 This presentation is called Libraries Advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, How Libraries Can Maximize Impact. In this presentation, we'll look at some of the work that libraries have done to promote the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. I will then talk about some of the current research that we are working on around the SDGs, which will inform how libraries can use the SDG framework to maximize their impact. My name is Chris Seater, and I'm an Associate Research Scientist at OCLC Research. OCLC is a global library cooperative, and this is a project that I'm working on with several of my colleagues. In this particular part, I worked on it with Lynn Silapini Conway and Peggy Gallagher. I was excited to talk about the Sustainable Development Goals, because this brings together a lot of different parts of my background. My research right now deals with library science, but my PhD is actually in political science with a focus on international relations. And I had some peripheral involvement in the discussions around including peace and security in the SDGs back in 2014 when the UN was developing them. So this project has been my dream for a while because it brings together so many different strands of research that I've done. This presentation is based on a larger project on libraries in the SDGs, which was initially put in motion by OCLC's Global Council when they selected the SDGs as their 2021 area of focus. Every year, OCLC members vote and elect regional council delegates who together make up the OCLC Global Council, and every year they select areas of focus. For example, last year it was discovery and fulfillment, and this year they decided it would be the SDGs. To get started, I wanted to give everyone a quick history of what the SDGs are and then talk about how they relate to libraries. Here we have the UN's definition of the SDGs, which says, quote, they address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. These 17 goals are all interconnected. And in order to leave no one behind, it is important that we achieve them all by 2030. Adopted in 2015, the SDGs were designed to establish the UN's priorities for economic development over the following 15 years and to provide indicators that would allow the UN to measure progress towards development. This is actually the second time that the UN has undertaken a project like this. Previously they had the Millennium Development Goals, which were adopted by all UN members in 2000, and provided eight goals for development by the year 2015. Each of these goals had specific targets attached to it and dates that each country should achieve the targets. In addition to setting the goals, the international community worked to help countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals. This was done primarily with foreign aid and with debt relief, with countries targeted for aid by their reports on their progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. As you can see with the goals laid out on this slide, most of them deal with three broad areas, which are education, infrastructure and human rights. So did the Millennium Development Goals work? The Brookings Institution, one of the most respected foreign policy think tanks, published a study in 2017 that tried to measure this impact. And they found that the MDGs were indeed generally successful. And the success went beyond some of the general trends that were happening before they were put in place. One great example would be in their measures of public health indicators like childhood mortality, HIV diagnoses and tuberculosis deaths, they estimate that somewhere between 21 and 29 million lives were saved just with those efforts. On this slide we have the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The UN was kind enough to lay out all the broad goals in one image so you can see what broad topics they deal with. I want to give everyone just a minute to look over the goals. One thing that I would like to highlight with these goals is the interconnected nature of them, because I think this really shows the impact that libraries can have. A program that addresses just one aspect of these goals, for example, a childhood reading program can have an impact that goes beyond childhood literacy when you think about it in the context of the SDGs. So it might, for example, directly address goal four, which is quality education, but education can also feed into several of these other goals. For example, goal eight, which is decent work in economic growth, and goal nine, which is industry infrastructure and innovation. And then those goals together can feed into some of the even broader goals, for example, goal 13, which is climate action. So I think when you think about library impact in the context of all of these goals, it really helps you see what sort of an indirect impact library activities can have. What exactly is the link between libraries and sustainable development? To answer this question, want to look at the Syrian city of Daraya, which was caught in the middle of Syria's civil war. The Free Syrian Army took control of the city in 2012, and then the government kept it under siege until eventually it was evacuated in 2016. During this time, a group of young people started to go through some of the abandoned buildings in the city looking for possessions of the former residents that were there. Now, you might expect that they were looking for valuable items and you would be right, but it's not the valuable items that you might initially think of. They were searching for books for their secret underground library. And when I say underground, I quite literally mean it was below the ground. And they didn't steal these books. Instead, they carefully marked where they retrieved or as they would say rescued them so that they could return them to their rightful owners when the war was over. Establishing a secret library in the middle of a civil war was a dangerous undertaking. On this slide, we have a quote from one of the librarians on a sock med that shows the dangers that they faced during their book runs. They faced, for example, sniper fire. When they retrieve the books, there was also a possibility that soldiers on either side of the conflict might confiscate them because they were valuable on the market. And so one thing that really drew me to this story is the fact that it was a situation where many people lacked security and basic necessities. And yet this group of young people was willing to risk their lives for a library. Why did they consider this library to be so valuable? To answer this, let's take a look at what they said about their reasons for creating the library. Here we have a quote from one of the other librarians Abdul Basit who said, quote, we believed that a place like this could store part of our heritage, as well as the keys to our future. It would not only help us continue our education, but be there for anyone who loved reading. And the thing that really sticks out to me about this is that it was not focused on the war itself, rather it was focused on what takes place after the war. How will the country rebuild. These librarians believed, and I would agree with them on this point, that the library that they created would be a seed that would help the country grow and develop in the decades ahead. This focus on the development really gets at the heart of what libraries can do. They act as a key artery for economic, educational, political and social engagement. The reach that libraries have to all parts of their community is virtually unparalleled, both among government institutions and non-governmental organizations. This library in Syria provides an example of how libraries can help countries achieve sustainable development, but it is just one of countless examples. While many of the cases of libraries helping countries achieve development might be a little bit less extreme than this case, and maybe less likely to be covered by the BBC, that does not mean that they are any less impactful. Now that we have a better idea of what the SDGs are and the link between libraries and development, I want to go through some of the sub goals that are beneath each goal and show how libraries are involved in furthering them. The list I'm going to present is far from exhaustive because libraries have been in one way or another tied to all 17 of the SDGs. As much as I'd love to go through every one of them, I do recognize that there is a limited amount of time. So I decided to highlight a few of the ones where I think libraries have had some of the biggest impact. SDG 4.5 proposes to eliminate inequalities in access to education, particularly inequalities based on gender, disability, age, ethnicity, and for people in conflict affected areas. They have several indicators to measure this, most of which are based on the level of inequality among different education indicators at the national level. Read Global is a great example of a library organization that has worked to improve education for women. Initially established in Nepal, the organization now has offices in Bhutan and India, as well as a headquarters in the United States. They build community libraries and resource centers in rural areas of South Asia and are involved in all sorts of training, much of it being targeted specifically towards women. For example, they include vocational programs, literacy programs, legal programs, programs on human rights and healthcare programs. Probably most importantly for goal 4.5, they provide leadership training to encourage political participation and help women in these countries become community leaders. They also measure their progress and impact. In India and Nepal, for example, they found that over 60% of women they surveyed who had used one of their read centers reported an increase in their decision making power and one in five reported that they were leaders within their community. I got a chance to talk about this goal in more detail with one of OCLC's former IFLA fellows, Rosita Petrinska-Labudovic, who is a librarian in North Macedonia who came to OCLC in the summer of 2013. She now works to promote equal access to education and culture, particularly for children with disabilities through an organization called Education for All. They've received support from organizations like the World Health Organization and the European Union, and I asked her whether she thought inclusion of equal education in the SDGs helped support attract for her efforts. And she said to me, quote, I believe that the fact that equitable education is recognized as an international goal, especially as one of the UN SDGs makes it much easier for us to make alliances with organizations from other countries. Collaboration is easier when the benefits of the activities are applicable in many countries. And I think this is especially interesting because it shows that the SDGs are not just a list of goals that they consider to be nice, but they really do have a tangible impact because they help organizations involved in these goals attract international support for their efforts. Goal 7.3 is to double the rate of improvement in energy efficiency, which looks at the level of energy consumption as a proportion of a country's entire gross domestic product. One example that I think was interesting close to my home in Ohio of libraries helping with this comes from Worthington library in the suburbs of Columbus. And one thing that they offer for patrons to check out is an energy check toolkit, which comes with the plug-in meter that you can plug into appliances and find out which ones might be using a surprisingly large amount of energy. For example, did you know that your cell phone charger can be using energy even when it's not charging anything? That's something a lot of people aren't aware of. I personally was not aware of this. And so I think it's a way to measure your own micro level energy consumption. But if you have a lot of people checking out these energy tool kits and using it to find ways to reduce their own consumption, that can actually have a pretty big impact on energy consumption worldwide. SDG 9.5 deals with enhancing scientific research and capabilities, especially in developing countries. And it's measured through research and development expenditures as a proportion of GDP and also the proportion of the population that works as researchers. One thing that I really like about this goal is it looks at people in developing countries as playing an active role as contributors of knowledge, which I think is a very important point to stress. One of the difficult parts, though, with scientific research is that there's a lot of inequality and access to scientific knowledge. And this is because a lot of the scientific research is behind gated journals, which can be difficult for people to access even in developed countries if they don't have institutional affiliations. Just a personal note on this, I recently last week published a paper that I still do not have a PDF of because even though I was the author of it, I don't have institutional access to the journal that it appeared in. And so I can't get access to my own paper, which, you know, I think really shows one of the big challenges with this issue of access to knowledge. And it's an issue that's even bigger in the developing world where a lot of times institutions don't have the budgets to subscribe to journals. Open access is one possible solution to this problem. And it's one where libraries are leading the charge on this slide that I highlighted just a few examples of ways libraries have been involved in open access. For example, they've signed transformative agreements with publishers to allow their faculty to publish in journals, open access without having to pay an article processing charge, because sometimes those can be in the thousands of dollars per article. Libraries have also been involved in the conversation around plan s, which will mandate that all nationally funded research from 12 European countries will be available in open access journals. Goal 11.7 calls for universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible green and public spaces. And it's measured by the share of open space available for public use in cities. Libraries play a front and center role in providing a safe space for community members. One of the most dramatic examples came back in 2016. When Ennick Pratt Free Library in Baltimore had protests that were happening in the city, that unfortunately in some parts of the city did involve, for example, a CVS across the street from them being burned. Throughout all of this, the library chose to stay open. At the time CEO Carla Hayden, who later joined the Library of Congress explained why saying, quote, I knew that the libraries are community resources. I knew that they are anchors in so many communities. In a lot of communities in Baltimore, especially in challenged ones, we are the only resource. If we close, we are sending a signal that we are afraid or that we aren't going to be available when times are tough. We should be available, especially when times are tough. And I think this quote is really interesting to think about given everything that's happened in the past year with COVID-19. Many libraries have closed their physical facilities as the ALA recommended. But even though their physical buildings were closed, libraries do remain open and they have continued to service their communities, doing things like providing digital resources, providing virtual library services. So the general public is starting to learn what it really means for the library to be opened. And it's about more than just the physical building. This is an emerging area of study. It's something we've been looking at. And I'm really interested to see what the long-term impact of this is. The last SDG that I want to highlight is one that I think is really interesting. Goal 16.10 is to ensure access to information and protect fundamental freedoms. And this is the last one I want to highlight because while libraries have been involved with furthering virtually all of these goals, this is the one where libraries were most explicitly involved in developing it. Seeing access to information is one of their primary objectives. This is one where libraries really led the charge to get it included when the goals were initially written. One way they did this is through the Alliance Declaration on access to information and development, which was initially drafted by IFLA in 2014 and signed by more than 600 libraries and library organizations. This document called for access to information to be included in the post-2015 development agenda. In this document, it emphasized the importance of libraries in access to information for people to be able to exercise human rights, to be active in their economy, to gain new information skills, to express their cultural identity, and to be active citizens in their community. I also emphasize the importance in libraries in information literacy education, and ultimately this push was successful and it's what led to Goal 16.10 being included. As I mentioned earlier, the Global Council at OCLC chose the SDGs as its area of focus for 2021. Because of that, we are currently in the middle of a research project around the work that libraries are doing to further the SDGs. For the last part of this presentation, I want to talk about some of the research that we have already done, and as well as our future research that will be disseminating relating to this. As a first step, we surveyed Global Council members on their familiarity with the SDGs and which ones they think have the biggest impact. On this chart, we can see that most Global Council members were at least somewhat familiar with the SDGs, with 45% of them saying that they were familiar with them, and 13% of them saying that they were very familiar with them. And we asked them to select the top five areas of the SDGs, where they saw libraries having an impact, and the top ones are laid out on this chart. Interestingly, the top SDG selected was quality education, with 9 out of 10 delegates including it in their top five. Other popular SDGs among the delegates were decent work in economic growth, peace justice and strong institutions, and then these were followed by gender equality and strengthening the implementation and revitalizing the global partnership for sustainable development. We then completed virtual focus groups with Global Council delegates last summer, and there was a lot of interesting information that came from that. For example, we learned that a lot of libraries when they're doing work related to the SDGs. It's not necessarily specific efforts around the SDGs, but rather it's something that they see as part of their overall library mission. We also carried out a large survey that we just completed this past January, based on the different themes and activities that were surfaced in these focus groups. The survey ended up receiving more than 1500 responses with people from all around the world at all different types of libraries responding. We asked them about their work around five of the SDGs. Specifically, we wanted to know how frequently they did some of the most common activities around the SDGs that came up in our focus groups. We also wanted to know what role the SDGs played in their strategic planning. We are currently analyzing the data from that and we'll be reporting it shortly. Right now I want to offer some suggestions about how the SDGs can impact library activity. I think that the SDGs offer a great framework for libraries to see their true value because they offer a more holistic view of impact than some of the other metrics that libraries typically use to evaluate themselves, such as circulation numbers. The SDGs are interrelated in nature, and when this interrelatedness is considered, areas where library activities have an indirect impact become more clear. A great example of this, when I've presented about this project in the past and I showed the chart of the SDGs, one common joke that people make is the last impact libraries have on goal 14, life below water. So at first glance it doesn't seem like libraries would have much of an impact on that because most libraries are above water. But if you consider the indirect impact, you can see that it actually is one where libraries do have a pretty big impact. For example, marine biologists use library resources to carry out their research. Libraries run conservation education programs for children. And libraries that have special collections related to topics like oceanography. And so while I doubt libraries typically think about that kind of indirect thing when evaluating their impact, thinking about activities in the context of the SDGs can help highlight these types of areas, which can help libraries see what their big impact is. And also to advocate for themselves when getting resources. So libraries can get started with this by making sure that their staff is familiar with the SDGs, and by explicitly including the SDGs in their strategic planning. I want to end by letting you know where we are going next with this project. We are currently analyzing the survey data and we'll be presenting it to the Global Council in March of 2021. Following their feedback on that will be disseminating results in a report through discussions and through webinars, and this will be ongoing activity through 2022. But that I really appreciate you taking the time to watch this presentation on this slide I have all of my contact information. And I would highly encourage you to reach out to me if you have any questions or thoughts on either the presentation or the broader project. You can reach out to me through my email address or I have my Twitter handle on there and either a great ways to contact me. I hope you have a great rest of your day and thanks again for watching this presentation.