 So this is our keynote presentation for everyone who's joining us. We're delighted to have Joan Lippincott, who's going to talk about making connections, ETDs, academe, and the world of work. And so before we start off here, I would just like to give a brief introduction, because Joan really deserves that she has been a huge supporter of ETDs over the years. So Joan Lippincott is Associate Executive Director Emerita of the Coalition for Network Information, or CNI. A joint program of the Association of Research Libraries, ARL, and EDUCAUSE, based in Washington, D.C. At CNI, Joan provided leadership for programs in teaching and learning, learning spaces, digital scholarship, ETDs, and assessment. She served on the boards of the Network Digital Library Theses and Dissertations, NDL-TD, the New Media Consortium, NMC, and on the advisory boards for the Horizon Report, both higher education and libraries. Joan was the editor of EDUCAUSE, Review, E-Content Column, Chair of the Association of the College and Research Libraries, ACRL, New Publications Board, and served as a member of the ACRL Task Force that produced the framework for information literacy in higher education. In addition to serving on the advisory boards of the Learning Spaces Collaboratory and the Learning Space Toolkit Project, Joan has served as a consultant to many academic libraries for their space renovation projects and has been on the planning committee for the designing libraries for the 21st Century Conference since its inception. So please help me to welcome Dr. Joan Lippincott. Thank you so much, John, and just give me a minute to get my slides up. Great. I hope that looks good. Not yet. Great. Thanks for the kind introduction, John, and thank you and the program committee for the invitation to keynote this virtual conference. I hope you're all doing well. I attended, I sat in on the first session where many of you might have been wearing your pajama bottoms, but you certainly weren't wearing them on top, but you really looked great and sound like you're adapting really well to working from home or in some cases on campus during this pandemic. And now that I'm retired, I am working from home and enjoying it as well as generally being retired. So my talk today is about the role of all of us in preparing graduate students, and this applies to both masters and PhD students, although my emphasis will be on the latter for their careers, whether in academe or otherwise. While the ETD is often seen as the culmination in a student's preparation to enter the scholarly conversation of a discipline to use the words of the ACRL information literacy framework, does that exercise prepare students today as well as it might have, let's say 30 years ago? My answer would be, it depends. My organization, the Coalition for Network Information, as John noted, is a joint program of a library and IT organization. We have a wealth of open access materials on our website, videos, PowerPoints, papers, articles, on virtually every topic I'll touch on in my talk today, and I invite you to explore our resources. You'll note that in the examples that I use on my slides, I've given the URLs so that you can go to explore these resources on your own. I have already submitted my slides and they've been uploaded to the conference website so you'll all have access to them. C&I was one of the co-hosts in the early 1990s of the meetings in the early 1990s that led to the development of the network digital library of theses and dissertations or MDLTD, and I don't need to date myself now that I'm retired, I'm old, and I was present at most of those early meetings and then on the board of the MDLTD for many years. I've always been interested in ETDs as a way to develop our new generation of scholars and professionals and introduce them to all kinds of new concepts and new ways of doing research and presenting their research in the digital environment. Many newly minted PhDs and master's students have faced a challenging job market for years. This seems to be widely known about humanity students, but there are many disciplines in the sciences and social sciences too, where students struggle to find an entry level professional job in their field. With the coronavirus and resulting economic impact, the prospects for our graduate students are even worse. In terms of academic positions for new PhDs, many universities have hiring freezes and furloughs. The situation is also very difficult in nonprofits, government agencies, and many businesses. At this critical time, it is even more important than ever to do our best for our graduate students in preparing them for the job market. What will make them more marketable and whose responsibility is it to provide them with opportunities to succeed? I think it's likely that every participant in this virtual conference is aware that only a fairly small percentage of PhDs will become full-time higher education faculty in tenure-track positions. Most of them, along with our master's level students, will find employment in government, nonprofits, business, communications fields, and some of them will find non-faculty positions, for example in academic advising or IT in universities, but not in tenure-track positions. Some research faculty think that taking positions outside of academia is a mark of failure for PhD graduates, but does our community and do the graduate students themselves agree with that perspective? Would they think that a position as a program manager or scientist at NASA or the head of the Smithsonian were not as prestigious as a faculty position? And is prestige really the issue? In the Chronicle for Higher Education's Trends Report 2020, they identified new rules for the PhD as one of their trends. I'm quoting, in the past several years, PhD programs have started to recognize and communicate to their students that non-academic careers are legitimate. Now a movement to rewrite the rules of graduate training is gathering steam. Are you seeing this at your own institution, or perhaps in some departments or schools or colleges at your own institution? Specifically, the report states, progressive departments backed by foundation and federal government money are granting credit for activities that wouldn't have counted toward the doctor in the past. Collaborations with organizations off campus, portfolios instead of comprehensive exams, courses for scientists on the business side of research, a podcast, a rap album, or a comic book instead of a traditional dissertation. I would be really interested to know if some of you have examples of those as accepted dissertations at your institutions. And I can think of some other types of alternative dissertations, for example, that include data visualizations or a piece of software that the graduate student has developed. But often these would be components of a dissertation and not the entire work. The National Institutes of Health broadening experiences in scientific training or best program issued grants in 2012 and 2013 for institutions to develop innovative approaches to provide biomedical PhD students a means to shift toward preparation for a wider range of career options than academic positions as a complement to traditional training. Faculty state that they actively discuss non-academic career opportunities with trainees, they call graduate students trainees, but a majority of faculty indicate that they themselves do not have a good knowledge of the skills needed in non-academic fields. There are a number of reports from this best program, and in one it makes this statement, which I believe is critically important. There is a need to enhance the doctoral experience to meet the developing needs for our knowledge driven economies. To me, this means that students need to be adept in finding, analyzing and using data as well as designing data collection activities, for example. In addition, the report states, and I'm quoting while faculty generally recognize that trainees need to develop skills that are applicable to careers inside and outside of academia. They had mixed opinions as to whether they were confident in their own knowledge of these skills and the ability to keep trainees informed about fields different from academia. The report concluded, as such, there is a mismatch between the perceived urgency in career development training for biomedical scientists and an individual faculty member's ability to provide such training. And it's not just in the sciences that national bodies recognize the importance of a variety of skills for graduates to augment their disciplinary knowledge. Here are the career diversity five as developed by the American Historical Association. I particularly emphasize the first one, the need for communication skills in a variety of media, and the last one on digital literacy for students to have a basic familiarity with the digital tools and platforms. But I would suggest alternatively a working knowledge, not a basic familiarity, but a working knowledge of some digital tools and platforms. Now I'd like to focus on the core of my talk, and that's on four specific areas of skills that I believe are important for all graduate students and that tied directly into their preparation for developing an ETD. They are, first, employing digital tools and data management practices, second, making choices within the scholarly communication system, third, understanding reputation management, and fourth, communicating research findings to the public. So starting with the digital tools and data management practices. Are you aware of how widely, for example, GIS or geographical information systems and data visualization tools are being used in the disciplines. Historians, archaeologists, public health researchers and biologists and many more use GIS and data visualization to both analyze data and present the results of their research. These tools and others allow researchers to ask new kinds of questions, particularly when approaching large data sets. Please note that when I use the term data, I include such things as text as data, image and audio collections, seismic information, astronomical data, and many, many more forms and subjects. Graduate students should be introduced to and have practice using the tools that are most used by researchers in their field. And I really want to stress that I don't believe that students should learn about technology for technology itself. Students should be divorced from their subject discipline or activities such as teaching or communication that are important in their discipline. It is becoming increasingly important for all researchers to practice good data management, and it's a requirement in many grant grants issued by governments and private foundations. Understanding good data management will be important for students entering careers in government, nonprofits, and business as well. It's not just for academic research. Now for each of these topics, I'll be providing some examples of programs. If your own institution has an exemplary program or resource, web resource in any of these areas, I urge you to put the URL into the chat window and share it with the other participants in this online conference. So here's my first example. In the fall of 2018, the Columbia University Libraries coordinated the rollout of a new campus-wide program to provide students with access to instruction in the fundamentals of computational literacy. Filling the gap between formal course credit offerings and do-it-yourself approaches, foundations for research computing is the result of a multiyear, multi-stakeholder effort to respond to a need for elemental research computing knowledge as a graduate student core competency. Supported by the graduate schools, campus IT, the Office of Research, and the Libraries, foundations for research computing translates a faculty-led vision for critical instructional intervention into several coordinated services and initiatives, actively assessing program success along the way. Through intensive boot camps, workshops, lectures, and peer consultation opportunities, Columbia students receive novice to intermediate assistance in the use of computational approaches, tools, and infrastructure. The presenters of this session at a CNI meeting said they have a waiting list of graduate students for every program they offer, and you can find out more about this exemplary program on the CNI website. Another session at a CNI meeting described various programs at UCLA, University of Rhode Island, University of Pittsburgh, and NYU about teaching artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital humanities, natural language processing, and virtual reality. There is a video presentation if you'd like to learn more. This web capture from Virginia Tech Libraries shows the range of data services and resources available to their students and faculty. So they do data consulting, they help people write data management plans, statistics, consulting, connecting them with things like the open science framework, etc. And I do think it's really important that they make this available for graduate students and not just faculty. And this data visualization toolkit from University of Minnesota Libraries is intended to assist others in jump-starting their own program. The Georgia Tech Library highlights the value and processes for open data. So providing workshops, training programs, web resources, toolkits, and other mechanisms assist graduate students in gaining skills in these areas. Note that none of these things are explicitly included in students graduate academic programs, although that may be the case in some institutions. And some institutions are developing certificate programs for graduate students, focusing on technology skills in the disciplines as an adjunct to their degree. Another area that's growing rapidly is the development of cross-disciplinary data science programs. And I noticed, and I don't know if he's still on the web conference, that Michael Witt from Purdue was attending and he's part of the development of such a data science program at that institution. And I think that's an emerging trend. The next area I'd like to discuss involves making choices in the scholarly communication system. You don't have to be a faculty member to contribute to the literature or communicate ideas related to your research. So this is relevant to students beyond those who do become academic faculty. While for each of the broad topics I'm covering this afternoon, I could present for an hour or more. Here are three topics I'd like to emphasize in this area. What are your graduate students being taught about the acceptability of various digital formats for communicating research in their field? Are graduate students able to identify publication targets for their work? Are students genuinely informed about intellectual property issues for their own and for the use of others' work? Sorry. In contrast to the chronicle article I mentioned earlier, most students would not be permitted to do a comic book or podcast as their dissertation, although perhaps they would be allowed by their committee to include those components in a standard text dissertation, or perhaps in a creative writing program, a comic book might be an acceptable thesis. I've long admired the NDLTD Innovation Dissertation Award since it recognizes those students who make an effort to push the envelope with the format of what's included in their dissertations. In this particular case, it's a video which isn't perhaps the most technologically unusual, but it is a really important element in this PhD student's graduate work in education. Often faculty advisors in many disciplines are very conservative about what they think of as publication or acceptable publication, and I think it's important for information professionals in particular to point the way to alternative forms of presenting research that come from very reputable sources, such as the Stanford University Press. This is just one of many examples I could have used. And this is a really detailed, media-rich website about a burial site in Egypt, an ancient burial site. I found it astonishing to read on listservs about faculty seeking redress after they've been bamboozled by disreputable journal publishers, or just asking advice on where to publish an article. I imagine many librarians assume that this advice usually comes from students' graduate advisor or committee, but this is not necessarily true. The Tufts University Library recognizes this and provides a guide for finding a journal to publish in. And Cornell provides a guide on how to go about open access publishing, including where to publish, and including author rights resources. And Spark provides advice and many resources for researchers, libraries, and others. One of their staff is active in the OpenCon movement, which specifically enlists students in becoming aware of and advocates for open access. The Harvard Library has a copyright advisory service for students as well as faculty, as well as really nice resources, many using rich graphic formats. My next topic is reputation management. Do many graduate students even understand what this means in the professional sense? Again, this is not just important for those going into academic careers. Researchers working in government, nonprofits, and business too will want to be aware of their professional reputation management options. They should understand the role, for example, that identity management plays in reputation management. I will give some examples of specific products in this and subsequent sections of my talk. And I'm not endorsing or showing preference for any. They serve as examples. You'll note on this slide that in addition to showing a web capture from the Orchid website, which of course relates to identity management, I'm also linking to a presentation of the use of Orchid by individuals early in their career. And I know there will be presentations on Orchid in this conference as well. Should graduate students be exposed to systems that can gather together information on their publications and their citations? Should they understand the benefits and drawbacks and differences of these systems such as Scopus and Google Scholar and of course there are others? Do they understand impact factor and for those pursuing academic careers, how important that can be in promotion and tenure decisions, rightly or wrongly? This is a guide from University of Illinois, Chicago on that topic. What other tools can they use to track the impact of their research and what kinds of things do they want to track? Kudos and altmetrics are mechanisms for tracking a wider impact than academic citations. This is an online challenge for Ohio State faculty, postdocs and graduate students designed to help them enhance the impact and visibility of their research. Each day during a particular week, participants receive an email with one or two tasks to complete that will help them to enhance their scholarly profile, along with links to instructions and advice for completing them. A nice idea easily replicated in other institutions and by the way, I do not know if Ohio State initiated this kind of research impact challenge or if others did and please indicate in the chat if you have an answer to that. And who's talking directly and honestly to graduate students about their social media presence, both related to the research and otherwise. A program from the University of Washington Graduate Schools provides some resources. And now to my final section and then to my wrap up. Communicating research to the public is important for so many reasons and we see the effects of both good and poor communication related to the coronavirus every day. When the library at American University hosted its first annual conference on high impact research, 125 faculty showed up by far their largest attendance at any event they had held. The conference highlighted the significant and changing role of the scholar as policy influencer and public intellectual, helping the faculty fulfill a funding agencies requirement to connect their research to the citizen public was a theme throughout. This would be a great event for graduate students as well. And again we have a video of that presentation from CNI. I found this ophthalmology association fellowship in the UK for postdocs, which emphasizes the importance of communicating research to the public. This is an excellent role for societies, but these topics should not wait until after graduation. And this podcast series at University of Michigan provides graduate students in history there with an opportunity to mine the archives and present an informative view of a topic in audio format. It's a useful way for human list to learn to translate their often narrow specialties into interesting ideas for the public. The pioneering digital historian Ed Ayers, formerly at University of Virginia and then president at University of Richmond is a master of this type of work in history. I was introduced to the three minute thesis program at a US ETDA conference in Washington a few years ago. Students gave great summaries in one case a truly brilliant summary of their dissertation research in three minutes developed at the University of Queensland. The three minute thesis competition cultivates students academic presentation and research communication skills and increases their capacity to effectively explain their research in a language appropriate to a non specialist audience. Is your institution participating in this. I want to wrap up with a few thoughts. And I'm going to leave plenty of time for questions so if you want please start typing them into the chat and really want to have a dialogue with you and learn from your own experiences. So has the purpose and function of the dissertation changed in the last 30 years. What do you think the dissertation experience should provide, not just the final product, but all that leads up to it. Are the kinds of skills and capabilities I've emphasized in this presentation being taken into account at your institution. And this is my challenge to you. Can we provide our graduate students with a systematic education in areas that are important for future scholars and professionals. All of this may sound good to you, but how will it come about evolve and grow. It takes individuals departments and programs to actually make these things a reality. So who has responsibility for education in these areas and that may be distributed across your institution. Who will advocate for incorporating these skills into graduate school education. You need some faculty on board and not just those in and syllary units within the higher ed organization. Who would be responsible for implementing programs and funding them or allocating staff time to these programs. And is there good outreach to graduate students to heightened awareness of availability and that goes for what you're already offering as well as what you might offer in the future. So moving forward, I encourage you to develop an institutional strategy. This is not a graduate school issue. It's not a library issue. It's not a research office issue. It's an institutional issue. So bring together interested parties from cross campus survey what's currently available. It's possible. There's more than you realize. Develop plans priorities capabilities and responsibilities seek support who might kick in some money for this or allocate some staff time and communicate in as many ways that you can think of. Leverage the work that has been done by the other institutions use some of the examples contact those institutions ask permission to adapt modify or adopt full scale. Some of the tutorials or guides or other resources that they have created. And then there absolutely is a need for staff. There are people need time to develop all of these kinds of initiatives, and in many cases you would need to rewrite job descriptions to include responsibility for some priority areas for resources for graduate students. Collaborate there is lots to be done. So I've listed some of the potential collaborators. Many of you participating in this conference are already collaborating among several of these groups, and if I've missed some other organizations within your university or other units. I'd love to hear which other units you're collaborating with related to etd's and graduate education. And finally, in these uncertain times, we owe it to our graduate students to provide a full education that prepares them for the workplace. What actions can you take to make this a reality at your institution. Thank you very much. And I have left plenty of time for questions. I'm going to stop my sharing so I can see the chat window. And I'm hoping that we'll see some questions and comments in the chat to also collaborating with the career center center. That's a really good one collaborating with pro quest. Absolutely. John, any questions in the chat. Oh, I was just looking through the chat window myself and thank you very much john that was most enlightening and I think you have the knack for finding the most unusual interesting experimental programs around the nation around the world, showcasing them and showing people how they can implement that on their courses. So at the beginning of the chat here, we had a question from Larry tag is that PhD students often do not address the question that surround their use of both methodology and instrumentation. Why do they use specific instrumentation or research methods. Are there alternative alternatives. There is in most cases an absence of the quantitative and qualitative value discussions of instruments and methods within their research topics. Did you have anything. I'm going to take a moment since it's a fairly. There are several parts to the question. I found it in the chat and I'm going to read it myself. So give me just a moment. Absolutely. Okay, so that the absence of really boils down to I think the absence of quantitative and qualitative value discussions of instruments and methods within their topics of research. And this can have implications for how the data is collected and presented and how it might be preserved for and for future reuse and rep for replicability and reuse of their data. In this kind of instance, then it will take people working in whether it's the it organization, the library organization, or the research office to work with specific departments or colleges on what are the kinds of instruments or methods that are either acceptable or prioritized or preferred. This would be to me, I think similar to the question say in the humanities of what software to use or whether to create new projects with new tools that are not used by anyone else and therefore very hard to preserve for the long term. So those kinds of issues need to be raised in, in every discipline, but I think it takes a joint discussion between faculty researchers graduate students it or data specialists and librarians. I hope that addresses your question. No, that's very comprehensive on the topic of preservation I just wanted to ask, what is your gut feeling this of the state of preservation digital preservation these days and where are we going with it. Are you concerned. I think that we're in reasonably good state for digital preservation of relatively mainstream kinds of digital publications, particularly things like e journals, with some, you know, with large international projects of working in those arenas. I think that there are many questions about preservation of alternative forms or new media forms or born digital forms of preservation. Now, for example, I don't know what the preservation strategy is for the site that I showed you that's done by Stanford University Press, but since they are also one of the leaders in digital preservation, I imagine that that was part of the development of that project. And so I think that the challenges are in the, the new formats. What I believe is that rather than trying to to view it as discouraging researchers from using new formats in their research or in the presentation of their research results. We still have a responsibility to educate them about what we think about the long term preservation possibilities for those formats. For some researchers, it may not be important that their results can't be displayed, let's say after five years. Others that would be critically important. And so we need to do a good job of educating our user communities about what we can and cannot preserve at this point. Great. And I think too there's a lot of responsibility within specific disciplines, depending on the kind of data and things that they use they often develop their own best practices approaches. And so I think it's important to pay attention to that. At the beginning of the chat there was a link that was posted. I think by Ashley to the Stanford program that you referenced so everybody can check that out. I'm going to try and scroll through your shore real quickly. Terry Green had a question about author rights. She just said, students also need to sound need sound guidance on publishing issues, intellectual property and author rights. Yes, and I probably short changed that a bit in my presentation I use the example from Harvard about their consultation service and their guides, there are many, many programs out there that deal with intellectual property issues. I think there are a lot of good tutorials and a lot of good guides that have been developed by libraries or libraries in collaboration with their legal offices on campus or perhaps with the graduate school. And I think that it's important that students particularly understand that they're both users of others intellectual property and that they're creators of new intellectual property. And they understand the advantages and disadvantages of using creative copy creative comments licenses for example, they need to understand their choices within those licenses, and how, how they want to view their own work. And I think there, there is a lot of education in that arena going on and I strongly encourage that. Great. I'm just scrolling through the remainder of the. I don't have any. I think I have an additional questions there are a lot of interesting resources people posted about things they're doing on their campus so thank you for doing that worthy. And we'll scrape the comments out and save them for the for later viewing. Yeah. And so we've got five minutes here actually I think maybe we could open this up to the floor if we can try to keep it orderly. I don't see Heidi a hand raised option in my options here but people can either ask us in the chat window if you have a question or if you want to unmute maybe we'll be bold and just as somebody wants to everybody at once. Yes. So, we'll open the floor to the audience. Give a second here. Sometimes it takes people a moment to react. Go ahead. This is a question suggestions for when institutional departments like student affairs or career center are really focused on undergraduates do we build a graduate specific resource center and service. And I do think that perhaps the assumption is that most of this goes on in schools and departments for graduate students, but I think that that's not the case. And I think that for many graduate students of many students who have masters and PhDs who are participating in this conference are really well aware that in their own programs, there was barely any career guidance given or really career opportunities. In my own case, it was really in internships which were requirement of the program that I've considered about the only helpful useful piece of career development that I received in my years of doctoral education. And in terms of my master's education is virtually non existent. So I do I would support myself. Graduate specific resource centers, but this will vary by institution perhaps some institutions have strong guidance or it would be best if a collaborative program were developed between the departments and the schools and colleges. Very good. Okay, I just got to know that if we own a participants we can see hand raised. I'm not sure. I know what I'm interested in Iowa they thought about an agreement form that students might use to ensure their understanding and elections for digital preservation of their work. And that's, that's great that to use something to engage them and actually thinking about those issues. Terry, I saw Terry had her video when you're open. Terry, did you have a question you wanted to ask Terry green. No, no, actually, several of my questions were already addressed. So I'm good. Thanks. I would like to go to this one we create we can create all the workshops and resources but how do we get our students to sign up for those workshops and learn from those resources. That's a really good question. And I remember attending a presentation at a totally different conference where some presenters talked about their graduate workshop program and talked about how successful it was and it turned out that only three to five students were attending these sessions and this was from a very large research university so I wondered, what are the criteria for success. Now you contrast that with a program at Columbia where they're, you know, the graduate students are beating down the doors to get into these technology intensive data intensive kinds of workshops. So I might suggest that maybe the emphasis needs to change of some of these programs that perhaps doing something related to data or related to, say, machine learning or something like that. And then augmenting that in the same workshop with something related to digital preservation or intellectual property related to data or whatever might be one way of getting more participation. I'd also note that from one of the previous sessions my impression was that your online services during the pandemic are being very well used at many institutions, including your tutorials and other things that you used to do in person. And I think that often has to do with graduate students schedules. They often want to do things at night or on the weekend which isn't necessarily when you're doing your workshops or your consultations. And so having that flexibility and having that the availability of using those tutorials or other things at any time may also be an answer for getting more people to those resources. And I do believe that many units and I know libraries best under promote or don't have really good promotion strategies for what they offer. And that is institution specific but it really does require understanding the needs of specific programs of graduate students in those programs. They may have their own communication devices whether it's a list for serve a Facebook Facebook group or Snapchat or whatever it is that you could use to promote some of your workshops and other materials that would be something from my point of view and putting my assessment hat on do some focus groups with graduate students to find out what are what they think there's not going to be one best way. There are going to be multiple ways that you need to communicate these things to graduate students. I see on that time john so I don't want to go on too long so wonderful we could go on all day with as you've been just fabulous thank you so much to Joan everybody thank you that's clap for Joan and Heidi we're going to be looking for Terry Robinson to do a poster session in the next segment here. And then we'll go into breakout sessions again at 315. Thank you john and thank you to the program committee and for all of the attention and great questions and comments and resources from the participants. I really enjoyed being here with you today. Thanks. Great thank you.