 ahead and get started. So thanks for joining us today. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, and I'll be introducing this session. The session that you've joined us for is part of week four of the CNI 2020 fall virtual member meeting. And just to remind you week four deals with emerging issues and responses to the current crises that we're facing. This session is being recorded and will be subsequently made publicly available. There is closed captioning and please turn that on if it's helpful to you. We are running a chat and please feel free to use the chat as we go along. There's also a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen and you can put questions in there at any point during the presentation after we hear from our speakers. Diane Goldenberg Hart of CNI will come and moderate a question and answer series. I understand that from our speakers that they've paced this so that we should have a good amount of time at the end for questions and conversation. So look forward to that. Now let me just very briefly introduce the topic at hand and our speakers. We have with us today Lisa Spiro and Ashley Fitzpatrick from Rice University in Texas. And I think many of you know Lisa's work from a couple of years ago on Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath in the Houston area. This is I guess a very natural kind of progression from there. And the topic today is about the approaches that academic libraries can take collectively to address the growing climate change problem that we're all facing. And with that I'm just going to turn it over to Lisa. Thank you Lisa and Ashley for joining us. I really appreciate you coming and bringing this issue to CNI. Well thank you very much Cliff and Diane and CNI for the opportunity. We're really glad to be able to talk with the collective CNI community about this pressing issue. So let me give you a sense of where we plan to go today. So after some brief introductions we want to focus on why libraries and really other organizations should try to address climate change present a few ideas based on other libraries experience about how we might address this problem then talk a bit about what we're trying to do at Bondron Library at Rice University. And as Cliff said we would really like this to be an interactive session. We hope that this session will spark larger conversation about how we might collectively and as organizations address the climate crisis. So we've tried to set aside a good amount of time for questions and conversation. So in the spirit of interactivity we'd actually like to start with a poll just to get a sense of how active your organization and you can interpret that as your library your IT organization etc is in addressing climate change. So take just a moment to answer that quick poll. And in the interest of time we'll give you like 15 more seconds. Okay if we could go ahead and close the poll and share the results. All right so it looks like about half of the organizations are active which is encouraging and then we have about a third not at all active and then about 17 percent somewhat active. So thank you for participating and we will be interested in learning what the active and somewhat active organizations are up to as well as we move along. So I was drawn to this work as Cliff mentioned partly by the experience of Hurricane Harvey and just to give you a glimpse of what that was like. I was not directly affected by Harvey but for four days there was a sort of constant the constant emergency alerts coming through on my phone just putting me into the state of anxiety and of course hearing about neighbors being rescued by boat or even from the the roofs of their houses was terrifying. And then of course in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey you could drive through many neighborhoods in Houston and see the debris along the side of the road. So this experience convinced me and some colleagues from Rice and other Houston area librarians that it was really important to capture the the experience of Hurricane Harvey and to build a community-driven digital archive that collects images, text, video documenting people's experience of Hurricane Harvey. But in the process of working on this project it also became clear to me that there's much more we could do to try to prevent these sorts of incidents from happening all together and we know that Hurricane Harvey was worsened as a result of climate change that intensified the rainfall. So that sent me and some colleagues on this path towards exploring how we might address climate change. Hi everybody, my name is Ashley. I am a student at Rice. I'm a current junior studying anthropology and environmental science. I became involved in this work through my coursework. My freshman year I took a course on the environment, culture and society and we learned about living in a global crisis and having to make a choice between fighting back or giving in. So I've chosen to move forward in my studies and dedicate my studies towards environmental studies. At Rice I am an intern in our sustainability office and I've also been involved in Fondren through both a student program called Fondren Fellows and now as our student eco rep. To give some context on Rice we have over 100 faculty that conduct research related to the environment or sustainability and we have a greater number of students than ever selecting environmental academic programs including the environmental science major, environmental studies minor and multiple certificates in sustainability. We also have over 10 different student clubs that are focused on the environment. So with that context we'd like to talk a little bit about why we think libraries, archives and IT organizations should act on climate change. In part I think the answer is that this is a general social problem and that we all must act on climate change. The 2018 IPCC report really sounded the alarm bell about the need to dramatically reduce carbon emissions by 2030. So we see Fortune 500 companies stepping up and committing to reduce their carbon emissions as well as a number of universities. So while we all must act there is a barrier to acting and that's the acceptance of science by our broader communities. While most Americans do understand that climate change will harm people in the United States they don't believe that it's already happening or that it will affect them personally. As a university and academic library we're situated within a city or state where community values and views may be different than our own and we can use our status to educate the public and be a central community space and a center of high quality information and use our university resources to raise a common consciousness about climate change. We also know that libraries like any organization have an impact on the environment and for example I was interested in a fairly recent study by the University of Victoria libraries that calculated their overall carbon emissions and as you see from the graph here the majority of their emissions actually come from natural gas so from heating although staff commuting is also a major contributor. Of course the major contributing factor may vary depending on region size and type of library but this points to the ways in which our facilities are major contributors to our carbon footprint. As the experience of Hurricane Harvey also demonstrated climate change is already impacting libraries and other organizations and I think colleagues in New York and Florida and others in the country can tell their own stories but here in Houston six branches of the Houston public library suffered really significant damage as did four from Harris County public libraries. Some of these branches remain closed. We also know that in the long term archives and by extension libraries face some major risk from climate change. Aira Tansy has been a leader in this area looking at the impact of climate change on archives and was a participant in a study that found that by 2100 about 18 percent of archives are at risk of storm surge plus sea level rise and over 90 percent face a temperature change of over one degrees Celsius. With all of that in mind the American Library Association adopted sustainability as a library value in 2019 based on the triple bottom line of sustainability which incorporates economic, social and environmental values to create a broader idea of what sustainability means. The American Library Association recognizes that libraries are well positioned to be catalysts that can inspire future generations to reach solutions about climate change that are not only sensible but also essential to sustaining the life of the planet and this can promote community awareness. Libraries can become resiliency hubs. We can educate the community on climate change and sustainable futures and we can lead by example to take steps to reduce our carbon footprints. So after that brief overview of some arguments to be made for addressing climate change we're interested in your perspective here. So what would you say is the most persuasive argument in making the case for addressing climate change and if you feel like you've got a better reason we'd love to hear it so feel free to enter that into the chat as well and we'll give you say 30 45 seconds to pick a choice here. Take another 10 seconds to make your selection. Okay let's go ahead and close the poll and reveal the results here. So mission is the main reason so I'd be interested for a broader discussion once we get to that section of the presentation about the connection between mission and addressing climate change especially the mission to support research and teaching. So now we'd like to present some strategies for acting on climate change based on what's been done at other institutions and as the example of Hurricane Harvey suggests libraries can play an important role in helping communities prepare for and recover from extreme weather events and we can look to the work of sociologist Eric Kleinberg in talking about the importance of social infrastructure as one example of this he points to libraries in particular public libraries as places where community members can go to get access to power to cooling and in the case of Hurricane Harvey there were pop-up libraries at shelters where people could get access to information and fill out required forms and so forth. Libraries can also play a role in helping community members both be more resilient and in reducing their consumption of materials so for example Austin public library has a seed library where people can borrow seeds for their gardens and bring seeds back so that others may continue to the planting and then the University of Florida has a tool library where people can check out tools to repair items or create new things. There are also ways that libraries can reduce their own waste and resource consumption through things like green office programs which is something that the University of Utah has a really great precedent for they have produced green office programs with checklists and guides that can be distributed throughout campus and to their library offices. There are also ways that libraries can compost so in Oregon State University library during finals they implemented a composting program and that reduced their waste by 42% during a peak period of time during finals and Rice University has also worked on this in packaging reductions and recycling through a recent Fondren Fellows program. So as Ashley mentioned there was a recent Fondren Fellows project that initially focused on packaging but actually shifted its focus to looking more broadly at the comparative impact of print versus electronic books and so this student did some calculations based on available data and models and found that in general electronic books had less of a carbon footprint and he actually developed an online calculator that libraries can use to estimate their own carbon footprints with the sort of asterisk that it can be pretty complicated to come up with these calculations so I think this is an area that merits further study. Libraries can also implement green building techniques Berkeley's library and also the Austin Public Library have both implemented many of these strategies these things include using solar optimizing the building for daylight and wind chimneys they also do things like put their libraries really close to public transit so that they don't have to have parking infrastructure which reduces single commuter vehicles and also reduces concrete spaces. There are also ways that they can integrate stormwater management and community spaces into these buildings. As Ashley has suggested libraries can also play an important role as a place to convene the community and to have conversations about the impact of climate change and how communities can address this problem. So for example Mills Valley Public Library in California started up a project in collaboration with several other libraries called Borrowed Time. Initially this was envisioned as a series of face-to-face events addressing climate change but of course the pandemic sparked a pivot to a blog and a podcast and the podcast includes interviews with people such as Bill McKibbin who is a leading climate activist. Libraries can support sustainability research and education. One organization, Ashi and their program STARS is dedicated towards doing these things so they support libraries doing this research by promoting or by encouraging us to do things such as providing research guides to students and faculty creating guides for material selection building curriculum development efforts creating sustainability literacy and also promoting e-learning objects focused on sustainability. Of course libraries and archives have also played an important role by providing access to data that can be used by climate scientists. For example the National Archives of Australia has provided access to title records that can be used to understand sea level rise and crowdsourcing projects like old weather allow the public to transcribe records of ship blogs which can be used in climate models. Also I think there is potential for libraries in the scientific community to really step up in supporting open science in climate research. We've already seen with the case of COVID-19 the ways in which openly sharing data and research can really fuel and drive forward research progress. And although there are a number of databases that make available climate data it's my sense that more could be done in open access to research and potentially to making available data as well. I think this is an area where we could be in more conversation with climate scientists to evaluate needs and potential roles. Finally I'd like to kind of go back to 2009 and to a collection of scenarios from the Library of New South Wales which sparked my imagination then and continues to have a hold on it. They imagined in one scenario by 2030 a really dramatic climate crisis and imagined roles for public libraries in which there was a greater dependency on print as people shifted away from electronic resources as there were more climate catastrophes and a greater sense of local community. So I think it's an interesting thought experiment to imagine roles for libraries as the climate crisis continues to unfold. Although as this presentation indicates I'd like for us to participate in this collective effort to minimize the damage as much as possible. Now we'd like to get a little more specific and talk about ways in which we are trying to address the climate crisis at Rice University's Fondren Library. In summer of 2019 we began the process of developing a sustainability plan. Fondren has took a largely student-led approach to this which has provided us with the opportunity to take the perspective of graduate students and undergrad students and create a sustainability plan through a program called Fondren Fellows. This program allowed myself and a graduate student to work together to create a plan that assessed five key focus areas in sustainability for our library. We looked at spaces, resource consumption, education research, collections and archives, and engagement and we have had multiple successes in these areas so far. In collections and archives for example we have created lip guides and we now have lip guides that range from general sustainability and we also have one that goes over all of our historical archives that relate to the environment and sustainability. We also are currently collecting oral histories that document toxic events in a neighborhood in Houston and we have worked towards archiving at-risk climate data. Through education and research we have hosted multiple panels and seminars and we're providing support to our environmental studies departments. Moving forward to make sure that our plan was implemented the library hired an eco rep which extended our existing program of student-led peer-to-peer environmental research. The existing eco rep program worked primarily in Rice's residential colleges and this was a pilot program to introduce eco reps into departments. The responsibilities include research sustainability initiatives, providing training, conducting outreach and coordinating with the other campus eco reps. We also follow the lead of other libraries and other organizations and formed a green team which is a group of seven members that is working to implement the sustainability plan that Ashley just mentioned as well as to assess our progress and try to really build a culture of sustainability at the library, raise awareness of these issues and advocate for sustainable solutions. Of course the pandemic forced a shift in this approach but we have I think made some real progress particularly in the areas of training and education as well as in the collections initiatives and guidance about collections that Ashley mentioned. And one of these areas where I think we've made some real progress is through the resilient communities program that was sponsored by the American Library Association and this provided seed grants to 20 public and five academic libraries to help engage their communities in programs and conversations about the climate crisis. Rice was honored to be one of five academic libraries to be selected for this program and as part of the program libraries are required to screen one film and then run two other programs or events. We decided to focus on our local needs and local community and have a plan that's really focused on advancing environmental justice and intersectionality in Houston. As a part of this grant program we hosted a justice and transformation panel that featured Houston women on local climate problems and their roles in engaging the community in solutions. We exposed local environmental challenges including air pollution and flooding and our event drew a diverse audience of around 50 people from across rice, Houston and beyond. And in this case having a virtual event I think made it a lot easier for people from across the city to join in as well so silver linings to the pandemic. Kind of inspired by and coming out of the event that Ashley just mentioned we also are hosting All We Can Save Book Circles and All We Can Save is a collection of essays and poems by women activists, scientists, artists addressing the climate crisis. One of the co-editors of the book Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson spoke at Rice virtually just before we had the event that Ashley just spoke about which also helped to inspire that event to have a local focus on women's perspectives on the climate crisis. And the co-editors Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson and Catherine Wilkinson have provided readers guides and discussion group guides to help in facilitating these meetings. We've got two small groups going right now and I would say that they've really helped to bring together a community to tackle the the climate crisis and to consider ways that we might act to address that crisis. In addition as part of the ALA grant, Fondren also has become a climate resilience hub which means that we provide help to the community before, during and after extreme weather events. In our case our primary focus is on providing access to information. We also hosted the program manager for crew, the communities responding to extreme weather recently where he talked about finding hope in extreme weather. And we are in the process of working with a community partner, a frontline group called AX, Achieving Community Tasks, successfully on running a educational program for a middle school focused on air quality monitoring data. And this builds on our prior work through the Civic Switchboard Project and in collaboration with Rises Kinder Institute to help provide education to students on data literacy. And in fact the the head of AX was recently featured in a Washington Post article about air quality. One event that is still upcoming as a part of this grant what is our screening of Fire and Flood. This is in partnership with Citizens Environmental Coalition Houston Green Film Series and also Rice Environmental Organizations. This draws on our theme of intersectionality and brings in the queer community and to our discussion on resilience and climate change. So I would say we're really just getting started. But at this point I think we can already point to some elements of success. One is just being able to draw upon the energy and knowledge of students like Ashley in making sure that our program is responsive to the needs of students and also can draw upon her knowledge of environmental science in other areas and really how to reach students as well. I think it's also been helpful for us to pursue diverse partnerships whether with groups at Rice such as the Center for Environmental Studies or through groups in Houston like the Citizens Environmental Coalition and AX which I mentioned before. And tied to that is really trying to understand our local community and its needs and serve as a connection point between the university and the community where there are some really significant environmental justice challenges around air quality flooding and other related areas. I think something that helps to distinguish our plan from a lot of other climate action plans or sustainability plans that we looked at was a specific focus on the library and its mission including teaching research and collections. And we're not trying to do everything. I think it's important to start small and have small successes and then build from that. So now it's time for another poll and this one is a little longer so it may take a little more time. But we are interested in your input on which strategies you think seem most promising for libraries to address climate change and that could include promising in terms of having the largest impact, being most feasible, some sort of meeting point of those criteria or whatever criteria you would like to use. So take a moment or two to provide your input. Let's take another 15 seconds. Okay, hopefully that's enough time. So let's go ahead and close the poll and see the results. So it seems like there's a real emphasis on research as well as on helping communities be resilient, reducing waste, shifting to electronic collections, using green building techniques, and providing access to archives of climate data. So we have some ties there but thank you for your input. So at this point we really want to move to discussion. Our hope was that our presentation could spark some ideas but we know that there's a lot of collective wisdom out there and we also hope that there can be opportunities for us to talk about ways we might work together to address climate change. So we have some questions for you but since we've been talking a lot we're happy to entertain your questions as well. Why don't we start with your questions and then we'll come back to ours. Thank you Lisa and Ashley. That was a really wonderful presentation and I know you're eager to engage the participants here and keeping in mind the tool that we have, I think I want to just point out to everyone if you're interested in participating live, you can just raise your hand and I will unmute you and you can just interact directly with Ashley and Lisa here. And of course the floor is open for questions via the Q&A as well so please feel free to do that. You can also if you want to address any of the questions that Lisa and Ashley have prepared here for you, you can type those into the chat as well. And while we're waiting for folks to sort of give that some thought, I just wanted to first off commend you for this very broad scope that you presented us with. I mean I had never really thought about the various aspects in which libraries in our communities can be involved from providing services and information as a trusted resource, also just what kind of an impact our physical plants can have on the environment, what kind of choices we can make in that regard. And I was thinking about a couple of current issues that I think a lot of libraries are going to have to be grappling with as we're dealing with the current COVID challenge and other current challenges. I was thinking particularly about financial issues and how you think Lisa, some of these issues, pressures might be addressed in light of the climate concerns with respect to the financial issues. Obviously saving energy costs is the obvious one, but are there other aspects of the financial aspect that you might highlight or share with us as we're thinking about the kinds of choices that we might need to be making with our organizations going forward and kind of arguments we might have to make to administrators, that sort of thing. Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean if we look at the definition of sustainability that is commonly used, I'm going to go back, back, back, back, back, back. It's kind of has three interrelated elements. So it's the economic, the social and the environmental. So we want to make choices that are economically feasible that have a social benefit and that protect our environment. And I'll say that our sustainability plan included elements like look into carbon offsets for travel, encourage staff to seek alternative means for travel to campus for commuting. And boy, we got those. We didn't really like the way we got those this year. But I think the pandemic has illustrated that remote work can work. And there can be some savings in terms of the library's carbon footprint from that. And I've also, I mean, even before the pandemic, I was thinking I would really try to reduce travel. And I think this is illustrated that virtual conferences can work, maybe not as satisfying as a hallway conversations, but we can make do. And as you say, I mean, I think sustainability has benefits beyond the environmental. So we can save money on material consumption, on energy, on, you know, travel, and so forth. We can also create in terms of like green building techniques in like environments within our buildings or even outside our buildings that are more pleasant and more healthy and more conducive to, you know, having a good study environment. Ashley, would you add anything to that? No, I think that is a pretty good overview of everything. Just a lot of the times there are places that will frame sustainability entirely as a financial and economic issue. There are precedents for cities or other governments that will frame sustainable initiatives as purely financial choices to improve budgets or things like that. So I think there are a lot of ways to make this argument, especially if you really look into, okay, well, maybe if we save money in this one area, we can create this new program that everybody's been really wanting, but we didn't have budget for before. So there are a lot of ways, I think, that you can make this work. And we are somewhat dependent on our institution for making choices about energy and other, you know, larger facilities decision. But the fact that the cost of renewable energy keeps dropping is helping with the shift to that as not only an environmentally sustainable approach, but one that has economic benefits as well. Yeah, for sure. Interesting. Thank you. And I was also thinking as you were presenting about the use of solar. I mean, I think solar is something that in my region anyway, we're seeing being implemented very widely, residentially, but I don't, I can't think of, I mean, in all the spaces and new buildings that we've featured at CNI over the years, I can't think of a single one that has implemented solar. Can you think of any examples? Is there anything happening in that space? I haven't studied this extensively, but I am aware that there are some net zero libraries around the country that have implemented solar. And these are award-winning libraries in New York, in California, in the Midwest. So I think that's something to consider in, you know, doing a new building or renovation or working with the campus to install solar. Rice does have some solar on campus. There are quite a few in California as well. I think California has at least one or two completely net zero libraries. And then, yes, solar is becoming more common of a building practice. And especially if it's a new building, it's a lot easier to go ahead and put that infrastructure in place. So when renovations or things like that happen, it can be implemented relatively easily. Yeah. And I'm sure there will be quite a few folks looking at how they're going to be re-figuring their space on campus. And that, you know, this may be an opportunity for them to make choices like that. Well, I want to thank you both so much for bringing this information to us here at CNI and featuring it for us. It's really interesting and so much to think about. And I wanted to share also the URL for sustainability at Fondren Libraries that is on your SCED page there. There's just a wealth of information on that page. I was browsing through that while you were giving your presentation. And I think folks will probably find that really interesting and useful. So with that, I think I'll go ahead and bring the recording and the public portion of this presentation to a close by shutting off the recording. But invite any attendees who'd like to stick around and have a chat with Lisa and Ashley to please do so. We'll turn on your microphones and we'd love to have you join us. And thank you again so much. Take care, everyone. Thank you.