 Okay. Thank you so much for coming to our session is dancing with a stakeholder. So I want to go ahead and introduce everybody on the panel. And we'll go ahead and get started with the discussion. Mr. and my name is Emily and I work for the University of Ohio. I'm Dean and I'm moderating DW from the University of Florida. We have Stacy Wallace also from the University of Florida. Emily Flynn from Ohio Lane and really loved it. She's joining us from Iowa State. We want to invite everybody to share their thoughts and ideas throughout the presentation. So we don't necessarily have to wait till the very end, but I do ask that we let all of our speakers go first. And if anybody has any questions in the chat, I'll be monitoring that and I'll be able to answer it or ask them as we come to them. So where was it? Oh, basically, part of what got me really excited about this was some of you may know my mentor Chris Shorrie. And a few years ago, she did an environmental survey of IR policy. It wasn't just ETDs, but you might have been one of her survey respondents. And I would like to start looking at the scan of the stakeholder context as it varies across our different types of institutions. I know there's going to be immense variety, but I'm hoping there are going to be some interesting parallels. I was starting to briefly, we could talk for two hours about the University of Florida context, but we start at the core are Stacy's unit and my unit in the library is the Graduate School of Libraries working together. But we have our UF administration. We have the different departments and faculty. We have the students. We have the Board of Governors of the Holy University system. We have the... What's the proper name of the people who are UF's Board of Trustees? The Board of Trustees for UF itself. We have pressure from individual legislators at times. So it's a really fun and complicated environment. And within our... I would go with the Graduate School and the libraries. There are, of course, factors at play that change needs to be met as time progresses. It is, I suspect, for everyone a moving target situation. Stakeholders come in and go out according to budget changes and role changes and whatnot. So with that said, I'll pass to Stacy. Okay. I guess I will talk about our significant stakeholders, which in my case is, of course, the students and the faculty. I think of them as my main stakeholders that are looking out for... that I should be looking out for. And of course, then we'd like G.W. mentioned we have internal stakeholders as well. That I obviously affect his workflow and he affects ours. So we have to work closely together to ensure that we meet everyone's needs. Oh, yeah. I did forget to mention ProQuest. Sorry. How does that sound? I'm Emily Flynn with OhioLink. We are a state library consortia of academic libraries that all work together for group purchasing. And we also have available to our members the OhioLink ETD Center, where we have about 100 members that are part of OhioLink as institutions, including the State Library of Ohio. But we also...of those about 136 of our OhioLink members contribute to the ETD Center. So they're submitting masters and dissertations from their local institution into one big kind of like a consortial IR, the ETD Center. And they all can be searchable together. They get picked up by Google Scholar as well, and they have the option of sending them to ProQuest too. So we try to streamline that all together. So as far as our stakeholders go, most of it is the local administrators from all of the institutions that run a version of the ETD Center. And they can customize their workflows, their policies. They have all different sorts of staffing levels. The platform is the same. The submission form and the process is the same. But everyone does it slightly differently based on their timing. Some publish as they come in, some wait till the end of the semester. And they're able to do that on their own. And then if there's any troubleshooting or development, we work together with the administrators to get that all figured out directly with them. In addition, we have the ETD community has a listserv for OhioLink. So we can communicate with the admins and any staff members or catalogers that are also working on ETDs can be on that listserv and we have a place to communicate with them all. And then a subset, we have the ETD council, which is a smaller group of four administrators from graduate schools and four library representatives. And we make policy together or talk about what should go into the next release and reviewing stuff like that. Discussing hot topics as they come up. For a few years we've been discussing accessibility and now it's becoming part of our release and requirements. So we're also addressing it from policy and workflow standpoint with the administrators on the ETD council. And then that goes out to our wider community group too. So it works together and they represent the community. So they have that in between layer for OhioLink and our consortial staff but then also the community itself. Those are our main stakeholders and we really work through them to do further outreach to whatever fits their needs on their local campus. As OhioLink, we have different policy teams and so they're an adjunct team but we also have the library directors and all of our groups report up to the library directors and deans committee. And so even if new things happen on ETD council sometimes things need to go before the directors and deans group for all of our members as well. So they stay at a higher level aware of what's going on and what's coming through but it's really that local administrators level that's the main stakeholder which is nice to work so directly with them at OhioLink. Good morning. I'm Lily from Iowa State and in my institution I'm housed in the grad college but in the center for communication excellence. So to say the least, my most direct or immediate stakeholders are the grad students and their faculty members. Our duty is to give them all the writing support from the beginning till the end until they graduate, right? I don't know if it's the same at your institution but the grad college is a very different college compared to other academic colleges and the students can never understand why they're listed under two colleges, their department and then grad college. So who is the grad college? Well we like to say that we are there to support them. So anything to do with ETDs? It's our view that we need to make sure they graduate, they have what they need to fulfill their thesis or dissertation according to the needs or what their professors and committees view as necessary. We do not interfere with content. We just research what's the best practices to push that final product into the institutional repository and also progress since we are collaborating with them. In the same vein, because we are the grad college and because we are the ones in charge of conferring the degrees, I feel like our ETD stakeholder too is the institution. So it is in our responsibility to make sure that the institution doesn't get sued. So that's why we've had an interesting talk about digital accessibility because it's the upcoming issue. So that's something that we need to look at. Copyright is another thing. We need to work with the legal counsel. That's our stakeholder as well because we deal with a lot of sponsored research. And so we have to balance that need for students to get financial assistantship but still be able to publish their research and demonstrate that they have gotten the skills from the graduate program. So those are our primary and immediate stakeholders. Obviously because we need to work with the library to get the final product into the institutional repository, we have to work closely with them about their needs as well, how we get the workflow so that it doesn't mess them up. So I think those are the starting point of stakeholders and I'm sure we'll get beyond that. Yeah, so thank you. I want to go ahead and ask a question in the address section of this session. Could you talk about the two questions? Could you talk a little bit about who's was allowed to engage in the group? And then what happens if you're too lazy and allowed to do this? How do you manage this? So an interesting one that we have that comes up I think for everyone throughout the years is the creative writing folks and they are very, I would say, one of our loudest stakeholders. They are writing a great next novel and they really want to protect it and they want permanent embargo, lifetime embargoes on campus. That's not something that's, you know, our other thesis and dissertation students even have those options. So I find in my case, every couple of years I go through it. The college wants to meet with my dean. We have big meetings. We get into the meeting and then realize that the Department of English hasn't even settled this. So like they literally go into the meeting with folks from creative writing and then their chairs of the department and then start talking about, you know, well, I don't know if we want a permanent embargo. I don't know if we would want to block all of this access and then you have very loud folks that are on the faculty that speak very strongly about why that needs to be the case. So I, like as the grad school, we often just put it back in their accord at the department and then the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and say, you know, you folks need to figure this out and then come to us with a proposal of what we could then work with GW and the libraries to see how we can, you know, meet your needs. But that certainly comes up every couple of years. They certainly have big restrictions at UF on that. But like I said, they often are arguing even further and GW will attest. It became not just the creative writing students but then the students that had been creative writing students at the master's level now moving into the PhD in English and they have what, a 15-year embargo because of that available to them at our institution. All right. So for OhioLink, because we're at a different level, we have to consider all the institutions who are using our platform. So for us, even though I might hear from a student offhand, I usually send them back to the different schools because that's where all the policies come from. There are timelines. Everything is all unique to them. So anything that would come up would come through the administrators themselves. A good point about the technical thoughts behind this is, you know, at OhioLink, we're blessed to have some developers that we can work with and so we're able to get on their project schedule. We work with them for other OhioLink things. We're part of the OTEC consortium in Ohio and so we share infrastructure and developers and a technical IT support, especially overnight when all of us OhioLink staff go home. They still have the OTEC answering calls on our behalf, making sure nothing fails and if it does, they'll get it worked on right away, that kind of stuff. And because of that, we have these developers that know the OhioLink platforms very well. The ET Center is homegrown. They've built it themselves, these developers, and last summer we rebuilt the whole platform to make it faster and things work better. Different layouts and putting in digital accessibility for the users and so it's really, sometimes it becomes the schools themselves want to do certain things. They have certain needs that they think the ET Center should be meeting and so part of it is working within them and within Council to figure out what features do we need, what can we go for, and then OhioLink then coordinates with the developers to say what's possible, how long is this going to take, is it a heavy lift or not? I ask for this, what seems to be a little thing and they say the database isn't set up like that, that's actually going to take a really long time, really big effort, you know, is that worth the value back to the schools and then we kind of have to sometimes negotiate that, you know, I want to give you one thing, it would be really useful, but do all the schools want it or need it and then can we build it and how quickly can we build it, what's it going to take especially with the schedule because the developers serve all of OTEC and so it's not just our OhioLink platforms, we also have to share them with the rest of our OTEC consortium. So some of it is negotiating that stuff as well but thankfully we can, as OhioLink, work so directly with everyone that most of the time we're able to compromise and work things out with very few things that aren't actually able to be handled. So as I said before, we want to prioritize the grad students but the voices that come through the loudest would be the faculty, right? And it's not a bad thing, it's because they're defending their students and if you keep hearing complaints from a specific department, something is not right there. I used to have a format reviewer who worked from Florida. She used to retire. She was really great at her job but she would complain about this particular department and said every time the student hands in I have to send a major reject and she was frustrated, the students were frustrated, the faculty was frustrated. The English department also started having the same issues with the creative writing because the guidelines that we had set up were not meeting your needs and usually when these cases come to me they come at crunch time and I can't do anything about it but I make a note and then I go back to the faculty and it's like what's going on, right? And if you start talking to them you'll start hearing there's something not right because of the discipline. They are doing it a certain way and your rigid rules are not helping them, right? And so I started talking to history and I started talking to creative writing and they started telling me stories about the way research is written in their discipline and it completely blew my mind. It's not your typical way, the way that they structure it's kind of like a story flow. I says wait, I can create something that will meet both your needs but it's not always the case either because then history says we are journal style and creative is creative though. We don't want to be associated. Then I say the template I'm creating for you is just like a very blank canvas with some presets there to help your students make it easier. No. So we went back and forth with the grad council trying to get the template approved trying to get the name approved I'm like I'm done. I just want to help the students. The template is called third template and the file is called third template. You choose your battles. You choose your battles. We went back and forth with the names. One would say yes, we're okay with that. The other would say no, we don't want to be associated with that. But essentially the template is just trying to tell you here's how you put your headers, here's how you put your whatever and you can name it however you can put however many chapters in there. But we got that settled. Another issue is that faculty do things very differently in different departments depending on the kind of sponsors. So you have sponsored research but then you have also labs that are not working the same way. Labs work across the United States. Their collaborators are across labs not just Iowa State. And so I get fearful when my dean says we need to meet with this dean because there's an issue. And so I go into the mediums like what's going on and they say your requirements are too rigid. We can't produce this. Wait, what can't you produce? You're requiring us to give documentation that we have how many percent collaboration? The student did 50 percent. Well I can't put a number on it. So that is not our goal to punish you. We're just trying to help our students make sure they tell their audience how much work they put in it. What is their role? And so if this template of consent is not accurate tell me how it works in your lab. And so I can work another template there. It doesn't matter which template you use. What matters to me is that my student is protected when their ETD goes into the library they're not going to say okay I've seen this research before it's in the different pieces for dissertation. How come your student is doing that? Share consent. And so that's what we need to do. Again prioritize your faculty. They think you are the boogeyman. But when you say I'm here to support your students let me know what you need. Listen to them. Listen to their needs. And then you start saying this is what you need. Here's the mock-up. Tell me if this fits. If it doesn't. Here are other stakeholders you need to bring in to have this conversation so that we can move forward. Once you have a proposal that you're happy with then obviously you need to go to the channels that bless it. Here at Iowa State it goes through the grad council. Nothing skips the grad council. So it then becomes my job to put this proposal in place so that we can get the blessings of my stakeholders bring it all the way to the next channel of stakeholders. So faculty, students. What GW was saying that is true. We're very much concerned about the readers. In fact I think at this conference I spent all of my evening last night talking about how we've got to improve accessibility and ensure that we're meeting those standards. So that is something that definitely for Ohio Inc. it's definitely something that we get from the development side of things and thinking about the use of our platform. So we have two platforms. We have the public ETD center and then we also have the back end the submission site that the admins really live in and use and all the students that submit go through that as well before it goes up on our published public site. And the public ETD center is the public ETD center is open access and almost entirely full text. So we do allow for abstract only submissions but that's only if the school allows it. Yeah I see we're getting some choppy audio. I'm going to try to keep continuing and hopefully it'll pick up better for the development aspects. We think about the website and how it works well. The redesign last summer was entirely centered around that making sure accessibility for the users was front and center. So we wanted to make sure that that was a main component to the redesign because the ETD center last summer celebrated 20 years which blows my mind. And we have over 100,000 ETDs now that are all open access and available. So that is definitely something when thinking about it from a platform standpoint all of our files are downloadable. So anything they're mostly the PDFs still that get submitted but we have supplemental files of any format that can be accepted. The council has recommended formats and even details such as like compression or maybe preferred file type to make sure that things are common enough format that we can carry it forward if we need to in preservation and thinking about formats later or even just openable later. So that happens all through each institution with approving the submissions and working with their students. But we do have some of those best practices into place as well. We also have an ORCID ID that is optional but some of our schools are requiring it and so that this plays on the public site when you go look up the students BTD you see their name, their retention of files around the side the abstract in the middle there's citations down below for the common formats that you might cite a work in to just help get it out there more, make that easier and the ORCID link is right at the top if they included it, they click it and if the students keeping it up or if they publish in a journal and that's adding citations and building that way. So trying to think of both the readers and the authors as we put the public site together and of course making sure the submission is smooth and that site works well. That also got revised last summer in the refresh too and you can ask Icy Terry and Tim and Kim in the room ask any of them how it's working they're the ones to talk to about on the ground how it works with their students and the smoothness I can talk about it from a different level but they've got the actual stories So I piggyback on Stacey's comment that the upcoming thing is about digital accessibility and making sure that your readers can't access the works but I'll not speak on that because Stacey mentioned that so I'll talk a little bit about thinking about picking up a dissertation or a thesis right Assume that somebody who's going to pick up the reader who's going to pick it up is going to read from beginning to end it's not always the case if you're a researcher researching on the topic you've got a whole list of things you're going to skim through So as an ETDA person trying to think about new guidelines or arcade guidelines consider how the reader interacts with that manuscript okay are you really going to expect them to read and search everything that they need to know or are they just going to pick up and say I can't figure it out We have the journal style dissertation that Stacey yesterday defined as a manuscript chapters So in thinking about something simple like this how do you organize a dissertation that has independent chapters that contain So everything that's pertinent to that chapter has to stay there you cannot assume that if I'm going to pick up your dissertation, I'm going to read all three chapters I might only read chapter 4 So everything I need to know has to be there has to be disclosed upfront whether it's been published whether it's going to be published whether it's under review, whether it's not going to see the light of day whether it's in progress everything make it upfront for the reviewer So in trying to maintain standards across the institution we think about those kind of things from the perspective of our readers What helps our readers enjoy interacting with this manuscript even in a small bit of time That's what guides us I said okay, sounds good So the creative writing seems to be not going to be from the side of it I don't want to talk too loud about that but anyway we've had a different experience and then I'll just say finish with the wall of the reader I think that's a great question and because when you think about the formatting the formatting guidelines really are a different reader I mean it's to make our documents look good but it's there for the reader to be able to access that document very cleanly and as a matter of fact we've the last few years I keep saying we've got it in our formatting guidelines there are so many things there are can stuff that you talked about we really care if the header is in the center or on the left as long as it's consistent we want consistency we want them to look good we want the title page to look good so we can tell us it's an Ohio State document but beyond that we've tried to loosen things up we want some structure so it looks good but we also want to make it so that students, I don't know if any of you noticed in the last few years supplemental files submitted supplemental figures that must be a thing in certain disciplines that's happening so I said you know we don't want to straightjacket them into this figure they've got to remember them also if they want to say something fine just be consistent and that probably helps with somebody in the discipline who is who is playing that document because the student is formatting that's what I understand so I think it's very important to do this in the format what I think would happen is for sure thank you for lunch thank you anybody else I'm the director of economic relations but I especially appreciate the focus of this panel we'd like to have the support of open access but of course we are talking folks about the fact that our audience is different from it it simply adds to the way that you can provide your research because it is a proprietary database our customers have very high expectations for reader experience and what that means is we focus a lot on reader experience so one of the things that we've done in the last year is it allows the reader to immediately see which dissertations are associated and what the foundational research underlines that this is a sort of thing that I think many of us who are who took graduate programs would have loved to have had the paging through pages of references looking for to see this work so yeah I just wanted to underscore that and share one other thing our former vice president used to call the authors of the thesis and dissertations the heroes of the work that we do I imagine that a lot of folks in this room would feel that same way the authors themselves are never to be forgotten the heroes of all of this so with OhioLink being at a different level I also hear from different campuses and they have different circumstances and it's fun to be able to see those different perspectives but it's sometimes difficult because it is based on people and it depends on your circumstances and just the right mix sometimes to go a step farther depends on relationships sometimes too we'll have some campuses that say I work so closely with my library and another institution will say I can't make a connection at the library I'm in the grad school and they just won't talk to me about it and it's just I can't get something started how do I do it and sometimes campus politics or the way things are done or the people that are currently there it's just a mix that's not quite right and that's the tough part to just say like sometimes it's just kind of based on what goes on on your campus and how things work or if a policy needs to go through the grad council versus a smaller shop that might be able to just create something off the cup as needed and make it a policy right away to put it into place sooner so it's all unfortunately dependent but I think that's a good question because there's something that came up recently and it was one of those I said you know we just haven't talked about it in a while sure we can try talking about it again and seeing so it's that periodically either checking in or especially when there's a change somewhere sometimes that shifts enough or just dependent on the year you know all of a sudden everyone's talking ETDs and it doesn't matter so much to the department anymore because there's that value in being found online and sometimes it's good to have a little interest in a manuscript because when you write a publication sometimes it's extremely different from the actual ETD that was originally formed right so sometimes being open access doesn't harm the work and we do have embargoes in place in case someone needs or wants one so I mean that kind of give and take but it just unfortunately kind of depends do you want to so I'm going to say you know we all wear multiple hats right so sometimes you just have to choose your battles and the most urgent ones you can pick and start doing your research you have to do your research there's a reason why you don't talk about it because it's so many generations ago things have been buried and think about your predecessors why did they not address those things because those things pop up at the wrong time when you have no time to deal with it right so when you actually do have an opportunity to explore and investigate you can start going back to figure out where did that come from where is the evidence is it made public is it a mandate is it a guideline can you flex on it who do you talk to and as you explore all these aspects you start getting a bigger picture of like well somebody just created this actually it's not important well okay out with it right or figure out who's the one can say yes my blessings go out with it right or no it's a mandate so therefore you need to start following protocols wait protocols are not in place you start figuring out what the protocols are so that it needs the mandate and you put it public nobody's going to challenge you on it but you also still need to go through the proper channels and then get blessings on it right in a different world in a different hat that I wear it has to do with testing and that was it we always made it a recommendation because we didn't think that we have any powers to implement that recommendation well I always got challenged on it from the students from the faculty from the department why do this right and then I started exploring and digging and digging and you know what it was a mandate from the board of regions it was right there so I drafted the whole page to outline the mandate and how we are helping to meet the mandate right it's now up there anytime I get more questions I say read that the department read that faculty read that they don't challenge me anymore it's the same with the ETD rules right if they are challenging you do your research why are they challenging you okay then explore talk to other people is this correct way is this not talking about accessibility and arcade rules double spacing huge issue some people like it some people don't I have to go and form a focus group just to figure that out right and then go to the grad council I haven't done that yet I have a list of people who want to be on the focus group but there are so many things that I have to keep slamming down right but in the meantime digital accessibility came up so I go to my digital accessibility coordinator say give me the guideline what is digitally accessible because that is a mandate in two years Iowa State has to meet the mandate I'm going to start now what is your mandate I will go with that when I do the focus group I would have come up with a proposal in my pocket but I'm going to listen to the people right the ones who say why do you have two lines I understand that we've explored that here's the here's the mandate that we have to meet so sorry no deal not one not two we're going to go with 1.5 certain things you can fudge on certain things you can't do research which I just wanted to add one thing when Emily talked about the stress that sometimes the grad school in the libraries have that breaks my heart to hear that because in our case we try to ensure that we're meeting regularly we make sure that there's a big E.T.D. stakeholders we have a working group they meet each semester regardless of whether we think there's stuff on the horizon and the one stakeholders that I think we didn't really talk about here are also our supervisors our deans the people we have responsibility to ensure we're working together with the libraries and ensure that you know we're meeting our deans requirements while they are simultaneously meeting the requirements of their dean as well the dean that's part of your quality in front of the presenter so come on up here please come up here maybe you'll go I don't have any stage correction here as well and then everybody can hear each other and just have a seat and actually we'll broadcast yeah when you're talking about stakeholders in general on the campus or even when you're dealing with stakeholders and I can see that you have for Ohio you have a council set up so that you take a lot of people in an umbrella type of environment for example everybody becomes a stakeholder everybody is together as a stakeholder and you've got them in one tent so to speak and we do that with our E.T.D. advisory committee and anybody that's a stakeholder on our campus such as a teaching and learning center or the library or whoever it happens to be at that time is brought in as an ex-officio member of that advisory committee now the advisory committee itself is made up of a group of students and a group of faculty who have voting power okay in terms of advising with E.T.D. policies but it's very important to bring all of those stakeholders under one tent so to speak and I think that the E.T.D. program in general should kind of aim in that direction rather than trying to go to everybody else all over campus bring everybody in under one umbrella deal with issues so that's my two cents for it that's great thank you that's a great point and I think you're very lucky to have that set up on campus sometimes it seems especially working with our various institutions based on even the grad school and or even if it so two thirds of our institutions for E.T.D. center are run through the graduate school or the graduate college and only a third are run through the library but either way it seems it is often just a portion of someone's job and there might only be one staff member doing it and it is part of a requirement to graduate and so I think on some campuses it's not an afterthought but it's already part of a process that's built in and it might not have enough time or departmental structure to allow for these larger conversations sometimes just based on what happens and so that staffing can be really crucial I think and it's excellent that you have this local advisory committee that you can do with multiple stakeholders talking about E.T.D.'s I just don't think it's possible on some campuses or hasn't been done yet maybe it's possible but you've got to work on it and if you don't have additional staff and it's just part of your job and you've got to run the grad school or you're a librarian and you just have to get these things in and approved it's a very different place to live in sometimes so it goes back to that campus culture it seems to me that E.T.D.'s could be their own department in some ways given how much work everyone puts in and to really get into some of this or to have its own professional space and we're lucky to have these conferences but it always seems all too brief for me and just a slice of everyone's job so that's kind of what's stuck out to me over the years I wish it'll keep growing I hope so because it sounds like everyone could always do more and wants to do more but it also takes that time and people effort too Thank you So we're nearing the end We're nearing the end