 All right. Well, welcome everyone to today's Mars guest lecture. The presentation is on Lessons in Design, Control, and Teenagers revamping the NASA History website. Our presenter today is an iSchool graduate, Robin K. Rogers from the MLIS program. And I want to tell you a little bit about Robin. Some of you I know are first semester students thinking about what you might do with your lives. After graduation. And so this, I think, will give you some ideas of how one student was able to make a number of changes, but still enjoy very much what she's doing. Robin serves right now as the inaugural senior archivist leading archival activities within the Department of Veterans Affairs in the history office. And in this role, she's responsible for developing archival standards practices and operations for the VA history program and the National VA History Center to be established on the VA Medical Center campus in Dayton, Ohio, where she's now located. Ms. Rogers comes to VA from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, having served as chief archivist. Previous posts include National Archives and Records Administration, known as NARA, holding a variety of positions in research services in Anchorage, Alaska, San Bruno, California and College Park, Maryland offices, as well as in agency services focusing on Department of Defense appraisal, including capstone and other electronic records. She has extensive experience in senior leadership, policy development, programmatic creation and strategic rehabilitation, as well as the intersection of records management and archives. I graduated with honors from Virginia State University, holding a bachelor's degree in American history, as well as the master's degree in information and library sciences with a concentration in archival management from SJSU. And now I'll turn the mic over to Robin. Thank you so much. I have to tell you some make me sound way more interesting than I really am. I was very impressed. I couldn't get all of those words. Alright, so good afternoon. I am so very pleased to be here. Thank you to Dr. Franks for inviting me and also to the entire team who works behind the scenes to make things happen. I'm really grateful for this opportunity. So one of the things that I have learned through my years is clearly not how to operate zoom and change slides. There we go. One of the things I've learned through my years of giving these sorts of presentations is that it's really important to tell people when you're going to stop talking, especially when you might be the thing standing between them and their lunch. So given that it's noon on the West Coast, that might be how is the day shaping up for some people. So that's what we're going to do today. Dr. Franks has already covered my bio. So we're going to cruise through that. I'm going to talk a little bit about Apollo 11 itself. So that way, you know why it's such a driver of this project. Tell you some of the things I learned in the process and then leave room for questions. So since Dr. Franks was kind enough to do my bio, this is my about me slide. One of the questions I get pretty frequently is what in the world possess student leave NASA. I love NASA. I miss my amazing crew and my very comfortable chair. But Mike Viscanon, the VA's first chief historian called and said, Hey, do you want to come build a national level federal program from scratch. And I said yes. In our industry, you know, people go their whole careers without ever even seeing that kind of opportunity come up, much less receiving an offer. So here we are. These are my girls up here on the right. And I did see a couple familiar names in the chat list. So they can probably confirm if you've known me for more than five minutes, you'll know that if I can find a way to work a dog and a horse into a conversation, I'm probably going to do that. So there may be references coming. Who knows, we'll see where the conversation goes. So not everybody is a total space nerd. And the NASA suite of activities is huge. There are, these are basically the things that you need to know to be able to talk about it at a party. The talk is self explanatory. So let's talk about the LM and CM and then frame that to what you already know. LM is lunar module. And that's what Tiffaniel Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the moon surface where Armstrong said his famous line once most of you guys all know that line, right. And then the CM, the command module was piloted by Michael Collins, who basically crew circles around the circumference of the moon, confirmed that there was indeed the dark side of the moon because he saw it, and was out of communications for about 45 minutes at a time. And that's what led the media to the whole loneliest man portrayal, which he hates, by the way, just so you know, he wasn't mad about not landing because he had the other half of the mission, which was to get them home. The Apollo 11 mission was not just to land on the man on the moon, but also to bring them back. So down here in this line right here, there's a lot of iconic photography taken throughout the Apollo missions, and it's really easy to mix up what was shot when and why and so this first link kind of just goes through the missions and shows you some of the really beautiful photography that were associated with each of them. And last but not least is the Apollo in real time. And just so folks understand what an feat of it, this thing is video of mission control was silent audio was done on separate tapes. And so you have to remember this was 1969 tape was very, very expensive and they weren't making a movie. So Ben Feist took his team and took the video and matched it up with the audio and then matched it up with the transcripts, and then put it in real time. So you can imagine as somebody's mouth is moving in the video, sitting and listening to hours of audio, and then matching those two things in something like Camtasia or another audio software. And then taking the transcripts and matching those up and rolling as people are talking and the tape is moving and so is the transcript and then putting it in real time on a website. So that means that you're walking through the mission as it happened, not just the highlights or the clips that people want you to see that are really cool. It is the entire Apollo 11 mission. One of my, is it this one or 17. I can't remember if it's Apollo 11 or Apollo 17. But my favorite part is when one of the engineers gets turned down for a date, because she was Washington setting her hair that way. And you can hear the whole awkward conversation, as well as read the transcripts of it, meaning that somebody else was listening to that conversation and typing along. So it's just really a great experience. And it's all archival footage, archival soundtrack and texture records that have come together to create this incredible experience of IT. Anyway, I can talk about it for a lot. Moving on, it's worth the time and it's amazing. So as information professionals, we know that anniversaries usually zeros and fives tend to be societal drivers. I mean, nobody really celebrates like the 12th anniversary or something, right? It's the 10th and 15th. And in this case, it was the 50th. So our public affairs teams were doing excellent work in the promotion of that. And especially because of the tracking stations across the world, many countries had a role in the Apollo 11. So it wasn't just a US based event. It was quite literally a worldwide event and our analytics were showing it. And I'm going to pause on this point and come back around to that to the end. So first, I also need to note that I'm not criticizing the older history.nasa.gov website. It was one of the first.gov sites out there. And for the time it was cutting edge. It did exactly what President Clinton wanted to do at the time. It was a useful tool for staff and NASA information, made NASA information available in ways that had never been done before. The only actual problem with that site is that the way we use the web changes and flash away. I know the original programmer and I know the content manager, so I promise this is no criticism of their work. I also need to make it really clear that I am not speaking officially for NASA today. I'm just here to tell us Dr. Franks liked it when she and I were talking about it and we were working on something else. And we thought there would be just things others might find value in. Also, I tend to talk about this as my site with finger quotes my because I was the program owner. But this is as much carrot Shae's work as it is mine. And without him, this would not be the glorious product that we have. So all of those customers done not let's get to the story. So in the before, it was rather easy to get a website. You bought a book, you would learn to write some code, get a box of pop charts and a half of that and do handy. And at about 4am, you wound up with some sort of web presence. Okay, so pop charts were important because they're nothing but processed sugar. They're shelf stable forever. And most importantly, you only need one hand to open and leave them. If you were, well, and I'm digressing. If you were really good, when you were done, you had a site with stable nested hyperlinks, some fixed imagery and a counter on the bottom that tracked page visits most of which were yours. And to no crimes on your keyboard. There's a specific tearing technique for the package with the one anyway and digressing again. So the point is, is that there's a lot of planning that had to go into it because web websites were static information pushers. Dynamic content and analytics had not been born yet. And there was certainly no such thing as a user population study. Many of us in middle to senior leadership were around to see the very beginnings of the internet. And that's exactly what NASA had. So I'm just going to double check that chat real quick and make sure there are no questions. And chat does not want to be checked. Come on little chat. You can do it. Apparently it can. Okay. So apparently on the way that these screens are set up, I can't actually see the chat while I even share. Can somebody say just bring up if there is no questions yet. Thank you. Let's see that. So this may be a trip down memory lane for a few of us. Normally I would ask if I could get a show of hands if there's anybody that was around for this era because it's going to tell me if my jokes are going to be funny, but I can't see the screen. So we'll just bypass the show of hands and we'll just pretend my jokes are still funny. So in about oh five, the ground breaker we know as flash came along and we started embedding media into our pages, which we shouldn't have been trusted with. And last year, Adobe decided that we couldn't have nice things. And so they end of life did as of this year for the federal government. That means that all of our pages that have flash product and let me tell you we put it everywhere in no longer meet security requirements. So now we all have dead pages that look like this. So if you've been cruising around various government pages and you see stuff like this with just these big boxes. That's what happened. They made us get rid of all of our flash. So now you're seeing why these things are becoming problems right anniversary is bearing down on this and because the landing is such a cultural icon people are talking. People want to share their stories with us they want to share their stories with each other. We would get calls at 3am because international audiences couldn't find a tidbit of information on the website. And let me tell you Twitter had opinions with capital letters had opinions about that. So our stats started to show some trends that senior leadership just didn't like and it's understandable right. But there was just this momentum and this energy that I thought could sustain a change. So I brought it to build my boss who filled me in on the back story of previous attempts and some of the players who would need to be involved. There's multiple parts that happen when you're bringing an agency from a federal level and you're bringing a new website for a significant rebound. It's not just you and the development team. So we talked about that. And then he turned me lose to go make a project scope. Nice to tell you that Bill Berry and his wife Monica are among my favorite people on this planet. And so I didn't exactly make him a project scope. I sort of made him a half filled website. I do have some development experience and I can find my way around dreamers. So I brought him an actual product and that's actually what made all the difference. That's when he greenlit it and we call the meeting with development and some other parties that need to be at the table. So despite some of the challenges and obstacles like not having a functional DMS a CMS that was inappropriate for what we were trying to do. No extra staff, no budget and about a four month deadline. I figured what could go wrong. Right. Yeah, sure. We're going with that. So first and foremost, on a project like this, you have to do your pre-work. You have to know what you are asking for. And the more that you know what your required end state is the easier it is for your development team to help you get there. And if you don't know that's that's okay, but you have to be honest with them about what you do and don't know. And moreover, release some of the control back to them and that can be really hard. But if you don't know what you want, you have to share that. So bring some examples of things that you do like and things that you know that you don't because it helps them find the commonalities. They are the experts at this. And they will find the jumps between those two things that that we don't necessarily think about natively the way that they do. So when you're doing that, when you're trying to figure out what it is that you want and moving into these kinds of meetings with this. Knowing what you have and what you want and what you need. But most importantly, where you want to be at the end are the things that you can do most to help them because I think we've probably all been on this with the receiving end of this kind of conversation. I don't know what I want, but I know that's not it. So go do something else. Okay, tell me more about what you're thinking. Well, I don't know, but it's not that right. You can see how incredibly frustrating there's there's no navigational point there. So the better plan you have walking in the door and the more rapport you build with your team, the better the entire process is just going to be for everybody. Building a website in today's environment is incredibly complicated. It's no longer a thing that can be built in a night don't run a server and pushed out despite what that nifty future that tells you. So there are reasons that the profession has developed and split the way that it has. It's a complex process that blends art, both social and hard science and technology and budget. That's an incredibly important part of it. There's time involved and time of all of those people, at least in the federal government, many of those departments also tend to be contractors. They're not necessarily civil servants, which means there's an entire aspect of business process that is utterly invisible to us. So when you know and you respect the fact that you are not the only party at the table, it helps. Also further for that to respect each industry in its own entity and not just this conglomerate of those web folks right in the parentheses those web folks are in the quotations. So I walked in with a site that was over halfway developed and now just needed finer tuning. And because functionally it did what I needed it to do. Garrett could do what he did best, which is make something that actually worked in the way that the user and the owner that was me wanted it to but it was also beautiful to do. So we didn't have to have that push Paul, because he could see exactly what the vision of vegan state was supposed to be. And then none of this to say is that was easy and uncomplicated. It's actually probably one of the most complicated projects I've ever worked with an incredibly sharp precipice for a failure point. Even with that great work working. Yes, good spot even with that great working synergy that we had, you know, it still took three weeks longer than what we had planned. And when you have that hard data anniversary that's on a movable point on the calendar right it's a hard day hard release date. So Garrett and I had some really long hours, because we were doing things like server tracking and refreshes, and those things happen best when traffic is lowest. NASA has an incredibly international audience. So we found out there were windows that it was best to be able to do this according to international time zones. And it was often at 11 o'clock. And so remember in the before when I was talking about the pot charts and I got distracted on it. So it's been about 20 years since I've had a pot chart at midnight, but it was like no time had passed man's like you tear the packet in this direction. None of those things have changed. Y'all I'm old. Okay, midnight is way past my bedtime and I have to be fed if we're going to be keeping me up that late. So, even though we're talking on the server we ran into some significant issues, some of which we knew were going to happen we absolutely had planned for the time and we think that in. But some of them were just a surprise. We had no idea that was going to happen at three o'clock in the morning. And we both got to work and we found these right and that derailed the whole day and this is where that that follow on planning and making sure that that respect right because immediately your stress level rises and your first instinct is to find somebody to blame right well when you come with a position of respect it helps to mitigate that. One of the other things that we also agreed upon immediately is that there was going to be a history 2.0 push at the end of August because we had to make choices about time or content. It's okay to not be 100% complete as long as you have a defined and measurable plan to make up the gap, and you actually implement it. It's not enough to come to the table with a plan, you have to have an implementation plan as well. Interestingly part of that gap that came in my feedback and user population studies. So when you are deeply entrenched in a project, especially when you're spearheading, it all makes intrinsic sense to you right now you know why this is here or how that decision came about or why this was not done. And you all you know all about it it makes sense you know why, but looking from the outside in some of those things are not apparent. And a website is, you know it's the most outside in thing the government office can have. It exists to do exactly that right to allow the public a window into what that office is doing with their taxpayer dollars. They want to be able to use that site. And so part of the early planning process needed to be dedicated to figure out how they were using it, as well as how you want people to use it because especially in this case those were very different things. There was in there's internal and external ways to do that. The user experience a UST user experience test is usually that's done professionals and beta test is usually an internal process, but feedback. Now that's an entirely different process and that is wide open. I found that the best way to make sure that things make sense to somebody who's not you, or in this case me, is to ask somebody who isn't you, or me, right so that asks me who's not the owner, asking somebody who doesn't have a stake in the product or the process. Once we went live, the most useful feedback actually came from my 20 year old and a group of friends kids, you know, digital natives, and in looking across, you know, I, I see, you know, they were in the same age group that some of you are in, born with phones in their hands. They find my iPod to be a charming relic of the past. And there's expectations, but most importantly, they were very good at explaining why something did work or did not work without delving into how they thought I should fix it, which was an issue with other testers. Remember, I was working with no DMS, a CMS that wasn't appropriate for what we were doing, no budget, no staff and no time. So things were the way they were as part of response to that. So there was one high school senior who had just graduated the month before and going through the middle college years. So the population was accustomed to doing research online. And the other thing I found is they provided just really great feedback as they were switching between Android and Chromebook and Apple and Mac and iPhone, sometimes on the same day working on the same project. And really gave me some good feedback about how those things all fit together, what their experience with it was. And moreover, their lack of investment in the project gave them room to be honest and really open without, you know, worrying about looking foolish or damaging relationships that might be needed down the road. There was no angle. There was no agenda. They simply tested and in cave feedback, which was exactly what was needed. So higher teenager while they still know everything. So if I see a little dot here, there might be something in chat. Losing the circle of yep, exactly, exactly attorney. Okay, so remember I said there was no functional DMS and inappropriate CMS and terabytes of shareable content. So, so how do we navigate that what were the priorities we needed to keep in mind. Now remember this is a surface skin right for every point that I'm talking about in here there was maybe hundreds of more refined points and that would be a much longer talk. So I showed you guys a talk the top of the previous NASA history website. So we went from that to this. It was a very text heavy it was it was two colors, which were not by the way compliant colors, by the way. There was no imagery there there was nothing to look at. And so that was one of the things that was that was very important as us for to make something that was visually appealing, as well as useful, but also wanted to make sure that my center history programs whose sites were a little bit more challenging to find had immediate presence. And so, especially for for San Jose is is is very local to you. I wanted to make sure that people were actually able to find their most local center history program while still being able to go. So, and that's what you see here. So first we took a look at our research statistics to figure out what people were actually asking about we have little in the way of resources but much in the way of content. So we had to make decisions about reconciling those two things. This is how we did it. We took the top 12 research questions that people had asked us about right here to research questions. And hopefully my network is keeping up with this. Since we talked about lunar module command module. Yeah, let's go down here. Okay, so let's take a look at lunar module command module since we spoke about them earlier. Now remember I said that we have no active backside DMS that so that could support this. So we looked at our user population studies we had about 14 different user population studies, and figured out that the bulk of their needs could be served by basically creating this. So we think about it. And so we took these overarching materials right audio video books documents right, and the goal, our stated goal was not to try to encapsulate anything and everything that somebody might want to know about the lunar and other materials right we wanted to get with basically looking to give serious research researchers so number one give serious researchers enough material to help shape and refine your questions before contacting us. Those of you who have some work experience know the researcher I want everything you have on the lunar module. Doesn't really work like that. But also to help people who were just interested in browsing just enough to feel satisfied and just maybe dig a little deeper. I was really trying to get to that. I didn't know that from that particular population. Moreover, we chose material that wasn't already floating about the internet on 12 different other sites. We're trying to stimulate new research right that last but not least we did not want a collection of links to just other places. So, I think across the entire site we might have four of these there's a couple to NARA one to Eisenhower library that's under Sputnik, and then one to airspace museum. So, next was the challenge of how to make our solely electronic materials discoverable, if not available, those are two different things. So we did that via the finding a process. Let's pop over here. So, materials are broken down into 12 different record groups that my predecessor had had device had identified and so reorganizing the intellectual was actually really easy process, if not physically easy was it was an election easy. So let's, let's go here to the aerospace. Let's look at malicious speeches. So here, we have a finding it right. In years past windows would not let you export file lists you had to do this weird copy paste reformat de format, we copy repaced reformat thing. And so now we don't have to do that. It just makes for a really tidy export that makes well it makes it easy to chop up. So, even though. So, actually, let me read me back track. These are actually not hyperlinked when we were when we're making the adobe portion adobe kept forcing this blue so it looks like there's that the hyperlinked they're not I tried changing the settings it just it just wouldn't. My point is, is this entirely full group, absolutely not, but it is much better than not having anything up until this point, or at least for NASA headquarters in DC, none of their electronic material sitting on the share drives was available. And so this is how we made it made it available. And the other talk about the DMS exports me go back. So, NASA HQ has this ancient database it's probably 22 years old which is older than my youngest child. And is it's still publicly available but it is very difficult to navigate it breaks constantly because it's doing things it was never intended to do frankly I'm still surprised we can get into it. And secondly, it's a relational database. And so I asked the powers that be in the underground server world to run me a CSV script, and then I retooled all of the data headers. In the interest of time, I won't download it. It also tends to mess with my VPN, which then puts me off the call and then it gets awkward, right. So, but if you're interested in thinking about how to repurpose ancient databases and how to think about it differently. This is actually a really interesting way that we did it. So there is one other spot that I wanted to show you. Yeah, publications and disorders books. So, NASA history has 287, 287 books on various aspects of NASA history. And one of the difficult things that we ran into see these SP numbers right here. Those are kind of a business evolution of the GP of the government printing and so they've, they've changed over the years and we find a non SP yet so the non SP is categorizing the books actually became very, very difficult. So what Garrett and I wound up doing was making a database of that fits up underneath this. Let me find will go for societal just because that's yeah. And so basically we made it filter for us, which is it perfect. No, it's not by any stretch of the imagination. It is really dependent on the keywords there's a spreadsheet of behind to this that talks that not talks I'm sorry that helps us to do this so if you put in a keyword that isn't there, then it just not, it's just not going to find out. But we were pretty exhausted in our keywords and on the front of the GPO pages there's that we took their topic headings and we made them into keywords. So, it's not a perfect site. It's not there was much more that with the right resources the amount of time that we could have done with this, but going from this, and this to this was a significant improvement for everybody. So, are there any questions, I'm going to come off of sharing real quick. It's truly amazing from you. I work in a similar field currently and I can really relate. I'm so curious you spoke. I'm excited at the insights you shared about your user testing process and I was curious how you ended up with listing some of those other topics under research questions rather than any other kind of heading I'm just really that's that was interesting to me. Oh, sure. So the NASA history office has a couple of different databases that they've used over the years to track reference questions. And so we took those we chopped in sort of the data we also took our Google analytics and looked at which pages had the most as you saw it was a really exhaustive list of topics in there. And so the way that the Google analytics works on the backside of that site allowed us to isolate the URLs and figure out what people were really reading. And then we sent out a couple of internal surveys across the NASA centers and said hey what are people asking you about. And we took all of that data and that was the 12 that whether you were at Ames or Stennis down in Mississippi or Langley or headquarters. These were the commonalities and so we took those 12 commonalities. Cool. And if I can ask a follow up do you have any data or survey mechanism on the site now to find out if people are able to find what they're looking for. Yes and no one of the great things about NASA researchers whether it is a member of the general public art Natasha thank you so much I really really appreciate it. I'm so glad that you were able to come today. Yes the answer is yes what are people looking for the great thing about NASA researchers is they are really communicative. They have no problem telling you what they like what they don't like how hard it was how easy it was they have no problem calling you at three o'clock in the morning. And even when they don't live in Italy US people would still call me at three o'clock in the morning. But you know what it's cool it's cool because one of the great things about having such a public facing job like that is that you really do get to know from a management perspective where to put your resources. No matter what sector whether your federal government state local independent private heritage house we are all working with limited resources. Right and archival resources are even more limited from there. You know it's it's kind of hard that to tell an engineer and no I'm sorry you can't have a wind tunnel because I need a database as an archivist right like those resources are just fine right and so having a great really engaged user population allows you to say I have to have it and here's the data. Yeah yeah. Thank you for sharing. Absolutely. So Rebecca says public tips on how to refine the research question proactive. You know it's archival research is hard. I'm going to digress for just a second because I want to show you something that if I make no other contribution to the entire archival world. This is the one thing that I'm proud of. That's a good point Lauren. I also came off my mute to talk and I saw that Jade had a comment that we skipped there. Jade you're in a class on UX UI design. And let's go with us yes and finding that class and how does that relate to what you've seen here. Well everything I mean we just did again I'm I forget what info to own classes but we just did a whole project about creating our first databases and obviously this is a much more complicated iteration of that but the skills and principles. So what you see from user testing research you know taking in demographics that you wouldn't even have thought of I love the example with her kids testing it out and digital natives versus you know Italian researchers and they're going to have different perspectives so I just this whole talk was just Excellent and that's a good point. The younger people have a different way of locating information than somebody who's been trained in research would have I see Robin's back with us so I'll be quiet now. Thank you so this is that this is a PowerPoint I made for a different an entirely different conversation that I was having it's a work thing but when when you're talking to your researchers from their perspective they come in they come in and in their In their head research your code research goes this way right you have a topic you do some Google you go to the library. You start bringing all of your sources together you get a full picture of what it is that you are working on as opposed to what kind of product you want what you want to say and how to put it out there. Right the point is is that it's this way. Archives especially government whether you're a federal down to tribal work this way. So you have your repository your time repository so in this case it would be now said your record group or your subject so aeronautics your collection will stay with Ed Walsh your series those were his speeches that I showed you he doesn't actually have that much more that the folder. He does have textual materials so his his notes from September 1967 and then the cocktail napkin that he's great scribbled a sketch design on right you see. But you see how it's this way right it's exactly opposite. And so what we were trying to build with that thing is this big white space in here. So those 12 topics we were trying to move people from this over to here to be able to help them best. And it was a really once it was a really long time before I figured out that the reason that archival research is hard for people is because it's opposite. And so once you kind of reframe that in your head and like oh yeah that is opposite. It helps you to realize why the job is hard. It was also in this presentation that I basically just proved that information science is just with craft. Because you have archival science and information governance and records management. Anyway this part is immature. Hi Robin. This is our training this training up. I just got a quick question. How did you convince them to see it that way. That's the question I got. I mean I understand the opposite but how did you get them to see it the way you kind of wanted them to see it. When I was doing this particular presentation. I knew for a fact that every person in that particular meeting had at least a bachelor's degree. And most people were PhDs. So I made them think about a paper that they had written in school and I made them write the topic or the name of the paper on a piece of paper and hold it up in front of me. So I really made them physically engage with a memory that they had. Because once you engage with that memory, you start thinking about all of the things that you had to do to accomplish it. Right. And so then I started talking about the topic. I picked there was a man sitting in front of me and I think his topic. And I said okay so when you were thinking about your topic walk me through. So this slide is up behind me. I said walk me through how you did it. And he basically walked through exactly this kind of process. And so on the table in front of me. I had brought down a couple of boxes of textual records and then there were also some there was a couple of maps in there too because I was talking to some engineers and being able to find a commonality something that they already know about helps to engage that expansion of learning when they don't have to learn the whole thing that's new. That's why we did the Armstrong, right. Right. I engage with something that I knew you already knew. So anyway, I put these boxes in front of them and I showed them and I physically put them in their hands. And once they realize what they already knew here and why it was hard over here because this is our business model industry wide, then they understood the key is to start with what they already know. Something that they've done intrinsically and have embraced in this case it was academia right it was research over to my side. But rather than trying to force it from the top down I came from the bottom up which is which is very indicative of my management style as well and how I build things. Forcing things especially in information management with slim resources, creating buy-in is the most important skill that I possibly have. I think this industry wide as well. The other thing is truly putting things in people's hands giving them something to touch giving them something to make this bridge. I wouldn't have been able to do it if I hadn't put this in their hands. Okay. That's great. Thank you. Are there other questions other thoughts. So chat right there. Oh, thank you, Jane. And just to thank you it is it is easier to demonstrate with a visual than it is to try to explain that. And like I said giving them something tangentially giving them something tangible rather something that to make the bridge people. So somebody who's very close to me is is a college professor and he and I get into it about learning styles and he's he's in the school that you know those those are a myth that they don't really exist I'm in the school of. If I if you if you can touch it you can learn it right like you have to engage all of these things for holistic experience. It can get really loud at our house, but that's. I think it's important to realize that if you can take something people already know and give them something to touch, and then drive a conversation. You can teach them. So anybody else have any thoughts anything that they want to share and and Dr Frank's from a professor standpoint I would love to know your thoughts on that. We were discussing learning styles yesterday. I asked someone in a meeting to quit talking and show me a chart. It was a friend so it was easy to do right right I said I know I know you have that in a chart somewhere can you just bring that out and let's take a look at it because I don't learn by hearing. I have to see so I appreciate your charts your graphics. Those to me I'll remember and I will also even remember looking at a page with text on it I'll remember text that way, but I will not remember what you're saying unless I'm also focusing with my eyes. I'm with you there are different learning styles. Oh, great. And so I also teach for when I was at Mara I also taught records management and. So I was teaching with my buddy Jeff at Seattle, and Jeff's been doing this a long time so that it was the first time that we went to go teach together in Flagstaff, Arizona. And I made him run me by the dollar store and I went and I picked up these little baskets and I just filled them with a little plastic Rubik's cubes and just things right and he's been running what are you doing. I might that people need this stuff people have to people who are kinesthetic learners, even if the object in their hand doesn't relate to what they're learning they're going to learn better for something in their hands because they're creating relational memories. He lovingly patting me on my head because we're friends and he could do that. And but but I showed him, you know, these are how these things work and audiences that he had not been able to previously engage with. He started to be able to engage with and so it's not a practice that he adopts for himself because it's not native to his teaching style. He at least doesn't pat me on my head anymore. I have a friend who had done that teaches marketing psychology of marketing and marketing, and she would teach large classrooms in a lecture hall so she would also have a basket full of things it could be candy it could be squeeze balls where. And she's talking she'll be throwing them around the world. You better be awake to catch them. But it did keep the students engaged as you say. Exactly. So Allison asks, let me scroll up just to touch. Rebecca you're absolutely right that you know keywords are wonderful but it's not going to solve the whole problem. We have to be able to provide guns and that's part of holding those reference skills, right that that's part of not just knowing your collection, but being able to have a conversation with your researcher and bridge them over. And I know you're here looking for propulsion, but hey let's go talk, let's go look in in the aerospace collection because I think there's something you're going to find right it's just. People tend to have this view of archives and libraries and historians as like the sort of underground cave dwellers, right that we don't like people and we don't like the like we don't want people to touch our stuff. That there's a skill there of being able to take what your researcher wants what they think they want and what they need and what you have and make those jumps. But and you're right the patron has to invest the time to conducting research. That was a really difficult thing for my archivist at NASA to learn was where the line between being an archivist and being a research assistant came to a full stop. And so Allison asks, oh I'm so glad that it's interesting for you. Tips and strategies to be to give researchers to bridge that mental gap between doing archival research and other kinds of research. Really honest one of my friends as a graphic designer is Garrett actually the guy after we were all done with the website. I made him why didn't make him I asked him to pretty this thing up this exact thing and this exact thing we had hanging on the wall in the archives. And whenever somebody came in when I did their their initial research orientation. So here's the bathroom. Here's the emergency exit. Here's the vending machines. This is what you're doing here in this triangle and this is how we work and let's talk about how to get between the two. So you know triangles may not work for everybody. Some people don't like triangles. I actually had a researcher tell me that my triangles offended him, not the content the triangles themselves. So you know whatever kind of thing works for your physical working space. I don't, I don't see any reason why somebody couldn't take this concept and make something like this and help people visualize it differently. So I'm just I'm scrolling up and down. What what would be some of so this is just because this is the way I do it doesn't mean it's the only way to do it. So what is something that somebody else might like to throw out there as a concept or a way to do this. I guess I would throw out an idea Robin which is and I'm looking at this from not a research audience perspective but maybe like a lay guest layperson guest audience. But it might be like if I was going to us to the NASA site, not knowing anything about what I was looking for. I might be really interested in like a guided tour of some highlights that from from which point I could see what sparks my interest and then dive in so a little bit of like one of the learning styles that you talked about. So that was something that came to mind. All right, so how does somebody that we haven't we still have a six minutes left. So the question from Rebecca I believe from Allison again was what strategies do you have to give researchers to bridge the mental gap between doing archival research and doing other kinds of academics. So I've shown you my triangles that just happened to work for me. But what about others you know you're you're coming up through your school these are things that are going to affect you. What do you see as strategies to do that I'd like to hear from a couple of other people. I wonder if anybody in here has taken the research methods class and gotten any ideas from that because they're attempting to do academic research. So one of ours in Mara is geared toward writing for journals, for example. So I don't know has anyone gotten any ideas or or any impressions that change the way you go about doing research for your 285 course that has changed based on being in that class. Rebecca got yeah Rebecca's got some comments there it may not be on my question but I think it relates to yours. Rebecca says US studies are something that I've recently discovered and found them to be incredibly helpful they really are. I've been getting the help of our web staff to gather statistics about how patrons interact with a page and then on the improvements to existing web pages to help patrons answer their own frequently asked questions which which we do have on the site is a page link them to digital images of records heat map studies yet improve users do not spend time reading like the web pages. Yes, agreed. And that was part of why we chose that that box methodology. Visually speaking, is because we had come from a site that was nothing but scroll scroll scroll scroll. And you kind of didn't know when the scroll ended. It used to be my site and I still don't know where the scroll and did so using the box methodology and stacking things visually the way that we did was an intentional choice on our part just for that exact reason users don't spend a long time reading with the web pages and also from a mobile perspective it makes it easy to know when to stop it frames itself nicely on we run it up I think against six slices of screens and they they stack nicely on the screen. All right, so we have about four minutes left is there anything any of any thoughts any lasting questions, impressions. I'm wondering this is I'm wondering if any of the students in the class that I'm teaching right now where they're working on collections for preservative code that will be presented through WordPress if any of you had any ideas that came from viewing the work that you might apply to your collections to your own projects. I noticed one there, a group of students are going to work on national parks across the United States. And on one of the pages you had materials, grouped according to I think type of material like documents as opposed to something and I was envisioning them perhaps putting together rather than saying I'm going to do the park service in California as opposed to New York whatever it may be. I wonder if they were perhaps going to now consider looking at pictures as opposed to maps as opposed to when the parks were created or whatever. We'll have a discussion topic that will be held in class that will go back to your presentation Robin so we'll be continuing this type of discussion there. Yeah, this is a training yes we. I'm one of the members of that group. So we are looking at the pictures, you know, but we were thinking about the category of all of them, you know, including the objects like maps and of that nature to make sure that we. I like the way Robin had them in various groups, so we can kind of group them. And I was there it is the images as opposed to the oral history is right. Yeah, your topic came out at me because I had just been looking at the ideas earlier today and it's good to be able to do them as separate separate sections from separate states but I kind of like this idea to just as a consideration. It makes sense. I think because your group is going to do different types of resources some are only going to have sound some will only have images but you're seem to have a nice variety. Oh, thank you so much everybody I just I'm noticing the time I want to make sure that I'm respectful of that I'm happy to hang out and continue the discussion if anybody wants to. I'm glad if everybody has things to get to thank you so much for your time and attention today or your great interaction I'm so pleased to be able to do this, and have a great day everybody it's beautiful outside. Thank you. Thank you very much Robin, and have a wonderful day everyone.