 So, hello everyone. I'm Natasha Simons from the Australian National Data Service and it's my pleasure today to be interviewing Megan O'Donnell who's the Scholarly Communication Librarian and Impact Story Advisor at Iowa State University in the USA. Thank you very much for agreeing to be interviewed Megan. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role as Scholarly Communication Librarian? Sure, thank you. I'm actually a very new librarian. I've only been at Iowa State for about a year and a half. I graduated with my Master's in Library and Information Science in 2013. Iowa State currently has two Scholarly Communication Librarians. I cover the science and technology departments while my co-worker covers the social sciences and humanities. Besides being Scholarly Communication Librarians, we're also subject librarians who do, who have these additional skills on topics such as data management planning, publishing, altmetrics, open access, things like that. And one of the areas I specialise in is helping our researchers prepare data management plans that accompany grant proposals. Our library also has a team that works on largest huge events like open access week as well. Our team is in the second year of its birth. Terrific. It sounds like you have a very busy role and congratulations on being named the Impact Story Advisor of the month for August 2014. How did you first discover Impact Story and what made you decide to become an advisor? So I thought about this. I couldn't actually remember the first time I had heard about Impact Story. I assume it was while I was in school, so it probably came up in one of my classes or a classmate told me about it. One of my co-workers here at Iowa State actually suggested I apply to be an advisor because I don't have a lot of research yet because I'm a new researcher and a new librarian. I hesitated about making a Impact Story profile and also starting maybe a longer path to become an advisor. But I decided that now that I was a librarian I need to commit to these practices such as publishing open access, understanding and using altmetrics, things like that. I decided to be an advisor because I felt it was a fantastic way to learn more about altmetrics and just to dive right in. So what's involved in your role as Impact Story Advisor and how do you carry that role out at Iowa State? Being an advisor is I would say it's probably about as hard or as easy as you make it. And right now, for me, it's about providing insights into what researchers need to the Impact Story team so they can improve their products. And it's also about spreading the word about altmetrics and Impact Story to people at my institution. So when I first started, I talked to actually other librarians about Impact Story and once they changed to like a subscription model, some people had questions about that. We had conversations about it. They also have these great stickers that say I am more than my age index which all of my co-workers wanted. So that was a great way to have conversations about metrics and altmetrics of everyone. And then we're going to be doing a altmetrics workshop next month that's going to culminate in an Impact Story profile for all the participants as a way for them to understand and get a hands-on experience of altmetrics. Oh, fantastic. So the workshop is aimed at the researchers at Iowa State? Yes. We're hoping we're going to get a mix of grad students, researchers and faculty because we do have researchers on campus that don't have faculty status. We think that while they are creating a lot of valuable work, not all of it is citable. And so things, you know, they're creating all this stuff and it's not just cited, it's viewed, it's read, it's downloaded, it's tweeted, it's liked. It has all this other stuff going on that's not currently being captured. So we're hoping that this new generation of scholars and researchers who are already doing things like this will be really excited about altmetrics and in particular Impact Story because it's such a great vehicle to talk about these different metrics we use to talk about scholarly products. Do you think many of them have heard about Impact Story or already have Impact Story profiles before they come to the workshop or will this be for new people, people new to Impact Story? I think it's mostly going to be people new to Impact Story. I think some of them will know about altmetrics. Some of them may have heard of altmetrics, but maybe aren't sure what it means. Okay, well much of your recent work, as you mentioned earlier, has been on research data management planning. So how do you think altmetrics can benefit a broad range of research outputs in particular research data? I really love the idea that data can be independent of research. And I think altmetrics provide a different way of really looking at research when you think about it that way. It's also once you have metrics to support the idea that data can stand on its own without a publication, for example, it's really hard to say no, that product doesn't have value. So I think altmetrics are an important part of understanding the value of research and also of different research output. Articles are great at summary and analysis, but data is fantastic at presenting facts. And sometimes we don't know what the facts will be used for in the future. So it's a great altmetrics provides this way of giving us value where we've never had value before. And I think it's also neat because you can build these links between citations and DOIs between not only the data, the scholarship, the size of the data, but then where that data goes from there. I think altmetrics has a lot to give to data and vice versa. So what advice would you give other librarians who want to do outreach on altmetrics to their colleagues and their faculty? So a lot of this will depend on the institution you're at, but I think it's important to frame the discussion of altmetrics as part of a larger picture. Is it about promotion and tenure? Yes. Is it about being able to keep track of your personal achievements? Yes. Is it about having a new way to track different types of research? Yes. It's all of these things. And you really need to not be afraid to start small and work your way up to something larger. Also, find friends, find allies, find researchers, find librarians, find people who think this is great. But I think most importantly, also practice what you teach. So a good example. I had to go off and defend and do this myself. So but I think it's been worth it. Well, that's fantastic advice. Thank you so much, Megan, for your time. You're very welcome.