 Thank you all for coming. It's really lovely to have such a full house for this particular talk. I'm Nancy Davenport. I'm the University Librarian at American University, and this is my colleague Catherine Simpson, who until three weeks ago was the Director for Strategy and Communications in the University Library and was one of my co-conspirators in this project that we're going to talk about. But she has left us, is still in the university, but is doing organizational development. So she's taking her skills that were localized to the library and taking them to the entire university. But for the purposes of today, she was very much a part of putting this conference together. I'm going to do some stage setting for about the university and the library, and then Catherine's going to lead you a bit more through the conference itself and what we did last year and why we did it. So if you don't know AU, we are in DC. We are 80 acres in Northwest Washington, founded originally by the Methodist Church, regard ourselves very much as a social justice school. And a couple of years ago, we were among the four founders of the Diversity Alliance for Academic Librarians, and the others were Virginia Tech, West Virginia University, and the University of Iowa, which was a great partnership for us because three big state universities in small towns or rural areas, one small private urban. And so we've exchanged our fellows and our residents among us so they get different experiences. The library at AU is more than the library, so my job includes managing all of academic technology, including Blackboard. We run all the computer labs on the campus. We own and run the GIS lab, and we're responsible for all classroom technology. So it's a full platter, but what it means is faculty members come to the library for just about everything. We've also been about reinventing other parts of the university. So all of this innovation spirit was one of the things that allowed us to take this big risk of doing a conference and high impact research for faculty. We've been reinventing the student experience and literally walking through the steps that a student would take as they register for classes, as they try to pay bills, as they do this and as they do that. And we've brought outside experts from Wegmans for their high standards of customer service to traveling to the Cleveland Clinic to see how they reinvented themselves. So we're very serious about creating some differences. We've reinvented all of the general education classes that our first year students and sophomores take, and it's now in an AU core, including two required classes, one of which is about being an emancipated adult and learning to be an adult, and the second is about living in harmony with people who are different from you. So it's an adventurous university. So when we began talking to our colleagues about doing this project, even within the library, we had a couple people who were worried, and they were worried because librarians might end up being cast in the role of a graduate assistant, and that's not the role they wanted. I came from a career in the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress where the librarians and the analysts were absolute partners, not one subservient to another, in every project that was taken on. So I knew that you could reach what we wanted to do, which was a peer relationship. One of the things in favor of doing this is a tenured librarian for several years has chaired the IRB, and so they are used to seeing a librarian in a strong role regarding research. Another factor in our favor is Rachel Borchard, one of our colleagues, is the co-author of Meaningful Metrics, which is a very powerful tool if you don't have it, of understanding alt-metrics and how they can play into your promotion files, your tenure files, and how you measure your social aspect of getting hits, rather than the typical citations. Rachel had been meeting with faculty around the campus in their department settings, getting them signed up for orchid IDs and making sure that they were establishing their research profile. The library is also known because we put on a scholarly communications colloquium series that many of our colleagues in the Washington area have been coming to, and we do a social justice lecture series, and frequently faculty will bring their entire classrooms to this. So Catherine's going to hit another button, and I'm going to tell you how we've been transforming ourselves academically over the past couple of years. Under the past eight years with President Kerwin, who stepped down in May, and Provost Bass, who has not stepped down, the two of them were driving the university, transforming it into a research university of much higher impact. We have moved up 64 places in ranking, and we have moved up in the Carnegie classification, and we have lowered our admissions rate into the mid-twenties. At the same time, this past year, we have a class that is 50-50, majority minority populations coming in. We have shifted most of our financial resources for students to aid rather than merit, and as I say, we are sort of determined to make a complete change. Why now for the library to do it? Well, we've built the Digital Research Archive, where we have been collecting faculty research, we have been collecting capstones from our students, and putting things into the Digital Archive, but it was time to showcase it. It was time to showcase the fact that we had the GIS lab. The Provost called one afternoon in frustrated voice that, can you build a GIS lab? Now if the Provost asked you that, is there any answer other than yes? Yes, we can, which he said, I can't give you lines, but I can give you cash. So we took the cash. We took a lot of cash, because he was very good at doing that, and eventually we did get a line. But so we've built that, we've hired a data librarian with extensive experience, who worked with faculties to build their data management plans, as well as helping us figure out how to do all of this. And we've built a very close relationship with a Vice Provost for Research. A couple of years ago, I was one of the co-chairs of the faculty retreat, and we had a speaker cancel the last minute, who was going to be our concluding speaker, and so we needed to dream up something on the spot. And we went to the Provost and the President said, we want to sponsor a research competition, sort of a TED talk kind of thing, and we want you to put up some serious money so that whoever wins this will get serious money to do some research. And the proposal had to come from two different schools, they had to come from different disciplines. I mean, we laid out some ground rules and they could do a five minute talk. We ended up sending two researchers to Africa, who specialized in Ebola, and who were there at exactly the right time. They had been invited to come, and then we persuaded the Provost they really needed to publish an open access because that information was needed now. It wasn't needed three years from now behind the gate. So in various small ways, the library has been very instrumental in the research process. The Provost puts major money aside to have research that the university communications can use to position research. And deans are allowed to nominate one paper from each of their schools, and the Vice Provost for Research and I are the two people who review the papers and decide which one goes forward for this curating. So it's being able to have this kind of a footprint, both personally and organizationally, that we think has made a really big difference. About eight years ago, the Provost invented AU 2030. When he invited faculty to, again, come as pairs to present topics that needed to be addressed at the time that the children who were being born would be in the class of 2030. So that we were forward thinking about how those students would be affected when they hit our campus 18 years later, and the kind of research that needed to be done. Again, it was a competition. He put up very serious money. The deans as a group are the ones who decide which of these projects go forward, and they get travel money, they get research time, they get time off from classes, etc., to make it go forward. So in everything that the university has been doing, it literally has been to emphasize research and to change its student body. Partly to change research, we have been recruiting faculty from your universities and bringing them in with tenure. And it's been an important thing to do about it. We bring in between four and seven every year who come with tenure, who come with a big research agenda, and who have found at home at AU. A couple of years ago, we brought several neuroscientists who are computational scientists, don't require big labs. This year, we recruited Ibram Kendi from the University of Florida to establish the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at AU, and we are kind of thrilled to have these people with us. And the library immediately meets with every new faculty member who comes to campus. We actually send them credentials before they come to campus so they can explore all of our resources and let us know what they don't have so that we set pot of money aside for them. So we get them invested in us as we invest in their research immediately. And that's part of what led us to be able to do all of this. So we defined high impact research much the way your provost probably does. It's research that is critical to one's field, that one's peers find is authentic, as real, as moves the discipline, moves the scale forward. But we're taking an extra step. And our provost is now, he gave a talk last year that Catherine will talk about, that talked about the role of becoming a public intellectual, of taking that step from academic research to having societal impact. And that's the piece that we wanted specifically to get out of this conference, was to be able to have him give that speech where we gave him a bunch of talking points, but he writes his own material. And we then had several deans talk about their university and doing it. We have a lot of people on the campus who are editors in journals, and we know that they're having an impact in their field. But our goal was to be able to showcase all of this, and to be able to do it in a way that the only people we brought from the outside for the first conference were funders. Other than that, we used AU people to talk to AU. This year, we're going outside a bit more. But Catherine will talk to you now about why that was so important to take that inside model. So first of all, before I get to that point, I'll talk a little bit about why we decided to make it into a conference. We thought a lot about, should this be, you know, a lot of the things we were thinking about, could they be just be workshops spread throughout the year? Did we need, you know, would faculty actually come to a whole day? They're always so busy. So we finally did settle that, no, we needed a conference because we really needed to devote the time needed to the topic of research, to emphasize its importance and to emphasize our role in it. And we really wanted to showcase multiple aspects of research while we were having this day. We did feel that faculty would be more willing to come to a day set aside than to come to multiple events throughout the year. And I think that we were correct about that. We built it as a day to learn more about the complexities of research and publishing. We talked about things like how to get grant funding, and this is where our outside speakers came from. We talked about data and preservation plans for grants and, you know, some faculty are not as familiar with some of the new requirements. We talked about measuring research impact beyond the citation count. Things like how to make your digital scholarship discoverable when there's just so much information out there. We divided the conference up into four tracks to start with. We had planning and managing as one track, methodology and tools as a track, discoverability and accessibility and measuring and promoting. And as Nancy said, we did mostly have faculty speaking at this first one because we kind of wanted to feel like their conference. It was, you know, their colleagues were speaking. A lot of times people are much more willing to go here, their own colleagues, if they're familiar with them, and, you know, they have friends and such to go here. So we felt that this might sort of draw some people in when they might not be otherwise interested. We timed it just so that it was the day after commencement, sort of right before everybody goes away for the summer, but not before they're totally gone. And that day seemed to work pretty well. We decided that we would have it inside the library. Now, this was literally hours before we started our renovation for the summer. So, you know, we had some mixed reviews about the venue and that's fine. We knew that it wasn't the best, but we did feel it was very important to have, since we were hosting the event, we should have it inside the library. And so even though it wasn't the greatest, we decided to go forward with that. We also decided to use mobile conference technology. I think it's the same one that is being used at this conference. That's, you know, it makes it look professional, but it also makes it easy to register. It makes it easy for us to track registration. And it links to our promotional software. We use Eventbrite at the library to kind of get the word out about events. It's been very useful and successful for us. And we wanted a conference technology that would link with that one. We did send out a survey. It wasn't a very high response rate, but we did send one out. It did give us enough information to help guide planning for this year. So, we felt it was useful. And in terms of the actual things that we found on the survey, the plenary was the most found to be the most useful. And that was the one where the provost spoke along with some deans. It was also very well attended. I think, you know, when your boss is the speaker, maybe that's where you go. But just under that, what people found most useful were things like, with things in the category of measuring and promoting. And that was online research identity, measuring your scholarly impact, and measuring interactions with the press or managing interactions with the press. Something that many of our faculty are being guided, if not shoved directly into doing, is working with the press more. It's not an easy or comfortable thing for many people to do. And I think there's a lot of interest in hearing about how that should go. From faculty who do have a lot of interaction with the press and are very well known in their fields. So, that one was very well attended. We also surprisingly had good ratings for the citation management session, which sounds a little boring. But they did to say that it was very useful for them. Some of them wished that it was a little bit more advanced. So, that's something for us to think about in future years about, you know, at what level do we set some of these talks. You know, we sort of went with what we thought was best, but sometimes we might need to readjust, you know, sort of the advancement level. So, the plenary, these are the speakers for the plenary. I was the moderator. Scott Bass is the provost, and he's the one that did the lecture on why research is important within the academy. But then the more important part is how it affects society. And it affects society through innovation and through discovery. But we, being a university where we are mostly social sciences, a lot of it also affects, can affect personal and individual lives. Jim Goldgeier was then the dean of the School of International Service, Barbara Ramzak for the School of Public Affairs, Peter Star for the College of Arts and Sciences. And they chose to talk about faculty members whose research had made that crossover that had moved from being strictly academic to having public impact. And for faculty members to sit there surrounded by their colleagues in a way that they aren't usually. And here the provost speaks so highly about the work that is being done and its impact. Who the new researchers are that we have recruited to the university and will be joining them in the fall. And the deans then pointing out their individual colleagues was a very powerful moment brought to you by your library, which we were, you sort of kept that a little quieter. But they expect now that the library will do a conference on high impact research that we've got the tools and the ability to reach out and do that sort of thing. So we have, we are well under planning for the one that will be this year on May 15th. I think it's, if that's the Monday after Mother's Day, we do commencement, five of them over Mother's Day weekend. And then this was the day after and the provost first said, everybody will be too tired. Everybody is you and me and we're going to be there because we do all the commitments. And it, it turned out to be the perfect day because people as Catherine said had not gone off. They were still sort of tied to the campus. And it was an easy thing to do. And we provided every meal. So it, it worked out perfectly. With that, I think we're open to questions and comments, which is going to talk a little bit about next, the next conference, this next one that we are under deeply planning, deeply planning. Yes. We have decided that we will still continue to have faculty speakers because that was effective, but we're going to bring in a few more outside speakers this year, including some journal editors and acquisitions editors, along with, hopefully, some people from foundation, family foundation funders. The topics that we're considering right now include things like peer review, planning for your pre tenure sabbatical perspectives from grant funders, and using social media and research networks effectively. Because again, these, these were, these had a lot of engagement last year. And or they are very timely topics such as peer review, which has had a number of studies done on it so far this year. So that's kind of where we're landing for this coming year. We're hoping the other people were talking to our storytellers to have storytellers come in and listen intently to a faculty member and come up with your elevator speech, come up with your two paragraph speech. And we've actually found professional storytellers that do this as a business, they usually go to corporations and talk to the CEO to be able to do that pitch that stays on and is on message and isn't full of all the details that are about implementation. And the other session that was really effective was reverse engineering and abstract. So the librarians can start with what are the search terms that would be the most likely to be used to find your research. And so you start to build those words into the abstract of the paper. And so the librarians were helping them do that. And that seems to have been one as well that got traction because it was practical and they could see over the next citation cycle could see how their citations might have changed because they pay closer attention to the words that they use to their own abstracts. Right. So we're hoping that as this conference grows, we can start to get proposals from speakers and faculty and that eventually we will outgrow the library space. But we've remodeled it so it's so much nicer. Two floors in one summer. So if there are any questions, we're happy to take them.