 I'm Sandy Thompson and I'm the head of Digital Research Services at the University of Houston Libraries and I'm a co-author on this presentation with my colleague Claude Willen who is the director of the Digital Research Commons. Claude couldn't be here today but he appreciates your attendance. I know he's looking forward to hearing back more on the conversation. So today I'm going to briefly describe the process that we went through at the University of Houston Libraries to launch the Digital Research Commons. Most of this presentation is going to be on the background and the planning of sort of the process of launching. You'll get to see some photos of like equipment in rooms but that's not the intent of this conversation for the most part. But we will talk briefly about developing the facility as well and I'll close out by outlining some initial expertise in programming that exists in the space and sharing the lessons we've learned being a semester in so far. So to provide you all with some context first of all the University of Houston is a Carnegie designated tier one doctoral granting public research University. This is a screenshot from the website at UH. You can see there just over 45,000 students enrolled undergraduate and graduate with 2600 faculty and over 200 undergraduate and graduate programs. So it's within this context that we first noticed the growing demand and need for digital scholarship services and expertise over time. And in 2013 the libraries made its first sort of I think intentional move towards understanding and meeting some of these needs when they hired a social sciences data leads on librarian who collaborated really closely with faculty on projects and class assignments using a variety of tools techniques and methodologies that fold largely into the umbrella of digital scholarship. So from their work we were able to begin to see some patterns that sort of that person helped collect and those patterns began to show some emerging digital scholarship services needs. So for example during the 2014-2015 academic year faculty researchers collaborated with liaison librarians on 23 long-term data service projects with the caveat of knowing that long-term means and I have to read this because I never remember it's defined as 30 library staff hours with a high impact on faculty research outcomes. Many of these involve consultations that focused on identifying appropriate data sets, manipulating data for mapping or visualization purposes and exercises, offering instruction and software and interfaces needed to compute and display data and the high demand for these consultations suggested a growing again need for the libraries to begin to think about. At the same time there are a whole host of other services and needs that we know we weren't necessarily fulfilling nor were other units on campus. Like implementing data manager practices, particularly data access, storage, preservation and description and exposing researchers to intellectual property and author rights issues and those also demonstrated again a growing need for these kinds of suites of services. So this prompted the libraries to begin planning a more intentional and comprehensive program for digital scholarship services and in many ways the launch of the digital research commons is one of those milestones, probably a major milestone along the way to understanding and fulfilling those needs. But the development of the digital research commons did certainly not happen overnight and if I could bestow a few nuggets of wisdom to you all today the first piece would be that this was not an overnight process. The development took multiple years with contributions coming from a whole host, a whole variety of different stakeholders within and within the libraries and within the campus community. So I want to spend some time today talking about some of those groups that made that process of launching the digital research commons possible and in particular within the libraries there were three groups. In 2015 there was the formation of the ad hoc digital scholarship working group. In 2016 there was a new group called the digital services digital scholarship services team which we affectionately called DIST and in 2017 the digital research commons engagement team. So the ad hoc group that formed in 2015 was comprised of 15 librarians, staff members and administrators who came together to discuss the possibilities of digital scholarship. So over the course of several months the group compiled data snapshots of the current digital scholarship partnerships that existed between librarians and faculty and the scope and extent of the services offered by the libraries and what preliminary needs we could identify from this process. So while this group identified this sort of anecdotal evidence for supporting new programs and resources, additional research was really required to move forward in a informed data-driven way. So in sort of true librarian form this group recommended that another group form and look more closely at the data and the needs to formulate a strategy moving forward and true to form libraries administration took that advice and charged a new group DIST or the digital scholarship services team to enact these recommendations. DIST selected three methods for gathering data about digital scholarship needs. The group first conducted a series of focus groups both internal to the libraries and external to the campus to understand what users were doing and how they were doing it. We reviewed services and resources provided by peer and aspirational institutions to have an understanding of the lay of the landscape. We also did an environmental scan on the UH campus to understand what the community was doing and to again identify where there may be unmet needs. From that data collection process we identified some top areas of interest that we knew we wanted to address over time and some of those included a dedicated space for digital scholarship and with that a host of technologies that may not be found elsewhere or may not be found as prominently elsewhere. Assistance with management and use of data for example assistance with data management data plans data description data storage etc expanded assistance with GIS data visualization and statistical analysis and an increased infrastructure for acquiring and hosting research data. So after analyzing these results DIST developed the following set of recommendations as a roadmap for implementing digital scholarship services and ultimately although not at first we thought building a physical center to locate these services within. The recommendations were divided into a series of phases with a corresponding set of services staffing and space components included in every phase. You can't really and also we included a sort of preliminary budget focused around the first three phases. I'm not sure how well you can see this but phase one was sort of broken into developing a marketing sort of strategy and a brand around digital scholarship and communicating that out. Phase two was formalizing a unit within the libraries to carry this initiatives forward and hiring the expertise needed to do that. Phase three was planned to build the space to house this and to create a community across campus in a central location and phase four was to consolidate some of the other existing services and opportunities within the libraries within that space and each phase had a very sort of different timeline. Some of them overlapped. The idea was that it should be iterative and it should sort of build upon one another using evidence from the previous phase to inform the next. But along the way the work of DIST moved in parallel with the larger initiative of the libraries to develop its 2017 to 2021 strategic plan. And really remarkably some of the DIST recommendations integrated into that library strategic plan. And in particular we have four goals in the strategic plan. One of those goals is focused specifically on advancing research productivity and this particular goal was heavily influenced by expanding digital scholarship services. And because of this integration the priority and timeline for developing in particular physical space in conjunction with some generous support from the University of Houston's Division of Research accelerated and rearranged the tasks that this team worked so hard to orchestrate. And so the establishment of a formal department and the establishment of a physical space became far more prominent far sooner than we had anticipated. So that led to a third group the digital research commons engagement team. Because there was this new focus on space and on moving things forward in a more accelerated pace. This group got together to identify needs by drawing on some of the existing data that we had already collected. And also by drawing on other libraries data that existed through user surveys. Drew upon all those sources to identify needs that would then be used to generate UH specific use cases for the kinds of space technology and software needs we knew we would need to fulfill in a new space. So those use cases compiled by the engagement team fueled the space and technology decisions we made in the digital research commons. With the work of this group. We had the high hopes of launching this space in the fall 2017 semester. Mother Nature had other plans for the University of Houston and for the city of Houston. And I think a weekend maybe two weeks into that semester. A little phenomenon called Hurricane Harvey hit and delayed our our plans. But we were happy to be able to launch this space this semester in January of 2018. The space itself is sort of intended to be multi purpose. With I'm not a space person. I don't understand space lingo but I learned that there are neighborhoods in spaces. And this the digital research commons has several neighborhoods including small and medium sized group areas to meet and to collaborate. Computer kiosks with higher end computing capabilities. Informal or casual meeting areas to sustain and cultivate that sense of community and individual workspaces for those who are I guess digging into their data and need to do it alone. Almost everything is on wheels. It's adaptable. It's movable. It's made to be functional and to meet the needs of a particular group at that point. We also have invested in screens to do to make a visualization wall and that while still in progress will enhance the kind of interactions and research available in the space. So along the way we certainly had to think about what it takes to make a viable space that could begin to meet some of these growing needs that we've identified over multiple years and multiple groups. But at the same time we also had to build the expertise and the suite of services that would make that that space relevant to folks. So we began by hiring two additional librarians to assist with the development of digital research services, being one being a digital scholarship coordinator and the other being Claude Willen who is the director of the digital research commons. Semester in our sort of startup philosophy has emphasized establishing a broad set of opportunities for those interested in digital scholarship. And much of the work we've done has been outreach driven. So in the first two months, the director Claude held over 21 on one meetings with faculty to understand their needs and to begin to cultivate some of the research agendas that could drive the research comments moving forward. Along the way we've also worked to build some infrastructure within the commons to both be a little more organized about how we do things and also to communicate out the the sort of rationale, the purpose and the direction that this space and suite of services are moving going forward. So the DRC director developed a charter, which is our guiding document over this first year has multiple it's intended for multiple audiences, including libraries, administration and our faculty and students stakeholders. The document explains what the DRC is and how we intend to operate it over the first year. It outlines some critical logistical and programming details. It includes an overview of some of the new initiatives that we've started, one being a sponsored projects program, which I'll discuss in a second. It also identifies the key stakeholders that we think should be aware of one another, both inside the library and on campus. And within the document, we've also sort of given a preliminary list of programming that we think would be important. And we've given a timeline for how we intend to unveil that that programming. And finally, it suggests sort of potential future avenues of collaboration and and work moving forward. So critical to enacting that charter is being able to sort of share the expertise we now have in house. So after formal approval of the charter, the director move forward with implementing the initiatives outlined in the document. And as you as you can see, he's been pretty busy this semester. He's teaching a series of workshops for all kinds of general audiences to be updated and or maybe be introduced to some of the tools and functionalities and methodologies used in popular digital scholarship research. He coordinates a monthly reading group for anyone on campus who is interested in becoming more engaged in these conversations and who is interested in becoming part of the community of digital scholarship on campus. He's been able to raise the profile of the day of the DRC by inviting classes to come into the space. And he teaches sort of one off sessions during those classes. He also goes to meet them where they are and give lectures on specific topics in classes. He's also collaborated with the department head of the English department to offer a formal for credit course in digital humanities for graduate students, both last fall and upcoming this fall. And in addition, he works really closely with his graduate assistant to track all of the various projects that we have underway. And again, I'll get to that in a second. And also works with walk in consultations during open hours that we hold weekly for the research commons. So I mentioned he does workshops just for your sort of information. The first slate of workshops this semester held were around network analysis one and two data visualization one and two topic modeling data cleaning and GIS. I also mentioned that a core part of how we are implementing and moving forward the goals of the digital research comments is through the sponsored project program. This was launched this semester in January of 2018. It's a call for projects process where we offer for those projects accepted funding from the libraries to execute a formal project proposal. And as such, those projects once approved have to articulate a plan for providing a minimal viable product and MVP by August of 2018. And we and so the list of projects are listed here. We were able to fund six this first round, all of various sort of interesting topics. But we see the benefits as sort of several fold. We certainly think that this kind of work by giving faculty and students the ability to pursue their projects, expand the visibility and the utility of the digital research commons. It sort of creates a built in audience of sorts and generates additional need moving forward. It also helps to indicate a larger shift I think in the world of libraries, where libraries are more and more being committed to fostering scholarship from within the library itself. And we think it's helping to build again that broad community of digital scholarship enthusiasts on campus. So we've been around for about four months now officially. At the close of this semester, we thought was a natural point to sort of take stock and reflect on where we've been for the first few months. And so our next steps in terms of moving forward are probably more housekeeping than anything else. We're making sure that we have mechanisms to gather feedback on the performance of the digital research commons. And part of that charter that we established moving forward for our first year created two mechanisms to do that intentionally. There are two teams that we have set up. One is an external team made up of faculty stakeholders primarily. So those who are doing direct research, they're their department heads and a few representatives from the division of research make up that team and we consult with them periodically to gauge the temperature and to see their sort of feedback as we move forward. We also have an internal libraries team made up of those librarians who have direct stakeholder responsibilities or see themselves directly in the work of digital scholarship to also sort of test the pulse of what they hear and what they see in their roles. That in addition to some exercises that we're just now beginning to develop a framework for assessing the whole host of opportunities that we've offered will be sort of our on our agenda over the next few months. I'm not sure how many people have been paying attention to a recent flurry of conversation on the digital scholarship sections listserv for ACRL. But there's a growing conversation right now on how do we assess digital scholarship services? What are the metrics we use? What defines a successful project or successful service? And so we're going to be engaging in some of those thorny interesting questions over the next coming months. I anticipate that we won't have a sort of one one size fits all sort of set of assessment criteria and to sort of be able to build those metrics moving forward will take some conversations with the whole host of stakeholders. So that could be a whole other presentation you all may be included into at some point. And all of this work is building towards helping us create a much larger strategic initiative moving forward through a formal three year strategic plan that will help us take the work that we've built to date through the charter and expand it moving forward. So along the way, the launch of the digital research comments has surfaced some cultural shifts within our library and I think resembles similar cultural shifts occurring all across library land. The DRC is one of the first research centers. I would I would call research center within the libraries itself and as such is helping to sort of move us with so many other libraries being in the same scenario from a sense of knowledge curation, which is a pretty traditional value of academic libraries to a scenario or situation of knowledge production. And we're hoping that the budgetary discretion that we have will allow us to continue to move outside those typical library faculty partnerships with initiatives like the sponsor project programs to continue to fuel that momentum of moving towards knowledge production. So this initial period this first semester has also given us time to reflect on some of the lessons we've learned along the way. As I showed you, our director is really busy doing some incredible, really engaging, innovative things for the University of Houston. But the director expertise only model is not sustainable beyond maybe a few more semesters. So we have to begin thinking about what priorities and areas of focus the director should be engaged in and how do we leverage the talent and the leadership we have in the libraries to expand that broad base of knowledge even more. We also noticed that culture shift is slow, changing culture takes time, and becoming a center of knowledge production will take time both for other librarians, internal and faculty external to the libraries to acknowledge and to understand. We've also learned a thing or two about sort of the idea of integration and integrating services, some more challenging than others. It's interesting to take years to plan a space and a suite of services and to enact that and not have a director there to help along the way. So we certainly made some decisions that don't necessarily always align with the director's perspective. So we have to sort of have conversations around why some decisions were made and how we can change some ideas moving forward, I would say. And again, another nugget of wisdom if I could leave you with maybe the most important dealing with integration is we have really seen the power, the true power of integrating a suite of services in a space like the Digital Research Commons into a strategic, a library strategic plan. I can't emphasize that enough. Having digital scholarship integrated into this has made it a reality. It's given it the resources it needs to grow and it's created by and across the library that may have taken more time, energy and effort to develop without the sort of framework of a strategic plan. So this is just the beginning. Claude and I look forward to sharing more about this process as we move forward and sharing out the stories of the Digital Research Commons beyond its first semester. So here's our contact information. Always feel free to reach out to me or to Claude if you have questions or if you would like additional information. And with that, I've left you like three minutes for questions.