of 2020 where we started doing shared working sessions for our members along with the ever-popular speed dating in order to meet new people and share experiences about how things were going, how we could help and support each other and it has really grown into a fantastic network where colleagues can share experiences, learn from each other, discover who's doing what and almost have a little bit of a bank of who's who of where people are working, if you need help and support the network has provided that sort of introduction and the ability to be able to pick up and go back to people in order to follow up with projects they were running or get a bit of advice and guidance. So it's been really great and we've also managed to do some really great pieces of work looking at digital infrastructure earlier this year and kind of coming out and recommendations and guidelines, also looking at copyright. So hopefully we've provided a range of really helpful resources over the period that people have found useful in their work and in helping them take forward digital scholarship. So I am really delighted and we've got a great mix of speakers here today for our second symposium and our first symposium was almost exactly three years ago and I was just thinking gosh the world three years ago was a very different place and I'm really delighted that some of our speakers such as Killian and Rick as well are here today joining us again to help us reflect and think about where we are, what some of the challenges are and how we can take this work forward. But that was a in-person symposium and that took place at the British Library and again I think world events have really changed. I kind of look back in 2019, seems a very long time ago, seems like no time at all and I think we've all had that sort of time warp experience that the last couple of years have brought us and again I don't think any of us could have imagined that we would have to deal with world events as they turned out or the challenges within our work that we've all had to look at and overcome over the last couple of years. I think the last couple of years have been really interesting because digital has come to a forefront in a way that I don't think any of us would have imagined and digital has really enabled many of us to continue working but we've all developed new ways of working and we've all gained a vast range of digital skills that we I don't think anticipated we would have. That did make me think a little bit about is digital scholarship still something unique and specific and do we still need to put in the amount of effort that we do but then in thinking about it I also realised that while digital skills and techniques have moved on and data science and kind of thinking around about data and data analysis and algorithms and AI are things that are much more within our conversations and our kind of vocabulary these days we're still not there yet as a sector and still have a lot of work to do and we've got a lot more to do around about both the skills that we need within our universities and also to enable our researchers to access our collections and we've still got a lot of work to do around about our collections and making those collections computationally available in order to do this type of research so I think there's a lot still to do and there's a lot of interesting challenges still to to tackle and I think I'm really looking forward to being able to spend the next sort of couple of hours hearing around about how different networks and organisations have dealt with and taken forward digital scholarship and kind of computational access to collections and but also thinking about how can we move things forward how can we all help and support each other in order to move on to the next step and what maybe have we got from the last couple of years that are something that beneficial that will help us take this forward and what are some of the challenges that are perhaps still there I think one of the other things that has really changed in the UK as well is the funding landscape and we had a number of funders join us at the last symposium talking about the funding and the funding that was coming and again we'll hear Jane and Professor Jane Winters reflect around about the UK and Irish funding that's been made available but also UKRI and AHRC have changed some of their funding models and it's been really great to see funding calls come through that really support digital scholarships digital scholarship within the arts and humanities looking both at physical and digital infrastructure for that and again just thinking about the recent UKRI AHRC call which was looking at embedding digital skills in the arts and humanities so there's still a need we still need to do more but a lot has changed and a lot is helping us move things forward and as I say it'll be great to hear what has happened and where we can continue to go we're just now looking at the first panel and as Kirsty mentioned in terms of reflecting on digital scholarship and what we've done so far the first panel is actually looking at institutional perspective thinking about how institutions have addressed any challenges and find any opportunities and also thinking about where we're going now what is going to be the next step so I'm really really pleased to introduce Abhi Potter and Megan Ferreira they're both working as a senior innovation specialist at the Library of Congress Digital Innovation Lab and they are doing a double act and two act presenting their work on the feasible adaptable and shared a call for community framework for implementing a machine learning artificial intelligence so I will just let you take it from here thank you Eleonora thank you so much yeah I'm gonna share my screen so is that visible can you all see that yes yes okay well thank you so much Eleonora for that introduction and to the research library's UK for having us here and to Kirsty for inviting us here to share this proposal and it's about an aspect of digital scholarship which is machine learning and AI and it's both a technical tool that provides machine readable text and information so OCR is a backbone technology for a lot of that for a lot of digital scholarships it provides the machine readable information and text that people are analyzing but it's also AI and ML are also a set of technologies that are really poised to alter the capabilities of and relationships between users and stewards of library archival museum collections so our proposal is that we develop ways of planning implementing assessing and improving shared practices for AI and ML that align with our values and our strengths as lamb professionals that means in lamb in short of library archive museum professionals and that based on the foundational experiments and research that's been already been done we can and and if we add additional use cases and perspectives we can create a framework that will allow for the transparent responsible practical and coherent adoption of these technologies in lamb's so today we're going to share about how we've been approaching machine learning in the LC labs and reflect on other flourishing efforts that have been going on in parallel in our broader professional communities in lamb's and sort of adjacent communities and then introduce some of the resources that we've been developing to contribute to community practice so why did we sort of start on this this this road and why should we sort of do this together so we think we have a lot of well AI and ML have a lot of potential to be really helpful tools we've already seen this with OCR it's you know sort of enabled digital scholarship and we have a lot of shared challenges that it could also be helpful with so some of these shared challenges include increasing user expectations so what users are expecting from our services from our tools and we'll dig into this a little bit more in the next slide but also the the our another shared challenge that we have is are the heterogeneous and historic realities of of our content and that this content is is growing especially born digital content and digital publishing formats are changing and growing while our budget our budgets remain limited so we are in this place where we we don't have a lot of funds or resources to sort of to to understand these technologies or how to operationalize them and another reason another challenge is that there's a gap in expertise in using these technologies in in our in our organization so with these shared challenges we think it's it's really important to to to ground ourselves in in sort of what we do best so that's sort of where this proposal is coming from the but we also want to acknowledge that AI and ML are not the only ways to just only strategies to meet our challenges are the only tools to help us but it feels inevitable that these technologies are going to shape the future of our services they're already embedded in many of our many of the larger vendor services and all the cloud services so we're going to have to sort of figure out what we want to do with these as a community so this is a call to not opt out of engaging with AI and ML but to learn about the benefits and cost terms so we can shape the adoption of these technologies in our spaces whoops okay so we really look at AI and ML as sort of the next wave that's coming towards our organization so we have our organizations have a long history of adopting to new technologies we've including digitalization online access digital preservation and then we see AI is that next sort of wave that's coming towards us and the promise and claims of AI systems to transform our organizations and solve our intractable intractable challenges with sort of data of driven results and solutions are enticing but um but we have experienced and others have reported on that um even though they're that sort of at first glance the benefits seem enormous there's also sort of bumps in the road or sort of they uh the most of the commercially available AI and systems are trained on and work reasonably well on contemporary more and digital data so most of the off the shelf tools are built to support business cases and are largely untested on library archive and museum content with the research use cases in mind so um uh a lot of the performance data or accuracy data that are cited in marketing materials or by vendors are often really quite unreliable for the complex tasks and the messy data that that we have that we're dealing with so um to dig into one of our shared challenges about the um about uh uh library archive and museum collections so they you know these collections the digital collections are vast they're produced to industry standards they're very high quality but they also include historic bias they represent an incomplete record they're selected from a larger collection and they're created in different contexts for different reasons and um that uh contributes to um challenges in in processing these our collections with AI or ML tools so for example this picture here this was um this is a an image of a woodcut that was created more than a hundred years ago and required acquired at our library probably 70 years ago this is just our views as an illustrative example we probably digitized it or we probably processed it 50 years ago um and and imaged it and digitized it maybe 20 years ago and put it online 15 years ago so the the level of description the tagging the resolution the quality of the scans and the images they bear with this image it's gotten through a lot of handoffs a lot of steps to to sort of have it appear on our on our on our screen and and this is just a very small example of the vast collections and and what AI and ML do is deal with um deal with images or um items at scale so accounting for the the handoffs the decision-making process to create this image um is is a complex thing to do in AI and ML um there there's also the the underlying structure of our collections don't map well to um to sort of modern uh um algorithmic sort of discovery system so the um so that's another sort of challenge that um that uh uh our our our collections sort of faced for um these technologies um but the the sort of user expectations for discoverability um is is going to um you know sort of be continue to be a driver for us to sort of figure out how to what ride this wave of technological change so maybe I'll pass it to you all right well it may not surprise you because our we have labs in our name that we believe that experimentation and iteration is really essential for adopting approaches as well as some of the frameworks such as the one we're presenting and this slide shows a notional um idea of moving through iteration and experimentation and it really makes sense to us and some of the work that we've undertaken but again it's just one way of thinking about experimentation and it's also interesting to think about the difficulty of mapping uh and predicting um what you may get when you're undertaking initiatives that integrate ML and AI and some of those reasons include that resource requirements risk complexity user and organizational needs these dimensions really are difficult precisely because in our experience this kind of information is gathered through the process of undertaking this work uh we also want to acknowledge that creating space and leadership buy-in for experiments and pilots and even prototyping can be more complicated in practice than it is on paper and uh so we hope that some of the things that we're sharing the approaches we're sharing can help you to make the case for experimentation and we think it's valuable here because uh following some of you may have undertaken machine learning or AI um experiments or small projects and this these observations may resonate with you so at the end of an ML or AI project it really can be a challenge to immediately assess the impact and kind of define the larger so what or what's next um you may have broader contexts is missing or you may need more evidence and that can make it hard to move strategically or swiftly to systematic exploration especially as that be called out before when resources may not have been allocated for that type of work it also can be a challenge to articulate the kind of preparation required for broad implementation since the outcomes and practices um that we are able to see tend to represent discrete projects so often laughing lacking a sense making roadmap or framework and then it can also be difficult to determine organizationally how that work was undertaken because again we hear about project outcomes which are really compelling and the methods employed but the things that are less foregrounded can include team and organizational dimensions like the ways that subject matter expertise was integrated what staff competencies were required and other critical considerations and finally it can be challenging to remind leadership and colleagues to remember people over tools and to think about the fact that diverse staff and staff and partners and subject matter expertise really will be essential for adopting AI and ML methods alongside emerging frameworks and all these elements together can be better surfaced through experimentation through evidence gathering determining success criteria and testing that other including other essential considerations that emerge serendipitously and taking a look at the gaps and critically reflecting on the practice next slide please so for the last several years the digital strategy directorate and our team in the library of congress office of the chief information officer have been exploring and launching experiments initiatives and events and in fact we're celebrating five years of LC labs and you can find examples of our these experiments on our website labs.loc.gov and many of these experiments really have focused on the possibilities introduced when collections data are made machine readable just as Abby mentioned at the beginning and the related necessary practices to support a range of users engaging with these materials so specifically in the last four years or so we've deployed a small excuse me developed a small body of ML experimentation and recommendations and we really have arrived there after hosting events and supporting knowledge exchange sponsoring experiments and research exploring user needs from a range of angles and regularly sharing the outcomes of our work so this slide represents some of that work including our machine learning and library summit collaborations like the speech to text viewer and intelligent data analytics report our innovator and residents projects newspaper navigator and citizen dj the collective wisdom project and humans in the loop and we continue to investigate methods models and resources through that type of experimentation and sponsored research and essentially knowledge exchange with peers over as we've discussed above it's become really clear to this experimentation that the challenges of collection scale and users are really complex and nuance and the outcomes have really enforced that we must continue to assess risk think about what types of resources resources are applied and what are the impact on people at each step when articulating project and organizational objectives next slide please so the findings of our own experiments have inspired some documentation and tools that we've developed but there is of course a growing and concurrent body of resources and tools as like as communities overlapping communities are sharing their reflections and expertise and this slide features an entirely non-exhaustive representative list from communities of practice like AI for lamb and glam labs to leading frameworks like collections of data to guides and reports like the museum and AI network and the DPC beginners guide to computational access for digital preservation practitioners to roadmaps for AI at organizations like the bayonet and emerging nest AI framework and our own growing set of resources available in labs.loc.gov and a recent page where we've kind of summarized all those things around our machine learning but many more resources are not represented here and we think that some of these resources can be even more impactful if we can include them within a framework or a toolkit to encourage modular approaches in any case we do want to say how inspired we are by this work of our peers and colleagues and we ourselves are really eager for feedback and collaboration particularly around recently formed groups that will evaluate AI and ML practice in labs with a specific focus on equity and inclusive justice next slide please so from our own body of work we have synthesized a set of recommendations and this slide shows a spreadsheet view and highlights the first recommendation which has that emphasis on developing frameworks and statements which is one of the reasons we are sharing with you today so many of these endeavors this is us burying the lead a little bit many of these endeavors were them themselves informed by the work of the digital scholarship working group report which you can find on the report section of our website and as I'm finished talking I'll share some of these links that reports foundational findings really articulated the essential needs for item level metadata and rights assessment and all of that is to enhance the usability of our digital collections and approaches that require human expertise and computational methods blended together to address the challenges of scale so very briefly looking at some of these recommendations you may recognize some of them from your own work and may resonate with you so some of those things include developing a statement of values to guide decision-making around AI and implementing it in your organization that there's no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to AI and LAMS and it's really imperative again this call for experimentation that we're making it's imperative that we experiment with models and data so we can capture accuracy and share results and assess performance outcomes and in particular evaluate ethical considerations within this space if we are going to integrate human in the loop machine learning approaches we really need to design those responsibly and it make them engaging in such that they involve expert user and community perspectives and that operationalizing any kind of AI system or machine learning is really going to require expertise from across the organization and also integrate require integrating more AI expertise within organizations but there are a few ways to get there and some of the ways that we've tried that includes some of our ongoing body of work including a new contracting vehicle that Abby will share about some of the resources that we've created and constantly sharing the outcomes of this work and ideally as you look at this slide and see some of these recommendations you really are hearing a wide range of skills and the type of staff that we need to be involved in this work if and when implemented we think these recommendations would benefit not only the library of congress but also the wider library archives and museum field and in addition to these recommendations we have practical resources so we'll share those with you and hope to have some feedback from you now i'll hand back over to Abby to continue to talk about that kind of reflection on the intersection of methodological choices organizational goals and community responsibility so um building on those recommendations that Megan went through um the uh uh we wanted to try to take steps towards creating a um a framework that would help us think through and make decisions um on about machine learning specifically for people um for ourselves included who um are still in sort of a state of uncertainty about how uh to approach these technologies how to um use them and adopt them so they benefit um our our organizations and our users so this um one of the first things we did was try to start creating a an organizational profile so the profile is um a recommendation that came out of um uh the NIST trustworthy AI um uh risk framework so this is um an exercise um that uh that um is recommended that organizations go through and um or or sectors so sectors like healthcare or um finance or transportation who are currently operationalizing a lot of AI systems have established these kinds of profiles to help guide their um their sort of regulation of the of the the technology so we've broken it down here and this is sort of a message to say our organizational profile is based on our organization and it's not necessarily a sector profile but um our organization we work in a national library um we do not have faculty or staff we um we our our collection does not circulate so the um the way most people um interact with our collections is is through is digital is through our digital services so although you can people can come to our buildings and use our collections um the so with our organizational profile in mind we sort of took a look at um how we might use AI and ML and we we also started thought of it as a front of the house versus the back of the house kind of um separation front of the house being um services that would interact with our users would interact with back of the house being um services that our our staff would um would would would would use um and to manage our collections um before uh sort of making them available to users so enabling discovery at scale the section um uh in the this this four um four part grid on the top left looks like to me um the enabling discovery at scale this is where most of our experiments have have been in so uh generating metadata for items um for uh to enhance search and discovery so this is where a lot of our um our current experimentation is living and then over here next next to the um across from the grid is enabling research use so we see this as a lot of the um work that our library and other organizations are doing that you know um like collections as data work so making um data available for um users data data and data sets available for research use and the and our researchers our users will will most likely use AI or ML technologies to analyze um the the content and and our sort of role there is sort of making the data available um in sort of in uh coherent ways and then um providing guides and and um and perhaps uh reference support for the for that data um the uh the bottom two are our experiments that we our areas we have not really been active in but see a lot of potential um or a lot of interesting experiments or um our applications there so um especially in the and this um bottom left grid of enhancing collection processing data and management for what we're calling business cases so this is um uh managing our content our digital content um uh for digital preservation for um uh in in a CMS uh for different formats uh um dealing with large complex formats like web archives what are the the sort of uh applications there that we could look into and then also then that the other many user services this is sort of I think what people recognize available in sort of wider commercial services where there's recommending systems chat bots voice search how how would those kinds of services um be applied in in our organization um so this next piece of the framework is a um uh uh and I see where we're kind of going over time so I'm just going to quickly go through these so this is a framework this is a data processing plan which includes um that will have vendors um fill out whenever they do an AI or an ML uh experiment experiment in in this contracting vehicle that we created so it includes things that would be on a like a data nutrition label it would include a model card and then also additional information for that would be particular to our sector like provenance data and um and uh trying uh articulating um uh gaps in data so another tool is this assessment um piece and this is looking at uh each task and um trying to look carefully at risks for users risks and benefits for users for staff and for organizations and then um this is sort of where we're trying to put it all together um into a framework and like I said in the beginning we really are looking for feedback and other use cases um with you know that have different perspectives that are outside of our context to sort of test this out to sort of are these ways to engage at sort of the model or data set level this data processing plan at the task level can we does this risk and benefit analysis matrix make sense um and then if we if we do do this as a community what could this this these sort of tools evolve into um so these first are sort of where we are operating right now in LC labs and then further down is a sort of where we really feel like we need the community and sector involvement in building out the the sort of framework and developing a shared statement of values uh building out that organizational profile into a sector profile and then um uh designing um potential design principles for systems or tools that use these systems so this is the um the slot this is the the the experiment page on our website that sort of is capturing all the machine learning work and um we're happy to answer any questions and um please get in touch with us in any of these ways if you're interested um in using any of these resources or um want to talk about them because uh we um are we feel like this is a way that we can sort of uh move towards certainty in using these these tools in our in our sector thank you thank you oh thank you so much uh for this presentation um for everyone who is um attended if you have any question please do um type them in in the question and answer box so that we can just uh collect them there in one place and then um we can actually um we can actually revisit them at the end of this session um I will for the moment um thank Abbey and Megan and I will call James Baker I think James joined yes um so um if you can James if you can turn your camera on and yeah wonderful um so um I'm delighted to introduce you all some of them all really well James Baker um so James is the Director of Digital Humanities and has been a Southampton for the past year and the month probably or two um so it's going to talk about his experience here at Southampton building a digital humanities and a library partnership from a perspective of a faculty um and I will I think you just muted yourself yeah great I will let you um get with your presentation cool thanks a lot all right this is the second time I've been on a panel with Abbey and Megan recently talking about very different things but I guess both times I've underscored why I'm committed to working in partnership with library colleagues so their work is really great um yeah so I'm James um I've been here at Southampton a year now and I guess what we're trying to do here in DH is to do what I describe as kind of discipline appropriate integrations of digital humanities approaches into research education particularly within the humanities here um I have a line about like I'm not trying to ram data and code on the throat to the unwilling but I'm trying to support those who want to explore whilst not letting everyone get away with totally ignoring it um and so for example I've just come from three hours of teaching a new module on data environmentalism that we're delivering here at Southampton which I think is an example of sort of connecting things that I care about in relation to data and DH and critical ethics things like that to things that our students also care about as well um and we're also an expanding team um I arrived like a year ago as Eleanor mentioned as a director of basically no one a building site and a pile of boxes with stuff and we now have a space a growing team new modules processes and structures we have equipment out the boxes on the shelves and we have sort of our work fully looped into student recruitment research grant portfolios all those kind of things so I want to use the time I've got today to talk around how our partnership between the humanities and libraries enabled and fostered DH at Southampton and then per the brief going to talk a bit about where this might be going um just a bit framing as many of you will know I'm not a librarian but I have a history of working in and with libraries um I started my postdoctoral career as a institutional repository assistant at University of Kent at their library for doing slope open access advocacy work um I spent a few years working BL in as a digital curator and really helped that gave me an insight into kind of the role of big research libraries and the kind of leadership role I think at that time with things around sort of born digital in 2013-2015 and getting involved in things like the big curated consortium um I was one of the people who founded library carpentry and the software skills training um regime they offer and I continued to partner with libraries and research in particular colleagues in the British Library and Lewis Walpole Library um and I'm involved in one of the ROUK research fellowships as a mentor around actually things around history of cataloging around the kind of accounting for the handoffs that Abby was mentioning earlier and some of you will be supporters of the programming historian which is one of my many hats and that's libraries are key supporters of our open access publishing work um via the GIS group in many cases for those in the UK which I guess frames the fact that I was really delighted when I applied for this job to um get an institute for to um so for the job and then find on the panel a librarian Wendy White um being there and so when I joined um it was also really delighting to sort of see that librarians have been really drivers of the DH project from the start from way before I'd arrived and were really sort of deeply embedded with the origin story of the project so I guess I want to start then by talking about some of the the practical ways in which our partnership has worked because I think the very practical things often that practical structural work is really key to getting things working across campus um starting with the kind of setup um as I said people like Wendy White, Eleonora were really central to the DH project before my time um DH actually occupies its hands in a space on our Avenue campus which is the humanities campus just away from the main campus and that was the Avenue library and the project to develop DH drew on data around the use of the revenue Avenue library how it was being used by students and so what was a staffed service with a collection footprint is now a small reference collection and an open learning research and infrastructure that is our digital humanities hub. Librarians are also really key to the leadership of the project Wendy chairs the DH advisory group here and I see kind of Wendy to some extent as the kind of institutional memory of digital humanities at Southampton and as ever with senior library colleagues as someone who's like a really vital bridge into the center of the university how to get things done how to write a good business case and really into understanding the kind of longer term changes our institution that are going on and I observe this I see colleagues and former colleagues from Sussex are here as well and I certainly observe this at Sussex as well when we formed the digital humanities lab having librarians as part of that was really vital and the role of the library and that was recorded was reported in the I think it's 2017 our Eureka report on DH in libraries so having librarians as part of that leadership has been a really key part of the practical setup here and library libraries also offered vital support and I'll single out for example the support of bringing in people from change management to really help us work through the final stages of and finishing off the digital humanities project as it were which I'll come to in a moment and the library is being really key to the shared outcomes we have lessons learned we have a closure report for the DH project we're currently moving from a kind of project to business as usual fate is the digital humanities and these are kind of both shared responsibilities between myself and Wendy in the library and Anna and Neil head of the library presenting those to university program board as well and as a final point and a change of picture it's slightly scrappy picture is to represent the fact that library is also in a very practical sense near us this is an office on the corridor from the DH hub which Elinora does spend some time working alongside some of our research colleagues and we'll be moving to a different office soon as part of a kind of this growing team and this is something that I think was really important to happen it's something I've pushed hard to have defended when it's been queried why my colleagues are working in our estate in which is traditionally just you know by humanities colleagues work now and to really kind of have that as a space where we can ensure those regular and structured collegial interactions happen between the digital humanities and the digital scholarship teams they have of course also been creative partnerships since we've been here. On staffing I'll note something Elinora knows very well which we slightly borrowed a colleague slash stole a colleague from the library when our technician post came up it was very much with Elinora's blessing and one of her members of the team on the panel but I think having that personal link between digital scholarship and digital humanities is really great to foster that partnership. Librarian is also central to the development of space and particularly the technical estate before I arrived and for this technician got into post helping get equipment investments up and running and documented and now I think it's really important from my perspective to think about how we might recognize some of those library colleagues who play kind of technical roles in essence how they might link into things like a burgeoning university's technician community. I would say I think the library is a really important partner when we're thinking about sort of delivery and particularly delivery of services. I used the case of 3d printers often here which is that sort of our kit that we have in DH is starting to demonstrate demand across campus for the sort of things we might better facilitate as a university so engineering students for example realizing they can beat the cues in their local capacity by coming over to humanities isn't our model to provide a service but perhaps it is a model to kind of think about the ways in which the library could respond to that and finally working with librarians as researchers is really important to me as well the RLUK report from is it last year now around the role of librarians in research really kind of underscored that sorting out the admin is really key here to getting library people on grants and I don't think our new grant system has necessarily solved that problem but Eleonora is a PI or an amazing AHRC funded project that draws on the DH tech and UQRI investments and pulls together and draws in the library into that kind of DH expertise and network and I very much do see that library colleagues as a result as kind of potential co-wires and bids that sort of complement library priorities with things like research development capacity building involving kind of like not yet service technologies might be involved. So I think our partnership over the last year has been on one hand very sort of practical driven and the other very kind of creative driven and it's maybe reflected on where we might be going as a partnership over the next years. I think the first point to say is that for me DH would not be DH without my colleagues in the library and I'm really determined to entangle the library into DH structures only of course if my colleagues are willing I'm not a weed but to ensure then that as kind of people rules money and life changes we have succession planning in place for DH and the library to remain aligned and the second one is around thinking about expertise and where our expertise overlaps and differs. The example I often think about here is things like research skills and the humanities how do we complement rather than overlap so you know who does the Zotero sessions with our PGR students for example but I guess the more interesting work here is around showing where library expertise is already embedded with an intellectual work of kind of expanded digital humanities. It kind of should be obvious when sort of I put a librarian like Tonya Sutherland and one of their works on a reading list for a discussion of archival violence but I think it's more explicit when library colleagues are in the room as experts and figuring out ways of doing that as part of as we kind of build our education off is really important and the final one is like the role of the library going back to my point about libraries being kind of keynotes in the university network more broadly is about kind of the changing landscape with HE and how we we monitor change together. Example my gift here is around service for example I try not to see service as a demo and us thing as you seeing service as something that sits in a continuum from kind of experimentation at one end and routine service delivery at the other. Everything else in the middle is kind of shifting it's dictated by sort of overton window of the range of work acceptable to a mainstream researcher as towards one end or the other and DH is certainly not conceived as a service at Southampton we are not an uncosted nice thing on grants but then neither should we therefore assume the library is the same and but the library of course has different missions to a DH department so the library being embedded within DH for me gives us scope to situate work on that continuum to decide who should lead on what and where and how and others how others might support it. Going back to my example of 3d printers and they aren't a library service now library researchers wouldn't expect them to be a library service at the moment but I'm sure we can imagine a future where printing a scanned model of a knitted shoe and a library printer is comparable to using paper printers to print copies of an article for some research purpose and how we get there if we want to get there in that particular example requires I think the kind of kind of library and DH partnership we've been building over the last year at Southampton but also in that sort of deeper time before I arrived here I think that's everything I wanted to say. Oh thank you so much and I'm going to invite yet Megan and Abid to turn the camera on. Thank you so much for your presentation I think you actually summarised and it was a good way to reflect on some of the things that we have discussed as a digital scholarship network in the past two years so you touched AI and machine learning but also you talked about skills you talk about services that co-design and James talked about the embedding partnerships in a sort of equal partnership between library and the faculties and now we can all be researchers in the same way but just from different angles which is things that we have discussed extensively I think in the last few years through the network so I do have a couple of questions that came to pop through the box but in the meantime if there is someone else also that has particular questions about partnerships and things that James had discussed please feel free to put them in the chat. So the first question is actually about specifically on Library of Congress and do you see the Library of Congress having a content aggregation role so one collection for the US and the world or do you see your role as a facilitating access to Library of Congress and possibly other collection and this was from Neil Stewart. Yeah thank you for that question Neil I think I think our we'll start by saying that out we have a vision statement that the Library of Congress is connected to all Americans and that's the all Americans part is partly because we're a congressional the US congressional library we're part of the so that's although we have collections in from all over the world but but I think we sort of look and and that vision I think has been a challenge for for us for the whole for all of the library I think the library has been the Library of Congress has a you know because like I said the lack of faculty the lack of students the collection doesn't circulate the what we have been you know building a lot of our systems and capacities and expertise is serving traditional researchers who come to our desks and that's kind of how the system is built to run and although there has been experimentation I think in you know in DPLA and other places where content is aggregated for for other users and I think we and I think everyone would say the the sort of use of those materials but that those aggregated services is not has not been what has been expected and the so I think in our role in labs in in this which is a lot of people are working on this is to sort of think about the users and what users actually want from our collections and and with these sort of tools and experiments that we that we're experimenting with you know are there uses that we can facilitate are there needs that we can fill that that we're not really doing right now yep and I would just add that just as Chris Christie mentioned at the very beginning of this the this time period is put an emphasis on the digital and we continue to see that the Library of Congress collection is going to continue to grow so the the challenges of access and use are only going to become more complicated and so bringing people together just kind of building on James's notions of bringing together partnerships and skills acquisition and developing competencies to build on already the amazing expertise and skills of our colleagues is a place that we need to kind of come together to put some emphasis on for improving access and use of the library's materials thank you that's a really comprehensive answer right so I'm just moving to a question from Jane for James do you have any suggestion on how libraries embarking on a DH mission can engage faculties and researchers to partner around creating an innovative DH support service yeah that's a really good question um don't be shiny I think like one of my things is like thinking tactically about when you say the shiny things and to whom so um you know at the most basic level like the I've got education my head because I'll teach in this morning but like you know don't say digital fanatism undergrad because it's kind of pointless but do say it to the VC because he'll be like oh digital humanities well that surprises me um and I think it's that kind of stuff really for me it's like find find the right spaces to have the right conversations I I I can't I can't imagine many of my faculty would be particularly excited if I started to try and tell them I'm going to transform their disciplines through the work that I do they probably want me to not be there and start lobbying for me not to exist and I think it's those kind of things around pitching because I think sometimes DH can come across as a bit hyperbolic so figure out that relationship between humble and shiny um and from there I think the only other thing I would say is that one things I found really valuable here at Southampton is to kind of dig into the ECR and sort of postgrad communities postgrad research communities in particular because they often feel like the least supported spaces the people who are trying to do things but can't get access to a research software engineer because they don't have any budget to do so and you might be able as a library person tap them into a local research software engineer team for example and get them a little bit of time and kind of those people have been really interesting because they are often in pockets that are unsupported but and they're and they're dealing with very pragmatic questions of you know will my second supervisor my doctorate like this particular approach I've taken that's a bit computational and it's those kind of things that they need those networks so drilling into them to help sort of create some of those initial networks I think is really valuable thank you and I saw Megan nodding so will imagine that that is also a shared experience so um something that you experience yourself um at the Library of Congress I don't know if you have anything to add or any other suggestions I would just say that we we continue to hope to partner with researchers and users of the collection to understand their needs more as Abby mentioned and we have a couple of initiatives that are ongoing where we really are hearing about the the people who are bridging technologies and approaches in different fields and kind of don't necessarily have a home and we would love to help make homes together like build together what's the future um thank you and then so there is another question for James um are existing faculty and academic librarians part of the H work or has the library employed specific staff to work with digital humanities I'll be really brief here so um I was hired into humanities so I sent the humanities at Southampton and I've been hiring staff that sit effectively under me within humanities um but I think on almost every panel apart from one there's been a library colleague on the on the hiring panel I think that's been sort of something I've been trying to make sure happens and then Eleonora has been involved in the library side digital scholarship and sort of parallel hiring so hiring for specific things the library needs to do but also that have overlaps with sort of things we want to do so we are on separate bits of funding but we're sort of emerging groups and teams kind of like together in a sort of parallel and starting to overlap I don't know if you want to say anything about that Eleonora but no I think it is merely to remark the work that we've been doing together to create a complementary expertise in services so we kind of been cross-referencing and job description or just sort of just making sure that we're not duplicating and replicating something that's already there but we're just adding value to what is already there by having complementary skills so ideas or angles of point of view which was a key for us to work with the faculty so and I think I can squeeze in the last question and this for Abia Megan and it's about the potential offer training so do you or would you consider offering training for using your data and collection for newcomers digital humanities researchers or do you put your data out and expect users to have those skills and I imagine James also can quickly chip in with his experience programming story but yeah Megan and Abby first go ahead Megan oh I was just gonna say we actually are very inspired by British Library digital scholarship support and programming both for staff development and also for wider communities of practice when we began our work about five years ago but we don't have a program of support for digital scholarship explicitly instead what we've done is tried to develop resources and share those and continue to understand user needs and improve upon them so we have I'll put a couple of links in the chat we have a roundup of digital scholarship support kind of guides including a digital scholarship lib guide that helps people step through requesting and transforming types of data we have updated and have been working on updating our colleague Eileen jakeway has been updating the apis documentation at the library we have examples of things like jupiter notebooks and other types of guides that we share via github and then we also have our colleagues who are sharing about the practice and our signal blog and there's some opportunities to kind of look at other methods that have been used and I also want to shout out our colleagues with the by the people crowdsourcing program who've been making data sets available crowdsource transcription data sets available as well as looking and developing guides for educators and researchers to use that data which is available on crowd.lc.gov so I'll put some of those links in the chat and I just made add-outs that really quickly the to sort of resonate with James was saying earlier about the kind of a new to Eleanor about the combining of teams and sort of kind of iteratively going towards a more comprehensive or you know some more support is that we started investigating digital scholarship when we first started five years ago and you know we started with the internal working group and then we you know are helping Kluge follows and you know it's been a you know five years of you know a project here project there project there and and we and just recently over the pen partly due to sort of really digging into uses of our AB API versus uses of our digital collect our traditional digital collections and we saw the API usage just sort of really jump especially for our prints and photographs collections we there are plans in the works now to hire collections as data librarians in our library part of our library so that we see that as a huge you know to talk about a handoff of we as labs we don't imagine ourselves being the the home the permanent home for this kind of support we we imagine that being in in the library reference services and collection services so we think this is a like a huge a huge win for um for you know advancing this work and and and moving it moving it on to more sort of stable and uh uh you know comprehensive support thank you that's great and I don't know James if you have lost comments I guess I think the question of who owns the kind of trusted training and support around sort of digital data and collections is is a live one I guess I mean with my programming historian hat on we've been working with Jisk in the UK recently who came to us and said well you are a trusted platform for delivering materials that are sustainable can you do some stuff please on large scale collections because you don't have a lot and we think our users need it and that partnership is really interesting partly because just came to us with that kind of like proposal effectively which suggests that to them there is still sort of questions around who hosts this kind of material and who does that kind of research and training and support um but it's really hard to make I mean again with that hat on it's really hard to make that stuff sustainable it's great to have an initiative when you can kind of get it going but it making it sustaining is is really tough and you know British Library as as before knows an amazing job of keeping that internal training program going for the best part of nearly 10 years now um and that really takes like substantive investment so investments in that stuff don't come easy right um they're not projects they're infrastructures so let's kick off the next session um and I'm delighted to have a panel of speakers with me who will be very much reflecting and looking at how different networks have helped and supported um digital humanities and also digital skills so it gives me great pleasure to welcome Professor Jane Winters who's professor of digital humanities and director of the digital humanities research at the University of London um to come and talk to us and I think she has been significant um and has led on a wide range of digital humanities London projects I think lots of them going right back um but I think today you're going to share with us your reflections around about the work you've been doing with the UK and Ireland digital humanities association sorry I'm tripping over things here but can I welcome you Jane I know you've been a supporter and have helped RLUK and also the Digital Scholarship Network think around a huge range of issues that look forward to hearing um your presentation now that's the slides in not in present that's it presentation mode thank you the end as well sorry about that I can almost start with the end thank you very much for that introduction um Kirsty I don't think I have quite as many hats as James has but um but it's getting there and um I don't have James's experience of working in libraries but I think all of my research projects in digital humanities have been partnerships with libraries and or archives so I'm really going to focus a lot on collaboration uh in this very short presentation and as Kirsty said talking a little bit about the work of the nascent UK island digital humanities association but I've also got a small local example in my institution which I think shines very much with what James was talking about so we were asked to reflect on some of the challenges um and opportunities always go alongside challenges but I wonder perhaps whether the opportunities are themselves not a challenge and that is the lack of opportunity sometimes for collaboration and work in digital scholarship so there is undoubtedly a skills gap and we heard earlier about that in particular in relation to machine learning and artificial intelligence but there has also been and continues to be as we've heard a huge effort to address this through programs like library carpentry and the AHRC research libraries UK professional practice fellowship scheme addressing the full range of skills not just technical ones but working on research projects and how to develop collaboration in fact so I was wondering whether perhaps it's now the opportunities gap that's a bit harder to tackle and that's also a difficult thing to tackle at a sectoral level because there are so many different institutional priorities and imperatives that work there which determine the opportunities that are open to people so I wanted to talk a little bit about the kinds of mechanisms that enable collaboration within and outside libraries and how academic researchers in particular can can work with their colleagues in the libraries and learn from their expertise and knowledge and exchange knowledge and really what are the spaces where people can engage in and with digital scholarship and that's space in terms of time but I'm also going to talk a little bit about physical spaces and venues for collaboration are really important and having a space again James was touching on this shows whether an institution values the work of digital scholarship it's providing an opportunity for people to engage and work together I also wonder about this question of language and the sort of digital scholarship and and I hesitated to say versus digital humanities but they are sometimes talked about slightly separately and I think that's particularly on the academic side of things which again is why the work at Southampton is so important and I've personally found the RLUK definition of digital scholarship to be extremely useful here that includes digital humanities but it goes beyond it and encompasses a wider array of subjects across arts humanities social sciences and STEM and that seems to me like a really useful point of connection because digital humanities is explicitly interdisciplinary in focus and thinks of itself as working across those disciplines but the humanities label sometimes gets in the way of collaboration and knowledge exchange and sharing so I think events like this which bring together people with very different experiences and backgrounds are fantastic for developing a common language for working together and for talking to people in our own institutions those vice-chancellors that we need to convince as well in terms of space to collaborate I'm very briefly going to mention a local example Kirsty mentioned the I'm Director of the Digital Humanities Research Hub at the School of Advanced Study which is quite new and we've only brought together our digital humanities expertise in the last year and a half and it's really led us to address some of these issues about space and time and institutional encouragement but also support I think people are often encouraged to engage in this kind of work without giving being given the practical support guidance and time to do it and one of the things that we were very keen to do as was to establish a physical space we wanted to have room for conversation and experimentation a space that didn't impinge on people's day-to-day working activity you're not intruding on someone's office space or workspace you have a separate dedicated area where these conversations can happen so just at the beginning of this month we opened what we've called the Senate House Digital Humanities Makerspace and it's an investment from the School of Advanced Study in digital humanities but it's also explicitly not just for us as academic staff and students and that's why we haven't called it the School of Advanced Study DH Makerspace and Senate House is the building that we're based in and we share that building with the University of London's major and undergraduate lending library and it also has research and special collections and within the School of Advanced Study we have four national research libraries and we wanted this space to be for everybody that it didn't have a sort of metaphorical a sign on the door that said this is for academic staff only don't come in if that's not you so it's in a part of the building that's open to everybody there are no barriers and no gateways to access anyone can come in and anyone can book the space for meetings or for teaching and training and just for collaboration generally we tried it out with a conference in the summer when it wasn't still entirely kitted out you can still see the remnants of a previous activity on the whiteboards in the background but it worked as a really fantastic venue for bringing people together to talk through the projects that they were doing to think about data we have 3d printers digitization equipment and so on as well and just in those two photographs we have research technical professionals phd students archivists librarians and independent researcher and university based academics who are all in this instance thinking through how we preserve and make available born digital material and the maker space links on to our key lobby area as well so we often extend out into the lobby so that there's visibility for this work and collaboration and people can drop in and see what we're doing when we run events like this and it's very early days but it really does seem to have opened up conversations that we weren't having before that we had tried to get going before with the library in particular but had failed to do so and we ran some introductory sessions organized for library staff in the central university of london ahead of what those for academic staff we haven't actually invited academic staff in yet that's going to happen in the next few weeks we prioritized the library and that was about bringing people equipment and knowledge together as i mentioned so academic expertise in 3d modeling and library expertise in digitization and talking through projects we might develop together so we're thinking of a set of exemplar projects which are going to be co-designed with a very strong collections focus to demonstrate the value of this partnership and collaboration and communicate that throughout the institution so these are very low cost in financial terms and we hope also in time that has to be contributed but have the potential for high impact within the institution in terms of opening up these conversations and at a local level that is what we're going to try to do with the uk island digital humanities association uh this is you'll notice there's no url at the top of this screen because the website hasn't actually gone live yet that's going to happen in the next week or so but this has emerged from funding from the arts and humanities research council in the uk and the irish research council in ireland they funded a network as part of a digital humanities collaboration scheme and we had support right from the start from rl uk and connell who both wrote letters of support because the network that's led to this association was always designed not just to include academic staff in universities but people engaged in digital humanities and digital scholarship wherever they were located that network funding ran from the end of 2020 to the end of 2021 so right through the pandemic various disruptive lockdowns and so on but we actually benefited I think from having our events online and being able to open that up to a wide diverse audience in a way that might not have been the case if we run face-to-face events so this summer we published a three-year roadmap leading to the establishment of a formal membership organization by the end of our second year and the association is going to be open to people who are involved as I said with digital scholarship in any sector whether that's Glam, HE, creative industries, wherever you might be independent researchers that I mentioned earlier as well and with any kind of role and we're just about to launch a call for proposals for special interest groups and these special interest groups were hoping will serve as one of the primary vehicles for community building within the association and it's not about those of us who started off the network deciding what we think is of interest but getting ideas from the ground up from the communities that we've been working with and it would be wonderful for example if there were to be a proposal for a special interest group around collaboration between libraries and academic practitioners as well that's just one idea leading up to this series of workshops too looking at advocacy, teaching, careers from and in digital humanities and Christina Camposiori from RLUK talked about her experience of moving from having a digital humanities PhD into her current role and how that facilitates the sorts of connections and collaborations that we want to develop so watch this space for the launch of that special interest group call for proposals and when we're not we've moved really quite decisively I think away from any sectoral focus and I've focused around a set of core values none of which will surprise you I don't think inclusivity, community, collaboration, sustainability, openness and transparency and advocacy and action and all of those map on to the work that goes on in libraries and we've heard people talking about so much of that today and one of the really important ones to me there at the end is action that it isn't going to just be about talking it is about practical help on the ground examples of what works what doesn't work helping people build these networks and partnerships the sort of work that the digital scholarship network has shown so brilliantly how to do and we'll certainly be drawing on a lot of the things that you've been doing so successfully there and as part of that community side of things I did just want to finish by acknowledging the input from all of the people who have helped to get this work off the ground both our local maker space but more importantly the digital humanities network which is now going to become a formal association and it will be wonderful as we embark on that association's journey to keep going these conversations with RLUK and with library colleagues across the sector and not just in the UK and Ireland we have a huge amount to learn from best practice in other countries as well and from other organisations so thank you very much No thank you very much Jane that was brilliant and again as with the last panel we'll take questions at the end so it now gives me real pleasure to invite Anya Schmidt who's the director of dance the Dutch national centre of expertise and a repository for research data and prior to that she was also university librarian at a number of Dutch universities and I've been watching what dance has been doing for a number of years and they always have fascinating work on the go and have done some really great work around about digital preservation but I was particularly blown away when I was hearing the work around about the digital competency centres and a sort of slightly different approach to that digital skills piece that we quite often grapple with so I'm really pleased to have Anya here today to talk to us about the work that they're doing and so thanks very much for joining us Anya you're going to be here for the final panel session so please do ask her any questions during this session on you go thank you thank you so much Christy and thank you very much for inviting me it's a wonderful audience I've also attended the last hour and there's so many things that I recognize in terms of activities digital humanities labs we had one in Utrecht we have one in Utrecht in the university library it's all about collaboration and finding connections and sharing knowledge to develop this area as Christy said I have been the library university librarian for over 12 years in Utrecht and I have since July of this year taken on the role of the director of dance which is an organization that hosts a national data archive research data archive but also is very strong in network services so this is a national organization as part of the the royal academy of sciences that has a network mission and also is in the middle of all these collaborations and developments today I would like to share with you a very very new initiative that is dance that dance is involved in I'll talk a little bit it's only 10 minutes about what it is and a little bit about the the context because as these discussions as we're having today show this is vital so this is about digital competence centers I'd like to talk about what is it which are there what is it and especially talk about the the the one in the social sciences and humanities domain so okay what is a digital competence center it is a place virtual and or physical space that brings together communities of scientists across research institutes institutes themselves structures support organizations like libraries structures like large-scale research infrastructures think of odyssey in the social sciences claria you might also me me be familiar with so large-scale infrastructures but basically very many organizations and people who are working in this area whether as a researcher or as a supporter it is also a focus point for organization and cooperation within the Dutch research domain but also connected to the inter to international initiatives it is well apologies it is also a focus point for organization of data and software and link with available computing so it's also about developing further the facilities that are needed it it's supposed to be a dynamic organization or focus point or community and also open to new members and partners partners it identifies common needs versus discipline specific issues there are three thematic DCC's and vision they are just starting one in the life sciences one in the natural sciences and one in the social sciences and humanities area and dance is involved in setting up and leading together with the PIs of odyssey and claria the digital competence center in the social sciences and humanities what is our focus our focus is very much on research reuse of research data and software that is the key goal that is defined in the roadmap for this DCC for the for the SSH domain it will address fundamental issues that are important for large organizations for large parts of the domain and that are not already addressed in any other way we have heard today on many initiatives that this is typically an area where where a lot is happening and the DCC SSH has said we will try to focus on things that are not addressed elsewhere and I'll talk a bit more about what that concrete means in a minute it's also we want to initiate initiate and carry out collaborative projects to address challenges in further developing infrastructures and services such as improving fairness in repositories that we see as a key element in enabling and further developing the research the reuse of research data and software it's about training programs for researchers and data stewards it's about privacy and competency legislation share best practices and interoperability organized knowledge graphs and vocabulary so this these last things are very concrete in terms of how can you further facilitate reuse of research data and software the last slide that I have for you is about the context because this digital competence center which is a network organization a community that focuses on what is needed in each of the three research domains is part of a larger context and many other initiatives I've simplified it here in this screen where there are the three thematic DCCs and you see on the left side there are also institutional DCCs they have come about a couple of years ago when NWO which is the the largest research funder in the Netherlands started to fund little centers in each university and each higher education institution to support digital scholarship basically in some universities this was already present in many cases in the library by the way so there are institutional DCCs by now in every higher education institution and research institution then there are these thematic DCCs that are starting up now and on the other hand on the right side you see our national open science program which of course also has one of their themes about fair data it should read fair data and software it's oftentimes forgotten but it's crucial of course but this fair data theme will also be very important in developing a support and facilitation of digital scholarship the interesting thing at this point is that there will be funding for 10 years a lot of funding for the thematic DCCs five years and it will probably be extended to 10 years so structural support with funding on a national scale at the same time there will also there's just been decided that there will be structural funding and this will be 10 also for 10 years 20 million that goes to the national open science program how these funds will be divided between the four themes is not clear yet at the same time it is interesting that our ministry basically funds development and advancement of facilities on the one hand over all the research domains through the national open science program on the other hand also is funding thematic DCCs where the communities within research domains will look at what is needed and advanced so there's there's multiple ways at least three but of course there's another one at least that is the fourth and that is what is happening and can be in contribute be contributed within the higher education institutions on policies for example but much more and libraries are part of that I connected them all in the middle because somewhere these initiatives and these funding streams have to connect in order to in the most effective way develop what is needed for digital scholarship and with that I'll leave it I'll leave it at this thank you thank you very much no thank you very much and again it was great to sort of see that connection to both fair coming through and data science because I think that's something we're beginning to see an experience to so now we're going to come to our next speaker and I'm pleased to welcome back Killian Joy who I believe spoke at our very first digital scholarships symposium and Killian is speaking and talking about what is happening at Connell and amongst other things and I will without further ado pass over to you Killian. First take so hopefully you can see my slides yes perfect yeah so hello everyone this brief talk is I suppose it's really about the the key challenges and opportunities for both the digital scholarship network and my own institution in the university of the university of Galway first of all thanks Kersi for the invite and for RUK for organizing like this great international events and great speakers I've learned a lot already so for the digital scholarship network I'm talking on behalf of the network's conveners it's myself Arlene Healy of Trinity and Owen Confeder of the National Library of Ireland and of course the the wider membership of the network as well so Kersi mentioned Connell as well Connell is the consortium of libraries in Ireland I'm a member of that research group and also the national open research framework infrastructure group so I'm mainly working kind of open and and digital research they're the kind of key areas for me so like in a few minutes I have I want to talk about the network and some of the some of our things we're working on and some of the next steps and then also as I said talk about what's going on locally I may talk more what's going on locally but I think those things cross over anyway so it should be it should be okay so for the digital scholarship network you know the digital scholarship network if you're familiar with the RUK digital scholarship network they're quite similar except that the the Irish version is smaller the smaller membership and that it's a Connell sponsored network and so that means that we're also open to all galleries libraries museums and archives on the island of Ireland so I think any organization in Ireland or on the island of Ireland that's focus on research active that is research active and that's involved in the development and the delivery of digital and open scholarship services we're saying digital and open scholarship as well and like the main aim is really just encourage partnerships and skills development across Connell and Glam but when we set up it's probably got timelines maybe two years ago we you know we identified key issues and commonalities across the network by running a series of workshops to like to talk about and to define and to gather member direction requirements but after this we did a whole lot of work and after this we organized around three themes common themes that you're probably very familiar with skills partnership and strategy and and these teams do represent them represent the main challenge areas and that came out and ones where we think you know we can help we can help each other so skills you know obviously it's been talked about today and it comes up a lot so in terms of skills we're doing a couple of things so we're kind of like in our action plan phase now where we're doing the things that have just come on the screen there in terms of in terms of partnerships I suppose what we're thinking is what opportunities present themselves you know as we are working together so how can we mobilize ourselves you know to take these opportunities and you know what we're talking about is shared approaches you know in terms of infrastructure funding you know all the things that we speak about but how can we action some of these things so we would I suppose you know the way this is working at the moment is that there is in terms of in terms of outcomes there's a workshop that's coming up quite soon which is across Connell and Ireland and other organizations in Glam as well and I think the focus there is really on the next I shared exhibition platform and what can we kind of commit to kind of getting together with that particular solution and finally then in the strategy area we're aware nationally that you know that there's a lot of different organizations everybody's at a different maturity level in terms of their digital scholarship development though we've set about to create a digital scholarship roadmap you know to help people along the way it's broken into three phases and of course the kind of just added on to that is this value piece it's like you know we're constantly asking ourselves why are we doing this what's the longer term goal can we define value that translates for our stakeholders and our funders so where we're at really with that on the network is we're just kind of finishing the action plan we're hoping to finish by the end of this year and we're just beginning now to reassess what the challenges are so I'd say if I spoke next week or the week after I'd have a clear idea of what the network challenges are we have some initial ideas obviously funding is coming up you know how can we influence and lobby the funders nationally to I suppose to consider infrastructure as a key piece how can we align ourselves in infrastructure you know I think on the open side on the open infrastructure side there's a lot of strengthening and alignment going on and that's not really happening on the kind of digital scholarship side per se maybe we're just a little bit behind so what can we learn from other activities that are going that are going on I'm just going to jump now to the University of Goa library and what we're doing in digital scholarship I'm really going to focus on some key challenge here yes so I was at this slide I think and I was really I think I talked about funding and I was talking about small funding grants you know for a project that you might have and you might have multiple ones of these grants and then I suppose the overhead that is involved like it's a significant issue right for digital humanities and the projects we're trying to get off the ground it just it does a lot of overhead so like I suppose consideration there for like that's the challenge and then the opportunity then I suppose is again on the network side is to to join up realistically you know to join up and to have more more power in terms of applying and bidding the next one is is is around hiring I don't know if anyone else is having this issue but at the moment hiring is is a significant challenge obviously it takes time and the skills are hard to find that's always been there but at the moment probably a covid post-covid issue but the the employee market specifically well I can just talk for Ireland really nobody really not that they don't want it but everyone has a better option for like they don't really want project work for like that last year to do especially anybody who is skilled so it's a real real challenge to get somebody so if you're trying to grow and you're you're basically you know you're working with project money it's a real challenge to hire people the next one is understanding the the campus and this is you know that's about getting out there it's about you know talking to to stakeholders the academics everything we've been talking about today and like that constant need to engage and understand the local environment so we you know we we've done a couple of these reviews where we have gone out to the campus to figure out what's going on and our strategies are built on that obviously but at the moment we are refreshing that to when we're going back out to the community really I think you know we're doing a couple of things in in this space but we want to see now if what we're doing is if are they still relevant are we still doing what what stakeholders want and it's about it's about the overlaps that we talked about earlier it's about you know not finding niches but as things evolve and change make sure that we're doing everything in partnership so where can the library help you know what is what is digital scholarship these are the questions we're asking so we ourselves we are actually transitioning away from the term digital scholarship more into digital research knowing that you know that teaching and research are often in reality intertwined but that is the direction that we're currently going in so that's all about as I said there you know it's about getting out there you know make friends it's build trust and it ends two things do things together I trust on value when it came when we talked about the digital scholarship network and at a base level line you know to be able to talk about value we need to be able to find and quantify you know the the metrics in terms in terms of where how that feeds in to into value and for for us for digital scholarship activity that means around you know web access you know we've a lot of different platforms doing different things and for a particular project one might be an exhibition or a digital collection or a bit on the website and how do we actually report on that in a in a way that is effective and a way that is accurate as well it's quite a challenge so we're looking at really at quantifying and and how do we communicate value as well moving on quickly a couple of other ones the first one around prioritized and there's a lot going on there's a lot of projects going on and how do we decide what work to do and how do we decide what to digitize so for us this is a balanced approach between you know program of activity that's based off you know business plans and things like that and then strategic projects you know that just land business case be quite business cases have been quite useful for us because they tie you know the collection or whatever's going on to the organization and the library strategy so like we have terms we strategic trust like you know being digital open by default irish it's a language international impact and they've been very helpful in prioritizing what we're actually trying to do in the space in terms of technology it's evolving quickly you know we all use different um different technology and uh different platforms to do different things maybe depending on our content so you know open access scholarly publications for open repositories which archives to different things and i'm not saying i says i said for a fragmented there in on the slide but maybe that's a bit strong you know in terms of um these things are connected but i think they could do with the a tighter connection even on let's say the front end or search or even the report again that i'm talking about so we are we are setting our sites on unifying or or open publishing platforms knowing that this will be different workflows in the background but trying to make the the interfaces to users much more easy to understand we feel we can get better um uh involvement then from the from the community as well a few more um the the metadata one is there because you know people talk about digitalization as being a lot of work but for us metadata is there is the bottleneck and it was mentioned already today about item level metadata for for AI and doing things like that and that's what we do aim to do as well item level metadata but that's that's a lot of work so there are arguments to be made you know do we look at going to file level um and then how can we augment that by using other things like other other data that'll come out tagging more relying on ocr i'm not saying they're perfect um but it would increase the throughput um and you know we ourselves and we've been talking we're using technology and using AI to extract metadata for for a long time and we've done some tests and that's what the first talk was actually quite quite interesting um but how do we move from they're talking about it to to mainstreaming um uh using technology to to to help us extract metadata so we ourselves we're doing a project at the moment where you know somebody is going in and they're defining detailed metadata and then we're following up with um some tools we're going to evaluate those tools and we have we have partners on campus that are working on that and lastly space this is really it's not a problem it's an opportunity a clear opportunity no space a lab a center um so for us we have an opportunity in front of us you know we're there's a we're building a new building a part of that is is a space um so we see it as a place for partnership know where the library can can work with researchers to to enable their work um by reference a colleague in Galway David Kelly's digital humanities manager and he's proposed some concepts around a new um digital humanities a kind of library space that involves and makes between kind of digital innovation a space for fellowships that the fellowships then will be placed in that space as well so that all is be a presence I think all these things are all these things are are very important so I think that's me for time um so I'll I'll stop there and say thank you very much for your time and if we could ask Kelly Couttenon to come and join us instead thank you so much Kelly for popping up on screen there and so as you may have noticed we've been hopping backwards and forwards between kind of UK Ireland and Europe and we're back to Europe again now um and it's a great pleasure that I welcome Dr. Kelly Couttenon who is an executive board member of Leader of Libra and leads on the sort of skills side of things there and she's also director of the Finnish Literature Society and so Kelly if you could talk to us a little bit around about what Libra is doing around about digital scholarship and digital skills thanks very much thank you Kersti uh while I'm now sharing my screen I also want to say my thanks you can see my slides now yes we can indeed thank you good uh so good afternoon from cloudy health oh it's sunny no again sunny cloudy sunny cloudy uh Helsinki Finland um and thanks for the invitation uh this has been an inspiring I feel quite privileged to have this chance of hearing your talks and and what is going on in in UK Ireland and uh Europe Anya's talk this is also interesting and of course uh Library of Congress um I'm here Kersti you already presented me I'm from now representing Libra the association of European research libraries and I'm talking about the key challenges from the viewpoint of Libra strategy um but I also want to tell of course talking about uh in the context of digital scholarship and digital cultural heritage digital humanities I took this photo this photo here indicates it's from my organization or Finnish Literature Society which is a learned society um and it indicates that my comments are rooted in the research landscape of my own institution my own country and my own language also to say oh there's something going on here okay so um this uh society Finnish Literature Society hosts uh uh library archives uh a department of our own with a few digital humanities humanists but we also serve the and we collaborate with the Finnish community of uh academics universities uh archives and and libraries across Finland so this is the background I'm talking about as well as the the community of Libra libraries I've been involved with Libra from the I think from 2011 and I was elected to the executive board in 2019 instead of showing the full scale of Libra I show the mission and values because the topic is the key challenges and the topic is the the Libra strategy uh towards the next five years Libra is uh the strategy uh represents the views and ideas of over 400 Libra libraries research libraries of which I just checked that six are from from United Kingdom and 18 from Ireland at the moment um it has been interesting to see uh that we are sharing the same ideas the same uh challenges the same opportunities and the next slides I have two slides that uh from the new Libra strategy and this is the one I use for explaining the key challenges we the process of uh building the new strategy took I think it took almost for a year I was part of the task force from the executive board following along the process we had a consultant that collected the information not only from the from the executive board who the members of the executive board come from across research libraries across Europe but also the Libra community all the Libra libraries were involved and also international partner organizations and you can imagine that in the beginning thinking about the driving factors impacting research libraries in Europe there were many many topics starting from the pandemic starting from the funding changing economics in Europe are changing situations but uh after we or in the process these three areas were identified as the key key factors and key challenges or opportunities uh those with uh which we in the Libra community and among Libra libraries individual Libra libraries can influence with our work the first of them is drive for openness uh the current strategy of Libra indicates open science and open access as one of our priorities and one of the challenges and during the discussions we not uh we recognize that we have not met the goals yet we have not met the open access course although a great deal has been achieved uh the fair data that uh Anja talked about is also one of the areas we need to to achieve more from the Finnish landscape I can say for example that in the cultural heritage area in archives and libraries in Finland we are also finding a challenge of our restricted access data the restricted access materials that all are also part of the open science if if access to some area of materials research materials or cultural heritage materials is not available to our research or our society that is a gap in this landscape that gap that needs to be filled and so this is one of the key areas that we consider important then all the presentations to the beginning from the library home representation new technologies that is undoubtedly factor that we need to face and we need to tackle the next wave so to say and um we we can see locally and we can see globally that uh things are changing there is a transformation going on and uh we in the area of cultural heritage uh following it's for example the discussion uh within the time machine organization which connects libraries and research institutions and archives uh there is much to to cope with then the third one upholding rights and values that was part of the reason why I chose to show you the Libre mission and Libre values which the strategy is built on during the discussions in the Libre while making the processing the Libre news Libre strategy we many times touch this area that has been uh I can see that it has been considered something that has been taken for granted of course we've been discussing privacy and copyright issues or questions of privacy and copyright uh for example in the relation to open science but uh there are there is a need for further or enhanced discussion on this area not well during the past years or this year it has been even more obvious that values are to be discussed because they are not that they for for example the technology brings along the questions of ethics and so when we are talking about openness when when we are talking about artificial intelligence and it's um use in the research or its impact in the research for the research integrity we are really talking about values so these three were elaborated and uh based on them these challenges and also opportunities we we in the new Libre strategy we identified five priorities which are now visualized in this illustration in the middle you can see three of them so to meet these challenges and to to face the opportunities uh first of all there is this engage entrusted perhaps which means or which with which we wish to and we are uh really and uh determined to build libraries as spaces and uh now a quote mechanisms mechanisms of collaboration within the research community with our customers and also outside academia and society the second one is state of the art services libraries people libraries are building state of the art services in the coming and Libre coming years and Libre is supporting libraries in this work the third one is the advancing open science as I said there is still much to do the as I said there are five of them five priorities uh in the bottom you see the great great bar and uh the upholding rights and values has been identified as something that we really want to address independently and to see how how it uh affects the other areas and then finally the fifth one is upskilling the library workforce and today we've heard much of these already one of the key challenges is on our next slide we have learned that uh any during the past years we have learned that anything can happen and we are in the middle of transformation and our strategic decisions and activities should serve the library community and research and society beyond 2027 so it requires resilient solutions and and activities and then I've now used my 10 minutes so I just thank you for your attention at this point I didn't say that uh I just if I may I will add that all these challenges will be met with uh with uh working groups Libre working groups and digital scholarship and cultural heritage will be one of the working groups working on these particularly or in the beginning with uh the skills development yeah so they this last panel well first of all thank you for everyone rejoining us with you um coffee and teas or water whatever you're having to drink um refilled um so we're gonna start the panel discussion with a quick summary introduction um from Rick Mulligan who is a digital scholarship strategist at the Carnage Mellon University and we love everyone loves his title for his saying so he's been working for many years in the era of digital scholarship and it will introduce um the conversation and discussion in the panel just giving his point of view on how digital scholarship have evolved um across the pond um so I didn't know some of the conversation and um that we had at the beginning um of this symposium but also reflecting a little bit on what has been discussed so far which is a lot of very commonality um through our way of um thinking and approaching but I will leave um the um I will let Rick to turn his camera on and just give us a quick it is back yes well thank you very much for the introduction um and the invitation to come today and you've not really carved it's such a small thing you're asking me to do to sum all this up and to give you an overview of North America hmm uh let's see what I can do in five minutes right so again I really appreciate the opportunity and actually as a point of interest my last conference travel and discussion digital scholarship in national and international scope was uh the 2019 ROUK event in London so a lot I'd say a lot's changed shifted no actually mutated over the past three years at least from the perspective I've got sorry perspectives in the US so I've learned a lot from listening to all of you today um in fact I'd even kind of hazard a very sweeping statement that some of my colleagues and former colleagues will bounce me for is that the trajectory you're sketching um in Ireland in the UK and in Europe you know looking at both Scandinavia and Dutch so at least let's say northern Europe is along the trajectory that I see in the United States along those of the more mature library-based centers for scholarships such as say the Scottish Lab at the University of Virginia or the Center for Digital Research and Humanities at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln um and other institutions that are working to integrate their faculty using cluster hires for digital humanities or digital scholarship along with their personal libraries such as a northeastern university in Boston for instance um you know tremendous work and a lot's been learned over their 20 30 years of experience others are doing new things uh I'd especially call out the Studio X initiative that's under the directorship of Emily Sherwood a former Clear Fellow at the University of Rochester River campus where they're working intensively with augmented reality and virtual reality as part of this extended reality um but largely I guess what I'd offer as a personal view is that I believe digital scholarship in the US is at an inflection point it's been triggered by COVID device of national politics social movements and the war in Ukraine among other things so in many respects I'd guess even before COVID for DH collections of data cultural cultural heritage collections and such um even many social sciences there'd been the shift to this important ambilated focus on diversity equity and inclusion first among practitioners in many cases then funders and finally somewhat reluctantly in some cases university administration I'd say this shift continues and it's also changed which faculty which libraries and collections and even which universities pursuing research funding and where they're putting their resources toward the sustainability of their current projects I'm seeing that through anecdotal evidence that I'm catching from friends in the NEH off the digital humanities but also the NEH public humanities projects more broadly other things said by the Institute for Museum and Library Services and even by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for instance so from my perspective within an individual you know particular institution who's been operating remotely for 30 months this COVID mutation has has really altered digital scholarship pursuits and even the communities to practice in the United States so kind of an odd highlight I'd offer here is that in many respects those of us who are working digitally who are very familiar with using Skype Zoom other tools to operate remotely and virtually with colleagues on projects across different libraries or institutions okay COVID happened shutdown happened for many of us it it did change our work we worked more we worked harder we worked longer hours and I don't know about many of you individually but I also found that those of us who were experts in this area were often asked to do unofficial work such as teaching everybody else how to use the technical tools in many cases asked to take over project management asked to come up with best practices or better practices from everything from how to talk to a camera to how to plan for a session and again I won't speak for many but this kind of recognition or I'm sorry there's a lack of recognition for just the amount of effort that many in the libraries and those operating digital scholarship did many were operating in two different roles sometimes three different roles as faculty as researchers and as infrastructure human you know human infrastructure this is kind of hit with a digital backlash I'd say particularly in the last year where at least in the United States many of the smaller libraries many of the tech based libraries have had to shift to put each on the ground as it were people face to face again to prove the value of the library the necessity of the return of investment for the funds going to the library because many in the sciences and STEM again overlooked the library look at the databases do not see them connected to humans this is kind of had some backlash on the digital practitioners who are now in many cases having these policies imposed broadly to say you two must be in the office and interacting face to face and this has been met with some resistance by those going hey I'm maintaining a zoom session with 15 people on two continents I can't do it face to face so you want me to come into an office where I spend all day virtually uh and we talk now I'll tie that in with part of this backlash is it ties me with uh Killian was saying there have been some tremendous personality sorry personality and personnel shifts um just the list of open positions that I've seen over the last two months has been somewhat staggering and I wish several have been there uh three four or five years ago for colleagues who have given up in academia because there had been nothing for them in faculty roles in research roles there'd only been project work there had only been postdoc work so this is a shift but it's not I believe Killian had a point that people couldn't afford to wait around so they've gone on and in many cases the graduates uh graduate students graduate assistants and even postdocs again had to leave academia some have been able to go to institutions library of congress has been a favorite destination for many uh national endowment for the humanities in the US uh even some of the funders nrw melons loan foundation regionals uh arts and humanities councils and I know a good many who have returned or gone to industry google meta amazon uh especially those that were jumping before ukraine was invaded and uh before the talks of recession so this kind of churn is really shifted where some of the attention's going where some of the resources are going and I'll even argue some of the expectations of administration libraries leadership uh there's been a disjunction at many institutions between university administration and libraries leadership and how they see the resources being deployed or who needs the money and broadly stated what I've seen is a lot of shift to focus on data open science open data research has data data as collection data as everything um and kind of a shoving of social sciences and humanities into its own little pigeonhole and something that's trotted out when a funder wants to give it attention or money sorry I am being the pessimist in the group I thought it'd be nice to to offer that because this darker side of the inflection point is really what I'm hearing by a number of disheartened colleagues people who really worked hard leading up to COVID throughout COVID and found themselves either cut loose cast adrift or just overlooked as I'll say even locally a lot of attention is going towards funders who can give us money who can give us money and a lot of it is tied to physical installations buildings large projects that are tying in with in some cases the National Science Foundation and others but not in a way that really recognizes the groundbreaking work the digital humanities and digital scholarship and the social sciences and arts have extended things and made so many of the materials available during COVID again speaking for our institution we had students who could continue projects remote work but also courses using digitized collections working with TEI text encoding initiative materials collaborating with colleagues across the state but also internationally in some cases you know say the equivalent of the sister city model to work with other faculty especially I saw some of this with the U.S. and Europe and students being able to interact with peers in this way and do group work and publish it on omeka or even WordPress for that matter and they're now using some of that as links to their digital portfolios so all these broad things also tie in three challenges that I've seen coming up and much sharper one of the issues we've had at CMU has remained discovery accessibility and digital publishing so issues with the infrastructure digital scholars ability to crawl publications open access journals of one but also journal like publications that often this is limited by the local infrastructure and no dispersions on Google itself but when they get enough bad links or have problems with the XML or problems with even the Apache web server configuration they just start ignoring that server and sometimes even that institution and I know this has been the case for some libraries that just been written off by Google scholar because they can't make their way through the tech wall in a similar fashion sustainability has been an increased attention for us that we've looked at the research life cycle offering resources been pulled into the role of funders even the PI the principal investigators career and their choices and we've seen again the case the history of projects trailing off rather than being retired in the sunset with any intentionality and part of this is we've started and I don't think it's going to go very far to be blunt trying to develop the idea of critical project metadata that incorporates an IR institutional repository deposit of flat files but also that critical metadata to create a DOI for a project but even though that creates a historical presence there's still no aggregated DHS project or funding registry I know we talked about this briefly in 2019 still haven't seen much done with that but so we're losing a lot of this historical work new tools new projects and that ties in with digital preservation more broadly where even work with the internet archive is under assault and others such as the rise on dot org and their work with the conifer web app that actually tracks web services in the browser to record not just the content of site but the activities of a user that's a tremendous thing but again it runs into the same problem that we don't all have a shared infrastructure for storage even though cloud computing and costs have been dropping there just is not the individual institutional interest or funding line and the US unfortunately does not have a group such as our UK so we are operating very much on individual responses and often that's driven by funding and the lack of funding or the loss of funding by various issues with investment let's say so I think that's kind of enough to hit you with is a quick overview thank you that was a good summary overview I do touch so many and I apologize I didn't realize my camera was off we didn't want to stop the flow because I know it's really difficult when somebody's presented to stop but just worried about something else and then go back so we didn't want to stop you because it was so interesting what you were doing so Kirsty you have your hands up yeah I mean I think that's really it was kind of you had definitely more pessimistic kind of tone to it and I think again it was an interesting reflection around about digital skills that I was sort of touching on at the beginning we're all now much more digitally able but actually that digital ability sits in a sits at a particular level and it's not really around about how you do how you do text and data mining or how you do some of the much more kind of sophisticated searching that we need to do and I think what was interesting in all our kind of reflections that digital skills piece is still a real challenge because yes we can all use zoom now we're all much more better on google and teams and you name it but actually we still don't have the skills to do certain other activities and I think that other piece that you touched on at the end and again a number of others were reflecting on and we had a sort of question in the chat earlier is that that digital infrastructure piece how do we get hold of the collections there is no national aggregator and I suspect you know I'll be stunned if in my lifetime there is a national aggregator that brings together all digitised collections with all their challenges around about equity and diversity and inclusion because of what's been digitised when so I think interesting that we're still at that point so I think my question to everyone is that digital skills piece how do we move up to that next level and how do we collectively come together to make a difference on the infrastructure piece just a few small questions does anyone want to pick that up and try and answer you've got your hand up Jane first because I think Elianora was ahead of me if you want to come in no it was just a reflection but Kershia's asked a good question so please it's really on the skills side of things and I should say that I'm based in a humanities only research institution that has a national role in the UK to deliver research training at the postgraduate level and we this is not a solution it's kind of adding to the difficulties that the real problem is the tension between trying to raise the skills base across the board but also simultaneously trying to train people to deal with the really to be at the cutting edge of where the digital skills are needed and that you know that's sort of stepping over the group in the middle who who've got part of the way there that haven't made it all the way and we certainly haven't found a way to crack this and it's very hard especially if you're trying to deliver introductions to particular kinds of digital skills we find to get the level of that right to encourage the people who really need it and there's also a shortage of people to train at the advanced level in universities and for the humanities too so I think that investment in trainers and developing the skills that there are in libraries to be involved more in in this training process as well but it feels like something that's not going to go away we've been talking about it for such a long time and the and the edge of where we need to be is always moving and is always going to move and then there are people getting left further and further behind so that's kind of just adding problems rather than a solution but bridging that gap between the really highly skilled and the people who just need to step up onto the ramp is quite hard right so who's going to pick up from that Eleonora or Rick next I think Rick was first so actually to kind of reach the two I'm thinking of what was said about especially the Dutch model so for what it's worth I attended James library's carpentry when they were presenting the University of Pittsburgh when I first started at CMU and I'd say they're a tremendous tool one of the difficulties we found CMU is that while libraries personnel can take these and some have a proficiency or develop it they don't have the time built into the way they work to actually maintain that proficiency I'd say this and I'm coming from having been software industry in the late 90s during web 1.0 of all things a lot of the problem is that a lot of us pick up the tool we need at the time and forget it six months later as we move on so it's almost a necessity for us to recognize structurally how the libraries have this digital component that is now part of how we work and I guess compel convince leadership that it's not just professional development as a class but it's closer to the certificate training and even certification testing for us to develop these capacities and maintain them over time it might require some something along the lines of us developing homework project work that is integrated into the assumed time that one works over the course of week and not just oh you'll do it at night you'll do it on weekends I'm poking fun at certain administrators right there no and I think I don't have an answer for it that kind of where do we find the time when the day job is already slightly fuller than the hours and we're supposed to be working Eleanor and then Kylian and Megan yeah so it's kind of similar what Frequent is doing so we see we're seeing a lot of embedding and again there's some stealing some of the things that James will know and I'm sure he's raising his hands probably to make this point but it's just a lot of work into embedding those skills seen to curriculum so that we train our students to be the next generation of and we still have the gap with the people that currently doing the job they need to make sure that our data is prepared data is is prepared for AI which is how do we how do we make this happen because we know the training actually takes time and it's not just your 10 day short development course and that is you're going to be mastering coding it actually takes time to develop the skills master them and also apply to your day-to-day job and I'm not sure as a library I mean that that was my initial question have we done enough to make sure that staff has time to develop in the same way that we are developing our students and developing their career but again it's just throwing out there and it's mainly looking introspectively of what library have been doing in the past apart from developing some skills in informal training and how can we maybe take this forward but I will shut down here Killian then Thanks Sarah I'll try and answer maybe a bit on on a bit on each about it being on the infrastructure and the skills so the skills one is interesting because like it can get very complicated very quickly but I think like the base level of having an ability to work with structured data and then you can build on top of that but like that's a core skill that isn't always available and we've tried a few different things the past and I think we're coming around to the idea of a library you know of this carpentry library carp going back to that really and saying right there's this is excellent and this is why change something that is that isn't broken and that is very effective at delivering those core unique skills data skills and then you know building on on top of that so I think we're kind of going back to that on the on the on the skills side thank you James on the on the infrastructure side it's really uh I touched on this I won't I won't get too much into because I know we're talking about skills but I do think we and I mentioned this I do think we're something to learn from what's going on the open publishing sphere in terms of how we could align and strengthen I'll use words like that rather you know there's different models of course like you know you can have a national upholstery you're right that's a challenge or you could have a strong network of repositories that are aligned in some way whether that be they have to be aligned in some way or else it's not going to work like so you could align on on some way on metadata or you can as you kind of as you I think use the word because you aggregate I think you're stepping into a lot of crosswalks and a lot of messing there and it would be better if you kind of went to source and and looked at the metadata approach is at a more granular level and try to align some way on that I know that gets challenging as well and then there's triple F in the mix as well that's one way to to align as well in terms in terms of being interoperable so yeah so yeah just some ideas that's great Megan and then we've got a question from the audience as well great I'll just add in a couple of additional ideas in the mix and really within our own context and some of the things that we have tried in our LC lab team which is a group of people who are trained with a range of different backgrounds and we work really collaboratively with colleagues and one thing that we found in bringing people into our team is the complexity of context setting of our own organization so transferring frameworks and models from other types of organizations when people join us and trying to have them learn really quickly you know that kind of context has often been attention so figuring out a way to kind of bridge and see the value in the transferable skill sets from other disciplines or other organizations and bringing it into our spaces something that we have been trying to do as well our details and exchanges we haven't hit the exchanges part quite as much so if anyone wants to host us let us know but we have been using some of our resources to try to support skills development and professional development for colleagues while also trying to bring in trying to piece together gaps and bridge gaps that we have within our our own context so we've been doing this within our computing cultural heritage in the cloud initiative for example and some of the other work but I will say one more thing about the the types of opportunities I've had the opportunity to be at the intersection of programs that are really can be the place of interdisciplinary engagement so in particular crowdsourcing programs at the Smithsonian and at the Library of Congress where you have an opportunity for the the long and you know well-rooted types of practitioner skills at the intersection of new skills and different types of ways of communicating and it really could be an incubator those types of programs could be places of incubating transferable skill sets so maybe trying to think about how we can piece together these different types of programming through details and exchanges and also thinking about the way our job descriptions can articulate transferable skills or call out transferable skills more effectively some ideas to think about no that's really great James I'll pull you in next and then I'll go to be the question on the on the I think just something that also links the question because like it strikes me that a lot of this is about like whether it's about infrastructure or around training it's around professional personas you know I've been working recently on some like histories of like cataloging museum studies and you know this moment in in the 70s where suddenly people got excited about information management and then it kind of just like drops off the radar for a professional persona and gets shunted into kind of kind of feminized clinic clerical work for example for a bit and so curators don't see documentation via computation as part of their job because oh it's been done and it's been done by those people over there and it strikes me similar things are with kind of skills to some extent as well I found out recently that you know people like the folks who do the the Glasgow kind of information management courses you know I they do wonderful work only recently added in digital preservation now I'm sure that's not I'm sure they've wanted to for a while right but the fact that's quite recent is really striking to me but then there's also like professional personas sort of lead into the kind of default things that we do so when I was at iPresent went to a lovely preservation presentation by a guy, Cumber of his name, who had used a wiki base as a trusted source for preservation metadata about software and that was just like well of course I do that that seems like the sensible thing to do but that didn't strike me as the kind of natural necessary decision of someone who's a professional working in these spaces people might have thought of something else to do so I mean it's about so the choices of infrastructure that we use and the choices skills that we have come back to the professional personas that people think people working in these spaces do what are and I think I can't help but think they're intimately connected and it's intimately connected to how I think every day and how people look at me and they don't see necessarily perhaps what I think I see when I think about my own persona. That's really interesting because again the question from the audience as regards to skills and skills gap is the problem ownership of the training and I think again we've alluded to library carp and trees which is kind of open source but it needs to be maintained and you've talked about the programming history in James and then what's happening there with Jisk that's also really interesting but you're right it is around about where does this and we all institutionally develop training and again I thought it was really interesting Megan and Abby that you weren't you know do yes you're providing a signposting to the training but you're not actually developing an in-house training system which again we've seen Cambridge and Oxford also do around about that sort of digital scholarship piece and it is that we are sort of all struggling with where do you go to get the training and the skills, who owns it, how do you get access to it, who will pay for it, which I suppose in an interesting way mirrors almost what Kylie was saying around about the infrastructure and I was sort of talking aggregated but I was just thinking most of our infrastructures just don't talk to each other which is why my sort of pipe dream of being able to download everything that's digitised and do something around about that is just feels like a pipe dream because we can't agree quite often as a profession and across kind of countries and I think that's my other reflection we can maybe the Dutch is really inspiring but that's in a country they've managed to get agreement how do we do that on a bigger scale when we're in a larger country or we're working across Europe and across kind of boundaries how do we get that agreement is it us as a community working together to do that upward action how do we get our governments to even engage and agree that these things are good you know and how do we make that happen so that we can collaborate more easily you know and have these networks of support and help each other to come move along a little bit further I don't know if anyone has any further thoughts on those I like asking small questions just so that we can you know and it's the end of the day as well I know you're all going off right but Heli and Rick in fact Rick I think you had your hand up first and then we'll come back to Heli all I was going to mention briefly is that there are experiments out there such as the emulation service infrastructure and some of the software preservation network just in terms of hardcore with metadata and actual code such that tie in with what was just said in terms of somebody using wiki somebody else using oh geez back in the day source forage or github that it's getting that that kind of lack of standardization so instead of hitting that from it's more the issue that the community is still so very disparate without recognizing that they often have alliances such as say here the digital library federation with the was it the national preservation network or digital sorry digital preservation network that they often don't see where they have alignments and I I'd say this is the curse of libraries and academics broadly all of us tend especially humanity social sciences we tend to pursue the answer to a question individually if we have some broad based background we often recognize that there are experts to whom we can direct a question if we can't find the answer quickly and this is kind of a problem within libraries librarians try and get the answer and then provide it as a service without recognizing the collaboration necessarily and even in dh while it is incredibly collaborative right and I think rick is just there so we'll move over to Holly okay thank you yes rick was frozen okay actually my comment is complimenting or building on rick's comment it seems to me that in the we are see the seeing overwhelming obstacles if we look at the the all the things that are happening in particular about the skills and and so on I would like being part of the liber community for me I come from a small small library I come from a small language area a country that is well at the moment there are even bigger obstacles in our society so if I were to think that the obstacles are something depressing I would go home and take the blanket over my head instead I collaborate and I think that I said that in Liber one of the values is inclusivity thinking that diversity is also a strength for us so not thinking the overwhelming obstacles but thinking about the in finish we have this word see so which is combined determination guts and hope so in one word that's if we think that something is important then we collaborate and the libraries we are really good at that and now we we can even cross the borders more easily than when 190 years ago when my association was built I have to say I like that that guts and determination I think that's something we should all take away guts and determination to collaborate and work together Abby um I was just going to touch on the the sort of question you posed at the about the you know sort of getting buy-in or agreement to sort of move forward and the we mentioned our presentation but I think looking at the mechanisms of how this work gets done in our context it's we work with contractors and vendors and we have contracts so in those we um so and we just created this contract for experimentation that um we'll be able to use for the next five years and and in it and the sort of broad areas are research and reporting and then um prototyping and experimental data transformation and um and in the data transformation we're having contractors fill out this data processing plan so that we can document performance and how um you know how uh what the sort of expected performances what the actual performances and so we can get a better uh more um uh granular and sort of solid understanding of what quality means and I think that's um and thinking about like the FADGI um the federal uh agency guidelines for digitization this is another tool that um that uh federal libraries use and I think other libraries use to express the quality standards and express what what we expect what um how these systems perform for us and um I think embedding our needs in you know our values in these mechanisms can can help um and and it and it can be sort of boldly stated or it can just be stated in sort of a business kind of way which sometimes is more kind of palatable but the um and then the other thing about the training so the first task order that we're doing under this mechanism is a experiment to see how um if we can create a mark record from an e-book or digital content so this and this experiment um you know we're have we're asking the vendor to test five at least five models and three of them have to be open source and we're gonna share all this data publicly and um and we've and instead of and we've done you sort of general machine learning kind of presentations at the library but the um but this involving the catalogers from sort of day one in in designing this experiment and talking about what they want from it what they're you know how this can help their sort of work lives has really made it so it's not like a training exercise but including them in sort of the design of the solution is um has been you know it's been great there's been lots and lots of interests all positive um and people are very excited about it so I think like that sort of including them in the solution not just you know like we'll train you how to do this um I think is a slight sort of shift that has worked for us Eleanor you were just saying there's a question in the chat yes I'm desperately trying to find but cannot sorry I was trying to unmute myself um there is just a question um stepping outside of this conversation for a second and talk about digital humanity outside digital humanities and social science and it was mainly to the panel to know if there was any collaboration that you're aware between research libraries and healthcare so anything that is in collaboration to NHS or the health national service um so if you are aware of any initiatives or anything new because it's true we always talk about social sciences and um engineering and humanities and sometimes not always NHS but oh I can see a couple of things have been posted and then there was another one at the yeah sorry Abby I was just gonna say I don't know anything specifically about that but in the um NLS the National Library of Medicine in the U.S. there's a um there's a role there um for the uh I forget his title but his role is to sort of um think about the history of medicine in in the so there's been a lot of DH projects that that role has sponsored and some of them are there but that would be a place to look and I think the National Library of Scotland is doing something as well with welcome and various others looking at medical health and Jane you're nodding do you know a bit more I'm just trying to remember the details of the project but I think um Sarah Ames at the National Library of Scotland there's probably a good point of contact um it may not be the same project but the archive of tomorrow which is working yeah it's um a collaboration with welcome I think is giving some funding to it to look at um web archive collections in the national libraries and how they can be made um open and usable and all the questions around misinformation and so on uh around COVID um and that's going to be a wonderful collection and it's pushing it some really interesting um things around copyright and privacy and ethics which are going to have really wide ramifications for working not just with health data I think but uh but with all of those digital archives that have got so much personal information in so so yeah Kirsty that's that's a brilliant project and that's only just started so I think the findings of that are going to start coming out very much and I think again um I think the University of Edinburgh is involved in that one too um I'm just conscious of time and I know just Killian you had your hand up earlier and then it popped down again is there anything else you wanted to pick up on reflect on it's about the infrastructure again hell of infrastructure me too I'm with you on that and it's such a conundrum exactly and it's complicated um because like it means different things when you say it like and and even if we just think even about the platforms of technology and enabling enabling research and you know if we talk about experimentation are we talking about building infrastructures to enable experimentation during the the research cycle are we more focused on the endpoint publishing uh a different completely case there's two different complete different solutions I think at this moment in time which is which is troubling and then also maybe focus on data you know then I suppose you know you could say that data publishing um in essence is solved and data stewardship needs to be a bit more robust and then preservation comes into the mix as well but I suppose I was just going to call out some again I'm going I've looked at this I've looked at the open area quite closely with the I'm looking at the endpoint in terms of publishing and like there is some good examples of of how it can be done on that side and I just feel um that in terms of the the end points for digital scholarship and where they might end up in terms of from a library perspective if you're thinking of something in a repository um things like things like open air you know like so that's like that's uh that's a way of of alignment uh eosk as well on the european level and things like that so these are all things I think that we can look at um just try and save ourselves um jumping through rooms right well I think I'm just really conscious of time um and I think um what we might begin to sort of round up there I think well it's interesting thinking back to three years ago and where we are now there are some challenges around about infrastructure and actually the sort of skills within the community that we're still facing and I think we it's interesting the discussion has very much moved on though three years ago we would not have been talking about artificial intelligence collections of data and the way that we are now so I think we definitely have moved on um and there's definitely progress I think what's interesting is that COVID has brought us a whole yes people are more digitally aware but there's really sophisticated skills they're still needing to be trained and actually we've got so much more demand on our staff that that kind of keeping staff up skilled maintaining those skills because I think everyone's reflected we need to practice and use these skills regularly is a real ongoing challenge and almost has gotten worse over that sort of intervening period and while we've seen a lot of work on making collections more accessible and we've got better understanding and some good frameworks have come in that still is a huge challenge for all institutions and how we sort of connect that up a little bit but I think it's good to see we're moving onwards I think it's good also that um we've seen funders have really changed their funding models and been able to move things along so things like the UK Ireland network and what we've been able to do in RLUK and RLUK with Clear and some of those other things have really helped those skills discussions and allowed us to kind of develop further but I suppose the journey isn't over and we need to continue the work um and kind of work and and again work more and look at what Europe's doing what's happening in the Netherlands and what's happening in other countries to gain inspiration for different ways of tackling work with the sort of data science community and and just keep things things moving there's a lot of work to do but I think it's heartening to know that things have also moved on um but I think again good to hear some of the challenges I don't know if there's anything else you'd want to add to that Eleonora No it's it's been a great um well you can summarize the discussion that we had and the challenges that we've been facing and and I do agree we moved quite um we are far away from where we started but there is still a long road in front of us before we can say we kind of solve everything but the good things is we're all together to talk and discuss and moving forward so the as long as the conversation and the communication continue to happen I think we're just going to move in the same direction and getting a little bit closer