 everybody. I think it's time to get started. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of CNI and I welcome you to the first Friday and the end of the first thematic week of project briefing sessions for the CNI virtual fall 2020 member meeting. And I would just note that we will have some more sessions today and then Monday at four I will lead a sort of a summing up session for the first week. A couple of logistical things. There is a chat and please feel free to use that to identify yourself or make comments as the presentations unfold. There is also at the bottom of your screen a Q&A tool. Please use that at any point during the presentations to queue up questions. We'll deal with all the questions at the end of the two presentations when Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will materialize and moderate a Q&A session. I would also note that we are recording this session. It will be available subsequently and closed captioning is also available if you'd like to make use of that. Let me with that introduce our speakers. We have with us today Daniel Noonan and Sue Beck both of the Ohio State University excuse me. And they are going to explain some forbidding sounding acronyms which you can see in front of you. And also what brain writing is a term that I hadn't come across until I saw their abstract. But really what this is all about I think at least as I understand it is about really thinking through what digital content and digital preservation mean to workflows and how appropriate workflows recognize those realities. At many of our institutions as you know dealing with digital materials has just sort of been grafted on to very long-standing workflows in ways that I would say are ever creakier as time goes on. So with that I will welcome and thank our presenters and turn it over to Daniel to start the presentation. Thank you Cliff. Thanks for y'all to come today to hear our presentation. This is our first kind of public walkthrough of the work that we've been doing for the past six to eight months. I'm Dan Noonan. I'm the digital preservation librarian at the Ohio State University Libraries. Today Sue Beck and I will be discussing the use of Cypoc, RACI and brain writing and exposing our existing workflows that surround digitization and born digital acquisition as well as the arrangement description of providing access to and preservation thereof. Sue, a senior systems consultant and I are members of the University Libraries Information Technology Unit. We'll be using a scripted presentation for the sake of future clarity as well as observing our commitments to the use of our limited amount of time most effectively. We are gathered here in Columbus on the unceded lands of Indigenous people who have been coming to what is now the state of Ohio for thousands of years and the series of large-scale geometric boundary and effigy earthworks still visible in Central and Southern Ohio bear witness to this region's historical importance as a center of economic, spiritual, artistic and intellectual endeavor in exchange. We acknowledge Central Ohio as the traditional homeland of the Shawnee, Miami, Hopewell, Wyandotte and other Indigenous nations. We have strong ties to the lands. Today, individuals from broad range of Indigenous backgrounds call Columbus and Central Ohio home. At the beginning of 2020, when the University Libraries was back at full compliment with various roles that affect the management of our digital content, a group of librarians and characters proposed the revival of a work group to provide a cross-functional consistent approach to managing our born digital acquisitions and our digitized materials. Various work groups over the past decade have come together around issues pertinent to our digital content with success in developing guidance, while others' efforts have not necessarily seen the light of day. Further, there is confusion at times as to where to find definitive University Libraries information regarding digitizing materials, accessioning born digital materials, and where we will preserve and provide access to them. One of the goals of this group, the Digital Preservation and Access Work Group, or DPNA, will be to provide a single point of access to find, discover and manage the institutional knowledge. Further, the DPNA intends to provide transparency and decision making regarding priorities, guidelines, and standards that the libraries adopt in these areas. We will define, refine, and clarify roles and responsibilities around preservation, the curation of digital collections, standardize the accessioning and processing of born digital collections, digitization processing for at-risk collections, and digitization, prioritization, and processing for providing online access to collections. We will work to ensure consistent implementation of metadata profiles, implement best practices for digital collection life cycle management, and continually evaluate University Libraries' current capabilities and make recommendations with input from all stakeholders around the evolution of services. The initial charge from our sponsoring associate deans, Jennifer Benapol and Carla Strebe, meant to eventually achieve these loftier goals as something much more basic, to identify our existing workflows that affect born digital acquisitions and processing, digitization, providing access to digital materials and the preservation thereof, answering the question, what are the intersections, gaps, redundancies, and areas for improvement? But first, we have to ask ourselves, who are we doing this for? Who are our stakeholders? Stakeholder is not a one-size-fits-all category or just a singular target. This is where we can often error not being transparent enough. When contemplating who our stakeholders are, we need to gauge their influence versus their interest. Clearly, our critical stakeholders are those that have both high interest and influence, and we need to keep them involved and most thoroughly manage them. But who are our other stakeholders? Major stakeholders are those that have a significant ability to influence, but possibly a lower level of day-to-day interest. These are the types of folks we need to keep satisfied by anticipating and meeting their needs. Significant stakeholders are those that have an interest in what we are doing, but do not have much influence on our outcomes. These are folks we just need to keep completely informed. And finally, minor stakeholders are those that have a low interest and low minimal ability to influence. These are folks we need to provide a limited effort to keep informed via minimal contact. So who are our stakeholders? It is a long list. Clearly, this represents a wide swath of the university libraries, and some may suggest it isn't wide or complete enough. But it is a starting point. Are these all critical stakeholders? That depends. It will vary as we work through the workflow mappings and analysis. Some stakeholders may have a relatively static role. For example, a couple of the major stakeholders who we need to anticipate and meet their needs throughout the process are our sponsors, our associate deans, and by extension the dean of libraries and the rest of the executive team. Whereas myself, as representing digital preservation, may have a more fluid stakeholder role ranging from significant to major to critical, depending upon the workflow or process. We also do not necessarily see this as a complete list. We hold expect reveal, and we have other stakeholders through this process that we may not have previously contemplated. Having identified our stakeholders, at least initially, what did we do next? We needed to begin to identify and differentiate our processes and workflows. This initially should be conducted from a very high level point of view, identifying activities, functions, handoffs associated with our work around acquiring and processing born digital collections, digitizing our existing materials, and addressing how we actively preserve and provide access to these digital materials. By a high level point of view, imagine looking at a map zoomed out to show Ohio State in relation to Franklin County, Ohio, and surrounding areas, as opposed to being zoomed in to identify campus buildings and roads. It is this broader abstraction that we are aiming for at the beginning of the process. We have engaged in utilizing three techniques to help us visualize and understand the workflow and processes that allow us to provide access to and preservation of our born digital and digitized content. These techniques come to us from the realm of process improvement, roots in total quality management that continue to be used in lean and six sigma programs. The SciPOC exercise provides for a very high level view of our workflow process, the steps in the process are aggregated up to a level of extraction that still allow us to understand suppliers, inputs, outputs, handoffs, and customers. The intent is to ensure that all processes are represented. Following up on the SciPOC, each group will be asked to conduct a race to determine for each step within a process who is responsible, accountable, consulted, or needs to be informed. And finally, we will engage in brainwriting to further tease out the granularities of the steps identified within the SciPOC. And with that, I'll turn it over to Sue. SciPOC simply stands for suppliers, inputs, process, outputs, and customers. Suppliers are the providers of inputs to the process. Inputs define the material, service, and our information that are used by the process to produce the outputs. A process is defined as a sequence of activities that usually add value to inputs to produce the outputs or transform inputs to outputs for the customers. In a traditional SciPOC, there are at a minimum four and maximum of seven high level steps that should be constructed in a verb noun structure. Outputs are the products, services, and our information that is valuable to the customer. The customers are users of the outputs produced or transformed by the process. They can be people, organizations, machines, or even software. Consequently, a SciPOC looks like a table and it lends itself well to being documented in a spreadsheet. However, the interesting thing about SciPOC is that it's not created in the linear manner that the acronym suggests. The creation of a SciPOC actually happens inside out. The first phase is to identify and name the high-level process or workflow. This is followed by moving to the middle and mapping it in four to seven high-level process steps. There has to be a first step and a last step, with a minimum of two and a maximum of five additional steps. Next, we move to the right side to identify the outputs of these process steps, which is followed by identifying the customers that will receive these outputs. Now, we jump to the left side in order to identify the inputs required for each of the process steps to function properly. Finally, we identify the suppliers of the inputs that are required by the process steps. Once you complete a SciPOC, it can be reviewed with project sponsors, champions, and other involved stakeholders for verification. Identifying and articulating the process steps may be the most difficult part of the process. As participants can get sidetracked in granular details, instead of abstracting the steps up to a higher, more modernized level. This is an example of a completed SciPOC for our archives group, Archives Digitization. However, this is where they started from, naming the process and starting with the first step, request for digitization, followed by identifying the last step, storage of material. Then they fill the remaining steps in between. After recording the process steps, we begin to identify outputs of those steps, which leads to identifying the customers of those outputs. From there, we jump back to the other side of the matrix and begin to identify the inputs to the process steps, before finally identifying the suppliers of those inputs leading to a completed SciPOC. After completing the SciPOC, we can begin to conduct the racy exercise. This exercise allows us to identify the roles and their accompanying responsibilities that they may have for each process step. This acronym stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. We need to make a distinction, however, between a role and individually identified people. A role is a descriptor of an associated set of tasks that an individual is capable of completing. These may be performed by many people. For example, a role might be a scan technician, whereas an individual is one person that performs a particular role or roles. Individual one could be a scan technician while individual two could be a scan technician and maybe a conservation technician. In a racy, we define Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed as follows. A role is responsible if there are those who do the work to complete the task. There has to be at least one role that is responsible, although others can be delegated to assist in the required work. The role who is ultimately answerable to the correct and thorough completion of deliverable or task is deemed accountable. They ensure the prerequisites of the tasks are met and delegate the work to those responsible. There must be one and only one accountable role specified for each task or deliverable. The first of the two optional roles are those that are consulted. These are roles whose opinions are sought, typically subject matter experts, and with whom there is two-way communication. The second optional and final role is that of Inform. These folks are kept up to date on a progress, often only on a completion of a task or deliverable, and with whom there is just one-way communication. The racy can be completed by creating a matrix where the roles are at minimum, the process steps from the Cypoc, but could be augmented with more granular steps. As in our example here, based upon the Archives Digitization Cypoc that we just shared. The first step, along with step three, four, and five, have been further broken down due to divergence in actual workflow and applicable roles. The racy can be completed in one of two manners. In version one, which we see here, the columns represent RACI, and for each process, the roles or persons are identified. Each step must have at least one responsible, but only one accountable role or individual. In this version, one can quickly identify who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed, particularly to verify that there is one and only one accountable person or role for each step, while there may be multiple roles for people or people responsible, consulted, or informed. In our example, it was an initial pass that identified multiple accountable roles for a few process steps, which led us to further dividing those. In version two, the columns represent the various roles and can be further broken down by individuals. For each step, one indicates if the role or individual is responsible, accountable, consulted, and or informed. In this version, one can see how a role or an individual's participation changes throughout the process, as well as the aggregate of their responsibilities. Both versions provide us with valuable insight into workflow and its processes. The racy is an important bridge to the brain writing process. It helps us identify who needs to be in the proverbial room for the brain writing exercise. We are using the term brain writing, not brain storming. What is the difference? In a brain storming session, we approach the exercise with an open mind where the sky is the limit, trying to get all the potential ideas on the table from various points of view. However, the objective in front of us is to determine and document the now, and what we are currently doing, not what we want to be doing, regardless of whether we are doing the right thing or not. Brain writing allows us to dive deeper beyond those four to seven process steps and examine our processes with finer granularity. There are various brain writing methods available, such as 365, while we decided on a simplified version. We selected this method with the following benefits in mind. Fast and efficient, less social anxiety and competing personalities, and avoiding the group sync consensus. This process would ensure that all ideas were recorded by the individuals who thought of them, additionally eliminating the recorder's bias and control. If you were to conduct this exercise in a traditional venue, we would be in a conference room with a white board, and folks in the room would have pads of notes, posted notes in front of them. We would ask them to itemize all the microprocesses and activities involved in each of the process steps identified in a sidewalk on a series of posted notes, and then have them all placed on the white board. However, we are currently in the throes of COVID-19 related restrictions, which only allows us to meet virtually. Therefore, we live for virtual white board tools in order to accomplish this activity. Having settled upon Google's Jamboard as a no-cost alternative, we quickly ran into some limitations. Our problem was twofold. First, the tool itself, whether Jamboard or other like tools, were cumbersome for some average users. Second, there is no way for the individuals to create their set of posted notes before sharing them. They are right out there in front of everyone, and folks start to react to them without doing their own brainwriting, such as stifling the progress. So, we went back to the drawing board, pun intended. We constructed a spreadsheet option that would allow each team individual to itemize the steps, as well as identifying general notes and or dependencies. Additionally, as Dan and I review these brainwritings, we are adding our own notes and questions for clarifications. It is from these spreadsheets that we will begin to diagram visualized process maps and workflows. Dan, you're muted. There we go. Yep, I knew I'd do that. Sorry. Thank you, Sue. Once we have our Cypox, Bracy, and Brainwriting complete, we'll be able to analyze the data along with validating and confirming it. Based upon the validated confirmed results, we'll be able to develop process maps with accurate information about the steps within the process, the roles and individuals involved, and where there are intersections and handoffs, as well as missed opportunities. Sue and I are taking the information gathered in the brainwriting exercise to begin to visualize the actual workflows. As with the brainwriting exercise, we had originally hoped to use online tools for drawing the visualization of the workflows, but we ran into the same issue of them being time-consuming cumbersome for the average user. Therefore, we have gone old school, as can be seen here with the hand-drawn visualizations. Once these have been validated with the particular groups, we will turn these over to someone who is competent with drawing tools to finalize our visualizations probably in Visio. The ultimate goal will be to assemble a larger visualization of all the processes, identifying not only the steps within the processes, the roles and individuals involved, and where there are the intersections and handoffs, but the organizational redundancies, gaps, and best practices. It is the intention that this will allow us to chart a more holistic, cohesive approach to acquiring, accessioning, and processing born digital materials, digitizing our existing content, and then actively preserving and providing access to that digital content. So as a recap of the steps involved in this overall project, we will be identifying all existing processes related to providing access to and preservation of our born digital and digitized content. We are utilizing CIPOC, race, and brainwriting tools to complete the list of process steps, capturing roles, and individuals, and handoffs, leading to the development of a process map. The draft process maps will be shared and validated with our stakeholders, presented to our digital preservation and access work group for final considerations, before sharing with our sponsors in the greater university libraries community. This is an ongoing project. You can track our progress at the go link that is on these slides, which has also been put into the chat. As with any project, there are challenges and benefits that we can identify as we progress. On the challenges front, we had to pivot early on as the pandemic disrupted how we intended to conduct this exercise, and we had to determine ways to transform a typically tactile face-to-face test into one that is conducted in the virtual environment. The CIPOC activity can be extremely challenging to get participants to focus on modeling the process in a series of limited macro steps and not get caught up in granular minutiae, and then transitioning them back at a later date to focus on those microprocesses minutiae, and availability leading to response, didn't we already discuss this, and you didn't want this detail? But the answer is yes, but now is the time to discuss it. And as discussed by utilizing tools within the virtual environment, instantly putting it into shared spreadsheet or on-jam board, the fact that it's right there out in front of everyone sometimes stifles the discussion. On the flip side, we have been told by many participants that this has created the opportunity to examine, contemplate, interrogate their processes and workflows for the first time. It has encouraged systems thinking among our library's colleagues. While we've had to revise our approach for data collection as we progressed, we now have the CIPOC racy and brainwriting consolidated into a single workbook for each workflow. We have been able to document gaps that we kind of knew were there, as well as ones that weren't, or we didn't know were there. And finally, we learned that the need to be up the pivot is a challenge and not an obstacle. Thank you, and we are open for questions. Thank you so much, Dan and Sue. That was a really interesting overview of what sounds like a very complex process, but yields some really useful results. It seems that you're finding, which is wonderful. So it was really interesting, and we appreciate you coming to CNI to chat about it. And I would like to invite our attendees to type your questions into the Q&A tool, and I'll be happy to pass those along and share them with Dan and Sue so that we can hear more about what they've learned. And thank you also to our attendees for taking time out of your day to spend a little time with us here at CNI. I was curious to know while we're waiting to see what kind of questions we have from our audience. So you're in the process of drawing together all your findings, and you've got your handwritten map that you're going to be translating into something more polished, and this is going to be sent along and finalized. So what happens when steps in the process change as invariably they will? What happens at that point? Well, at this point, we're trying to get the sense of what we're actually doing. And because of that, we know there will be gaps. We know there will be changes. So part of what comes out of this ultimately is a recommendation for process improvement within the libraries. And so, you know, we've been looking at everything from the way our special collections folks look at, whether it's a digitization project or potentially accessioning born digital materials, how our metadata folks interact in that process, how the digitization group works with that, how our copyright interacts, how our collection management. So, and we're still in the process of conducting even some of the initial Cypoxjet as we begin to piece these things together as we move down the road. So the map that you saw there is just for one small workflow. We've got a lot more maps that all come together in the larger maps. And, you know, do we see in somebody's Cypox where they were doing this or consulting that person that three or four others are not? Is that the right thing to be doing? Or maybe those other ones are supposed to be doing it? Or maybe that one, it's like, why did you do that? Nobody else. So we're still, that's ultimately what we hope to get out of this is so that we can improve the process, but at the same time then is make this visual so that everybody in the libraries understands how the processes work and how we're part of a bigger project management exercise than just in our local areas within the libraries. That makes sense. So it's bringing a lot more transparency to the elements in the process itself. Got it. Okay, that's really interesting. Thank you. And what does the staff say about this method? It's been interesting, especially some of the, I'm sure everybody else kind of felt the same way that when they heard the acronyms and what they are, and they, you know, just trying to, for the first time, as Dan mentioned, some of them were exposed to thinking about their process, thinking about things that are happening in the process beyond what their very specific part of the process that they were responsible for. And that's what the system thinking kind of came in like, let me think beyond the silo of me and what comes across my desk. So it's been, we've heard that it's been eye-opening. It's been like an aha for a lot of folks to think about the bigger accumulative efforts that go into getting something, you know, from the paper to the hands of the user in a digital manner. And this is just hopefully goes beyond the digital preservation and access. And it could be thought about like everything that's happening at the libraries. Well, that's really interesting. Well, thank you so much. I see we're right at time. So I'm going to go ahead and close down the recording of this session and thank everyone for attending and just invite any of our attendees who are still around. If you would like to approach the podium and have a chat with our speakers, please feel free to do so. Just raise your hand and I can unmute you. And we will be back again in half an hour, two o'clock Eastern time for our next webinar that's part of the CNI Fall membership meeting. Hope to see you there. Thank you again, Dan and Sue. Take care. Thank you.