 I'd like to welcome everyone to the plenary session. Roundtable discussion, working nine to five in your pajamas, life in the time of COVID-19. Presenting today or speaking on the piano will be John Foudreau from the University of Pittsburgh Libraries or a young University of North Carolina at Charlotte Graduate School, Elise Fox and Dana Dickman from Sacramento State University Library. And the moderators today are myself, Terry Green from the University of Toledo, and Stacey Wallace. And I don't know if Stacey is on here yet. I don't hear her. So I will just continue to go along. So before we begin, during the presentation portion, just keep your microphone muted unless you're a speaker. Please feel free to use the chat feature to pose questions. Those are going to be addressed during the Q&A portion. And then so I'd like to welcome everyone. And I'm going to go ahead and start asking each presenter a question whether they all received already. So let me do that. OK. So Dana, Elise, John, am I missing anyone? Whoever wants to answer first, you're each going to be asked to answer what is the most surprising change in your work life and your home life since March. I'm Elise Fox here. I can go ahead and get us started. I'm the library services specialist for digital projects at Sacramento State University. I would say probably the biggest change has been I had these preconceived notions that I was a home body and wanted to work remotely. I am neither of those things. As a mom with a toddler, I didn't realize how much I really relied upon going to work in that process of, I guess, the ritual of going to work and that commuting time to myself and even just having the social interaction of being with adults. And even if you're not personally socializing at work, the social aspect of working on projects together and being able to talk through bibliographic problems fulfilled a social quota that's been very hard to replace in a remote environment, especially out here in California. We've had incredibly strict guidelines under COVID. And recently with all of the wildfires, we haven't even been able to leave our house on a lot of days. So it's just been, there's always something new challenge underneath this kind of umbrella of the COVID pandemic challenge. So yeah, I think that transition to working exclusively remotely and not having that direct social interaction has been definitely a challenge. My email box now is a very convoluted hierarchy of folders and subfolders just to keep everything organized. So just kind of that readjustment to entirely email or app-based communication has definitely been a lesson in organization. I also transitioned immediately to going from having one student assistant to having 45 student assistants who are also themselves transitioning to remote schoolwork and remote work. So that was a huge learning curve and was definitely a challenge to keep that many people on the ship. I was sailing as we kind of did these trial and errors and resolve technology issues that come with remote work. So I think those are, I don't know if that solves any problems, but that's kind of my experience and the surprise that I just didn't really anticipate happening with working remotely or I didn't think at all through, I guess. Right, right. Thank you so much, Elise, for sharing that with us. Laura, can you go next? Yeah, well, I can relate to some of those problems a little bit. I'm a single mom, I'm an eight-year-old, and fortunately, I am an introvert. So I love working at home. It's great. And the biggest surprise, I think, was I've actually been pretty good at facilitating online events, and my supervisors were super happy about that. I conducted an orientation panel the other day that almost 800 students attended, and I never would have thought I would have done anything like that. But it has been pretty challenging, and it's going to feel really weird when we get back part-time in person soon. Thanks so much, Laura. Elise, are you still on the phone? Oh, Dana? Oh, Dana. OK, hi. Yeah. Hi. Yeah, so I have a new challenge, which is trying to attend and present at a conference with the electricity out, which I feel like at work, there would be some more options than what I have right now. But I had been at Sac State for about six months when we went home, and my prior job was actually primarily remote for a hospital system, where our library department was based across seven states. So I honestly didn't think it would feel like a huge change to work from home, but I was really wrong. My prior job was set up to be remote, and coming home this time, this was a huge adjustment for my colleagues because our library is very place-based. We are very much like a nine-to-five sort of library, as far as staff. I mean, obviously, we're open longer than that. The biggest change in my work life has been how complicated it's been to collaborate outside my department, because this was all new for us as a university. So I've been running into things like not everyone keeps their outlook calendar up to date. They don't all use the same communication platforms. So I can't just send out a calendar invite for a meeting like I could at my old remote job. I have some colleagues where I have to go back and forth on email a couple times. Elise and I, our department uses Slack. Our reference and instruction department uses Teams. So part of my job requires working with people in that department, but I'm not on the same platform as them. And then there's, of course, complications working with folks outside the library. I think another thing has been a lot of the people I work with are parents who are extra stressed since our K through 12 districts are still mostly remote as well. But on the whole, I am definitely lucky because I came into this with remote experience. I'm tech savvy and I have a job that transfers really well to being remote with pretty minor adjustments. I think the biggest change in my home life has just been how stir crazy I've been. Elise has mentioned we've had wildfires and smokes and not being able to go outside. And when I worked remotely before, I would often split up my day by working at cafes or libraries or just going for a walk. And of course, that's not as possible now. I can take walks, but that's about it. So this is just really not normal times, not normal working remote. I do love being able to do things like cook at home, do laundry at home during work. And yeah, I am lucky that I have a dedicated office space and I don't have childcare or child teaching to juggle. Thank you so much, Dana, for sharing. And I think I saw John on here. If you would like to share with us the most surprising thing to you since March. Yeah, sure. I guess the most surprising for me, probably the antithesis to Elise is sort of, I am also an introverted person in heart and we had recently moved into an open office setting and our office shifted. And that was completely what I didn't like at the time. And it was very interruptive. We were close to a large computer lab area where people would ask questions. And so being able to shift into, be able to set my own sort of timing for when I'm working on a lot of projects here, my daughter's also in middle school. So having that ability to help her with her projects and step away during the day. So I didn't have to have this sort of asynchronous with her was very positive. But I think the other side of it in terms of just work in general, being able to find the policies and procedures and things that weren't necessarily codified or put in place somewhere though, this is how this should work and be able to try and get those down in writing and post them somewhere and discuss them with the team and sort of iron out the issues that have been lingering for years. And a lot of our processes has been really positive. So I hate to say that it took a disaster to bring about change and small things, but it's a nice time to refresh and sort of do a cleaning house in that regard. So yeah. Awesome. Now all of our panel presenters today also received a list of possible topics that they could, you know, expound on. So since we already have John, John, do you wanna just lead the pack and let us know, you know, a little more information about one of the questions? Sure. Let's see. I wrote them down so we can take a look here. I guess I'll probably look at the one of what does the future look like in terms of libraries or in terms of your TVs, what have you. I think a larger sense is my hope in general is to take a look at how we structure our staff environments and the way we set up interactions and manage projects, things of that nature. I think we definitely at Pitt, I know we had this problem that some departments had sort of remote policies where faculty could work remotely, very few staff could. And I hope that this brings about the ability to allow managers and administrators to make decisions that are a little more flexible and realize that, you know, we had, I think, eight or nine people in a very small room as an open office where half of those could have worked remotely. You would save time, save energy. And I hope that that sort of echoes throughout the rest of the environments and how we facilitate our workshops and our presentations and what have you to realize that there's more than just a building and we can still make things work and be quite as efficient, even if we're not all standing next to each other in arms length. That hopefully that brings about some of those change. I don't think it's gonna change overnight necessarily once we all start to get back to a normalization of what we had as our previous lives. But I think we definitely are realizing that we can do a lot more in a hybrid setting without interrupting the larger scale of things. Thanks a lot, John. Heidi, we just heard from Dana that her powers back on, yay. I'm on it, yep, I'm on it, thank you. I knew you would be. So now we get to see your lovely face, hello. Dana, if you would like to share your response to one of the questions that I sent out, that would be great. So I'm just grabbing my notes. This was a little hectic. So I think similar to what the last panelist was saying, I'm really hoping that the future will include more flexibility with remote work, flexible schedules. I know at least the library at our campus has been very anti-remote work and anti-flexible scheduling. And it seemed to largely be from a place of distrust. So I'm really hoping that administration sees how dedicated everyone is and how well everyone is working during this time so that when we can go back, we'll have some more ability. I'm also hoping the future looks like less meetings. I know for me, coming from a work environment that was set up to be remote, when I came to Sac State, just the amount of meetings was crazy to me. And I really think that being remote is showing us more effective ways to communicate and empowering people to have more autonomy with their projects. Since we can't walk over to someone's desk or check in with someone at their office. I've also really been into strategies for balancing work-home life. I think because I did have this background of working remotely and I saw a lot of my colleagues not having good boundaries around that. So I'm really strict on setting my work hours, just like any job. There's some days I do work a little longer, but otherwise I am working 8 to 5.30, just like before. I turned off, part of that was turning off my email notices on my phone because I would get emails from other librarians at 10 at night and that wasn't something I wanted to feel like I had to respond to. Now that we're back in session and I do have some liaison responsibilities with our College of Ed, I'm planning to add in my signature my working hours just so that's clear that this is when I'm available and this is when you can expect our stances. Thank you so much, Dana. Could we have Elise next? Sure, I definitely, you know, everything that, you know, John and Dana have both said, I definitely feel those are excellent recommendations I would make myself. I would also add too that, you know, for instance, you know, I don't have the option of having a home office. My home office is a nursery and an office and kind of a storage space because we are currently living in a, you know, very small quarters. So I don't get to have that ability to like shut a door and walk away from work, but what has helped is making sure that at least my little work area meets all of my needs, especially ergonomically. So if you haven't done so already, you know, working with whoever you need to make sure you can bring home your desktop computers, that was a huge game changer for me rather than just working on the laptop. I also, I did have to pay out of pocket the university wouldn't pay for it, but I did purchase, you know, a pretty reasonably priced tabletop converter so that I can convert into a standing desk, which has also been incredibly helpful. So just anything that you can do to just, you know, if even if you don't have like a little, you know, room that is exclusively for your work, just making your little workspace work as best as you can for you. I know we're actually gonna be remotely through next semester also. So that's a lot of time to be spending at home. And I know not everyone's in that boat, but just even those little minor adjustments can really help to stay focused and stay energized and engaged. Thanks a lot Elise, Laura. Well, as I was thinking about changes going forward or what changes we've had that hopefully will remain the same, our graduate school has always been really strict about no remote participation during pieces and dissertation defenses, especially for the chair or the outside members actually needed to be there. And of course the student and all of the paperwork needed to be signed by hand and like carried over to the graduate school, although finally got to the point where people could actually email me stuff. So that was nice. But then, you know, all of a sudden we had to go remote and lo and behold, somehow the world did not end with people defending remotely. And they managed to get their electronic signatures on their documents sometimes and kind of the documents to me and everybody got graduated in the spring and in the summer. So now we have finally instituted docusign for our documents instead of just relying on the Adobe signature feature. And in future, I hope, I think that the grad school will continue to be flexible about remote participation, especially when we have obviously faculty members and students all over the world doing research, doing all kinds of things. I think it's really impractical to require that everybody come to campus. It's so difficult for scheduling and it's just a pain for everyone. So I think this has been a good thing to come out of this. Salad, thank you so much. We've started getting some chat comments going. And so, you know, if you have questions or ideas or thoughts, please go ahead and share them. I'll go ahead and share some of the conversation prompt questions in just a second because now my computer is freezing out. Okay, hold on. Sorry. I think one of the questions would be, you know, what would be the best piece of advice maybe that you could give to other ETD professionals? So, I mean, this is addressed to our panelists, but also, you know, I'd invite our participants to, you know, offer their suggestions in the chat window because all the chats are going to be, you know, recorded and available for everyone. So, yeah. So what advice can you offer? So I had, oh, sorry. I had thought about this. So I'm based in the library and we obviously work with our Office of Graduate Studies around ETDs and our library is in the midst of migrating to a new institutional repository platform where ETDs will be housed. And I would say if you work with another department in any way, give yourself way more time than you think because you don't know what's going on in their department, what things might need to happen on there and it just seems like we're gonna need way more time than perhaps what we had originally thought. I know I've had experiences not with Office of Graduate Studies but with our archival collections where because so many things need signatures, we've had to figure out workarounds for that whether that's using something like DocuSign or our institution uses AdobeSign which is a similar platform or we've been moving things to web forms where we don't need a wet signature but we need them to acknowledge something. And, you know, if we need a web form created at our library, we have to ask the one guy at the library who does that who has a million IT related projects. Thanks Dana. Any of our other panelists have a choice piece of advice to give? I guess I would say that one of the very similar of that is to sort of get a landscape idea of what is going on in the university, what changes have been made. Understanding what maybe you haven't been made aware of a new technology or new application or some new change to a policy in your IT division if they have that sort of ability to figure that out because if they've added some new service that you can take advantage of and integrate into a service that you've already been doing and perhaps in an analog way, you might be able to sort of outsource that to their expertise and find a better solution than you initially thought of. I know we've had similar things with that going on where we were lucky enough to get Zoom as a license quite quickly and able to transition certain aspects of our workshops and things like that to different environments. So it's really being able to reach out and find connections in the university landscape to say, how else can we try to solve this problem and not try to do everything yourself? We tend to do that, at least we do at Pitt. We've also often tried to reinvent the wheel a million times over instead of asking for others who can help us and be partners in a solution rather than the only ones trying to think up a new idea. So that's my big piece of this is really to say, look for support in your organization. You're probably gonna find it now because everybody's stressed, everybody has to make changes and don't be afraid to ask. It sounds odd, but. Thanks a lot, John. I know I'm the moderator, but I just wanted to add something to kind of add on to that. And that is, a lot of universities have lost a lot of staff positions. And so people that you may have collaborated with or had to work with on a regular basis may not be there anymore. So it's always a good idea to just kind of keep up, keep monitoring who it is that you work with. Yeah, because that's what we've discovered at the University of Toledo. Anybody else would like to share a piece of advice? Okay, how about this? What big question do you have for other ETD professionals? I guess I'm just personally interested to know what projects or opportunities have arisen as a result of this pandemic. For example, Dana and I will be presenting on our 508 compliance project that we would have never had the opportunity to do at the scale we're doing unless there was a pandemic situation. But our repository is still far from perfect and I'm definitely always interested in hearing what other projects people are doing to either remediate content or metadata in order to enhance discoverability and access to documents. Thank you so much. I know participants are sharing, you know, what systems they're using and steps that they're taking. So please just keep sharing. Anybody else with question for other people? Aura, Dana? I just wanted to respond to, let's see, Josefina Greene's question about kind of casual contact with grad students. Because I was answering a reference question for someone saw that our Office of Graduate Studies essentially has their Zoom open during business hours for drop-in because I'm not in that department. I can't comment on how frequently it's being used but that's one thing I've seen. I was, I saw that question there as well and I was sort of thinking, you know, I work in the Center for Graduate Life which is within the graduate school but we provide professional development programming and writing support and all sorts of different things. So we have lots of opportunities to interact with the students. And at the, let me see, at the beginning of COVID, the graduate school had to send out a survey to all the graduate students and ask them what they're struggling with and what they need. And the grad school went through the responses and tried to figure out if they could help anybody financially or, you know, what they could do. And now we're sort of like working on another similar survey right now because now that the semester started, a lot of students have said that they're really overwhelmed. So we kind of want to figure out why they're so overwhelmed exactly and see what we can do. So I don't know, I guess a survey sounds funny but that might actually be a good way to connect with your students. And then, you know, for myself, I use like a booking website. So if students want to make an appointment with me, they just go to the website and make an appointment or talk to me on the phone. So we do, you know, like formatting support that way and in groups as well. So that's just a few things that we do to keep in touch. Well, yeah, I would like to add on to that as well. I mean, I saw the question about other schools having a special graduation period and I know at Pitt we did have an extended spring semester deadlines that went throughout the summer, which was a slight interruption, obviously, to the schedules and how things were running, but we were able to facilitate that and communicate it out through. Some of the other changes we made, similar, that's what Oro was saying, that we used spring share software to allow for people to book consultations with myself and some of my colleagues in the ETD support round with things here. So we could allow the students who normally would walk in into our office or kind of sit down with us at our desk to schedule a Zoom meeting that way and trying to keep our avenues open for questions and availability there. It's been interesting to see that change. And we have a million things and projects coming up and I'll be talking with that in my presentation later. We had already scheduled out phases to things we were gonna be looking at in terms of the ETD process at Pitt, but some of them kind of cropped up rather quickly because we had to make changes to what we were already thinking. And some of them are basically, what do we do with ETDs or aren't PDFs or what do we consider those sorts of documents and sort of files? And what can we do with those in our institutional repository, which we're also looking to change the next few years. So when it rains at pores, I suppose for us right now, but looking at how we do online forms from milestones within the student systems, what we can change with the committee forms and the way they do remote committee defenses, all the things we've heard are probably gonna be a lot of people we're dealing with and hopefully we can get together and find solutions that worked. We're still stepping through a lot of those hoops right now to figure out what was gonna be the best solution. But yeah, it's a matter of doing sort of a process audit in a lot of ways here, what we're looking to say, what has been done, what can we do, and what happens the next time something interrupts the services and what if a platform goes away, what if support for a platform goes away or services, what are the alternatives we can use? So disaster management, I guess, is some of the skill we didn't know we were gonna need in repositories. Thanks a lot, John. I'm reading a question here from Larry. Larry says that they conduct ETD mixers training sessions using Zoom for the first time. It was Q&A, it worked great. And so if Larry can unmute himself and share, did you get more participation through the Zoom than you maybe normally would have for a training session? Yes, actually, I got a tremendous turnout. We had the best turnout for our students, this particular Zoom session than we've ever had before. I would say it was almost double. And we also had more faculty this time in the session as well. What was really, I felt was the thing that was most important in terms of the Q&A was posting what we would normally do in stand-up presentations and talking with the students. We did that using video prior to the mixer, almost a week prior to the mixer, and we posted it to a Blackboard discussion thread which had the ability for the students to actually ask questions before we got to the Q&A. That was extremely helpful. And because we were able to review the questions, questions that we might have had a problem or stumbled over during a live session, we were able to deal with very well in that way. So it went very smoothly. We cut down our actual time in terms of the live video, the Zoom video piece from three hours to one hour. And we were finished. And I've got a lot of good feedback from the students on it as well. That's fantastic. That is fantastic. So I'm curious, Larry, or anyone who have gone to new modes of operation, whether it's virtual defenses or virtual training, what do you think, I mean, when life gets back to being on campus again or relatively normal, non-pandemic, how do you anticipate going back to the way things were? What do you think is going to remain changed for the better? Hey, everyone, this is Tim Watson from the Graduate School of Ohio State. Hey, Terry, I'm going to second Aura's comments from earlier in that we were very strict about no remote defenses. Students had to be on campus. Format reviews had to be done in person. We do format reviews of their documents at the time of the defense for the PhD students. So they had to come into the office to do that. The cat is out of the bag and all that is gone. As far as I'm concerned, and I think the Graduate School administration would feel the same way. We are moving forward to using a online format review system. We're actually adopting a bit of Virio, to be honest, for that, and so we'll be doing that. The remote exams will take place. We will allow hybrid exams, all remote, all on campus, whatever happens. So those things have changed dramatically. And I think it'll be interesting to see going forward just how much will we see students in person? That was a big influx for us. I'm actually back to work. We are working part-time back on campus. So I am on campus today. I've been back for over a month, working three days a week on campus. And I've seen three students and it's been the same student the whole time. She keeps coming back for more questions. But other than that, it'll be interesting to see how this impacts things going forward with whether students will come in or whether we will continue to do a lot more remote. And I think it's gonna be a lot more remote. Yeah, I'd like to comment on that too. At a prior position, I worked with students with disabilities around their accommodation requests. And there was oftentimes a lot of resistance to things that are now very much the norm, right? So the last person was speaking about doing things more remotely. And I feel like there had always been such pushback, especially to students with disability needs around those things. And I really am hoping that that is something that stays, that we continue with these things that were special accommodations before where students felt like they had to really justify and then were often turned down anyways. I just hope we become more accessible as a result of this. Thank you so much, Dana. I agree with the comment that this is a very important issue. And in fact, for OhioLink, we are looking at a major requirement to make our ETDs accessible. And so this is kind of a major undertaking. But like you say, it's more than just making an ETD. It's more than making a document accessible. It's about how do you support and serve your students? Well, we only have about four minutes left. So I would just like to thank all of our panelists and our participants. You know, if you have any more comments or questions, get them in the chat as soon as you can. And then at 1.50, so three minutes now, we'll be taking a quick break and we'll also have some sponsor messages right here in the same room that you're in. And then after that at 1.55, we'll do the breakout sessions. So I think I'd like to just go ahead and wrap this up. If anybody has any, from the panelists, if anybody has any final words to say, go ahead. Oh, just thank you for having us. It's been nice to, if anything, commiserate about our experiences. I don't see anybody in their pajamas though. So I don't know how accurate this panel was, but you know, I can't speak for myself because, you know, I may be wearing pajama bottoms. We don't know. All right, everybody, thank you so much again. And we'll go ahead and take our break and do the sponsor messages. Thank you.