 started I think. Welcome. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Network Information and you're here with us for one of the project briefing sessions on the second day of week two of the CNI 2020 fall virtual member meeting. And just to remind you of a couple of things, this week is themed around the transformation of organizations and professions. We are recording the session and we'll make it available after. We do have closed captioning available if you'd like to avail yourself of that. There is a chat and feel free to use that to comment, to introduce yourself as needed. We also have a Q&A tool on the bottom of the screen. I invite you to queue up questions at any time. We'll take all the questions at the end of the presentation and Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will moderate that Q&A session. But as I say, feel free to queue up questions at any point during the presentation as they occur to you. Finally, I'll just remind you that starting with week two of this virtual fall meeting, we are making available not just synchronous sessions but also a few pre-recorded videos. So please have a look at those when you have time. And I think with that, it's time to introduce our speakers. We have two speakers in the session, Katie O'Neill and Matthew Trexin. Both of them are with Loyola Notre Dame Library. And the session is going to focus on what really is sort of a classical CNA partnership between academic libraries and IT but infused with a new dimension which is deep engagement with academic affairs around an agenda tied to student success. And I think with that frame, I will just welcome you all. Thank Katie and Matthew for agreeing to do this presentation and pass it over to Katie. Thanks so much, Cliff. We appreciate the opportunity to be with you all today. And I look forward to talking with you all about this topic. As Cliff mentioned, my name is Katie O'Neill. I'm the associate director of the Loyola Notre Dame Library. I'm here with my colleague Matthew Trescon, the library's technology librarian. Today, we'd like to share with you our library's journey to infuse technology with pedagogy, leveraging campus partnerships with IT and academic affairs to support student success. I'll be sharing context about the work that we've done to build the foundation for success. And Matthew will then talk about the programs and user experiences he and his technology services unit have co-created with colleagues across the library and the campuses. Next. Yes, at L&DL, we like to say it takes two. L&DL is a little different. We're one of only two independent academic libraries in the United States. That means we're a separate 501c3 nonprofit and don't report directly into either of the two schools that we support. Under the leadership of our library director, Barbara Priest, since 2012, the library has been aligning its purpose with the educational missions of the two universities. We support Loyola University, Maryland and Notre Dame of Maryland University in northwest Baltimore. As Barbara likes to say, to succeed in our work, we really, she has to work with two provosts, two CIOs and two CFOs to make things happen. And we do that throughout the organization with the partnerships that we have. The library aligned with the strategic plans for both institution and has been transitioning to an innovative center of learning that adapts to users changing needs for space, both physical and virtual, information and technology to support the research teaching and learning of students and faculty. Dr. Bram Rgani, the associate dean of Applied and Natural Sciences for Loyola's College of Arts and Sciences was actually an early partner and supporter of the development of a campus makerspace in the library after winning a Pathways to Innovation grant through the National Science Foundation in 2015. In 2017, he was dubbed an honorary librarian for his work with us when the innovation station makerspace officially opened. The partnership has expanded with the use of the library space for program support and funding for new technology by Wendy Bolger. She's Loyola's inaugural director of their new center of innovation and entrepreneurship. Next. Early in 2015, our director and Loyola's chief information officer sponsored a technology audit for the library. I was partnered with the library's acting head of digital services at the time, Daniel Renn Johnson and David Arnett, who was the associate director of servers and storage at Loyola's technology services department. We get all of our technology infrastructure from the bigger school, which is Loyola. We developed a plan to demonstrate how technology could best support student success in a 21st century academic library. This plan was approved by the library's board of directors, as were an independent organization, and it also had to be reviewed and approved by the board of directors for both schools. At the end of the full implementation of this plan in 2019, the following results were achieved. Funding for library technology was increased annually on average by 52.5% until the pandemic. This level of funding was sustained. We are in a pause this year, as imagine, you all are feeling, you know, pinches on budget, but the commitment remains strong around educational technology for the library. All 23 recommendations were fully recommended and implemented building the digital infrastructure that's allowed us to upgrade and maintain building technology, optimize library's operations, and the customer experience, while also building partnerships with faculty to integrate educational technology into the curriculum. This slide really illustrates our transition of the main level of the library with the introduction of the Copyright Information Center in 2016, the Innovation Station Maker Space, as I mentioned before, in 2017, the Digital Learning Commons in 2018, and a virtual reality classroom and a recording studio in 2019. Despite the pandemic in the fall of 2020, with our partners in the CINE, the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, we introduced a new laser cutter for our Maker Space. Next slide. Additionally, the library has expanded our institutional capacity to reposition our services by focusing on user needs. L and DL has 26 full-time employees with a headcount of 42 employees when part-time employees are included. Early on, the library reframed roles to meet current and anticipated needs as staff changes occurred over time. Matthew's position of technology librarian is a good example of this. This position was redefined as an outcome of the technology report. Key communication and collaboration infrastructure was added to provide formal and informal means for creative problem-solving. In 2012, managers used to meet bimonthly in a manager's meeting, and unit meetings across departments occurred really based on department head preferences. Today, decision-making happens at a director's advisory group, which meets bimonthly and includes senior library administrators to make sure that there's awareness of programs across the board that are happening. Regular department unit, as well as liaison meetings with academic units, now also occur regularly. Charges for standing committees and use of task forces to innovate programs and engage users has remained really critical to our ongoing success to facilitate change. This approach has been particularly important for staffing and sustainably growing the library's digital scholarship program, which Matthew will talk about a little bit later. New consortium memberships in East and USMAI, our Maryland state consortium here, has provided opportunities for networking and professional development for librarians and staff. Finally, as this slide illustrates, as the work evolves, so did our organization structure. In 2018, with the technology infrastructure in place, the library reorganized, shifting away from a traditional public services and technical services model, and created two different departments, collections and access services and research and technology services. This placed our technology services unit with our research and instruction librarians to really maximize the breadth of programming that we could allow to partner with academic affairs. It has allowed us to optimize collection development, access services, building use, and really helped us expand our instruction consultation and outreach programming. Specifically, this reorganization really facilitated a reframing of our library instruction program so that we could support and promote information, digital, and data fluencies. You can see we used our information literacy, which has had a strong background in active and engaged learning to build a basis to build upon to add in our instruction program in the technology, digital scholarship, copyright, and we just launched a data management consultation this fall as well. Next slide. When we look at specifically at the digital fluency aspects of the expanded instruction program, we have really focused on the following model and competencies to help us kind of frame that program. I'm going to turn the presentation over to Matthew at this point because he can share with you examples of how we're going about doing this work together with our partners in academic affairs. The Loyal Notre Dame Library has provided a digital scholarship support in some capacity for several years. However, until recently, the support was generally ad hoc. In FY20, the library completed a digital scholarship program review and this we evaluated the current state of digital scholarship at the library, benchmarked against peer institutions, and developed a set of best practices, and also established procedures and website language. Key to this work was formalizing the life cycle assessment of our digital scholarship program. This included an intake interview slash form and a three-year review process. In this way, we set help set expectations and manage our capacity. Skills include collections and development, project management, web technology and programming, online training, and we work with existing staff members, myself included, to find ideas and interests and skills that leverage our interest level and excitement and partner with the university's faculty members in ways that are standard traditional things like Omega versus other things like working with APIs to analyze and analyze new analysis. These projects range from a work that is limited to classroom exercise to those that are developed with the broader academic community in mind. One such product has been the women's literary club of Baltimore, which was a multi-year project that includes several semesters of classroom scholarship. Clara Love, now a member of our digital scholarship team, worked in this project as a student. In 2018, she and I presented at the Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference. In the following year, the digital scholarship team worked with an education professor for a project that involved both web work and creative making, and on the right hand side, Holy Comics Batman. This was a classroom exercise and is a good example of what classes can do, although the scope is limited to the interests of developing the students' understanding of the curriculum. Later that year, the professor and I presented at the Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference. We continue to partner with academics and academic affairs, faculty, and other units across both campuses that support the research teaching and learning of the two universities. One area we do this, as mentioned before, are these hands-on technology of popular classes that were really the brainchild of the associate dean of applied natural sciences at Loyola. The library continues to develop. We believe that the ability to create and navigate technology is in alignment with expanded scope of the information literacy as described in the Association and College Research Library's information literacy, and works towards answering the need for digital fluency, which the Horizon Report considers a significant challenge. By positioning students as makers, libraries can engage them in critically thinking about choices that influence the development and application of media and technology. And second, the information creation is a process just as information or knowledge just doesn't exist, the world of technology doesn't just exist. It evolves. Today and the library has developed this pop-up class series, as well as launched a successful makerspace. Starting in 2017, the library organized a series of classes each semester on emerging technology such as Arduino's, Raspberry Pi's, virtual reality, audio video editing, the ancient technology such as the biology of breadmaking and knitting. This initiative started, oh, sorry. And in addition, regarding the innovation station, which was launched at the beginning of 2017, branded the innovation station, we started with 3D printing, 3D scanning, computerized sewing embroidery, a large one printer, one button recording studio, and the music creation editing computer. And later, the following year, we expanded to include the old-flage recording studio, a digital paper cutting machine, laminator, button maker, virtual reality classroom, and Arduino's and Raspberry's available for checkout. Integral to our success has been our partnerships with faculty and integration with their curriculum. One particular notebook example is with our recording studio, which was developed in partnership with a faculty member at the Lowe University of Maryland communicates department, who is also the TV radio manager. He helped with his expertise. He let us know what equipment was necessary to get it working, what people would be expecting, and how to do our best to isolate the sound of a speaker with the proper microphones. He also helps teach pop-up classes on various video editing software and has helped develop library staff members with our expertise so that we can help him help his students. Our VR classroom, launched a bit later, has been focused on providing experiential learning opportunities pertaining to psychology with apps from Guardian VR on various psychological experiences, nursing with a schizophrenia app, which we got specific to the professor's need, and historical reference points like religious studies and medieval Europe. Our one button studio has been used extensively by the English Language Institute at Notre Dame for the purposes of practicing learning, practicing speaking English. This program brings students from all around the world to Baltimore to learn how to be immersed in the English language, and this technology, which if you're not familiar with it, is a simple way of you put your thumb drive in, press the button to start recording, and then where you're done recording, press a button, and then it's automatically saved to your thumb drive. This simple technology, at least simple for the end user's experience, makes it really easy for them to practice speaking, either putting together a really simple play or speaking in a monologue, explaining about where they're from or what type of food they'd like to eat. And one other point that we'd like to bring up is that we also are heavily integrated with the first-year experience at both universities. At Loyola, it is the Messina program, which pairs generally two very different disciplines together and has some kind of overarching theme, and also at Notre Dame, which has a first-year experience as well. We provide many class tours, and we also have had the opportunity to engage them with American Space and having creative exercises that produce artifacts that use the technology, but in ways that further the point of the exercise. The library has also brought on the reach of the innovation station beyond these academic departments to other areas that support the education mission, such as Center for Entrepreneurship Innovation. Our Viswell and Consultation Spaces have been integral in with their multi-preneurs program, which provides potential business startups with the opportunity to meet with experts in areas of how to do business research, how to set up the financials and things like that, and also the DENT summer program, which provided the opportunity for high school students in the Baltimore area to learn about various making technologies and ways that they can potentially leverage those things for potential careers in business and making. And one more thing I'd like to mention is our book bank, which in partnership with Copyright Librarian and her expertise in copyright, we're leveraging our streaming video service to host story time videos for Baltimore City public school teachers to use with their students. And oh, just went right ahead. Anyways, so we, in three years we've seen dramatic increase in use of our makerspace, both in terms of equipment use and check what we call Check Out, because we use our library catalog to determine the chocolate of kids and such, and also in seeing dozens of class tours and exercises with departments all across campus. We've, however, then in, as we all know, COVID-19 hit, and we had to shut down the building and plan for what we figure out what we can do in the interim while we're all virtual, we're also virtual, and how we can, what we would need to do to open up back safely. The Technology Services Department modified its services in order to follow University guidelines from Loyola and Notre Dame, and best practices that are derived from ALA, our consortium, and peer institutions. These modifications limit the need for face-to-face interaction, encourage social distancing, promote virtual services, and facilitate the cleaning of touchpoints. While we're working virtually, we figured out what we can do remotely, and one of the things we, one of the things we did was to mail packets to a Masina class, a couple Masina classes, the first-year class at Loyola, and where we provided them with the equipment necessary to experiment with paper circuits, with conductive tape, LED, and such. And we have also taught classes that, that help students remotely, but the virtual makerspace, such as things that can be installed on their computer, like open source, podcasting technology, or video, audio editing, like audacity, and also mapping technology, such as story maps. And an important note is that when we're planning for the, how to open it back up, both in the fall and possibly the spring, we're thinking about how to work from not just get through this and provide educational services and media, but how we can do those things in ways that improve the experience of the university's students and faculty over in the future. Some of these things include developing a virtual tour of the makerspace, virtual tour of the library, provide virtual training, and also provide virtual support. And with the virtual support, we have two levels. One is that we've worked to, we've partnered with the Research Instruction Librarians Library Chat Service to be a, to be able to answer questions pertaining to technology. And the second level is that we are available for video training at a distance using our Zoom card, the station, the makerspace. So this way, with the Zoom card, we can provide in detail support at a distance over an extended period of time without having to worry about contact tracing and potential infection. But also, this is something that we could leverage in the future for after-hour supports. That way, we can provide this kind of training at a distance, say at eight o'clock at night, when we're generally not working, but we can flex our time and figure out how to do that. In addition, we're also having, we also have the opportunity to discuss the faculty members in higher level classes about how to design classes that leverage our technology, such as 3D design and development for the communications department, and also VR and XR development for nursing. Another way that the library has supported, oh, we're running on time. Wow. Has been to produce PPE for the universities. We've partnered with OpenWorks to produce 540 face shields for them to deliver to healthcare workers. And we've also shifted towards production for the university to make completed face shields. And this work was featured in EdTech Magazine, a local business journal, and also the student newspaper. And finally, we support student success through creative partnerships, working with the student clubs, such as robotics, providing space for them, and also providing opportunity for them to teach pop-up classes on how to work adorinos. And they develop their own curriculum, they develop their own training procedures, and also the Society of Women Engineers. We also work with the departments, computer science, data science, and engineering on their senior capstone project, where we provide them with the opportunity to, where we serve as client for them to think through these creative problems that we pose, such as like, how do you do a dry erase word, use a system, or meeting room availability, and also artificial intelligence, where we provided them with privacy restricted search library chats to analyze how the submit, to identify sentiment and clustering for a data science. And these students have gone on to be partners in the university to do well in higher, I've received some feedback from them, they're doing well in the various software development companies, defense, and such too. And they are able to think through the challenges of writing, writing through the procedures and describing things in such a way that they're, they can do the stuff, but they can also work with people to get the problems understood and defined. Okay. Thanks, Matthew. So none of this happens without a creative staff and a culture of assessment, as you all can well imagine. And that's been, as Matthew said, very critical for us as we've worked through our reopening. Matthew, if you can switch to the next slide. We also realize that all of this happens and you need to make sure we're understanding the impact that this is happening. In addition to a library impact dashboard, we're currently working with colleagues in academic affairs to define and demonstrate each student's success for the overall new instruction program that I mentioned earlier. We've crosswalked the ACRL information literacy framework with the AACU values rubric that's used by both of our schools for accreditation purposes. This slide shows you where our instruction program and the work Matthew described earlier supports the rubric by learning outcome and discipline. And this fall, we're actually piloting a common assessment tool across all programs. Next slide. And finally, a common question we often get is, how do you get started? Allendale has learned that it's about starting the conversation and keeping it going while remaining open to new ideas and partnership as they emerge. At Allendale, outreach was prioritized early on from all areas of the library. The library's liaison program was redesigned quite early on. Our social media and social events committees and a communication and collaboration task force have been charged over time to really engage people in virtual settings and spotlight high visibility in new programs. And in 2018, a staff member was promoted to a reframed outreach and engagement librarian position to expand our reach. Last slide, Matthew. And so ultimately, we are still working to find the best ways to connect with both campuses to share how the library can best support faculty and students. This work is, I imagine, is true in all of your organizations, is never done. Matthew and I want to thank you for your time this afternoon and we'd be happy to take any questions now or any follow-up after the session via email. Thank you all. Thank you, Katie and Matthew, for that wonderful presentation. It's great to hear of all the interesting things that you are doing there in Baltimore and really interesting stuff going on. The floor is now open for questions so please feel free to type your questions into the Q&A box and our speakers will field them now. While we're waiting for people to think about that, I did want to follow up, Katie, on the transition in the library to this new alignment. You mentioned, you did talk about the staff adjustments, some of the realignment of the staffing. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. I'm sure that was a big undertaking. What was involved? How did it go? What were some of your takeaways from that? Sure. Interestingly enough, I think the reorganization we did in the middle, where I described moving us to that halfway point, was probably the larger adjustment than the shift to combining the research and technology units together and that cause. I think that's because we were still in the phase where we had a number of new positions that as people retired primarily, you would take the opportunity to reframe positions but also at that point in time, partnerships were still in early development across the campuses so understanding how to connect and how that work drove things. I think that was a larger adjustment. For example, in that phase, we combined our reference desk with our circulation desk into that integrated desk. That was a big cultural change. That was part of that mid reorganization. I think we really used a task force from both units to explore it, define it, and they owned that transition. Again, back to using those short-term task force with clear charges to help and make sure there's collaborative involved teams in those processes to help us define the work so that there was more buy-in as we made those changes. The other piece that we're still working on is communication and collaboration. It's one of those things you're never done. Like I said in the past year, we did a culture survey for our organization last year. We scored very high and very well. But an area of ongoing improvement, even though the scores were very high with communication and collaboration. We have a task force now that's looking at additional ways for us to continue to grow in that area. But I think because we took an incremental starting small to work big is the way we like to think about it. I think Anne made sure that we weren't too far ahead of the campus, but it was very much tied to customer service, which was a strong ethos and value for all of the organization in the library. I can't say it wasn't without some pain and some disagreement, obviously along the way, but it allowed us to evolve our organization over time. Sure. Okay, that's very helpful and really interesting. Thank you for elaborating on that. Cliff has got a question or a comment here. He's asking if you could talk a little bit more about the virtual maker space after COVID and what kind of reception this got and also whether the user community changed when the space went virtual. Any comments on that? Sure. I can speak to that. Our virtual maker space, our pop-ups this past semester were all aligned previously. They're all in person, but there have been benefits with that. There have been more opportunities being able to record that, share that after the fact with people who may have missed it, and it's also provided them with opportunity to just check in and check out or when they're available and when they have need, as opposed to walking to the campus, walking back to their dorm and things like that. The pop-up class series went pretty well. It went well this semester. Similar use, maybe a bit more. I have to add the total numbers. Regarding the support of the maker technology, our equipment is generally still available for use, although there are very few people on campus, so it hasn't been used that much. We're focusing on how to provide these virtual trainings. The students that have gotten through the training, when they walk into the library and we set up the Zoom cart and they can work with one of my colleagues to be trained in the sewing machine and such. That has gone just as well as in person. It's really quite nice. It's one of those budget tech meet-up cameras with nice Zoom. It's really with good microphone, and it really does just as good a job as being there in person. We've also had the opportunity to, what else is there, and then provide support for some software that is not some open-source software like Audacity and Storymaps and ArcGIS, not open-source, but we have some limited licenses with that. We can provide them with support for these technologies in ways that are starting to merge the boundaries between what is makerspace and what is digital scholarship. Interesting. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for that elaboration. Thanks, Cliff, for the question. I see that we are a little past time here, so I'm going to go ahead and close down the public portion of the presentation by stopping the recording, but I invite any attendees who have time and wish to stay and chat with our speakers. Please feel free to hang out a bit, raise your hand. I'll be happy to unmute you and give you an opportunity to engage with our speakers. With that, I just want to thank all of our attendees, both of our speakers. Thank you so much for coming to CNI, and we hope to see everyone back at CNI's fall meeting here again soon. Take care, everyone.