 Good morning Thanks everybody for coming to our presentation I'm Geneva Henry and we're going to talk about some work. We've done in looking at the model of centers of excellence for information services and In this area what we want to do is talk about this project that we've done Which was a planning grant and then how we went about doing it the methodology looking at reasons that people and Both centers and funders have given for starting centers of excellence How people react to the term center of excellence? Look at the business models that centers of excellence have established and what seems to work What doesn't seem to work and then talk about our next steps as a group in what we're doing on the grant So first I'd like to introduce the team Jose Diaz He's with the Ohio State University Susan Fliss at Harvard University Heather Gendron She's University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Myself Geneva Henry. I'm at George Washington University Joy Kirchner University of Minnesota, and then we have two team members who are In absentia, but they're with us in spirit and that is John Cawthorn who is newly at West Virginia University And John Colshaw who's at the University of Iowa So what is this project? How did this all happen? This was a grant funded project And the thing that all of us have in common we have a lot of things But where this got started We were all part of the ARL research library leadership fellows cohort And one of the things that we did within that cohort was take a visit to the Mellon Foundation Don waters and Helen Cullier were gracious enough to invite us up and meet with us To start brainstorming ideas around, you know, libraries for the 21st century and you know What this next group of leaders coming up, you know, what were we interested in what kept us up at night? You know, what things did we worry about and what did we really want to do? So it was actually a wonderful brainstorming session about the future of library Directions and one of the topics that came came up was the number of services libraries are now being called on to provide and it's Requires skill sets that are not being produced in our library schools So certainly we are going outside of library schools to bring in the professionals that have this knowledge and expertise But when you try to scale that up to every Library as every research library and even broader every library To fully support the services that we're all being asked to support It you start to see it starts to break down It requires a lot of skills that are rare at this point So we looked at possibly exploring other ways of providing those services And we landed on this idea of centers of excellence And would that model work for information services would that model work? specifically for libraries to be looking to rather than developing their own whole Set of skills in all of these areas. Can we think more in terms of centers that provide these for multiple institutions? So Mellon did award us a planning grant to explore this idea of centers of excellence for information Services as shared expertise The kinds of services we're talking about for the 21st century library include digital archiving and preservation data management use of multimedia and teaching learning and research information discovery search Scholarly communications and digital humanities So what we were trying to do is assess the viability of this center model As an approach to provide the services for multiple institutions And then you know through our our research provide both funders and future centers with some guidance about What are the kinds of things you should be thinking about or looking for? in a center of excellence We started by developing Did a lot of exploration a lot of research on centers that exist out there and ended up developing what we call profiles for? 34 Centers that might sort of fit into this idea of a center of excellence and then from that we whittled it down to 19 centers that we felt warranted In-person or Skype interviews to dig more deeply into how they operate and then seven funders So we did interviews with this group of people to Arrive at our findings, so I'm going to Turn it over now to Heather gender and he'll talk about the methodology that we used Okay, so our high-level questions for this project Looked at you know, how effect how are these effective and successful centers actually formed? What was their Genesis story? How do they operate on a day-to-day basis and How are they sustained over time? We were also interested related especially to that sustainability issue What were the criteria we can identify through these interviews for funding both? the formation of a center and the long-term sustainability of a center and of course we were interested in understanding how these centers assess themselves internally and how They're required to do assessment so as Geneva said We conducted overall 26 interviews and these were all recorded interviews and transcribed and Some of them the interviews were with these funding agencies that you see here on the slide And then these are the centers And we did a lot of site visits most of these were site visits And we did as a team interviews with these 19 centers with directors for the most part and other staff as well And so these were hour-long interviews typically But sometimes it would go into maybe a two-hour time period and we would get a little tour of the facility if we did a site visit and These are our main questions And I just wanted to put them up on the slide not so you'd have to read through them all right here But these will be available to you on the CNI site So we asked basically 10 to 12 main questions per interview depending on the interview And there are a number of prompts that you don't see on the slide So if you want more information from any of us just about this process just let one of us know so We asked center directors to give an overview of their center and its desired impacts To talk about the ways in which the center fosters and or instigates innovation or entrepreneurship We wanted to know what types of assessments these to measure the performance and impact of the center our interviews explore the roles of partnerships and what successful partnerships look like to these center directors and We spent a lot of time talking with them about their funding streams and what an ideal business model for a center might look like We hope to develop this concept from these interviews of what a really you know a really good business model would look like for a center and then finally we talked about the center of excellence Concept and what it meant to them individually and if they consider their own center to fit this in within this category And so the questions we asked a funding agency program officers and directors Really mirrored these questions we asked of center directors and we were interested in seeing where their answers aligned with those of center directors and Where there was some divergence and so we asked funders additional questions about Conditions for funding a center of excellence factors that drive a successful center and they're you know From what they've seen and any perceived risk that they see in funding centers So this is really today what we're reporting is our preliminary analysis And this is what we've done to get to this point so far we started off with individual team members looking at the transcripts from interviews that they took part in and They started we started to harvest key quotes From those transcripts and then pull them all together and share a document And then as a group we met in person and we did these rapid fire analysis sessions We only allowed ourselves an hour to go through the transcripts from each interview And we tried really hard to stick by that because we had a quite a lot of work to do and many of us have become Directors in the last year library directors that we don't a lot of time so then we identified patterns and best quotes and Articulate started to articulate sort of high-level insights and reflective questions from these interviews And so this is the process that that we're going to continue with with the group So I'm going to pass it on to Jose who's going to start giving a Overview of some of our findings as Heather indicated we conducted a series of interviews with centers of excellence and funders What I like to do is to give you a taste of the initial findings These findings focus in two key issues What prompted the creation of the centers and what are funders looking for when they are considering whether to fund a center of excellence or not? to put it more succinctly What are the reasons What reasons did people give to start or fund a center of excellence? This quote I think sums up the urges behind the creation of centers of excellence It deals with the core of the academic enterprise the creation of knowledge and its dissemination That is truly the urge behind the centers of excellence, but all urges are not created equal Some seem more aspirational and amorphous from the start Others are more down to earth. I call the former the creative or initial or initial impulse And I dub the latter reality check There's nothing scientific or secret about these terms. I just made them up Yeah, I just made them up Many centers of excellence we interviewed told us that they wanted to do the following things They wanted to forge multidisciplinary approaches to address big issues They wanted to build common infrastructures that will reach beyond one institution. They wanted to bridge disciplines To respond to significant cultural phenomena To create a sanctuary for scholars to offer scholars a place to go away from committee work tenure and promotion office politics They also wanted to respond to specific questions and solicitations and to answer a particular proposal a particular request for proposals Notice some of these are very lofty reasons. They're good reasons. They're short on specifics the second section I dub reality check and Here you can see more granular answers. They verbalize or desires a little better In this set of answers the COEs told us they wanted to understand the ethical role of technology They wanted to understand the impact The internet's impact on society. They wanted to transform scholarly publishing into open access They wanted to enhance scholarship They wanted to increase the flow and accessibility of e-science. They wanted to advocate nationally and internationally and they wanted to reach a variety of audiences When you combine the creative or initial impulses and the reality check again, I made those terms up You get a fuller picture for example centers of excellence Want to respond to significant cultural phenomenon such as the internet's impact on society or COEs wish to build common infrastructures to enhance scholarship and to make open access possible them and other things At the end of the day though things coming to fuck things came into focus and we all arrived at the same place Centers of excellence are created because scholars and students want to forge build Create transform enhance increase and more importantly bring about change One thing we are sure of even at this early stage is that if you don't have money you can't create a center of excellence So what are funders looking for when they are trying to decide if a COE is worth their time and money? Well funders are looking really for one thing success Why because funders see themselves as a venture capital operation. They are putting their money into what amounts to a startup company Like good venture capitalists they want to put their money in a place. They think will be successful as One funder put it quote you really got to prove the concept and show that there is demand for that center or that specialty and a quote So far our analysis of the data shows That funders see the potential for success when they see the following attributes or a combination of these attributes I won't cover all of them But this is just a sample originality a funder might fund an entity call a COE if the center is doing something Nobody else is doing they want to see a distinctive mission and distinctive goals Passionate engagement leaders must exude passion trust between the PI and the granting agency is a key ingredient in this mix Impact beyond beyond the confines of the institution the NEH For example once the lead institution to bring scholarly expertise Manage grants well and bring in other good people from other institutions. They also want to see impact on scholarship Common goals funders will fund initiatives that are in harmony with the funding agencies goals and strategies Didactic potential Can others learn modify and adapt not only the center's model, but its products Leadership as I mentioned earlier there has to be trust between the funders and the PIs Funders want to deal with leaders who have done their due diligence in preparation for the project Who understand the necessity of risk mitigation and no less important They need to see leadership that has the skills that build collaboration in groups that are different libraries archives museums as One funder put it quote personal personality counts because ultimately you have to trust the PI Funders are also open to leaders who might not have all the expertise at the start of the project, but are sensitive to the important questions Let me end where I started What reasons did people give to start or fund a COE? The COEs want to push the boundaries of what's possible. They want to create new products Reach more people enhance all technologies and create new ones Funders want to make sure that their investment doesn't go to waste That the centers they fund are viable Innovative and sustainable that the leadership they entrusted with their money is trustworthy competent and visionary I will turn this over to Susan During our meeting with the funders and the centers we casually brought up the concept of center of excellence and What was interesting was that many of the centers and some of the funders were put off by center of excellence they They thought of it They thought it was a little pretentious and how do you become a center of excellence and do you just say that you're a center of? excellence They thought it discouraged Innovation and collaboration if someone claims they're a center of excellence then does that discourage others from trying to research in that same area? And if you're a center of excellence will others want to work with you because they may not feel that they have the Expertise or the funding to be able to work with you on a certain level one of One of our interviewees actually quoted Jacques Derrida and said there is no center at the center and Trying to be the center is the problem rather than thinking about what your goals are what are how you want to have impact So we then read a definition of the centers of excellence And we took the set the definition from Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute a center of excellence is a premier Organization providing an exceptional product or service in an assigned sphere of expertise and within a specific field of technology business or government Consistent with the unique requirements and capabilities of the coe organization. We had to read it a couple times so that they could absorb it and interestingly Once we shared this definition. They started to identify with parts of it especially exceptional product or service and assigned sphere of Excuse me assigned sphere of excellence We asked them how broadly or narrowly they believed a sensor of excellence should be defined and if they thought they were one Overall humanity centers and funders were less comfortable with the concept of centers of excellence but the science and engineering centers and funders seem to understand it better and and Some of them did reply that they thought based on this definition. They were centers of excellence We went on to talk about so what would the characteristics of a center of excellence be and Coming up at the top was providing leadership or expertise in a field or specific area being innovative Collaborative and sharing in a deliberative way. So talking about collaborative But not for just collaboration sake but for a specific purpose and thinking about how one would how that center would share Where with whom and what the the transformative impact would be they talked about two elements to what it means to have to be transformative One is to allow researchers to do more and better research and the second is to serve future needs Not yet identified by the community. So pushing the boundaries of innovation Thinking for the researchers before the researchers even know what they need If you see in the last line the descriptors for the characteristics are aid agile nimble evolves adapts Explores all of these have a common thread signifying evolution with openness and Mechanisms to encourage or embrace change for a center of excellence It's not enough to enable change a center of excellence has to seek and embrace it as the center itself Evolves and that was a strong common theme So we asked them okay. Well, what would how would you define a center of excellence and? The common definitions are it's a center is it's really a network rather than a center One center decide described it as they were a node So it's less about the place and more about where they connect in that big network expertise and again mechanisms for sharing and Focused expertise delivered broadly Most of the centers and funders described a center having a narrower focus of expertise, but distributing sharing broadly and Producing an impact in the world Two other themes are Important to mention the centers brought up Certification for a center of excellence. So is there a way to validate what a center of excellence would do similar to lead certification? Secondly often mentioned was well, you would know that you could you could know you're a center of excellence if others came to you to want to work with you to Ask you for advice to ask you for your expertise So that's a peer validation that you are a center of excellence Then the next three bullets came from the funders specifically They described a center needs to be high-profile. It needs a public-facing personality Someone who drives the center and prevent I'm sorry presents the face of expertise That also came with a caution if you rely on one individual and that individual leaves that affects the stability of the center Selecting experts who will shine so people who are able to communicate Who are willing to go out and work with others on their what their findings are on the center and also? Recruiting different expertise periodically so refresh the team that you have That does two things it gets new ideas into your center It might get new ways of working it also draws attention to your center periodically So who you've drawn to the center and you would release that in a PR In a PR message Even changing the institution that a center partners with periodically it was a recommendation so for us for this part of the The interview what we learned in the words of one of our interviewees is that excellence is a very unusual term And now joy Okay, I'm gonna delve a little bit more deeply into the business models that we learned about in general, I would say that with all of the Centers that we looked at they were based in some kind of institutional setting and There were partnerships with other institutions typically that was because of the the grant funding requirement But also there was value in partnership with others To solve a particular problem that perhaps no one institution could solve on their own They also valued the institutional setting particularly if there were faculty Faculty who are also in departments could utilize their their graduate students to help resource the center and provide research in general Many of the centers had a variety of funding sources Grants being the number one a variety of different kinds of grants. There was also university funding state provincial funding Endowments, although not many of our centers had endowments. They all wished they had Memberships have a variety of different kinds of membership models that centers utilize to generate revenue some had partner dues Many had in kind contributions of various kinds There were others that also Were generating revenue through the sale of products knowledge products. Some had fee-based services others provided training opportunities that were funded or Had a fee-based service attached to it Many had conferences that they hosted that provided some revenue or Workshops some even went into a center and provided the training in-house in General when we looked at the overall picture of the centers Most established some kind of core funding and usually this was established with multi-year funds of some kind and Adalments state funds and generally that was with our data so far at least about one-third of the overall funding was Was associated with the core funding and then the shorter term Funding was around two-thirds so two-thirds soft money And this was the bulk of most of the centers. We looked at were very busy with Grant funding and pursuing grant funds When we spoke to the centers we asked one of the questions we asked is how much time do you spend on fundraising and All of them spent a lot of time on fundraising So it was difficult to get an exact number, but generally 30 to 50 percent of their time Some of them had a distributed model where each person in the center had some obligation to do fundraising 10 to 15 hours a week was an example of one of these Some spent a hundred percent of the time that one person was was dedicated or usually there was a team of people Dedicated to some kind of fundraising in a center What we learned even though it seemed to be quite a burden to do fundraising and pursue grants Almost all of them said that they valued the process of pursuing grants that although they found it time-consuming That they felt it drove a lot of innovation And I think these two quotes are fairly indicative of what we heard The last one I think it is really important to have grant funding model to keep us hungry and innovative is what we heard a lot This idea of the competitive edge the pursue of grants to keep them innovative And I will say that the grants the short-term soft money grants tended to be used for the innovative things they were doing the experimental projects that they were pursuing When we asked what our centers felt for an ideal business model Some of that most of them weren't quite there But they all said that it was very important to have a diversified funding portfolio So that kind of parallels a little bit what Jose said about what the funders Are looking at at these centers as venture capitalism is what you used And that the center directors felt the same way that that there was a real need to have a diversified funding portfolio And and a real requirement to have some long-term or permanent-based funding of some kind And so typically most of them especially the more established centers were looking for multiple revenue streams and Not a single source Many of them valued the institutional support To provide that permanent core support for for their activity When we asked about long-term sustainability the answers were slightly different so the obvious one is that Reliance on one-time funding is not a good idea for long-term sustainability But more importantly what was important for the future and sustainability is for the center to maintain a clear sense of purpose And a strong leader, so we've been hearing this constant theme over and over this need for a strong Leader who can really sell the vision into the future They also spoke frequently about What the center is providing? The need for the services that they provide to the community and to keep that fresh This was pretty a really great statement that said it all in our minds Nobody gives you money because you need it What they want to hear is that you're doing great things. You're confident. You're optimistic. You're committed and they support that and again that comes back to this notion of a strong leader that can sell the vision that can be persuasive in terms of pursuing grants and being successful From the funder perspective we also asked them what they felt was an ideal business model Again, they said they want first of all they wanted to know why a center was needed What was it meant to serve? How was how was it going to help with the synergy in a center on a given topic? They too like to see a blended revenue scheme or some kind of diversified funding and not permanence on dependents on grants Some of them said that they like to see that the center was starting a business of some kind and then use the profits to cross subsidize the work Others like to see production of knowledge products that could be sold to help with supporting the center They also wanted to see in this parallels what Jose said earlier They wanted to see evidence of trust that they could trust the center Evidence of stability and that relates to a clear governance model clarity in the proposal clarity in how will be run Most wanted to see evidence of partnership or cross-institutional collaboration And more importantly even though the funding may have been start-up funding They wanted to be sure or see evidence that the funding was going to support capacity for the future All of the funders said something about that this was going to help some future need and They all said a champion a trusted champion They wanted to see who they could trust to give the money to So I'll summarize some key insights so far The concept of diversified funding a funding portfolio was very important The funders are not interested in forever funding that they're Interested in startup funding and innovation, but they do want to see future capacity Grant funding model is difficult and time scoots time consuming But it appears to be a motivator for innovation for most of the centers and again coming back to the trusted champion the Personality to lead and influence And I'll hand it over to Geneva You'd like to talk about our next steps where we're going from here So we've got a few more things to do One of the the big things we're looking for is some feedback on our draft Findings once we put the draft report out there to start to get some feedback This is the first time we're presenting our findings on the work that we've done. So We were very excited to have the presentation accepted because we're looking to you As an audience to give us your feedback on what you're hearing today. Let us know your thoughts your experiences So that we can Take those into consideration as we draft the final report We've intentionally kept this presentation Short so that we have a lot of time to engage with you in discussion We also will be sending the draft report to the centers and funders the individuals there that we interviewed for the study One of the things we also realized when we got together after we've done all the interviews and you know We're pouring through the transcripts is that you know, why did we start this? We started this because of this problem that we're having with research libraries trying to meet the need for all of these new services And so then once we've stepped back after we have all this information we're excited about you know the findings that we have and We sort of stopped and said but you know what? Would probably be pretty good to get some feedback from library directors who would eventually bear the burden of Going after these centers or supporting them or being you know full champions of them And will they embrace this model? So that's another group that we want to get some feedback From we're planning to we're hoping to do a focus session with some library directors Since they're probably the stakeholders who are most likely impacted by these centers for information services And let's see it what if they would buy into the concept So our goal is to reach to release the final report by the end of June Clear has agreed to post it on their website. So it will be available there fully open And then we'll be delivering it to the Mellon Foundation and all of the individuals that were interviewed as well So with that I'd just like to open it up and invite your comments and your thoughts