 time to get started. Welcome everybody. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information and you have reached one of the project briefing sessions for week two, day three of the Coalition for Networked Information's full 2020 virtual member meeting. Week two focuses on organizational and professional transformations and certainly this fits right in perfectly with those themes. A couple of logistical things. We are recording this session. The recording will be publicly available later. There is closed captioning available. There is chat running and please feel free to use the chat to introduce yourself, share pointers, add comments as the discussion goes on. We have a question and answer tool and please feel free to post questions at any time. However, we will address all the questions after we've had the four presentations when Diane Goldenberghardt from C&I will beam into existence and moderate the question and answer session. With that, let me move on to introduce our presenters in the session. This is a session that really centers on collaborations between libraries and the Office of Research in the context of these sort of emerging interdisciplinary research teams that some of our major research universities are trying to encourage that work on complex important multi-dimensional problems and we'll see some good examples of that here. We have four presenters as you can see here. Kinnerette Ben-Con, Angela Clark Hughes, Kelly Miller, and James Sabza. All of them from the University of Miami. With that, I will just thank our presenters for joining us and turn it right over to Kelly Miller. Thank you so much, Cliff, for that introduction. I'm so delighted to be here. Hopefully everyone can hear me. Yeah, okay. I'm the Associate Dean for Learning and Research Services at the University of Miami Libraries in Coral Gables, Florida. I'm very delighted to be joined this afternoon by my three colleagues from the University of Miami. We're here today to report on the results of an ongoing experiment between the Office of Research and the UM Libraries to explore roles for librarians on interdisciplinary research teams working to solve grand challenges. I will offer the perspective of an administrator responsible for helping develop a collaborative relationship with the Office of Research on campus. Angela and James will describe their own participation on individual teams and Kinnerette will discuss the ways that we've assessed our collaboration. And then we'll conclude with a time for Q&A. So thank you so much for being here. We're really encouraged by the attendance and your presence here. So before we dive into the topic, I will advance the slide here. And let me share a few facts about the University of Miami. It's a private not-for-profit R1 institution located on three campuses, including a downtown medical campus, a central campus in Coral Gables, and a marine and atmospheric science research campus. The University research expenditures in 2019 were approximately 350 million. We have seven libraries that support 11 schools and colleges, and we have more than 17,000 students and 16,000 faculty and staff members. The program that we'll describe today is based on collaboration between the University of Miami's Office of the Vice Provost for Research and the UM Libraries. The seed of the collaboration was planted when Susan Morgan, then Associate Provost for Research and a professor in the School of Communication, came to the libraries to discuss with us the possibilities for collaborating around a new strategic initiative called ULink that the University was launching. In our conversations, Susan described some of the key questions her office was asking. How can the University advance solutions to societal problems or grand challenges? What is necessary to stimulate team-based interdisciplinary research and what do researchers need to be successful? The questions for me then were how might librarians contribute to this effort and more specifically, could this be an opportunity for subject librarians or liaison librarians in particular to participate in research in new ways and to experiment with new roles? Over the last several decades, librarianship has been adapting to meet the changing needs of 21st century researchers by building expertise in such areas as scholarly communication, data management, and digital scholarship. It appears to us that a new area of exploration is library support for interdisciplinary research. What do interdisciplinary researchers need as they are working on pressing global challenges like climate change and systemic racism? And how can librarians help address these needs and reimagine their own roles in response? So the new strategic initiative that the Office of Research was about to launch was called the University's Laboratory for Integrative Knowledge Initiative, also known as ULink. The goal of this program is to address the world's most compelling problems through interdisciplinary inquiry. Teams of scholars from multiple disciplines receive funding to pursue solutions to the problems they identify. As Susan talked with me about what the university leadership hoped these teams might accomplish, I mused aloud to Susan whether librarians might be able to join the teams to learn and provide support. She thought the idea sounded extremely intriguing and suggested that we go ahead and try it. The first set of teams had just been selected, but had not yet received their grant notifications. So Susan thought it was feasible to invite librarians to join each team as part of the grant award notification process. In essence, the librarians would become part of the infrastructure offered to support the program. As a result of this strategic conversation, librarians have been part of the ULink program since its beginning in January 2018. In the first three years of ULink's existence, as a requirement of the grant program, librarians have been embedded on each of the award-winning teams. This opportunity has provided librarians with direct knowledge of the needs and demands of their teams, and the experience has allowed them to deepen their relationships with research faculty members and courageously experiment with new ways to share their expertise and their skills. This is an overview of the vision for the ULink program, and I'll just emphasize several of the key elements. As I mentioned, the programs focused on grant challenges that require multiple disciplines to interact with one another in the creation of solutions. And typically with these teams, there are at least three disciplines involved, and then funding for research teams is provided in several phases. The first phase offers fundings for teams to develop their concept while team building, and the second phase provides funds for teams to begin implementation of the proposed experiment or project, creating prototypes or collecting preliminary data. So one of the supports for the for the teams is training in the science of team science. Science of team science is based in emerging scholarship on how scientists, social scientists, humanists, and others work together across disciplines to solve complex problems. An annual science of team science conference is now taking place. We presented at the most recent conference in May, discussing the question of what role the librarian might play on teams, and our session was attended by a mix of faculty members, administrators, and librarians. The next conference will take place in June 2021. The U-Link vision also includes a commitment to fostering team interaction and bonding. We created spaces in the UM libraries for teams to gather and work together. This is a picture of the faculty exploratory where U-Link teams met regularly prior to COVID-19, and we expect they'll be back post COVID-19. This aspect of the program connects with our UM library's long-term vision and planning for a future renovation of the third floor of Richter library, our largest library, to create a research commons where faculty can meet and collaborate across the disciplines. The program has funded more than a dozen interdisciplinary research teams. As a senior administrator, I served on the U-Link action team, a committee that was facilitated by the VP for research. We reviewed each application to the program and advised on the program's development. So the library is actively involved in the selection of teams. This is a chart showing each of the three rounds of phase one funding between 2018 and 2020. Topics have included the ailing health of the oceans, facial profiling, and other societal issues. Faculty participants have been drawn from across the university's 11 disciplinary schools, and nearly a dozen librarians have been involved as team members. So now I'd like to hand the microphone to my librarian faculty colleagues, both subject librarians who have served as U-Link librarians. They'll provide their own perspective on the roles they've played and the contributions they've made. So, Angela. Good afternoon. Thank you, Kelly. I am Angela Clark Hughes, the director of the Rosenstil School Library at the University of Miami. I've been in academic libraries now over 30 years, and it is, as the picture that Kelly showed earlier, a beautiful campus. The Rosenstil School is a graduate school, and we're located about 40 minutes from our main campus on a barrier island called Virginia Key, but the school has a presence on the main campus as well for our undergraduate program. So there is a great deal of back and forth between the campuses. As Kelly mentioned, UM launched its U-Link program in 2018, and at that time I was assigned to two teams the first year of the program. Both had marine science focused, but overall I've been on four very interesting and very different research teams. I was on a team integrating ocean and human health, focusing on the aerosolization of harmful algal blooms, a team researching coastal resilience, employing reef restoration strategies that combine gray, cement-based, and green nature-based defenses to reduce the impact of ocean waves. This team has just completed its third and final year with U-Link funds and continues through extramural funding. Recently in 2020, I was invited to join a team looking to develop integrated solutions for sustainably feeding the world using aquaculture, focusing on coastal communities directly affected by fishing declines due to overfishing, climate change, and environmental degradation. This team has just applied for phase two funding. Next slide. And lastly, in 2019, I was asked to be a member of this U-Link team, hyperlocalism, transforming the paradigm for climate adaptation. We represent the atmospheric sciences, architecture, English, communication studies, marine geosciences, and information sciences. In phase two, we added to our team a GIS and mapping librarian and a PhD student who's also in communications. The PhD student is funded through the U-Link program for all teams reaching phase two. So we are a very large team with a lot of research experience on a senior level. But the difference with this team was the immediate team dynamic. The first phase of U-Link, as Kelly mentioned, puts an emphasis on the science of team science, essentially building and solidifying the team before the research even begins. And while that could be very clunky with newly assembled groups of individuals, we managed to organize very well. But we couldn't truly be hyperlocal without working closely within communities and with organizations that also saw the need to approach climate adaptation from a people-first perspective to bring community voices to the forefront. To do that, we partnered with advocacy groups that were working to inform and empower individuals in climate change awareness, the Clio Institute, Catalyst Miami, and resilience officers and teams from the city of Miami and Miami-Dade County. With the team fully assembled, we explored the gaps between current policy and neighborhood interests and assessed the potential impact on a granular scale or hyperlocal scale. Next slide, please. So our team created an integrated climate risk assessment protocol, ICRA, by mapping several parameters that are, you see listed here, that could be overlaid to determine the grade of risk in a neighborhood. This particular map shows the septic systems in the city of Miami with the majority of the systems in need of repair. And we know that these systems are vulnerable to sea level rise and to heavy rain. And when the sea level rises and the water table rises, it greatly affects these systems. So once we determined the most at-risk areas, we then conducted our field studies. Next slide. So the field study portion of this team was by far the most exciting part for me. And this is a part, this picture is our team out exploring on a cloudy day, meeting people with different perspectives. And the team members took this as an adventure. So we were out evaluating storm drains and pumping stations, essentially walking neighborhoods in Miami, noting streets that were flooded, ponding on grass, housing elevations and marking every creek and every canal and every hot spot to familiarize ourselves with the area, with the people that live in the area, the social environment, and the topography. Next slide, please. Then with the help of our community partners who solicited participants, we held a series of workshops focused on these communities. This year, of course, we had to pivot to online workshops, but these workshops we developed with the novel protocol for community engagement using two techniques. The first technique is called photo voice, in which we took participants illustrate their observations through photos that they took of their neighborhood. And then they would caption each photo and were given opportunity to give a brief narrative about the photo that they had taken. So the middle photograph just shows a broken bus bench. And it might not seem problematic at first glance until you meet the woman who stands in the heat or in the rain every day on her way to work. Then that broken bench takes on a new meaning. Then we used a process called design thinking, a method to arrive at possible solutions next course of action for these community members. Next slide. So how have I contributed to this team? I've helped in the development, the testing, and the creation of the ICRA protocol. I co-facilitated the photo voice and design thinking workshops and the subsequent data analysis. I am collaborating on two articles on our protocol and the results of our study. I co-wrote a grant proposal for external funding which we were awarded in January of 2020. Next slide. And because we did receive that funding from AT&T, our team made the UM news. Next slide. So we also created a website to maintain a touch point for all local communities that we will have engagements with and for our partners to stay engaged with us. With the idea that this team and our research will persist beyond the final ULink phase. And with that, I'll turn it over to my colleague, James Sobzak. Hello, everyone. Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is James Sobzak and I am the STEM Librarian at the University of Miami. And before I dive right into my section of today's presentation, I just wanted to give you a brief overview of my background as I think it helps inform how I approach my ULink experience. So as you can see from this slide, I'm relatively new to the library profession having obtained my MLIS in 2018. And I'm also somewhat new to research and scholarship in the STEM fields as well. As my other degree has come from the field of architecture, which is a subject I consider to be a little bit more STEM adjacent rather than a hard science. And finally, I'm also somewhat new to the University of Miami as an institution having taken on this position just a little over two years ago. So the point I'm trying to get at is that I'm very much a early career professional within libraries, and I'm very new to many aspects related to my current job. And to be very honest, this gave me some non-trivial bouts of imposter syndrome when I first started working with these ULink teams, a lot of tenured faculty and multiple PhDs on sitting around the table. So that was a little intimidating at first, but as I got kind of more in the swing of things, that quickly dissipated. And I think also my newness added to the fact that I was kind of fostered a can-do attitude on my part as I was able to take on new roles and responsibilities within a library. And I wasn't so much burdened with any kind of preconceived notions about quote unquote, traditional academic library roles. Next slide, please. Currently, I serve on two ULink teams as a ULink librarian. The first team, which I joined almost immediately upon starting here at UM, is interested in the development of the next generation of coastal structures. And more specifically, this team, which is made up of faculty members from engineering, economics, biology, architecture, and sculpture. This team is researching interventions that holistically address the effects of sea level rise and storm surge mitigation, which are two critical issues facing coastal communities around the globe, but especially here in South Florida. This team has already gone on through one year of phase one funding, and based on our preliminary research, has now been awarded two years of phase two funding. And my second team is looking at plastic usage as part of modern material culture. And it is just hoping to find ways to promote more mindful use of consumer plastics throughout their entire life cycle from production to disposal. This team is composed of faculty from the departments of archaeology, English, chemistry, economics, marine biology, and communications. So as you can see, a lot of these teams are very interdisciplinary and actually quite big. Next slide, please. So how do I as a librarian contribute as a team member? And I do emphasize and underline the word team member, because ULink, as a program, really does strive to view librarians as full-fledged team members on its projects, not just kind of ancillary support staff. The first and foremost thing that I think I contributed to as a librarian is that I helped with my team's initial literature searches, because this is interdisciplinary team science. Everyone comes to the table with their own preferred resources, databases they go to, default research practices, and so on. So having a librarian as somewhat of a neutral party allowed the team members to find articles and research materials that they might not otherwise have explored because they had been outside of their normal purview. Another service that I provided was the coordination and setup of specific library spaces in which to hold our weekly face-to-face meetings, thus emphasizing the library's role as kind of a collaborative hub on campus for everyone, both faculty and students. And while space coordination might seem somewhat insignificant, I can't really emphasize how much and how important it was to get everyone in the same room on a weekly basis sitting around a table, sitting around a white board, really hashing out ideas, especially in the early stages of this project. And while COVID has made this face-to-face interaction a little impractical or impossible, in our case, the habit of meeting weekly face-to-face has continued on into Zoom. So kind of starting those practices early has just moved right on into the digital realm. Through participating ULink, I've also got the opportunity to contribute to the scholarly output of my team, and this has included helping author various articles, presentations, and even in the case of my plastics as material culture team, we recently collaborated together on an op-ed piece that was published in the Miami Herald, which was a very exciting opportunity, as that was my first time to really kind of directly engage with this particular form of science communication to a larger, more general audience. But where I really think I excelled as an asset to my team was in the creation, documentation, and management of information objects that we generated as a team through the use of kind of new emerging tools and technologies. And I'm going to share two quick examples in the next couple of slides, one of them being 360-degree video and the other being Microsoft team. Next slide, please. Because my next generation coastal structures team needed to document very complex and dynamic environments along the various coastal sites that we visited on our various field trips. I had the idea of leveraging our library's creative studio, which has an audio visual equipment loan program. And this allowed me to introduce our team to our series, our GoPro 360-degree waterproof cameras, which you can kind of see on the screen right here. If you actually visit the site, you can actually orbit around and pan around this image. But this really allowed you to kind of our team to capture the dynamic information that these sites presented in a way that really wasn't available and still imagery. And this allowed us, when we got back to the library to or back online to actually explore these videos and actually revisit these sites in a way that was very dynamic. And this also allowed the, sorry about that, if you could go, you can just leave on this. But one other quick point I want to mention is that through the use of this kind of creative studio equipment, it was kind of a synergy between these two different library programs, one being ULink and one being our creative studio. Because now the faculty know that this equipment is available to them and their students. So here's two different library programs both supporting one another in their endeavors. Next slide please. The other game changer that I think was the introduction of Microsoft Teams as a way to collaboratively document and communicate and share resources as a team. And having the ability to use this platform to informally chat, set up designated channels around specific topics, and store documents in the cloud and back them up was kind of a huge productivity booster for my team. And because we implemented this in 2018 when I first started, this was well before COVID hit. And when COVID did hit the campus, the University of Miami rigorously pushed Microsoft Teams as a campus wide collaborative platform. But because we had adopted it early, my team members already had kind of a leg up on their colleagues in their departments, as they're already familiar with this tool and its capabilities. It just kind of just shows how kind of early adoption of new technologies and tools can often yield kind of unexpected dividends later down the road. Next slide please. So what did I personally gain as a librarian from my ULink experience? Well, first and foremost, it was a great way to directly engage with my faculty. If they could see me as a productive collaborator in these kind of intimate team settings in ULink, I feel them much more likely to reach out to me and see me as a collaborator in other research endeavors that they might be engaged with on campus. ULink also helped me learn a lot more about the subject areas I liaison with, as I said, I come from architecture. So a lot of these disciplines were something very new to me and just kind of their research practices was something I wasn't familiar with. But just through the informal conversations with my ULink team, those kind of five minute chats before or after a meeting starts, it really gave me a much clearer insight to their and their respective departments, research interests, and things that they might be working on. And this has allowed me, I think, to become more informed and kind of sagacious librarian from a resource allocation and collection development perspective. The next bullet point touches on the science of teen science topic that Kelly mentioned a little bit earlier. Not only did I get to learn about the latest research in the science of team science through the workshops and guest lectures hosted by ULink, but I also got to participate in the actual team building and formation processes firsthand on these teams. And then I could take these skills and apply those to other projects I might be working in within the library. So kind of a crossover from ULink into my professional practice as a librarian. And finally, ULink gave me the opportunity like this presentation today to present the contributions of academic librarians to research endeavors in higher education and hopefully kind of expand interest in similar projects at other institutions. Next slide. And with all that said, I just had one final slide that I wanted to include to indicate that ULink as any program of its size and scope was not necessarily without its fair share of challenges. And as I hopefully continue with both my old teams and new ULink teams in the future, or if I was advising anyone looking to join similar interdisciplinary science teams at their own institutions, I would try and be mindful of the following points. First of which is to realize that there's no one best way to be a librarian on any of these interdisciplinary science teams. What works really well for one team could be completely unworkable for another. Each team has its own unique combination of skills, expertise, and personality types that it brings to the table. So as a librarian, you need to be flexible with your role and find whatever niche works best for you and your team. Second, sometimes you just kind of have to put yourself out there as a librarian and try ideas and see what works or what catches on with the teams. Sometimes this is the only way to demonstrate your skills and hidden talents that you as a librarian as well as a person bring to the table. Because like it or not, most faculty members and researchers on campus only have a very rudimentary understanding of what we as librarians can do as librarians, let alone as individuals or persons. And finally, I want to emphasize that you cannot take kind of a slow research pace or failures too much to heart when you're working on these types of teams. Interdisciplinary science by its very nature is a tricky thing to get right. Otherwise, every wicked problem in the world would already be taken care of. So you just have to realize that failing may not feel great. It never does, but it's just kind of part of the process. And it's not a reflection of your personal skills or talents. And just like with team sports, not every team makes it to the championship match. Neither does every U-Link team go on to get repeat funding year after year. That's just the kind of the nature and the endeavor. And you have to kind of get used to that as a librarian because we're not used to working in this type of environment. And with that, I think I've spoken long enough on my particular U-Link experiences. So I'll turn it over to Kenra now to talk about assessment. Well, thank you, James. Hello, everyone. My name is Kenra Ben-Knan, and I'm the assessment librarian at the University of Miami Libraries. And I'll be presenting on our U-Link assessment activities and findings. U-Link opportunity has opened new avenues for all librarians to collaborate with researchers and become their partners. It has also opened the door for U-M libraries to gain insight into interdisciplinary research and its challenges. This insight knowledge has informed our library renovation planning. It will guide our professional development investment and help the library's better response to interdisciplinary research needs in the future. In 2018 and 2019, we conducted surveys and focus groups to learn about librarians' experience on the teams. We wanted to know about librarians' roles, benefits to the teams, challenges, and how the library can better support our librarians in these emerging roles. To examine these questions, we developed... Kelly, go back again. To examine these questions, we developed an open-ended survey instrument distributed annually to librarians who participated in the program. The results of the survey accumulated from two consecutive annual activities. In addition, a semi-structured focus group with 11 U-Link librarians was also conducted. We asked only several guided questions to encourage our librarians to share their U-Link experience and allow them to learn about their colleagues' experience on U-Link. The focus groups led to an open and enriching dialogue that lasted two hours. It was extremely valuable and supplemented our understandings of the survey results. Next slide. We found that librarians contribute to interdisciplinary research teams in diverse ways, but that the contribution clustered in three main areas. The first one, finding and accessing information resources across disciplines. The second, connecting teams to experts and resources. And the third one, improving collaboration and communication strategies. This first area is not surprising, but the second to our particularly interesting and promising. Librarians are serving as connectors and also serving to help the team cohere and engage more meaningfully. Next slide. During the focus groups, challenges and barriers to a successful partnerships between librarians and research teams have surfaced. Several librarians express frustrations over the level of inclusions on their teams. Some mentioned the need to determine clearer expectations. What is exactly the role of librarians on interdisciplinary research teams? This question does not have a general answer as each librarian comes with different expertise and skill sets. Librarians also discuss the differences between them and other team members regarding compensations, shared authorship and grants. Should rewards be different? In most cases, they were different. Lack of confidence in their own abilities and skill to participate as a research team member was another issue we discussed. However, we noticed that concerns related to soft confidence faded once librarians gained more experience. Lastly, we learned that leadership changes in our administration, in our university, may also influence the librarians' participation on this or other similar projects in the future, regardless on our contribution, inclusions and value. Next slide. With this finding, we were able to refine our descriptions on the U-Link librarian program to educate faculty members applying for a U-Link grant about the beneficial roles that librarians can't play on their teams. On this informational sheet distributed to applicants, librarians are quoted about how they contributed to their teams by connecting their teams to community stakeholders, conducting extensive literature searches and identifying and managing project collaborations software for the teams. Next slide. In the context of science of team science, prior research studies have examined the value of adding a knowledge bridging collaborators such as librarians to scientific teams. One study indicated that participation of a bridge builder or knowledge broker such as librarians contributed to their successful integration in teams. Librarians who know how to ask questions about disciplines other than their own serves as integration specialists. With their unique skill sets and neutral vantage points, librarians can help teams address some of the most common challenges they face, including how to manage large teams, navigate difficulty communicating with team members, and find a common language with which to address the proposed problem. Another way to describe the role of librarians might be as cultural translators who are necessary for breaking down silos on all sorts, in this case between discipline and for the benefits of society. Next slide. While our finding about ULink librarians have helped us understand their present contribution and their prospective roles on interdisciplinary research teams, we recognize that we are still missing the researchers' reflections and feedback, those non-librarians' faculty on ULink teams. So already this year we have partners once again with Susan Morgan, the former associate provost for research and an enthusiastic supporter of the ULink librarians' initiative to develop a set of survey questions related to the involvement of librarians on ULink. These new questions were added and distributed as part of the annual ULink survey that has been fielded by the university office of research since 2018. So we distributed it just recently this year. We asked faculty questions like if they are clear about librarians' responsibilities and expertise on their teams, how do teams benefit from librarians' involvement, and whether their perceptions about them, the librarians, have changed over time. We also wanted to know their views on what might hinder the involvement of librarians on ULink now or in the future. Representatives from 11 out of 17 ULink teams have responded to the survey, a total of 33 participants. Librarians did not receive this portion of the survey. It is too early to report the survey results as we are now in the process of analyzing them. Selected open-ended comments are shown here in this slide. Though we are very encouraged by many of the responses we received, it is important to note that all faculty reported a successful integration, some viewed initiative in a less positive light, largely due to the lack of guidance and clarity on what the librarians can do for their teams. We noticed that gap exists between potentiality and actuality, between researchers' understanding of what libraries, librarians, could have done for their projects. Next slide. As mentioned, many comments alluded to significant potential benefits of having librarians on interdisciplinary research teams. Still, more investment on the following are needed to sustain these types of partnerships, clarifying the role of librarians on interdisciplinary research teams even more, supporting professional development and scholarships in the area of interdisciplinary research teams, science of team science fields, training librarians and offering educational opportunities related to research practices, perhaps even offering internships opportunities for librarians who are fit and trained to be on interdisciplinary research teams. Finding the right match is critical, not all librarians fit to join interdisciplinary research teams just as not all researchers fit to do interdisciplinary research, being conscious of institutional and structural barriers and make efforts to overcome those in creative ways. See you, Kelly. So, thank you. Thank you, Ken and Angela and James. And the librarians have been called pioneers by university administrators who designed the ULink program. Dr. John Bixby, our former vice provost for research, confessed in this local news story that initially he didn't expect the librarians to become such important ULink partners, but he said each of them has added content expertise to the team in which he or she is embedded and our teams have reported that the librarians have become a critical aspect of their team. So, what's next? Our next steps for our ULink librarian collaboration with the Office of Research involved connecting with our new VP for research, Dr. Aaron Kobetz, a medical faculty member, to develop the next iteration of the ULink program. Aaron's reviewed the data from the first three years, met with faculty researchers who participated, and begun to make some adjustments to the program design. In the current academic year, ULink is sponsoring a round of grants focused on the particular theme of social equity in response to the call for racial justice. So, this year there's this particular theme. For this round of grants, building off lessons learned, we created a more flexible, versatile set of options for the ways that the team can engage with the library and ways for librarians to be involved with the program. First, librarians were invited to serve as expert application reviewers for the interdisciplinary research grant applications and many librarians have expressed appreciation for being included in this way. Second, instead of being a requirement, teams can choose now to add an embedded librarian on their teams. Two of the teams have chosen this path confirming that our three-year experiment is bearing fruit. Teams are opting to have librarians on board. Third, we are offering another form of library support for ULink beginning in January. We'll be learning from similar programs at Kansas, Minnesota, and Michigan, and we'll be offering research sprints to interested teams as a pilot. And this model is probably well known to this audience that where with research sprints teams can apply to work with the library on a particular challenge they're facing in their work. And then teams will receive targeted short-term help by selected librarians working together in intensive sessions over the course of two days. And then finally, thanks to our experimental collaboration with the Office of Research and the ULink program. We're beginning to revise our plans for our faculty research commons because we now have new insights about the types of services and spaces that faculty need. So this concludes our presentation. We're really grateful for the enthusiastic response with your large number of people who have attended today or just would love to hear from you about whether in what ways you're experimenting in this space. We'd love more conversation about it across institutions. So thank you so much. And now I'll turn it to Diane for Q&A. Thanks, Kelly. And thank you to all of our wonderful speakers today, Angela, Kinnereth, and James. Thanks for that wonderful talk. Really inspiring project going on there at Miami. And so please that you were able to share that with our community today. And as Kelly said, the floor is now open for questions. So please type your questions into the Q&A box. We'd love to hear your experience if you have a similar project, if you're thinking of doing something like this at your campus, or if you have questions about how to get something like this going or what's involved. We'd love to hear it. Clem just chatted in. Thank you, Clem, for that very interesting work. How receptive have librarians been on taking on this type of role? So, well, I can say a few words and then I'd love for Angela and James because this is one of the reasons we include, you know, Angela and James were at the center of the presentation today because we wanted their voices to be shared and heard. So actually, I would love instead of me commenting, Angela and James, would you like to say something? I think the librarians are very receptive. And as James mentioned in his slide, ULink, that model is definitely not for every researcher to do interdisciplinary research, nor is it really for every librarian to be on a ULink team. So I think you'll find those who really want to roll up their sleeves, get involved, try something new, learn a lot, interact with people who just may, they may never come in contact with. I think you'll find more than enough willing librarians and then, you know, other people won't be so inclined, but that's the nature of this type of program. Yeah, I can basically echo that same sentiment that a lot of librarians have been really enthusiastic about this and others have been less so, but I think what has kind of been really great about kind of library administration, there's been encouragement to kind of step up and do this work, but there hasn't been pressure to do so. So I feel that librarians are really kind of, if they want to make this part of their daily kind of practice, this highly encouraged. But again, there's been no real pressure to do so. So I just want to say that that's been really kind of beneficial to a lot of people that they didn't feel that they're being forced to do something too much, if it was kind of against what they wanted to do. So. Thank you for those thoughtful reflections, Angela and James. And Clem, thank you for that question. Kelly, did you want to weigh in? I, Angela and James did a great job. It did make me think also reflecting back on James's comment about a posture syndrome and Kendra's report about this gap that exists between expectations and delivery and wondering, you know, in effect, I guess it's sort of a self-selected bunch of librarians who might step up to some kind of opportunity like this, if they either feel like they want to have a new challenge or if they feel they have the wherewithal to deal with something like the imposter syndrome. And it made me wonder, you know, how might, how might libraries begin to address that gap and help give a little boost of confidence to encourage folks who might not naturally want to step into a role like this? Is that something that you have thought about or addressing? Yeah. And I will say a few words about how we've begun to create some structure around that support. So in the first several years, we met monthly as a group of ULink librarians to chat just with ourselves about how things were going. So this was a place that hopefully librarians then could share, okay, this is what's going well. This isn't, this is what's not going well and could have frank conversations. And what was interesting is Susan Morgan often joined us from the Office of Research, which created its own kind of dynamic, but then she was learning too, we were all learning together. So I think those meetings helped. They didn't solve all the struggles, but at least that regular opportunity to share was helpful. And then, yes, I'll just pause there, but we'll actually then shift to maybe Kim would want to say another word or two, because we really do think there's potential here for more professional development opportunities for librarians. So to offer supplementary programs, maybe in the summertime or some of the quieter times in the academic year, when maybe librarians could get training or additional education in something like research communication, for example, or it could be project management as well, but several topics like are quite intriguing to us around research communication as Juan James mentioned that he's, you know, co-written and op-ed, for example, and we think librarians are really well positioned to be these translators. So those are the kinds of exploratory areas we'd like to investigate going forward. I would also say that sometimes you need both sides to be open for collaboration and to open the door for librarians to contribute because you need to educate both sides in those groups. Another thing is that also the research agenda, I think James mentioned that their research agenda needs to be established within the group and they need to have a really good strategy moving forward in order for it to be successful, not only for the librarians within and a good experience, but also for the other researchers within that group. And we always do reflection of ourselves, but we never think of what individual, other individuals in those groups feel about their contributions. So interesting. Thank you for those reflections there. We do still have a little more time if there are other questions. I think I just wanted to ask one more question and then I think we'll probably bring this to a close. I was just wondering, and you may have addressed this and I apologize if I missed it. How are librarians selected? How does that process work? How do people get to work on these teams? Yeah, that's a great question and we've shifted it and learned each year actually. So the first year we didn't have much time because there was this fortuitous conversation with Susan that kicked everything off. So there it was matching, trying to, so as administrators sitting, okay, who might be able to be on this team and then inviting the librarians, would you like to try this out and participate in this experiment? So that first one, we know that was awkward because the teams didn't get to select. The librarians really didn't get much time to consider. So we knew that going forward we needed to be more thoughtful and mindful and planful about it and then we ended up with the research teams being asked to invite a librarian to join them and so then they could issue the invitation and then that helped because then the librarians felt that it came properly, the invitation from the PI of the team. So it's a sort of better way of, more respectful way of doing it and that's actually what's holding true this year with the social equity teams. They, in some cases, just knew exactly who they already wanted to work with so. Terrific. Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, thank you again Kelly, James, Kinnerett, Angela. A terrific project, wonderful presentation. I really loved hearing about it. I'm going to go ahead and bring the public portion of the presentation to a close. I'll turn off the recording and just ask any attendees who have time and are so inclined, please stick around, raise your hand, we can unmute you. You know, you can sort of approach the podium if you like and ask our presenters questions, make some comments, have a little chat. Thank you so much to our attendees for joining us here today. That wraps up today's programming for C&I's fall meeting and we hope we will see you back tomorrow or in the coming weeks. Take care, everyone.