 My name is Ed Faye, I'm the University Librarian at the University of Bristol and this morning we're beginning with a discussion of inclusive libraries. Inclusion is a foundational value for our libraries and our understanding and practice continues to develop. There are issues of equality due to race, gender, sexual orientation, disability and neurodiversity, globalisation and international cultures and widening participation in higher education. And of course how any of these intersect for any individual engaging with our libraries and how we facilitate student success and a sense of belonging as part of our learning communities. This morning we will hear from colleagues from three institutions about community-led approaches to collecting, representation and indigenisation and EDI library champions. So first we will hear from Justine Mann. Justine Mann is project archivist at the University of East Anglia and works as a literary archivist, focusing primarily on acquiring material from writers from the 21st century and currently collecting the archives of underrepresented poets. Justine will talk to us about a community-led approach to inclusivity, new ways of collecting, collaborating and curating. Justine, over to you. Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about work underway at the University of East Anglia and thank you for the introduction. So I'm going to be talking about a Mellon Foundation funded interdisciplinary project towards the Centre for Contemporary Poetry in the Archive which began in June 2022. And its key objective is to build a community-led collection of diverse poetry in the archive here at UVA. So I'm going to focus on three areas in particular, our methodology and really getting under the skin of what we mean by community-led and diverse, the role of the research library in this collaborative project and the potential for its wider application as a collection model. So first of all I want to give you some context to the collecting practices within the archive at the University of East Anglia as it's relevant to the project as a whole. So UVA was founded in 1963 so it's a relatively young collecting institution but it has an interesting history in the discipline of creative writing. It was the first university to offer a Masters in creative writing founded by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson in 1970. And it has a number of successful alumni, Ian McEwen, Kashi Shiguru, Tracy Chevalier and Enright to name just a few and the writers Angela Carter, Ali Smith and Rose Tremaine all taught at the institution. So through its year-round international literary festival it's also made forge relationships with major writers Arthur Miller and Doris Lessing amongst them. So the British Archive Contemporary Writing is a collection that sits within the wider university archives and was developed in 2015. And prior to this UVA didn't have a proactive strategic approach to collecting literary manuscripts but its literary reputation and those relationships I mentioned meant that we were offered donations. And most notably a vast archive from the Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing author of the Golden Notebook. I want to say a little bit about an innovative loan model we have as this is key to our being awarded funding from the Mellon Foundation and key really to this project. So traditionally institutions either purchase archives, receive donations or occasionally take material on loan, usually with a minimum of 20 years. And individual archives are often taken in towards the end of someone's career or posthumously. So that is a significant and sometimes competitive market for the archives of preeminent writers and UVA doesn't have an acquisitions budget for archive collections so purchases are out of the question. Another complication is that writers are often freelancers so disinclined to loan material for long periods in case they find they need to sell at a later date, either to fund writing time or in the form of a pension. So the traditional 20 year deposit model doesn't really work in contemporary collecting either. So in order to grow collections that our students, researchers and visitors would want to engage with we developed the storehouse model. And in order to form this model we consulted with writers with literary agents with Society of Authors, which represents writers and also literary archive values. So having formed the model, we collect a script material from writers earlier in their career as a temporary loan and with the idea that it can be returned to the writer at six months notice should they wish to move or sell the archive at a later date. A storehouse model deposit might be correspondence working papers notebooks and manuscripts relating to one or two literary works. So 22 writers is led by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and is scrutinized by government's group made up of faculty and library staff. So we have 22 writers archives nine acquired under the storehouse model, and have a busy program of archive based teaching across the spectrum of undergraduate postgraduate and PGR teaching. And we've engaged in National Lottery and Arts Council funded projects, and a variety of public engagement activities including exhibitions and outreach programs within the wider community. In each context, working with archive depositors much earlier in their careers has allowed us to better understand their working practices in a digital environment, and the characteristics of a 21st century archive, together with the implications and opportunities this presents from archives digital infrastructure. And we advocate for digital humanities and literary scholars, institutional archivists and archive depositors to be at the heart of archival collaboration to fully realize the affordances of those digital collections and their potential for research. And the involvement of academic staff in the archive has led to interesting interdisciplinary research and publications, and one such publication was read by Mellon Foundation staff. In April 2021 the Mellon Foundation's public knowledge program contacted me directly. And they felt some frustration that collecting institutions were not yet building archive collections of underrepresented writers, and wondered whether the dynamic nature of the storehouse model might be a mechanism to escalate this. I think that prior to the pandemic, a proposal to build a collection of contemporary poetry archives and increase the diversity of our collections in our governance group had already been approved. So incredibly, Mellon were inviting us to apply for funding to enable an already held ambition. It doesn't happen very often so a great opportunity. And the Mellon funding and that invitation pushed our ambitions further by testing a new methodology they were advocating a community led approach, not community collecting, but community led, and by community led elements poet led. Over the course of six months between May and October 2021. I worked with a poetry critic and academic Jeremy not hard to write the funding proposal with Mellon program staff offering advice on various iterations which is their typical approach. So it's a long haul. Mellon committee met and approved at the end of 2021. And we commenced the project in June 2022. It was essential for the credibility of this project to place a poet at the heart of the leadership team, and we developed a role description and advertised it widely. And will Harris the successful candidate pictured here is an acclaimed writer of Chinese Indonesian and British heritage born and raised in London, his debut book Rendang won the forward prize for best first collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize in 2021. And his latest collection brother poem has just been published. His role as visiting poetry fellow is to consult and represent the four poets and residents who are depositing archives with us. And I'll say a little bit more about this methodology later. So now to the definition of an underrepresented writer, the Mellon Foundation highlighted by Poc poets as a priority area for collecting. I'm sharing a statistic here about the UK which demonstrates that as latest 2017 18 the London review of books one of 26 publications to be surveyed as part of research, only commissioned white poetry critics who wrote exclusively about white poets, the vast majority men. The research was led by the UK poet and critic Sandy Palmer, a member of our advisory group. Palmer is a co founder of Ledbury poetry critics, which mentors marginalized writers in writing poetry criticism. Palmer's research had identified that structural exclusion operates across many intersections of identity concurrently, including around sexuality gender and class. So it follows that poets at the intersections of these forms of discrimination are particularly disadvantaged. So mindful of intersections, and in consultation with our advisory group, we started to define what the under what under representation means in a British and Irish context. It extended to include poetry, which is innovative inform, and which uses marginalized dialectics dialects. We're aware our project builds on pre existing initiatives like the blood axe poetry archive at Newcastle, the British libraries between two worlds poetry and translation archive, and the Mayday rooms radical poetry archive. So taking the definition of underrepresented we then worked with the advisory group on our short listing criteria. We moved on from talking about underrepresented groups towards thinking about the various critical markers each writer would need to meet to be included in the archive, and then mentioned at the bottom there. So, once we had a definition on our critical markers the group was invited to nominate the four poets to be archived during this proof of concept project and poets with the most nominations were invited to deposit in the archive. So now I'll say a little bit more about the methodology and stakeholders involved in the project. I've talked about the project team already that the poets are depositing as a street collection of archive material, reflecting on the process, producing creative critical responses and running workshops in Norfolk public libraries where artists are invited to respond to their archive through creative activities, and this will form another layer of interpretation in the archive, and the poets are paid for 14 days of their time. Our public engagement partners National Center for Writing and the public library service in Norfolk work with us on audience development, allowing us to reach participants the university finds harder to target. The group scrutinizes proposals and approaches and provides critical feedback, and the stakeholder consultation group includes members from the US, Canada and the UK, and representation from the International Council on archives. This allows us to highlight our approach to see if it resonates with different institutions and territories. We have eight months left of an 18 month project, so a number of the milestones listed here have already been achieved. This period has really been about establishing the various groups developing those relationships, particularly with the poets as they deposit material and carrying out consultation. The participants have been funded for their time and this affects who becomes a member of your various stakeholder groups, and the voices you have influencing the project definitely can't rely on voluntary contributions for freelancers. I feel and really understood this. Other funders sometimes don't. If you really want diversity, you need to fund people's time, however small their contribution. So there are emerging questions and challenges that the projects confronting and these will be written up fully in the final reports at the end of the project. We're encountering a healthy suspicion from the poets in terms of how they regard the institution, why you, why your location, what's in it for you. From scholars who are questioning the authenticity of the archive. If it's a discrete selection curated by the depositor, is it really an archive. And also that deposit is a sharing a reluctance or some reservations about sharing digital material. I think the separation between work and private life for a writer is not straightforward. Sometimes there is personal information. And although there are, you know, embargoes available and tools exist. Trust needs to be built over a long time with writers and individuals. So here are the remaining deliverables for our project events. It's more of a dissemination phase events symposium, a public outreach program and a final launch reports and publications, including a pamphlet of creative critical responses from the poets physical and digital exhibitions at UEA but also Norfolk libraries. The archives will be launched and scholarly publications will be written. So I just wanted to say something about the library's role in this the funder came directly to me as archivist rather than to a scholar because it was about collections growth. Academic scholarship within poetry and literary criticism was absolutely vital to the integrity of this project, but collection management is key to sustainability of the collections in the longer term. There are many moving parts of the project and their interdependencies on collection management and infrastructure meant that it made sense for me as archivist to oversee the budget and to act as project manager for the entire project. To avoid silo working the project team meets weekly and shares decisions. So poets academic and archivist shape one another's outputs and learn from each other. It's a genuine collaboration. The role of visiting poetry fellow as a bridge between the underrepresented poets and the institution, building trust, sharing constraints skepticism and concerns as well as desired outcomes. It's been absolutely vital. So finally the potential legacy of the project. In terms of next steps, if successful we'd like to expand our work and identify UK and international partners to work with us. It would be great to see a wider adoption of alternative collecting models elsewhere to speed growth in representative contemporary collecting, but I think further research is needed to identify barriers and opportunities at other institutions. On a personal level, it's my first time as co investigator on a research project. It's been a fantastic experience. The library and archive staff should feel emboldened, take a lead in developing grant proposals. And this is actively being encouraged by HRC and RO UK, drawing in scholarly subject expertise from within the academic community. It's always possible. And finally, winning research income really makes internal stakeholders take notice and can be valuable in making a case for investment and infrastructure. Thank you for listening. Thanks, Justine. I'm sure that will have led to many questions arising for those of us listening to you this morning. And we'll look forward very much to exploring those with you at the Q&A session towards the end of the session this morning. We're going to hear next from Michelle Blake, University Librarian at Tawara Wananga Owakato, Kim Tyree Katoa Puka University Librarian at Auckland University of Technology, and Sue Roberts University Librarian at the University of Auckland. Many of you will know Sue and Michelle from their work in the UK. And I encourage them to share some insights from the indigenisation journeys they and their libraries are on. And this will be a pre-recorded session. So over to you. We would like to begin today by acknowledging the indigenous peoples of the land on which you are today. And to me, or greet and acknowledge, to our colleagues at both Konzo and ROUK. I'm Michelle Blake. I'm the University Librarian at Te Whare Wananga Owakato, the University of Owakato. I'm here today with my colleagues Kim Tyree from AUT and Sue Roberts from the University of Auckland. And we've chosen whakatouki, which is a Māori proverb. And these play an important and large role within Māori culture and are used often as a reference point. And we've used this whakatouki at the bottom of our slide that you can see, which in English, what is the most important thing in the world? The answer. It is the people. It is the people. It is the people. And that's really what we're going to talk to you about today. Our journey in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Kouta tangata for the people. Kia ora koutou katoa. Kim Tyree, my name is Kim Tyree and I'm the University Librarian at Auckland University of Technology here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. And it is my pleasure to start this session with a karakia. Now karakia are traditional incantations and they're used to acknowledge our ancestors, our tupuna and our atua, our Māori deities. And in this context they can be used to create a safe space for us to meet. Tūtara mai i runga, tūtara mai i raaro, ātau, tūtara mai i waho, ki o tāi, i te maoritou, i te maoritou, ki te katoa haumie, huie dai kie. I'm Sue Roberts, Director of Libraries and Learning Services here at the University of Auckland. We thought it would be helpful to place our work on indigenising libraries in our national context. We are members of CONSUL, the Council of Arteroa New Zealand University Libraries, which is the collective leadership of Arteroa New Zealand's academic libraries. We are small, there are eight of us, but we are powerful. As you will see on this slide, this is our strategy Kete, our Kete is a basket, which is our collective commitment to working together to progressing these shared goals. You will see that we are committed to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the founding document of Arteroa and to the partnership with Tangata Fenua, with Māori, that this requires. It is this commitment that has driven the indigenisation work we are sharing with you today. You will also see in our strategic Kete, the pillar, Heitanga Te Rāwe, which means amazing people. Heitanga Te Rāwe, as part of our strategy, is about nurturing and growing our amazing people. In doing that, we aim to create and foster environments that are culturally safe, inclusive and encourage diversity. We also nurture and grow Māori and Pacific staff, aiming to increase numbers and representation at all levels in our libraries. We also focus on enhancing the cultural capabilities of all staff, underpinning the work that we do together as a council of values. Values like whaka whanaua tanga and kōtahi tanga. These are about creating mutually beneficial shared experiences and relationships that are mana enhancing. Massey University Library defines mana enhancing as respectful interactions where all the members of the university community work collaboratively in a partnership way at every opportunity, thus enabling a person's mana, their dignity, their power, their influence, their status to flourish. Library leaders must recognise that individuals within the organisation and teams will be at different stages on their indigenisation journeys, and that we need to support people in their learning in this space. Also, Consul Te Te Riti led, which means respecting and enacting Te Te Riti o Waitangi, which is the founding document of Aotearoa New Zealand that was signed in 1814. And it is a contractual agreement between the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand and then the British Crown, but now the New Zealand Government. The other values that we practice are tika, ponno, and aroha. So, tika is about doing things the right way, doing things correctly. Ponno is about respect, integrity, and aroha is about compassion and understanding. So, Consul is a values-based organisation or collective of university libraries. Although each of us is on our own journey, a number of common themes have emerged from the indigenisation work that we've all been doing. We've represented these on a thickie or an octopus or squid on each of its tentacles, and we're going to pick up and talk about some of these common themes in the next few slides. Now, Kim has already talked about the values which underpin the indigenisation work that we've been doing. And she's also going to pick up around the new ways of working. Sue is going to talk about leadership and really how you make indigenisation a strategic priority. Finally, I'll focus on rethinking our recruitment and making sure that we build capacity across all of our staff. Indigenisation requires different ways of working, and when you partner or collaborate with Māori, there is definitely a preference for working collectively. It can require more time because the collective is inclusive. Everyone is given the opportunity to contribute their ideas and thoughts. And this is often done through wānanga, and wānanga are best described as forum. We can get together and meet and deliberate and discuss and consider the ideas of all of those present. The other things to consider when working with Māori, so we've touched on whaka whānau ngā tanga, which is about building shared experiences, and kōtahi tanga, which is about working collectively. But it's also important to meet at the right time and place, and that there is an element of reciprocity involved in this work. The expectation when working with Māori is that there is utu or balance and reciprocity that flows back to the community, whether that is the iwi or nations or the hapū, family groupings. The other things to consider are the place of kāwa and pīkama, ceremony and custom customary practice. The karakia that we started this presentation with and will end with is an example of kāwa. The karakia is used to create a safe place. In the Western paradigm we might consider this as a culturally safe place and practice, and so it's really important to create the space to include kāwa and pīkama. So when working with Māori there are different ways of working that need to be considered and practiced. We want to talk about rangatiratanga, which means leadership, and how critical it has been in our indigenization stories so far. I will speak about Tumuherenga, about this team here, real people committed to the mahi work that we have been outlining. I know this is all very relevant to Kim and Michelle's teams too. So leaders go first and do their learning out loud. This was and still is a vulnerable place to be and a space that we continue to prioritize and invest in as a lead team for our library. We share our own learnings with each other and with colleagues. It's okay to make mistakes, to model our learning with the wider team, to talk about when things go wrong and how we felt. We've also learned most importantly the critical nature of a place and a voice at the table for our Indigenous colleagues. A significant step forward for us in partnership and co-governance was the introduction of the kaira hii role. This is a senior mahi leadership role, our colleagues Abigail and Manahiri that we introduced several years ago. I can't overemphasize the transformational nature of this change for us as individuals working with the kaira hii as a team in our culture, decision-making and perspective and for our wider organization. It's not just enough to create senior roles, we also have to empower and support the individuals and the key aspect of this is to share the power, to be genuine in this and see where it leads. On our journey we didn't know where it was going to lead, we didn't know what it would mean but sharing that power and being in the work together genuinely together was our goal. So I think as Consul Michelle, Kim and I can't overemphasize the importance of senior mahi leadership roles, we have them all in our three institutions now and other Consul members do too. They help us understand how to provide services that are representative of and responsive to Indigenous staff and students. We need to employ Indigenous staff at senior levels with enough authority and power to influence decision-making and affect real change. They need to be embraced and supported by the team, the whanau, their family, who are fully committed, who will step into the challenge, will step into the discomfort at times and into the learning. Kia ora. I'm now going to talk to you about our recruitment that we've done at the University of Waikato in the library. So last year we underwent a change process that brought about the creation of new Māori and Pacific focus roles. We were very intentional about what roles we needed and that was based on conversations with people like Sue and Kim as well as our existing Māori library staff. We wanted to avoid any of our staff undertaking unpaid cultural labour. Once we knew which roles we wanted we were then able to determine which skills, knowledge and experience we needed. This allowed us to really ensure we weren't looking for a unicorn. We know that skills such as flamencia and te reo Māori and knowledge of te kanga are really in hot demand across organisations in Aotearoa, New Zealand. We were then able because we had a number of roles to undertake cluster recruitment and this of course had the advantage that all of our prospective candidates could see that we were recruiting for a number of staff and they weren't going to be token Māori staff member after undertake unpaid cultural labour. We were also very lucky in that we could advertise these roles reflexively from 0.6 FTE to full time. We also made it very clear in job ads that it didn't matter if you had library experience or university experience or not. What really mattered was your commitment to the University of Waikato becoming an anti-racist institution and fulfilling our new library strategy. When we went to interview our prospective new staff we thought very carefully about the te kanga that needed to be in place for that and that continued on into when we welcomed our new staff into the library and we did that through a mihepakato which is a traditional Māori welcome ceremony and this ceremony removes the taku or the restrictions of the Manuhiri, the visitors, to make them one of the tangata whenua so the home people and now we're welcome for any new member of staff whether they're Māori or not. Include elements from that mihepakato and it really is that welcome into the library far now or the library family. As a library we've also worked very hard to co-create our emotional culture and we've done that through a number of all staff library workshops but really this is around defining the emotions that we need to feel at work to be successful and from that our behaviors and our rituals will come. We've also ensured that we understand our obligations and our responsibilities from te te te o wa pangi. It's been really important to be able to call out systemic and casual racism and we're working with all our staff to ensure they understand what this means how they can be an ally and truly live the values and the emotional culture that we have set. It's my great pleasure to now close our presentation with the karakia. Kia whakaeria te tapu, kia waitea a te ara, kia turuki wakataka ai, kia turuki wakataka ai, haumi e iui e, tai i ki e. So thank you Michelle, Kim and Sue for sharing those insights into the journey that you have been on and we're fortunate to have Michelle and Kim with us later on to engage in our discussions and answer your questions so please do keep reflecting on those and add those as they occur. So we'll hear now from Liz Osman. Liz is Head of Humanities and Social Sciences Libraries at Cambridge University as co-convener of Cambridge University Libraries EDI forum for staff. Liz is here to explore the creation and challenges of a new staff development scheme focused on EDI. Liz over to you. My video, there we go. Right so thank you so much. As I said I'm Liz Osman and with my EDI forum co-convener hat on I'm here to talk about creating an EDI program for library staff. So just to say what I'm going to be going through this morning I'll start off with a little bit of background as to why we started to think about some sort of program and then talk a little around the concepts and how I developed the idea, the model I created, the three pillars of EDI I'm calling it, working up the full scheme proposal, some of the challenges that we found along the way and then I'll finish with a little bit about piloting and my hopes and ambitions for the future as well. So I'll start with a little bit of background about the context within Cambridge University Libraries. So the EDI forum for library staff was launched pre-pandemic and then as with so many of these things it went into abeyance really whilst we all just dealt with the last few years. So we relaunched the forum in 2022 and also undertook a survey of library staff to understand what it was they wanted to see from the forum. At a similar time University Libraries had agreed to get involved with some research from an organisation called AlterLine looking at Black student experience in libraries and they were one of I think about 10 institutions to take part and the feedback from that report was really interesting. It was all anonymous so we couldn't pull out Cambridge specific information but it was interesting to see. It showed us quite a few things to give some thought to but it was focused on student experience and I think that kind of chimes with what I've seen which is that we as librarians are really good at considering EDI for students and for taking feedback and seeing how can we improve but that doesn't always translate across to thinking about our staff and colleagues so much. In the wider university there are some EDI champions and their roles stretch right across all the staff groups of the university looking at leadership at advocacy facilitation but really within Cambridge University Libraries EDI for staff has I think traditionally taken a bit of a back seat in comparison to student experience so the creation of the forum and focus on staff is something a bit newer that's been finding its way so this is a small snapshot from the survey that the forum undertook just before I came in as co-convener so staff were asked what do you think we should be trying to do with the forum and I've just put the top three responses to that question here so as you can see that the vast majority of people felt that our priority was supporting understanding and developing the confidence of staff ensuring the community in the widest possible sense understands EDI and how it applies at Cambridge University Libraries nearly as many people felt that we should be amplifying voices so making sure a wide range of people can contribute ideas about how to create an inclusive culture and also encourage and support the leadership team to be making appropriate changes as well and then the same percentage 81% they're not necessarily all the same people felt that they were interested in practical support so really how they could do things themselves in their own local settings and again that might have been them thinking about focus on students but also you know what can you do locally with your library teams and colleagues to ensure that EDI is being thought about for them and that there's good practice amongst everyone so with all of that in mind a concept started to form for me of some kind of training opportunity to help with EDI for staff and there were some key principles that I felt needed to be behind it and it needed to be available to all staff regardless of their grades or roles so this wasn't about training managers it wasn't something that was 10 minutes in your induction when you first arrived and this wasn't something that only related to people who class themselves as librarians within the teams I didn't want it to be dependent on a specific level of prior knowledge I wanted a scheme that would be open to everyone so some of the early adopters might be those who are already really quite interested or knowledgeable in EDI but I also wanted it to be available to someone perhaps coming from a much lower level of awareness of EDI in all its various forms. It really needed to have a light level of administrative burden for it to run successfully if I was going to be asking Helen Murphy or myself as the co-combiners of the forum or our local HR department to do an awful lot of work then it's not really going to work I also wanted the focus to be on individual learning and improvement again building on that idea of not needing a specific level of starting knowledge it's all about individual improvement and individual awareness I thought it was important any sort scheme had some level of recognition or celebration across Cambridge University libraries so when you do complete it it is acknowledged in some manner and finally I wanted the scheme to be repeatable so just because you have taken part in it once you're still able to do it again at a later date and learn something more so when it came to developing the idea there were a couple of different things that were touch points for me first was the solid professional knowledge and skills base which is a great tool for self-assessment it's got lots of different areas of focus and you can score yourself and identify areas where you want to develop that may not be the areas where you could score yourself lowest but the areas that you where you feel further development would be helpful also the scone or seven pillars of information literacy harking back I think to my library school days what I really liked here is is the actual structure the idea of pillars there's a notion of these underpinning concepts and that they are all equal so thinking about these models and about what I was hoping to achieve led me to my very simple but hopefully effective three pillars of edi I must get someone with design skills to make this look fancier at some point but we have here equality diversity and inclusion stretching across the top and beneath we have the three pillars so the first pillar is knowledge of edi so that might be a really simple thing like knowledge of relevant acronyms it might be learning about debates around say trans women and female only spaces it might be learning more about protected characteristics and what those mean in law then we have behaviors so learning about something more active you might be learning how to be a good ally or an active bystander and came to university runs courses and the staff can attend on these topics but it could also be learning about individual behaviors and the difference they make so thinking personally do you want to put your pronouns in zoom and into your emails why might you do that so the behaviors per might mean looking to understand what your behaviors mean for particular communities and last but certainly not least professional practice some element of learning around edi that is actually transferable or actionable within your role something that you can actively embark on in your job this model is deliberately very broad because thinking about the range of job roles just within came to university libraries is really important that people can identify something within each of these pillars that they would be happy to develop so professional practice can't just be about how you treat students when they come to you at the inquire desk if you're a cataloger say and don't interact regularly with students there are still lots of things that you could do within your own professional practice if you're a manager then you have your team and that is part of your professional practice um so the idea behind the scheme with the pillars underpinning um was that it will be open and applicable to all staff regardless of grade length of service type of role um to complete the scheme participants will have to complete five pieces of learning or development that have been identified across the three pillars so anybody undertaking must identify at least one thing relating to each of the three pillars they can't just do say five bits of knowledge so five bits of I went away and did some googling and I learned this thing this thing this thing this thing and this thing and they also have to do at least one piece of behavioral learning or development and one piece that can relate back directly to their work in practice um participants will self assess to decide what their priorities and areas of focus are though this might be done in relation to conversation with their line managers but it's really it's for them to reflect on what their current level of knowledge and understanding is and on where they feel they want to learn more there is flexibility in the learning activities so there's no list of acceptable courses or activities or anything like that rather than being quite fixed and saying here is a list of courses you can go on I want them to be as much freedom as possible because EDI is such broad area and the last thing we need to do is kind of close it down uh through a scheme like this after each learning activity um there will be a period of reflection and that reflection could be a written piece um or it could be a reflective conversation perhaps with a manager um but there's a desire really to ensure that um the learning is reflected on and sort of synthesized the hope is that anybody who undertakes the scheme can complete it within a year so it's not supposed to be something that that becomes a long-running feature of anyone's life and if people can complete it quicker then that's fantastic and as I said previously some form of recognition and visibility of the achievement on completion um there have been some challenges uh naming the scheme has actually been one of the biggest ones um so the title of my talk was library champions and you may have noticed I haven't really used that term whilst I've been talking champions has meaning elsewhere within Cambridge University which is uh suggestive of a far more active role involving advocacy potentially at quite a senior level and that's really not something that we are asking people who complete this scheme to do so the final name is still up for debate and I welcome suggestions in the chat if you want to put them in um I think manager Byron is always going to be a challenge we aren't at the point yet where we've hit this barrier but um it's going to be a difficult one because I don't want to see that some departments have a really good take up of the scheme and other departments absolutely nobody's got involved um because the manager is not pushing um that this is is something to do um administration how the administration of the scheme will actually work is also still a little up in the air whilst we've been in the creation phase um but it's going to be so important to its success that it is not onerous on any particular individuals um precisely what the reward will be uh is also open to question I can say it definitely won't be monetary um you're not going to get an increase in salary for participating in the scheme I've got some different ideas about what I think we could do but again I think those need more conversation um one of the biggest challenges has actually just been getting to the piloting stage I'd hoped by the time I was giving this talk that the pilot would be well underway um but that's been a challenge just in terms really of due diligence so having conversations with people like our HR department um even if we're not asking them to get involved directly they obviously need to check that the scheme is is going in the right direction um and that we're not doing anything uh that's sort of out of step or in conflict with anything else that they're planning so looking forward hopefully within the next month we will be able to put a call out um for piloting and we'll be looking for about six participants take part and we hope to um get people from across a range of different grades different libraries uh different job roles and really we're asking that they are enthusiastic uh and that they will stick with the program and complete it but also all we want really is scrupulous honesty uh in their feedback to us and that they'll be quite vocal in giving feedback that the more information we have the better we can understand any changes we might need to make to the scheme um if all goes well then with any tweaks from that pilot um ideally we'll look to launch the scheme fully later this year and promote it and then have a process of continuous assessment going on um to see whether the scheme is really reaching the objective of improving edi knowledge and practice across our staff members how we will measure that is another question that is still open to further discussion but we have some expertise within Cambridge University Libraries that I'm hoping to utilize um hearts and minds is going to be really important we need to demonstrate to those for whom edi is a really important and personal topic that this isn't just a box ticking exercise or hollow gesture it is about trying to improve edi awareness and knowledge across our entire community and we also as I said earlier need to ensure that managers are going to be enablers and not blockers of this scheme um we also want buying from all the different staff groups um so it may be that we need to push a little harder in some areas um to get say security staff I'm not picking on them but just as an example of non-librarian to get them to understand that the scheme is for them as well and and really just to reach a normalization of participation and get to the point where it's just something that the people do every so often within within their work um and finally if if it all does go really well um I really feel that there's the potential to roll it out further um there's nothing in the principles of the scheme that couldn't be translated certainly to another university library or indeed another part of the university organization it's deliberately not library specific um and I think that's really important um but let's get through the the piloting stage first thank you thank you Liz for sharing your insights into how to put together the systems and the structures to do this across our libraries I can see a number of questions coming in already for everyone who's spoken this morning which is great I wonder if I might invite everyone to join the panel now and we will start to discuss between us the questions that have come in so with thanks to everyone for really insightful presentations this morning some really inspiring work presented but also some really frank recognitions of the challenges that we encounter whether that's within our organizations but also for us as individuals leading and participating in this work so I hope there'll be plenty for us to explore Liz I can't ah there we go super okay so thank you all for participating in the discussion and with particular thanks to colleagues from New Zealand where it is very late in the day um and we'll possibly be entering into tomorrow I think as we conclude to all our discussions so thank you to everyone I was really struck by some of the commonalities across each of the presentations that we've heard this morning so we've heard a lot about inclusion activities themselves needing to be inclusive the importance of really conscious effort in creating safe spaces whether that's through ritual um and other activities and also the importance of building confidence we've also all reflected on some of the challenges that we encounter and I wonder if I could ask you all initially just about those journeys for you as individuals what has struck you really stood out to you on your own journeys as an important point of learning that you might share for us all saying no once I'm muting I'll go first sorry um so I think for me um it's been about being brave and vulnerable um and and just being open um so for me personally having moved back to New Zealand after 15 years in the UK um I knew that I knew nothing if that makes sense so why I needed to do a whole load of learning right and just be open to that yeah I think sort of following on from Michelle's point really I think um taking on the uh the co-committee of the EDI forum just open my eyes to actually how broad EDI is um you know beyond just the protecting characteristics that we would talk about in the UK in legal terms um and really the EDI is uh affecting everyone at some point even if you you know wouldn't necessarily um identify in any particular way um so I think that was a huge learning point in terms of actually just the breadth and then thinking about the scheme and or how do we capture that breadth within the scheme and it's by by sort of not um putting barriers up to it and keeping it as as open as possible I think for me on the Melon Foundation funded project um definitely just to echo what's already been said being open and being brave and putting the imposter syndrome to the side but I think with this particular project just bringing people in um Jeremy Nolthard the poetry academic and critic and myself um had some sort of knowledge and understanding but wouldn't have been able to begin this project without bringing others in to to you know to define what we meant by under represented to also we had to push back a little bit to Melon and say actually this is under representation in Britain and Ireland and it's a bit different to you know what might be the case in the States so there was quite a bit of conversation going on there but I think by bringing in those other parties having a genuine consultation and funding their time so that there was really a level sort of playing field in terms of who could get involved in the project right the way through uh that was that was really important I think I was also on a learning curve in terms of it being my first research project and also being the project manager for it so yeah yeah quite daunting but um I definitely encourage people to to follow um for me I think it's that thing again about vulnerability and um it's okay to make mistakes in this space if you've created the right environment then mistakes um are something to learn from we have another whakatoke um which is uh koti hapa te tua kana or te aku which basically means uh mistakes are the oldest siblings of learning so you've got to make them to learn and that's been really important in this process so I think it's if you come with a opened and or authenticity in this space any edi space work then um you know your intention will be true and that will get you a long way we're picking up on that theme of authenticity there's a question here from New Zealand libraries that I have a feeling you'll all be able to offer reflections on this and the question is how have you ensured respectful use of in this case Maori culture that doesn't bother on appropriation and asking did it involve reaching out to local communities to discuss how culture was used in certain environments but I have a feeling this will also apply when considering how we build representation within collections or build true inclusion in edi programs so any reflections on um I think uh the things that Michelle touched on it it's really important for this to come and be led by Māori indigenous staff and then you won't get that risk of cultural appropriation if it's led by community it's led by iwi all our universities have offices of Māori advancement so there's quite a lot of expertise sitting within our organizations and I mean I must say I'm the only indigenous university librarian in Aotearoa in our eight universities and I was the first and I've been in the role for seven years and it's such an indictment really on Aotearoa that it's taking this long for an indigenous person to be leading uh academic academic library but it's the same in many of our cultural institutions so it's not just an issue that we have in higher education it's um in a lot of our cultural institutions um and I know that there's more questions about recruiting things later but I'll leave it there. I just want to add one thing if that's okay to what Kim said um and and it just goes back to what Kim said in the presentation about the importance of whaka whanangatanga and that um reciprocity so actually that has to be genuine and certainly as someone who who came in uh back to New Zealand that was the important piece right is being genuine in those relationships doing what you say you're gonna do if you say you're gonna do something you do it and you build up that trust that credibility but it's not just about you it's actually that um that idea of the um reciprocity that's so important um so I just wanted to to add that to all the amazing things Kim already covered. So just in relation to the building collections, poetry collections and the melon project um it's been really important to include the poets in terms of their own curation of the material so yes there will be a traditional kind of archive catalogue for each of the deposits that have been made but we're also inviting the poets to do a creative critical kind of reflection on the project and the process and the material and then they're taking that material out into the community and running those public library workshops with their archive and encouraging public participation and then that material will go into an exhibition also be another layer of interpretation in the archive so poet led um in terms of how the collections are set but obviously there will still be a moment where a scholar comes into the archive and you know as with all archive collections um the scholar has the freedom to kind of interpret the material as well but they will have this other kind of context sitting around it. Thinking about the um so the EDI forum a little more widely than just the particular project I'm speaking about um we've almost had uh sort of the opposite in that um previously there have been um some members of library staff who have put an awful lot of work and energy into initiatives on a voluntary basis and I was really taken by the kind of unpaid cultural labor um that that was mentioned in the talk from New Zealand librarians and uh we're very very aware that that's exactly what we don't want to do um you know we we have fantastic diversity across libraries um in Cambridge but actually we don't want to say to people or for people to feel that actually because they happen to have a particular characteristic that they need to come and represent um and that you know we're going to pull them in every single time we're doing a project that relates to that particular area so um I think actually having the forum and having the co conveners whilst we are not pretending to to be able to uh completely represent is about saying we welcome your input and we welcome your support but we will take this to some extent we will take some of the organisational burden and things like that but please come to us with all of your ideas and all of your feedback and we want to learn and if you want to be more involved then you can be but we're not going to put the onus onto you because you happen to have a you know a particular characteristic and so I think that's that's been really important um for us So Justine there's a question here for you asking whether the African continent would be eligible in your future consideration for international partnership is that how you consider representation in the work you're doing and is that part of your future ambition? Absolutely we we want to develop links with international partners so that would be a really exciting development be really keen to make contact um with anyone working in that area so so far we've spoken to colleagues um in some European institutions America Canada and Australia but um we're very very happy to to look further afield and really I think because we're in a pilot phase at the moment and we've still got this period until the end of November is once that period has finished that's when we'll be starting to talk to other organisations and see if we can put in a sort of follow-on funding to expand what we've been doing but with those partners so please do get in touch if if it's of interest and we'll be making some forays out there too Fantastic and I can see a number of connections being made in the chat already so that's a wonderful outcome from a session like this this morning. To take a couple together now we have a question about proportions of staff from Indigenous backgrounds in libraries also touching on progression but another question about how uh customary practice and behaviours and is that tick and anger um are used within recruitment practices within your library so I just wonder if you had some reflections on the diversity within your staff body how you're addressing that in recruitment and progression. So um how you recruit um it's a lot to do with where you recruit and um about where you advertise and a lot of it is about networks um in in our culture relationships are really important so people might not apply until somebody they trust has told them or knows somebody in the organisation because you know they want to know that they'll be safe wherever they go um we also when we interview uh in Aotearoa New Zealand we'll start the interview process with uh mihi like a greeting a traditional greeting we might say a karakia to create safe space so those are all signals to Indigenous people that it's not just tokenism you're actually taking the culture seriously and creating a space where they'll feel comfortable to discuss who they are and what they'll bring to the organisation and I just want to pick up on that thing that the cluster recruitment is really important so you know all of New Zealand was really excited when Michelle started advertising her jobs because usually these roles come up and there's sort of like one role and it was really fantastic to see that there were a whole bunch of them and the same with Mike Walls down in Otago he didn't just advertise one or two roles there were quite a few of them and that was a really clear signal to the uh Glam sector in Aotearoa that something there was a fundamental paradigm shift going on in our libraries and that we were taking indigenisation and uh building cultural capacity and knowledge seriously so um you know props to Michelle and Mike that I just want to um totoku or um support what Kim said um and she was instrumental and I don't want her to get off the hook for this but for helping um support me and educate me as well around some of this so it's very much about um you know um utilising your networks and learning and as we said before being open I just thought it might be helpful to touch on uh Shirley's question around like the the kind of proportion of staff I think we're surely they asked that so at Waikato we had about seven percent Maori and Pacific staff I haven't included we have got um other nationalities Asian staff etc but if I just focus on Maori and Pacific for example that's gone from seven percent to 17 percent now and we have 33 percent at our manager level um I just want to also say we're not done like it's not like it finishes um and I think sometimes people think that oh like you've ticked that box now you're done but it's you know we we also don't want just Maori and Pacific staff in Maori and Pacific focused roles kind of touching on what Liz said just because you happen to be Maori or Pacific doesn't mean you want a role that's focused in that right you still might want a job as I don't know open research librarian or you know what whatever it is that you might want to be doing um so we're really conscious of that and we've just added two new roles which are student focus roles to try to grow this which people might be interested in so we now have a Maori student library assistant um so that's uh someone who is a student at the university who's coming in specifically because they're Maori and they're doing uh different work than say just a regular library assistant because we want to give them a broader experience to show the sorts of roles that are possible and we're looking to recruit a Pacific student library assistant as well so we're in the process of of doing that um so I just thought that might be interesting for people as well. And I think that links really nicely to a question for you Liz um when thinking about how those behaviors are inclusive across the staff body though the question is how a behavior professional practice pieces of action implemented and performed do you have evidence particularly of how staff might evidence this and did you ensure that colleagues with more flexible job descriptions would also have the ability to perform in these spaces. Yep so um in part I can't answer because the scheme is is not quite up and running yet um but um within that sort of self-assessment there is so much breadth as to how people can identify and I think um for a lot of staff we are hoping that there will be some conversation with managers as part of this process um you know partly to say I want to take on this scheme are you supportive but also for the managers to be able to help if necessary with identifying what those sort of areas might be um but they the the my whole concept really is that there is nothing that is too pinned down and and nothing that there's too sort of prescriptive um in terms of how one might do the learning again I don't want this sort of scheme to be pinned down so you need to go on a course over here so I think there's an awful lot of learning that can be done you know it might be reading journal articles it might be going to visit another library and actually talking to people about their practice uh and and that sort of thing so I I want to keep it as wide as possible but I do think it's something that we need to explore as the pilot takes off to really understand and we may need to to kind of provide a bit more guidance and a bit more steer on those things but for now I I don't want to pin it down too far I want people to be able to to explore and define uh their their learning journeys um quite organically um and and what feels right for them so just just building on that and and to you Liz but also perhaps more widely there's a question about transferability thinking about the ways that these initiatives can be extended to other marginalized groups with more specific requirements or needs whether that's learning differences or disabilities and sort of practical inclusive and non-performative ways I wonder what reflections you might have on that I really like what Liz was talking about it's our and also Justine um most of us are not ever one thing we're intersectional and I think that intersectional um is the interesting piece around particularly when you're dealing with marginalized communities so it's it's really difficult when you start putting people in boxes because you're not ever getting one thing um I think the aim in most of our libraries is exactly that it's around equality diversity it's inclusion it's it's all those three things and our Te Oroa New Zealand a context is different because of Te Titi or Waitangi and that contract with indigenous people so we have a whole other layer that we need to deal with but we're also very much about equity diversity and inclusion and any work that we do in the indigenization and um decolonization space intersex with that EDI piece as well so if you're doing indigenization work you're also doing EDI work and then if you're doing EDI work then you're doing LI work and it's all about um diversifying our profession which we really need to do we need to be representative of our community that's about the types of organizations we're building isn't it and how we get that sort of attitude and intense and inclusion running right the way through everything that we do there's a specific question here which is touching on the histories and perhaps some of the power dynamics around this the question is around the institutional archive and whether there can be a lack of trust and how that's addressed the question's about Maori but I think very much applies as well to the work you're doing Justine about situations in which there has been an historical silencing and I'm wondering how you address that and how you build up trust necessary to navigate them so I think in relation to the Mellon Foundation project the there is sort of pre-existing work had already been done in terms of research and so the poetry academic Jeremy Nolthod already had links with Sandeep Parma and some researchers working in this area and an organization called the Ledbury Poetry Critics so I think there was already a relationship of trust between some of the poetry community and the institution but a lot needed to be done to to build on that in terms of the storehouse model I think that's a really great way for poets who wouldn't traditionally see you know the poets that we're contacting wouldn't traditionally see how they fit within the collections within an institution can see that model and see that it's something they can they can try and they can withdraw their materials later so that helped build trust as well so I think institutional practices tend to be quite different in those traditional models of either taking it and it's ours now or you know we're buying it off you and then we can do with it whatever we like so I think throughout the methodology and through the different consultations thing I think that just continuing to have conversations and build relationships and be willing to change our methodology to adapt that's been kind of key for us if that answers question I would say I agree with Justine and that there's nothing hugely different it's about the relationship building it's about being credible and doing if you if you commit to doing something doing that and building that trust incrementally to show that you're genuine and as I said earlier as Kim said in the presentation that idea of reciprocity is so important so I think for for me at Waikato one of the big markers was obviously listening and then making very intentional decisions that we were going to recruit to these five there were six roles but there were five that we were recruiting for so five brand new roles and as Kim described that went out as a kind of cluster recruitment and that was quite a big signal to people as well that we were serious and then when our staff started to arrive building on that so when there were and I'm not going to pretend that this doesn't exist but when we have racial microaggressions happening we tackle those we don't just let them lie so you know that's been quite confronting for a lot of staff but I would also you know really recognize how my staff have fully linked into that as well because they are difficult conversations and there are people who haven't realized the impact that they have on others so their intention is one thing but it's their impact right and if you don't if no one tells you that's the impact you're having how can you learn and how can you grow it's a question to hear about the other side of this and you've all touched in different ways about avoiding unpaid labor the importance of building capacity to do cultural labor the question is that people from underrepresented groups should not be burdened about who leads and who is empowered and this was raised by each of you in different ways I was wondering if you had any further thoughts and reflections on them I think there's a there's a really difficult balance to find which is that there is no expectation being put on anyone that because of who they are they they must do this extra stuff but they equally by not putting the burden on them we have to ensure that they're still being represented and that they still have a voice and they're not therefore marginalized because they're not having to do the extra work if you see what I mean so I think as as the co-communist of the edi forum we Helen and I are you know incredibly aware all the time that whilst we can facilitate we cannot speak with authority for everybody that we are representing so we there is still some some reliance really on on all of our colleagues to to talk to us but the hope is that we're taking some of that burden of of administration of organization and that we are giving them more choice about how they want to engage rather than there being a vacuum that they then feel they need to fill because nobody else is talking about these things and nobody else is doing anything but I think it is very difficult I sit here knowing that you know I'm I'm not x y and z and yet I'm sitting here and you know as an edi person so it is kind of coming to terms with that and and trying to find ways that enable people to to feel that they can be involved and that they are being represented whilst at the same time not pushing them into into that kind of more tokenistic or free labor kind of model so you did touch on this a little bit in the presentation but I guess it's about power sharing as well and so one of the things that we've tried really hard to do in all of our universities is recruit indigenous people at all different levels but particularly in the senior leadership teams so they are driving the changes and and never alone so I've got a really good friend when we created a role at University of Auckland she works in the private sector in our IT company and that was her the best advice I ever got was you never create these roles alone and I think it's it's the same for other marginalized groups they want to know that there are going to be safe spaces for them with other people like them and if it's not within the library then the broader organization so I think the other thing that that we can do is actually work across the organization because there's a lot of goodwill in the edi space and libraries don't have to do this work on their own but also foreign like this are really fantastic opportunities to build those networks and kind of you know hear what other people are doing and go I mean you know there's a lot of deeming and conversations going on I know here today and that's that's the best you know you talk to people about what didn't work and what is working just picking up on that theme of what didn't work there are a couple of questions here thinking about resistance or barriers that we might encounter and we'll probably have to make this our last theme but one of the questions is whether you have encountered barriers within the organization as you've attempted to take forward this work and if so how you've navigated them oh I'll be honest my main barrier was trying to do a massive change proposal but that's quite a different sort of barrier that makes sense because no one likes to change process but I wrote in the chat that actually it wasn't it wasn't a negative change process in the fact that I was trying to make redundancies or anything it was about changing the work we did based on a new strategy for the library and that's a really big thing right and then I would reflect that the other the other major thing has been around fear for staff so it's fear of the unknown right so trying to ensure that staff can be comfortable being uncomfortable is what we talk about like because you want to challenge people you don't want them to continue with some of the behaviors that might be taking place but doing that in a way where they feel safe to be challenged and and how we do that is really critical so a lot of that relies on the staff that we recruit the way that we have those conversations a culture that we set in our organizations so it's not just one thing it's a whole series of things one of Sue's staff said in a recent presentation that we did together and she's a senior leader a Māori Indigenous senior leader said that I feel safe to be Māori in my library and it was one of the best things I've ever heard and I think we all just want to feel safe where we are but it's often a barrier not feeling safe to be yourself I think there are really huge barriers institutionally in that you know like a handful of people cannot decolonize a whole organization so the framing and you have to be really realistic about what you can achieve because otherwise you're just not going to succeed and always in partnership and in collaboration so there are a lot of barriers but you shouldn't let them stop you it's a great question you should just you know one foot from the other and keep going just wanted to say something about the Mellon Foundation project actually so for six months I worked with a poetry critic and academic on this funding proposal and although we were consulting others we didn't want to take up too much of people's time because we weren't sure if the funding would actually come through or not so actually we and Mellon wanted us to be very specific about how things would go they gave us the brief of you know community led and we defined that we defined the methodology we had to literally produce agendas for meetings that were happening two years ahead with how many copies of tea people would have it was a very granular budget narrative and bid that we had to put together but the great thing is that when we brought in Will Harris the poetry fellow and looked at our methodology together and adapted it and Will was just making suggestions for changes that Mellon were very open about that particularly as it was community led and so it was easy to go back to Mel and say actually we're going to move some of this funding around because it's going to make the project better it's going to make the outcomes better it's going to make the impact better and that fund was really welcoming of that so I think that that really helped in terms of the very back in 2015 coming up the storehouse model I was lucky to have a very open-minded library director and in Nick Lewis and sitting down and saying look this is what libraries do when they're collecting archives they literally it's like you know you either get it for 20 years or you buy it or you know it's a donation we're not going to be able to do these kind of innovative things without changing the model and Nick went away and you know we had some more discussions and the model came into being so without that you know open-minded leaders who are willing to try things that would be very difficult but worked out well at UEA. Yeah I think Cambridge University Lives have been incredibly supportive of developing the scheme I think that the only problem really has just been the time it has taken to sort of take things to people and consult with them and then sort of do an iteration and come back I think just you know the kind of committee structure and everything that we all come up against that just actually slows slows things down but actually the support that I've had and and really useful feedback has been great so the support is there it is just the time to grind through the formalities. Super so I think this will have to be our last question there's a question reflecting on the challenges of developing an emotional culture within an organisation which doesn't always foster that way of being that way of being for our whole selves it's framed here as asking how you work through certain barriers but we've touched on that so I wonder if I might reframe it slightly and offer an invitation for each of you to share as you are comfortable to do so about your own emotional journey whether you've encountered difficulties and how you overcome that or perhaps just what you are particularly proud of or take delight in as you've navigated this. For me it's I came back to Aotearoa after 27 years of living in Australia and a bit like Michelle it's you can't undertake this work if you don't start decolonising yourself and it is it is hard and as an Indigenous person who didn't speak Aotearoa our language when we came back and feeling whakama which means embarrassed about that it's it has been uncomfortable and it remains so but it I just have to do it it's important as as I mentioned the only Indigenous university librarian that means that I have kind of a responsibility and I don't take that lightly and if I want others to be on the journey if I want our libraries to do it then I have to be there and do it as well so yeah it's it requires bravery and courage but I'm really fortunate that I have amazing colleagues to work with and friends who are also on similar journeys so that that makes such a difference. So I might just touch on two things one is that for me I think my journey around some of this started when I was back in the UK particularly with Black Lives Matters and things like that and starting to educate myself around anti-racism and I was it for those that don't know I was at the University of York before which is very white kind of middle class university and it was a very different environment to what I've come in to at Waikato but I'm really grateful for all the learning that I had at York and the conversations with colleagues etc and starting to do a lot of learning and relearning about things and there was something and I and I apologize because I could not remember which book this was in but it basically was my light bulb moment about anti-racism which said if you're not doing anything then you'll complicit in the system essentially and for me that was such a big light bulb moment that when I came and arrived back in New Zealand I was I was just really conscious that I was coming to a university that was very different to where I've been before etc and that I needed to be really open to just listening and learning and then I'll just talk a little bit about what we've done at Waikato around that emotional culture which I mentioned in the presentation. We've been really intentional about this and used a tool called the emotional culture deck if anyone's interested I'll put a link in the channel it's a New Zealand company people like Air New Zealand use them and we have co-created with our library staff the emotional culture we all need to feel at work to be successful in the work that we do and that is what we hang everything back on so when we experience things like racial microaggressions we can go back to the emotional culture we've set as a library and we can have conversations that say so you know this happened this was the impact you know does that fit with being and our five things are connected supported appreciated fun-loving and open-minded and it's really easy to connect back to those and think about the behaviours and rituals that need to come to make people feel that way so it's actually given us a really good tool for language to be able to have these conversations with stuff. I think I still feel that I'm very much still on a journey you know I'm quite new to senior leadership so actually thinking about what does that mean how do how do I need to you know think about the behaviours that I'm modelling and think about actually how open I should be about things and certainly in terms of the EDI forum recognising that I am a facilitator but I am not a representative and I think my my learning my EDI learning journey is you know I'm nowhere near there is no end for starters and I am nowhere near it so I think the hardest thing is is actually kind of recognising that I am not an expert whilst I might appear to be in a position where people would look to me to think I am an expert so worrying about saying the wrong thing which I hear from so many staff is you know an anxiety they have I absolutely share that in in a huge way because I have put myself in a position where I feel even more vulnerable if I did say the wrong thing but it's so important to just be able to say well I am still on this learning journey and I will never stop being on it because you know EDI never ends and just to be able to to say I want to know more I want to be better I want to be doing the best for all of my friends and colleagues and trying to understand their problems their needs and yeah but it's it's all it's all still very new and I think being in a leadership role is is an extra challenge just in terms of that representation and that expectation on you so I really liked what Kim and Michelle were saying about just being really open and authentic and owning up to mistakes because I think that is that is the responsibility that we have because at the end of the day we are human and we will get it wrong just to echo that really I'm very much at the beginning of this project and I want to progress and develop more collections but I was very much afraid of getting it wrong at the beginning and it's gradually through sitting down and being honest and open about that with the poets has really helped and learning a lot along the way I also think one of the journeys aside from EDI related is the just last time being on a research project and being a project manager I'm managing a big budget around that so there's been it almost feels like starting my career again in some ways but obviously bringing with me my professional support kind of background to some of this as well so I think it's been really really exciting and really rewarding and I definitely recommend it both you know building collections of this type and also embarking on research projects and encouraging research led initiatives in the library