 Hello everyone. In this short presentation, I will talk about ableism in libraries and harmful post-COVID-19 practices that discriminate against disabled staff. I will show how by centering the voices of disabled staff, positive changes that benefits the whole library and student experience are made. Before we go deeper in the presentation, there are a few points I need to make. First, I am not an expert in disability. While I have a very solid understanding of my own disabilities and how they impact my life, I am not an expert in other types of disability. Please be mindful that examples given in this presentation are based on real experiences of disabled library staff. And last, it is okay to feel discomfort around discussions on ableism and disability. To continue to learn and take actions against ableism, we need to embrace discomfort. These are the moments of discomfort that we are often able to learn, shift our way of thinking and have transformative insights into inclusion. Even before the COVID health crisis, progress on advancing equity and inclusion in academia had been slow. It is without surprise that barriers to inclusion of people with disabilities have been intensified by the COVID-19 crisis. Before we dive deeper, let's refresh our understanding of word ableism. On the slides, there are three definitions that are found most helpful. A network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body, but is projected as a perfect species typical and therefore essential and fully humane. Disability then is caused as a diminished state of being human. The act of prejudice or discrimination against people with disabilities and all the devaluation of disability. Academia powerfully mandates able-bodiness and able-mindedness as well as other forms of social and communicative hyper-ability. This can be best defined as ableism. Campbell tells us in her book, Contours of ableism, the production of disability and able-ness. But a chief feature of an ableist viewpoint is a belief that impairment or disability is inherently negative and should the opportunity present itself be ameliorated, cured or indeed eliminated. So how do you know if you or people around you are ableist? Here are a few examples using ableist language. For example, I don't even think of you as disabled. If you find it hard to describe things, the reason is because it is hard. A language around disability has shifted dramatically in the last 10 years, so it is always good to ask or do your research. Thinking of disability only in terms, in visible terms. There are different types of disabilities and a lot of them are not visible. For example, mental health conditions. Questioning if someone is actually disabled or diminishing their disability, telling them you'll be fine, you won't die. When hiring, you discriminate against people with disabilities by failing, for example, to provide basic reasonable adjustments or wars, saying you will provide them and on the day of the interview you forget. Inspiration phone is everywhere and some people use them to hide their ableism. They like to talk how disabled people are brave and courageous, always saying stuff like, but only disability in life is a bad attitude. When adjusting to disability, well adjusting to disability requires adapting to a lifestyle, not bravery, not positive attitude. As Stella Young said, no amount of smiling at the flight upstairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. When learning and reflecting about disability and ableism, I use two frameworks to strengthen my understanding. The first one is the models of disability. The medical model isolates the individual who is seen as being the problem. It seeks to cure or improve individuals to fit them into society. The model fixates the problem within the individual, while seamlessly absolving society from any further consideration. It ultimately perpetuates stereotypes, perceiving people with disabilities as incomplete or damaged and needing fixing to accomplish any task at hand. The social model shifts the emphasis from the individual to society. The model says that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairments or difference. Boreas can be physical, like buildings, not having accessible toilets. Or they can be caused by people, attitudes to difference, like assuming disabled people can't do certain things. Another framework I found useful to understand the experiences of people with disabilities and understanding ableism is the intersectionality of disability. A framework of intersectionality can help us take into account people overlapping identities and experiences in order for us to understand the complexity of producers we face. Dr. Kimberley Crenshaw first introduced a theory of intersectionality in 1989 to challenge assumptions that undermine the feminist movements. In the UK, although there has been a lot of positive changes in terms of law and legal rights for people with disabilities, there are still challenges when intersectionality is involved. As a result, people with co-existing identities are more likely to suffer from multiple systems of oppression and not get proper support. Most universities today portray themselves as a diverse international community who care about inclusion. However, inclusion without considering intersectionality is harmful. Let's examine a case study where a black, disabled woman with dyslexia and auditory processing disorder asks for a reasonable adjustment to her manager because she's finding it difficult to work at beheld this as it has protected screens installed and have difficulty understanding people wearing masks. On the side of other respawn of a manager, let's dissect this respawn using the model of disability and intersectionality framework. The first paragraph, we have discussed your individual circumstances and what we can do to accommodate them. Here, the manager is making assumptions of what the disabled person needs instead of listening and asking questions. Also, managers should approach requests for reasonable adjustment in a confidential manner and talk to the university disability consultant to get insights on best practices. The second paragraph, there will be protective screens at the health desk. Signal people not wearing masks to approach you or ask people to temporarily remove their masks covering while speaking. Here also is the assumption that protective screens are not an issue. These screens usually block the sounds. Also, if we see the intersectionality of race and disability, as you may already know, COVID has affected ethnic minorities including Black people by a higher percentage. The instruction to signal people not wearing masks and asking people to remove their masks here is very problematic. The third paragraph, we will reduce your on-site presence compared to other colleagues, but remember, you have contractual on-site responsibilities. The third paragraph is a mixture of microaggression and threats. These come out for people with disabilities to experience these at work. We are all unique individuals with various identities. In comparing disabled staff with how their colleagues are performing is an extreme form of ableism. Fourth paragraph, an occupational health referral should be made so that any additional support can be assessed and advised by a medical practitioner. Here it is clear that the manager understanding of disability is based on the medical model. The intention of a manager in this case, study, may be based on good intentions, but good intentions without understanding the basic of disability and its framework does more harm than good. In the specific case, an intercom system with microphones at both ends could have been installed on the protective screens. Intercoms are widely used in banks and other public spaces, and the cost of misadjustment not only would have benefit, but disabled staff, but also over-library staff, the whole of the university community that uses the library, that uses the library, including disabled students. We all agree by the diversity representation in the library sector is a big problem. Leadership often seek consciously or unconsciously to a point and be surrounded with people like themselves. This is captured perfectly by Bedin Don and us, Berlin, in their paper, the paradox of diversity in leadership and leadership for diversity. The paradox of diversity is that successful diversity interventions require leadership support when diversity in leadership positions is so evidently lacking. And it would be naive to expect a homogeneous group of leaders to effectively champion diversity. Therefore, in order to tackle the paradox of leadership and diversity, work has to focus on both changing the composition of leaders based on the principles of mitocracy and to raise awareness and develop the skills of leaders for the effective championing of diversity interventions in the sector. When we look at the number of students in higher education with a known disability, it has increased by 47% since 2014-15. I have never seen these types of detailed statistics for university staff. Brown-ledged paper, Abolism in Academia, where all the disabled and ill academics built on this. Abolism in academia is endemic and so the concern for equality and equitability is on the increase. But there still remains our question, where are all the academics with disabilities, chronic illness or neurodiversity, particularly given the comparatively high number of students' disclosures. In the last five years, there's been an interest of inclusion and diversity in academia. Most universities' strategies have seen inclusion and diversity as part of their strategic goals and objectives. At the same time, there is an obvious lack of diverse representation amongst professional and academic staff. There are multiple ways to uphold representation of disabled staff in leadership positions. The one I will explore here is recruitment. The culture of whiteness is evident in libraries hiring practices. To start making sustainable changes, library management needs to first acknowledge that they have a problem with recruiting and retaining diversity. Recruitment is a key area where flexibility is vital, especially when it comes to giving a fair chance to diverse candidates. But changing the hiring process of hiring procedures imposed on academic libraries during COVID is a great opportunity for us to reflect on interview practices, think creatively on how to create inclusive interviews, interviews are stressful for most people. The questions I want you to reflect on are, do you evaluate your candidates on aspects like listening under pressure? Does your job advert have ability to respond under pressure and to think on your feet as part of essential requirements? I've seen this requirement in the description of an airline pilot, but I haven't seen it yet for a library job. Have you considered providing written interview questions before the interviews to help candidates prepare more thoughtful answers and meaningfully reflect on the experiences when answering the questions? What are your worries about sending questions to all candidates in advance? Sharing questions in advance in interviews is never against any HR policies, I know, but failure to provide reasonable adjustment, however, can have legal implications for your institution. Bianca Rush is a successful entrepreneur that said, a way that you can become more inclusive as a leader is to run towards opportunities, to engage with people from a variety of backgrounds and respect their outlook and perspective. There's a lot of growth that comes from discomfort and being challenged. Leadership presents huge potential to change for an inclusive international culture. So what are the lessons we had learned from COVID and can take forward? Of all the lessons I have learned in the past year, perhaps one of the most significant ones is that libraries can be drastically more accessible and inclusive. Inclusive leadership is a journey of change that requires efforts to build diverse and inclusive spaces. A groundwork for a more inclusive practice is to be aware where we are not being inclusive. To do this, we need to self reflect, recognize and overcome our unconscious bias. It is also especially important to challenge ableist attitude and practices and know our legal responsibilities as managers and leaders. It requires consistent work and commitments. Leadership represents huge potential for change. For example, I've seen a lot of positive changes recently in the US around inclusive recruitment, but it is still an open question for me as to whether this potential will be realized in the coming years if there are not enough representation in the sector. Thank you. So thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you today. I'm going to be talking about our reimagined descriptive workflows project in which we undertook to better understand and address harm caused by cultural institutions collection descriptions. So I'm going to be talking about the project and also the forthcoming report that was resulted this funded phase of work and then some other work that we've been doing here at OCLC. And before I get started and dig into this topic, I want to start with acknowledging that I live and work on the unceded traditional land of the Chichenolani people. And I'm grateful to the past and president leaders of this group for their stewardship of the land that I live on. So I am not an expert in the topic of racism and exclusion or othering and its impact, but I am witness to it. And I'm always trying to learn and educate myself. I am coming to you today from Oakland, California, which is very close to San Francisco across the bay from San Francisco in California. I am very privileged to share what I have learned with you on this topic. And I want to just acknowledge that it's okay to feel discomfort in dealing with this topic. As Kareen said in her presentation, it's normal and natural to feel this way when dealing with this type of material. So the reimagine descriptive workflows project convened a group of experts, practitioners and community members to determine ways of improving descriptive practices, tools, infrastructure, and workflows in libraries and archives. So the result this forthcoming community agenda is offered to the broad library and archives community of practice. The agenda draws together insights from the convening that we held in June, related research, and operational work that is going on in the field right now. So one thing I want to emphasize is that all institutions hold power to make meaningful changes in this space, and all share collective responsibility. So the agenda will not be a how to guide, but is instead constructed to instruct and chart a path towards reparative and inclusive description. It's divided into two distinct parts. The first part provides contextual information regarding the project, the convening, and the methods used to create the agenda, and also frames the historical, local, and workflow challenges and tensions to consider when approaching inclusive and reparative metadata work. The second part offers a framework of guidance that suggests actions and exercises that can help frame institutions, local priorities, and areas for change, and also provides examples to help inspire your own local work. So this is not, as I said, a how to or a step by step guide. It is meant to help uphold that there are many issues at play, and also to inspire capacity for solutions. And one thing that I will underscore is that what we really need is for change to be supported at a leadership level. So the report is very much written with that in mind. So what do we mean by radically reimagining? So reimagining is really about the level of creativity and problem-solving that we need to bring to this space in order to transform our practices, our infrastructure, and even the way that we think about these issues, the possibilities. And the radical is really looking at these foundational systemic changes that are needed to transform, I would say, a profession at its core. And one thing that I want to uphold is in the 2021 catalogers code of ethics, that this is a quote from that international code of ethics, is that cataloging standards and practices are currently and historically characterized by racism, white supremacy, colonialism, othering, and oppression. So this project was very much led by our advisory group who set the terms for and led the work. And I am quite grateful to have been led by this indigenous black and people of color group who worked to prioritize the areas of focus, identify how the work we were going to undertake in this project should be structured, and then really provided extensive feedback and help to guide drafts along the way. So many thanks to those on this list who spent months with us really helping us to reimagine as we carried the work forward. So the goals spent for the three days together were set by the advisory board and not OCLC staff. And you can see here the goals that the advisory board laid out for us. Number one was to create a safe space to share and connect honestly, as humans to be to create a space where people could be vulnerable and express what was really on their minds rather than holding back. And then carrying on through to building a roadmap and then keeping the conversation going to establish space for community to continue to engage after the project. And those of us who worked on the project have really kept these goals front and center having this outlined for us. So articulately was really wonderful. And I still carry these goals with me today in thinking about the roll out of the report and other associated work. So the framework of guidance, which is the second part of the report may seem remedial for some and maybe revolutionary for others. So just keep that in mind as you as you read and work your way through it. I will say that descriptive practice very much relate reflects library practice. So this isn't really just the problems for catalogers to solve. This is really the work of all people in the library. And it's also not a set of problems that are for people of color to solve. So we shouldn't be looking we need to of course hire and retain librarians of color, but it is just as important for allies to lean in and support and leave this work as well. So I'm going to dig in a little bit to the framework of guidance, which looks at three different categories of work, organizational shift. So things that need to happen at the top level of an organization to move it forward. And this is thinking about investing, staffing, things of that nature. Operational workflows are kind of where the where the rubber hits the road, where are you going to change your day to day practices? And this is something which is going to hit perhaps at mid level management thinking about how to operationalize some of these principles. And then finally, professional and personal development. As I said, this is really work that is for everyone within an organization. So looking at the many ways in which individuals within an organization can look within themselves and look to to change their own personal practices. So within the report, there are these kind of broad topics, so organizational shifts, for example, and then these sort of subtopics, which dig into give give examples of the type of work that and shifts that we're looking for. So one of these areas is under organizational shifts, a call to think of commit to the long to the long game. And this is, you know, organizations need to need to kind of set out and I think that many have that this is an organizational priority, but then back that up, not just with words, but also with money and with staffing. And and think about what the long term implications are of committing to a strategy of of anti racism. One, there are examples along with each of these. And one example is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the reckoning initiative at the University Libraries. And this is just a screenshot. This is the top of the page that looks at a number of things in various areas that the libraries have undertaken. And you'll see here that it's not just about describing materials, but really looking broadly across the library as a whole, and thinking about what types of initiatives the library needs to undertake in order to shift mindset, culture, etc. And this is just a snapshot showing the first three projects on a page that goes on. I think that there's nine or so different separate projects that are being undertaken as part of the rush reckoning initiative. So in each of these areas, we have kind of a couple of exemplar projects to look at. So that's one of them under operational workflows. One of our calls to action is to support new values. So one of the things that we saw here was the potential for a feedback layer to be built into library discovery layers. So in previous research that we had undertaken, we heard from catalogers that they might not hear back about harmful terms because there's no way to report them in the catalog. But some organizations have put that feedback mechanism directly into their discovery interface. And this is a great way to invite the community in to reflect on what terms are and what they should be. So two examples from Australia is the National Library of Australia catalog, as well as the Trove Discovery Portal, which represents a collaboration between the National Library of Australia and hundreds of partner organizations around Australia. In each of these cases, each item has a mechanism for reporting culturally sensitive content and or problematic language. So those are some examples of ways that we can see supporting new values playing out at that operational level. And there's just a screenshot showing the little icon that you can see in each of these discovery interfaces that calls attention to, that invites people to report this type of culturally sensitive content. And finally, under professional and personal development, one of the things that we need is systems of support. So just acknowledging that work around topics that are linked to racism, othering, erasure, these are difficult time consuming and emotional work and really fraught with complexity. When we're looking at undoing the systems that we've had in place for a very long time, it's difficult and challenging to work through it. So it is really essential to build strong and multi-layered structures of support for all of the people who are involved in this work. There is really a need for mentoring relationships that provide reciprocal benefit for emerging mid-career and late-career professionals, as well as for those who are in positions of leadership to help them better understand the diversity of their constituents. Not any one of us can see all the different facets of this work. So it's a continuing learning process. Recognition by and although this work happens at the individual level, recognition by and in funding from organizations and individuals with power and influence at all levels are really critical. We are a learning profession and here we are never done learning in this topic with all others. So that's what I have to share with you today in the short amount of time that I have and I just want to thank you so much for your time and really look forward to continuing our work and sharing together and look forward to the discussion with you. Thanks. Hi everyone, my name is Sarah Pitzway, I'm head of Library Academic Engagement at The Hive at the University of Worcester and this session is about who is open for the impact of digital poverty on the move to open and the focus of the session really is about what the move to open means beyond academia. So I'll be drawing on my experiences of working in The Hive over the course of the pandemic and particularly what we've seen during that time about digital inclusion and exclusion and a big shout out here to my colleague Steph Jones who's a Hive Library Manager. I co-presented some of the material in this presentation with her at the Silip Rebooks and Special Collections Conference last summer and the meaning of the picture of the Conquer there it's just kind of I kind of liked it but also the idea that it's something nice and shiny and aspirational but also a little bit spiky and tricky to deal with. So I'm going to start this presentation with something of a provocation. It's a very deliberate provocation and you might not agree with it and in fact it's actually some of the opening papers in the RLUK conference. We've seen things that actually probably do suggest that this might not entirely be true but I would say that in academic libraries when we're talking about open we are largely as implicitly referring to scholarly information that's freely available to other people within that community. Now we do talk about publicly funded research being made available to the public but even then I think we're talking about a certain kind of person we're talking about someone who's educated, who's digitally included, who's got the skills, who's got the the access etc and I'll come back to this idea. First though I want to take a step back and tell you a little bit about the Hive. Many of you will have heard of us we're in our 10th year now and we're a fully integrated university and public library. We're a partnership between the university and the county council and it's worth saying we're not an RLUK institution. Worcester is a teaching led university. We gained full, we gained degree awarding powers in 1997 and became a full university in 2005. So what does that integration look like for us on the ground and again I know some people at the conference will have visited the Hive. We've got previous colleagues here in the audience today but what that integration looks like for us is that we have one set of staff who are there to support all of our customers. Some of them are appointed by the university, some are appointed by the county council but as a member of public or a member of the university walking into the building you don't know and it's not important and those staff are all really expected to adapt and evolve to support that really wide customer base who have a very diverse range of needs. So our front-of-house team for example might be running Bounce and Rhyme in the morning. They might then move on to help an elderly customer get a blue badge and they might then help a student find some academic resources and on any given day we have something between 1800 and 2500 visitors. Now we've got a shared set of resources so members of the public are able to borrow and print academic print resources and they have access to a number of different resources that they wouldn't normally have access to in a normal public library. There are some restrictions on who can borrow what but broadly the collection is shared. Obviously all of those resources all of those customer types they all need support especially around the digital and all of our spaces are shared. All the spaces in the building are for everyone there is nothing that is cut off and is just protected for the university. So the point of the hive really is that it shouldn't matter who you are but during the pandemic it did matter and what that meant is that in terms of the service that we could provide to our different customer groups and increasingly what we saw of their differing digital needs. So like everyone we closed our doors in March nearly two years ago now we went through to the bitter end we stayed open until that national lockdown and we all saw at that point of course that magnification of digital need everything and everyone moved online as we all locked down and we really quickly learned how that was experienced and practiced for our customers and I think it's shown a spotlight on how different their lives are how some of the inequalities were playing out how they were being impacted on by the pandemic and again I think that tells us a little something about this idea of openness in libraries. So before I tell you about what we actually experience with our customers I think it's quite useful to conceptualize what we're talking about with regard to digital inequality or digital inclusion exclusion and this framework from the Good Things Foundation is a really really helpful one. I think people tend to think when they talk about digital poverty they tend to think about not having a laptop or a phone or some sort of device to get online with but as you can see from this pyramid here it's much more complicated than that so you might have the devices but you don't have the connectivity the broadband the mobile data you might have those things but you don't have the digital skills that you need and the digital skills that you need to be online confidently and safely and again you might have all of those things but just not really have that personal motivation to just keep doing it. So when we're talking about digital inequality for our customers we're talking about different levels of this pyramid different combinations of exclusion and need and I think the only thing that's missing for me from this pyramid is the idea of a space in which to be digital you might have all of these things but you still need the libraries that third place in which to go and be digital and get online and that's something that we do really well in libraries of course and again coming back to the idea our customers have really different digital spaces we saw this very stark contrast between some of our customer groups and I think what we really saw is that the digital space that many of our public customers is operating in is actually much much smaller than that of some of our university members and we saw this as we went into lockdown and we had to build this public digital offer and that was across Worcestershire County Council the Hive is one of 21 different county council libraries we're kind of the flagship but we are part of a network so the offer was being built across the county and had to be useful and appropriate across the county so one of the things we did was create these library connect bubbles these were digital social connecting bubbles so we had book bubbles we had a knitting bubble we had ones for children and families and then we were also engaging some of our customers with things like webinars and online events that were helping them build their confidence and their skills around things like using zoom or press reader or borrow box and it became really clear that while we could improve the digital skills for those who had a device and didn't know how to use it we weren't reaching people who felt elsewhere on that digital exclusion pyramid and we really found this out I think from staffing the here to help service so this is a telephony service that was for those seriously impacted by the pandemic it was a county council initiative so some of our county council employed front of house staff were redeployed onto the service during the first lockdown and so the people contacting the service who maybe couldn't use leave the house because they were shielding or people who couldn't engage with services anymore because those services were now online and they couldn't get to them so it was things like people who needed emergency food deliveries so maybe they become financially stretched and couldn't afford food so we'd get an emergency food parcel to them or maybe they weren't digitally capable of ordering an online shop in which case we'd get them set up we'd get a date booked in etc and there were more extreme cases that came through this service so people who needed their medication really urgently whose mental health was suffering and couldn't get an appointment people who were homeless so couldn't have an address to send an emergency food parcel to so for the most part these were people who were in dire need of information and advice and guidance all of which they were they were they were they should have been able to access as citizens but they were hampered by the fact that these were digital systems that they couldn't navigate they couldn't access because of digital poverty and exclusion now moving our students online was a very different experience and I will caveat this with the fact that although although it felt quite seamless of course we know that not all of our students have our digitally literate or have the kits or the data that they need and you know I think everyone attending this conference will have had access to learning funds digital hardship funds whatever you call them something to help students make the transition to that lockdown life and online learning and we did a lot for our students to move them online and I'm sure the things that we did will be very familiar to everyone here so we'd always had that digital first book purchasing policy now that paid off during lockdown and successive lockdowns we also increased the availability of our online chat again it was a service we already had but we just made it much more available and a use of that service quadrupled during that first lockdown and again like everyone else we implemented online teaching one-to-one appointments again it's a great success and what we found is that the students were largely okay in terms of the digital skills they needed they were still approaching us with the same kinds of questions about referencing about information finding um a critical evaluation just just doing so in a different way the main problem we saw for our students actually was the closure of the hive and um and of campus study spaces so again they'd lost that space in which to be digital so we have a lot of students who are maybe mature students with care responsibilities um we've got commuter students who are living at home so maybe they've you know they were at home whilst their younger siblings were at home schooling um so in a very literal sense they needed that openness of the library they needed that physical space to be in to be digital in the other thing that we found a real challenge with is um students from elsewhere um due to the complexities of academic exemption so in autumn 2020 the lockdown rules were pretty clear the government was saying university libraries needed to stay open whereas local authorities were largely keeping public libraries closed um with some exemptions for kind of core digital access so we had one building with two sets of rules applying to us and that was fine for our students we were able to provide that consistency of service for them um they were able to come in and make use of the building and the feedback that we received from students at that time was excellent a lot of them said you know without this we just wouldn't have been able to cope we might have dropped out and we were literally having to card people on the door they had to have a university id to get in but what we weren't able to do was to support students who weren't maybe studying in the local colleges or students who were studying elsewhere in the country but were still living with their families back in Worcester during that lockdown and it just didn't make sense for us with our shared ethos our openness um to be having to turn these students away so my colleague Steph our Hive Library Manager was negotiating with students these individuals as they came in so if they had significant need for digital services you know they needed somewhere to reset an exam or to apply for um extenuating circumstances should work with them and make sure they got what they needed so I think everything that we did we did at Misesi it was the right thing to do at the time it was in line with the guidance but it's now that we're coming out of it that we can really see what the ramifications were around openness for our full customer base and it's making us think of things in a slightly different light so it's made us think about our digital first policies because that they mean over time there are going to be fewer and fewer print resources for non-university customers to make use of now that was happening anyway and we were kind of aware of it but the pandemic has made us think about it much more and what the implications are so we know we've got those customers for whom the library is a very trusted resource but they're not going to be able to access to some of the resources because of restrictive um online licensing um we all know that around particularly around ebooks but also because they wouldn't have the digital skills or the digital confidence to access them anyway and you know when we're talking about um the restrictive licensing our typical response is to talk about moving to open access monographs which you know I fully believe is the right and proper thing to do but again we've got those people that won't have the skills or knowledge to find them or to use them that digital pivot or shift that we've experienced it hasn't applied to everyone and we haven't resolved this by any means it's something we're kind of still thinking about and grappling with another example is that we've done away with our physical enquiries desk because of the runaway success of um online services during the pandemic again that's been great for our students but it does have implications for our other user groups so when we had a physical enquiries desk we would have people like independent researchers in the community we might have sick formers doing extended project qualifications who would come to us you know a range of people um and so we're looking at how can we support some of those groups so we're thinking about things like well what training can we give our front of house staff not to handle those higher level inquiries that need to come to someone with a bit more information specialism but how can they confidently be empowered to have conversations with those different user groups to sign post them to services and to support them accessing them so maybe sit down with them and go okay well I don't know that but I know there's a library online now let's you and I go and do chats together and then we're also extending that support out to the network of 20 other county council libraries as I said we're kind of the flagship in the center we've got the academic expertise so how can those colleagues make use of our expertise for themselves or for their customers and that's something we're kind of in the early stages of exploring so I think I painted quite a complex picture here and hopefully you can see why I gave you that provocation at the beginning about how we typically think of the concept of openness in academic academic libraries and that that it is broader than that there's things we need to think about and I've shared some of the ways in which the Hyde is continuing with its shared ethos of openness and partnership some of the issues we're grappling with so the questions I want to leave you with are where do RLUK libraries fit into this picture so part of the point of me doing this paper was to kind of connect RLUK libraries with these broader issues that might not necessarily be at play within your institution and again some of what we've already seen in the conference suggests that you know there is some thoughts around this but but where do you think about it where does it sit and to ask you to consider what can you do to bring digital inclusion to the wider community that you're situated within and then finally to reiterate the title of this talk when you're talking about open who exactly is it open for thanks for listening