 Good afternoon again. I think I'd like to get everybody started, so if you could take a seat, we'll begin the next program. I am Melissa Lanning. I'm Associate Dean from the University of Louisville Libraries, and I'm really delighted to introduce the next program to you. Before I get started, however, I want to acknowledge and recognize Bonnie Smith, who is my co-planer for this particular program. We just had a great time working on it together, and that was part of the whole experience being here today. When Bonnie and I agreed to start working on this program and developing something around the Ithaca SNR report on inclusion, diversity, and equity, our initial conversations were leading us in a direction that probably would have resulted in a fairly conventional academic analysis of the report. We had a list of potential speakers in mind. Many of them would be very familiar to you in the room, but as we talked more about it, we realized that part of this symposium and part of the reason that we wanted to be here today is a call to bring different perspectives and different voices into the conversation, and so really we had to think very hard about the direction we were going in, and so we went back to the drawing board, and the program that we have here for you today is the result of that further reflection on what that means. You received information prior to the program, including Extensive Bios, so I won't repeat that here for you now, but I will tell you a little bit about the format of the program and what you can expect. Our first speaker is Brian Lim. He's Dean of University Libraries at Adelphi University. He's going to provide his perspective on the Ithaca report as an administrator and also as a participant in the study that then became the results of the report. In addition, he's going to identify three challenges that emerge from that report in terms of what we need to do within academic libraries to move past where we are, past the status quo for diversity and inclusion in academic libraries. Following Brian's talk, Varajita Singh, who is Assistant Vice Provost in the Office of Equity and Diversity at the University of Minnesota, will provide an overview of design thinking, which her discipline is architecture. So it's a methodology that she draws upon from her discipline, and she will talk about how you can use design thinking to address the challenges of equity and diversity that I think we realize we all face. So that's going to be part one of the program. Part two, it follows the break, and for those who are interested, part two will be back in this room. It's one of the concurrent sessions and where you will actually have an opportunity to work through some guided exercises around those design or challenges that have been identified. And so if you are interested in being involved in that part of the program, please come back to this room after the break at 3.30. I think that's really all I want to say. Just one final note, though, before I turn it over to Brian. Many of you have probably participated in planning conference calls with people that you don't really know or have never met before and how awkward and challenging those can be, and I have to say that was absolutely not the experience working with Brian and Varajita. They immediately dug in with the ideas that Bonnie and I were putting on the table. They molded them and shaped them into something far better than we ever would have come up with on our own. And so I'm very appreciative to both of them for that. Thank you. Thanks, Melissa, for such a wonderful introduction and setting the tone for today. And thanks, Bonnie, your co-conspirator, in bringing us into this program. I'm really honored to be here. I'm not an ARL director. I'm not in an ARL institution. However, this report really spoke to me. How many of you participated in the survey? Great. And I won't ask how many have read it, so what I'm going to do is provide you what I call the reader's digest version first. Does that betray my age? Does everyone know what that reference means? OK, good. You're all librarians. So I was honored to be asked to, well, participate in the survey. I received the email from Roger Schoenfeld at SNR, as all of you have, to participate in this wonderful, thought-provoking survey and report. And what I'm going to do is say first that the invitation to participate came at a perfect time for me at the Delphi University. The Delphi University is located in the New York City Metro region. We're about 25 miles from Manhattan. We are a 100-year-old liberal arts-based institution that has now a graduate program that's been in place for at least 50 years in a variety of subjects and disciplines. We are an institution that is really pivoting from being a primarily white-serving institution to one that is becoming much more diverse. And so under our new strategic plan, under the leadership of our first woman president, of course, Reardon, we embarked on a strategic initiative to really focus on diversity and inclusion of faculty, staff, and students. And I was heavily involved in this effort and because there had been an opening in my library, because as many of you are experiencing, you're seeing attrition in your ranks due to retirements and all of that. The baby boner was leaving positions. There was an opening for me to recruit library faculty. And so I eagerly dug into what the university was giving us administrators in terms of tools to do outreach, to really look at the national-level candidates that we could bring in with the least amount of prejudice about who should be at a delphi. And I successfully brought in diverse candidates. And as a university, we brought in the most diverse cohort of faculty ever at the university, 45% of our new faculty that came in. This academic year are people of color. And we are about to replicate that next year. It's been a hard lift, but it's been fun. And the other thing that really sang to me with this participation and survey and report is that, obviously, I'm a Rara Abbas. I hope you all know what that means. I'm a rare bird in academic librarianship. I'm an Asian-American gay man in a position where there are mostly women or men who are white. And I have always found myself as the outsider of the marginalized person, but in a room like this. But I've always felt welcome. I've never actually felt marginalized to an extent that I have in other forms. And so I felt very personal, a personal investment in participating. And I'm also presiding over a predominantly white staff. And that is, in comparison to an increasingly diversifying student body, 46% of our students are students of color. And we are on our way, we hope, in three years to become qualified to be a Hispanic-serving institution. So that's the personal context that draws me in. And here's the report itself. You've all read it. There's the URL in case you need to get back to it. Now, I want to give some provisos about this report. ARL and non-ARL libraries were surveyed. It was a massive, comprehensive survey. But the most robust results came from the ARL participants. So as you know, you should know, the report just focuses on a subset of the entire surveyed population. So it just covers the ARL respondents. Now, the ARL respondents have a lot of employees that are part of the academic library workforce. So that gives this report some heft and some universality. And certainly, when I received the report back or received the analysis that Roger and his team did about the employee demographics of a Delphi University, the results were, frankly, very startling to me, but not unsurprising. And the results showed me that my library is just like all the other libraries that were reported in this ARL survey report. Key findings. Again, not surprising, we are all familiar with the kinds of national surveys that are being done about our profession. The majority of our overall employee base are non-Hispanic white, 71%. 82% of librarians are non-Hispanic white. And in this survey, as you saw, librarians are defined in quote marks. Ithaca coded librarians as those having MLS degrees and those employees occupying certain positions that are librarian-like or librarian-identified. And further up, 89% of library leadership and administration are non-Hispanic white. Again, are you surprised? I'm not. Now, the other surprising kicker, if you read into this report, is their own statement that it was the most diverse ARLs which provided the responses to the survey. So the estimates of people of color versus non-people of color are overestimated. In other words, we can look at the report and say they've overestimated the proportion of people of color of the underrepresented in the report. So what we may be looking at are actually the best case scenarios that we have, or the worst case. And as you go up the chain, as you go up the hierarchies in academic libraries, the top-level hierarchies, the exempt senior levels are primarily homogenously non-Hispanic white. And the lower levels, the non-supervisory positions represented in column two, the second column, are less white. Whereas gender ratios are fairly, fairly constant. And I use that word carefully. You can see that according to the study, let's see, 61% of the academic library workforce at the ARL respondents are women. However, if you look at each level of each category, broad category of position here, you'll see some fair consistency across the levels, except when you get to the very end, when you see that there's a little dip at exempt senior level, that women are less represented at that level than the other ones. And I bring this up because that wasn't really brought up in this report. But I know that gender representation, gender, is an issue for some, and maybe many, as reported on Twitter and social media and in the academic literature, that are women really, truly represented at the top levels. I don't know. I'm not sure if these stats are very conclusive. But according to them, the ratios are fairly constant. The real problem, the real issue, as all of us have seen, is that the racial bifurcation, racial slash ethnic bifurcation occurs most glaringly when you look at the types of jobs across the libraries. So if you look at the bottom half of this chart, you'll see that on the left-hand side, and the red bars represent on the left-hand side, the most professional, the highest level librarian-like positions in the libraries, the ones on the, and that's where whites predominate. Towards the right side, the lower bars on the right side represent the support level positions, facilities, access services, operational kinds of positions. So we're seeing that there is a trend or here of increasingly non-white Hispanic and higher level jobs and people of color in the lower level positions. And maybe I shouldn't use lower level. I just should say support level positions. I don't think this includes student workers, but I think we can think of student workers also maybe as another iteration of the study and probably see student workers as possibly a diverse element in this chart. So that was really what I saw from the survey results that they did based on employee demographic analysis. The other part of the survey was attitudinal. They asked all of us, library directors, those who participated in the survey, what we thought about diversity, equity, and inclusion. And uniformly, library directors perceived that their libraries are more equitable than the overall academic library community. Again, not surprising. I think most of us are probably like-minded in that regard. We think very highly of our own libraries, our own institutions as being highly diverse. I mean, that's, I think, was my response, frankly, until I got the results back, which confirmed something else. And that's my own gap. And I have to be self-reflective. As I go through this, I have to be self-reflective. Even though I'm a person of color, I'm a marginalized person, I'm part of a profession that maybe imagines itself differently. We have to imagine ourselves as who we are and recognize who we are right now and look at our institutions right now as what they are. So some of the telling findings from this report was, in terms of the attitudinal data, was that library directors at the libraries which are widest, that is, the largest numbers of non-Hispanic whites, perceived their libraries to be more equitable and diverse in greater margins than those library directors at libraries that are truly diverse or more diverse. And that was, and they also perceived these same directors at the widest libraries perceived that their libraries were much more equitable and inclusive than the overall library community. And that told me that there is really a metacognitive gap that a lot of us have. And it doesn't matter if you're a person of color or not. I think a lot of us have it because just of our acculturation as librarians and our grand expectations for what we think libraries should be and who we should be as library directors. I went into this profession because it's noble. And everything about it is noble. But now the scales are falling off my eyes. I'm thinking all of us are starting to question the perceptions we have about the nobility of what we're doing and that everything is perfect and everything is good. Rightly, most perceive that there are barriers to achieving racial and ethnic diversity in their own libraries. And they see that those barriers are at the application level. And most of the directors thought that or think that it's geography, which is the barrier. But we see from the Ithaca report that regardless of whether a library is located in an urban or suburban location, the proportion of white employees is about the same, 71%. So geography is not really a barrier. I mean, that's what the data is telling me. So in some ways, framing the issue is just so easy. It's so obvious. There is a lack of racial and ethnic diversity among librarians and senior leadership in libraries. And I want to frame this issue by underscoring the fact that, of course, as we all know, our student bodies, our student enrollments are increasingly diverse across the board. We're seeing more people of color, African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian-Americans filling our classrooms. And the diversity that we see in our classrooms and our campus is not reflected in the diversity of our libraries, of our overall university workforces. And this report focuses primarily on really one kind of diversity. It's racial and ethnic diversity. And that's because that's what Ithaca could collect. And that's what our HR departments. And that's what the federal government is collecting in terms of data about our workforces. It's racial and ethnic demographic data. But that doesn't mean that there is other kind of diversity that we need to be mindful of. And they do mentioned through the report that the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans status, queer status, religion, veteran status, disability. And I think I would add age in there. I don't think age is there. But because of the nature of the demographic data that's available to HR departments, to the federal government, and to us and to SNR, the focus has been primarily on this one kind of data point in terms of diversity. It's racial slash ethnic. That's not to diminish that racial slash ethnic is an important kind of diversity to be concerned about. That's one that we can act on today. And speaking of acting on these issues of barriers to diversity in academic libraries, we have to think about the extrinsic factors that are there. This morning, Deray Bakeson eloquently spoke about the systemic structural things that we have to think about, the levers that we have to pull to change society, to change culture, to make everything work the way we want it. And I have to remind ourselves that some consider librarianship a white profession. There is an article in our blog post, I guess, article in the librarian with the lead pipe. Recent contribution by April Hathcock, I think that's I pronounce her name, the whiteness of librarianship. I think that was a tile in it, it was eye-opening for me. And for ethnic minorities, for underrepresented folks who are from disadvantaged backgrounds, do they perceive librarianship as a white profession? Is that the barrier that we have to deal with first before addressing anything else? And we see, evidently, a diversity lag in LIS enrollments. And that's reported in the literature and in many studies. And if not geography, what are the other kinds of barriers that we have to consider at the university level? Our libraries do not exist alone apart from the university or college ecosystem. Are there issues of compensation for librarians and other staff? Is there issues in institutional reputation and lack of student diversity? Those all factor in. So I leave us with the challenges that we have to think about. And that's where we're going to be focusing on today, the intrinsic challenges that we can focus on and maybe do something about to remedy the situation. And that is, number one, consider attitudinal change. How might we see more clearly the gaps present in equity, inclusion, and diversity in our own organizations and inspire attitudinal change in library leadership and all of our employees? All of our employees have some kind of leadership capacity or function, whether they're actually given the title of leader or dean or whatever or director or not. What about the retention of our underrepresented employees who are already working for us, who are already in our departments, who are in those support level positions? And that not only includes regular employees but student workers. How might we foster equity, inclusion, and achieve retention of those underrepresented individuals, could be librarians and from other professions or other professions? How do we promote underrepresented employees? Well, how do we retain that group first? And how do we promote our underrepresented employees? How might we create an internal pipeline through development and promotion of existing employees, support staff, et cetera, to MLS positions and senior leadership? And I put in parentheses, MLS not required. I recently read David Lewis's reimagining the academic library. And his assertion is that the number of academic librarians will probably be a remaining level constant. But what we're going to see the growth in our workforce is in those other positions that require expertise. But that expertise doesn't necessarily require an MLS. So thank you for letting me express my comments and thoughts about the report. And I want to turn it over to Velajita. First step. Can you hear me OK? Thank you, Dean Brand Lim, for your excellent introduction to the Ithaca report and the insights into equity, diversity, and inclusion context and challenges facing research libraries and other libraries across the nation. I'm very pleased to be here. Thank you to Barney Smith and Melissa Lanning. And as you mentioned, it's been a great pleasure to collaborate with you and Brian to plan this session and also the next session that follows this one. I wanted to start a little bit talking about my work in equity and diversity to connect to some of the things that Brian has mentioned. And then I'll switch to the presentation on design thinking. So libraries in general are very important institutions in our United States society. As once an immigrant graduate student to this country 20 plus years ago, the public libraries in the United States have been an invaluable resource for me and my family. Simultaneously, in the same time frame, I experienced an exemplary research library, specifically the University of Minnesota libraries as a critical experience for my own education, teaching, and research. Are there members from the University of Minnesota libraries here today? OK, I see a few of you there. Welcome. I guess I have had the pleasure of partnering with the University of Minnesota libraries in many contexts over the years, including a more recent opportunity in developing the University of Minnesota's first open access journal, the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, on which I serve as an editorial board member. And speaking of equity, diversity, and inclusion, a lot of work is to be done in the context of libraries. But I'm also happy to report what I see at our university is that the University libraries has taken the lead in bringing some issues of social justice. Their recent exhibit, which is now online, and I highly encourage you to check it out, is called Campus Divided Progressives, Anticommunist Racism and Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota from 1930 to 42. It was a really powerful exhibit and brought to the fore something that many campuses are grappling with, the racism in their own history. It's led to some difficult and serious conversations about where universities should move forward in some of the naming of our buildings and so on, which is, and it's still underway. So the work of equity and diversity and inclusion in higher education is complex. At the University of Minnesota, through the vice presidential office for equity and diversity, we have a comprehensive vision framework to inform the work, which is very broad and includes community engagement and so on. But to operationalize this work and make it simple and easy for all of us to understand on campus, we have organized it into three strategic priorities. The first is increasing representational diversity, and that's what Brian referred to as well, is that we need to continue to grow more diverse. The second is improving campus climate, which is we must address issues of climate that are key to retaining our diverse students, our faculty and our staff. And that gets to the retention challenge, again, we can continue to bring people on increasing our representational diversity, but it's a revolving door if people don't feel welcomed and can't stay. And then the third direction we have is in leveraging strategic partnerships and initiatives. And that really connects to the idea that we can't do this work alone or in isolation. We have to partner on our campus, not only across colleges, we have 17 colleges and units like university libraries, many more of those. But we also have to collaborate across our departments, across central administration and so on. So it's also helpful to define what diversity means in an institution and in our institution also the current definition is quite broad. We include American Indians, people of color, people who identify as women, people with different sexual orientations. We also address issues of access and climate on individuals who might encounter barriers based on their religious expression, age, national origin, ethnicity or veteran status. So this definition I often get asked about, what do we define as diversity? And I think it's important, but I also wanted to say that this is something that is constantly evolving. Oftentimes we ask that question from the idea that if we have some boxes that we can check, we can solve the problem. And I think that's not going to actually happen. This is a constantly moving definition and we'll continue to have to shift it as we learn and become more aware. I'll also mention a couple initiatives to implement this work. The first one is what we call college made and made refers to multicultural access, diversity and excellence. But it also refers to the fact that that whole initiative is made in the colleges. It's a partnership from sort of central administration and the colleges in which we look at data around the three priorities I mentioned. Where are we at with representational diversity? Where are we at with the climate in that college as well as across our institution? And then what strategic partnerships and initiatives we're leveraging to advance our work? And so we meet with all of our 17 colleges over a period of an academic year to set goals and ambition and take action at the college level. In terms of data, much of this data is focused on race, ethnicity and gender, we're expanding in this new cycle that we're beginning to disability and sexual orientation data as well. So that whole process of getting access to the data of our institutions and looking at it as Brian showed with us is really important because it brings everybody to awareness in ways that they might not have been and that becomes the starting point then to do our work. The second initiative is a diversity community of practice and this is a grassroots community that involves staff, some faculty and some administrators in a learning and action community around equity diversity and inclusion on the Twin Cities campus. It's not system-wide, we have five campuses across the state. This meets monthly and has four committees, one on assessment, programming, communications and the newest one is a policy review committee that offers feedback as part of the new equity lens process on university policies. Now the university libraries is an active member of this diversity community of practice. One example of the kind of work that emerges is the assessment committee that I just mentioned. This was a brainchild of that committee of launching what we call diversity data deep dive. So the idea is that we take what we have in terms of diversity data, look at it, share it with others and continue to do so and bring speakers from across campus and different partners and again in that work too we have partnered with the libraries. In fact, as a result of the first event we had last fall some librarians who attended the session said that they would like to partner because they have the data repository which could be used to actually share this diversity data across the institution and also the digital conservancy and other things. So we're continuing to explore and that's the idea of continuing to experiment and advance this work. So from all of this work I'll share a few insights into what I think is critical to advancing this work. Equity, diversity and inclusion is everyone's everyday work. That's what we say in our office because it's not possible for just the leadership or just central administration to affect change. Certainly some decisions are being made at the leadership level but if you take climate that's happening in interactions between people but at every level. I mean on campus you could have some microaggression in the cafeteria and it's affected the climate for individuals and that's not something you can mandate. It's a question of education. So ongoing education is the second thing about these issues, about your impact, about identities and continuous learning is needed. A practice aspect is really helpful too not only on the issues themselves but as I mentioned our willingness to look at our own identities, our role and also commit to that work. And then a recognition that we are in the continuing of past, present and future because sometimes people wonder about, I don't, I am well meaning and so why is there some resistance against certain things and it's coming from historical oppression and other context. So we are connected to the past but at the same time I feel in equity, diversity and inclusion work we can get stuck in the past as well. It can be that well we don't know how to move forward and so I think this is also about perhaps breaking as needed from the past and moving into the future and that's where I think design thinking. So that's my segue into design thinking because designers are focused on creating the future. They do this sometimes by improving on the past and small increments which I would call tweaking or sometimes in big moves moving away from the past which I would call leaping. In some instances designers create something that hasn't been seen before and radically changes how we experience the object or the world and how it's perceived and so design has that ability so it makes sense to look at design thinking as a methodology as we are trying to do this work. So I'll transition now to talking more about design thinking. So a little bit of context. Perhaps you've read some of these books changed by design by Tim Brown who is the CEO of IDO, the design firm that actually was responsible in making design thinking very popular, I want to say almost a decade ago is something that you might want to look at. It's about changing organizations using design thinking. Another book by Daniel, the author Daniel Pink is very interesting because he talks about how we moved from an information age of which you all are experts to conceptual age where we are trying to make meaning of things and we have more information at our fingertips and in our electronic gadgets than we can handle really what matters now is how do we make meaning and how do we take action. And then closer to home, Tom Fisher was for 19 years the Dean of the College of Architecture. He still is there running the Metropolitan Design Center and he wrote a book called In the Scheme of Things and as an architect trained this was very influential on me where he talked about the idea of design as a process not just being about products but being about designing anything and everything from operation of a company to the organization of a community everything can be approached as a design problem. And that's something that has been influential and I think it's at the core of the design thinking as an emerging field. So what is design thinking? It's an emerging field of practice rooted in the tools and processes traditionally employed by the design discipline so certainly architecture, landscape, architecture, graphic design but there's more new emerging fields emerging that use design as its core process. The process of design thinking involves actions such as problem definition, field research, idea generation, storyboarding, prototyping, narrative and as a way to engage participants and motivate creative action. And there are other fields that do that as well. I mean engineering certainly has some of the same overlaps or field research is common to many other disciplines. It's perhaps the combination of these tools and how it plays into design as a methodology that makes it unique. This is really referring to the fact that design for long and continues to focus a lot on products. So if we look around everything in this space has been designed including the building we're in. In fact, this is my first experience being on the 50th floor on the IDS tower. So, but at the core of it we often focus and think of design as a product-based profession or way of thinking, but it's really about the process and that's what the field of design thinking which is not just designers, it's many disciplines are involved in that field engage with. Design thinking uses tools and methods to create something new or to refine and make better something that exists. And there's many aspects to design. It certainly seeks to function well but it also seeks to delight, innovate and create beauty and so there's a lot of intangibles in design which I think we need to keep in mind and sometimes when we talk about equity and diversity and inclusion becomes a very serious topic because there's a lot of serious things about it but if we don't keep that sense of wanting to innovate, wanting to create beauty, wanting to delight in a community sense, I think we're missing the point. So I wanted to refer to the Stanford University and D-Schools process and perhaps you've seen it in other ways but empathy or empathize is the first step. So it's a five-step process, empathy or empathize define which refers to defining the problem, ideate, prototype and test. So maybe I should talk a little bit about it in terms of how designers think. So when you start designing, you have to understand who you're designing for on a very deep level. You have to really sort of get into their shoes, so to speak but also really understand what are their needs, what's their daily life and depending on the thing that you're designing for them if it's a house then it would be about how they live, what's the family, what are their needs and aspirations and dreams. So there's a lot that goes into it. So after a designer steeps themselves into that understanding they then try to define of what is that problem that they're trying to solve for themselves, meaning as a designer what are they trying to solve. So put some words to it, create some specific concepts that they're trying to solve and that's another important step. Then there is the ideation part and I think a lot of us ideate, I mean we do brainstorming is one way to look at it. I think what makes ideation unique in the design context is that it's also visual, it's about drawing and sketching and doing expressing things in ways maybe that engages the right brain and it's not purely verbal as well, so that's different. The fourth is prototyping and certainly again we have in all of our disciplines the notion of a pilot, that we create something and you pilot it and that's prototyping is related to that but prototyping is also about bringing into physical existence something in intangible ways and we certainly know that in the car industry like you know that a car that is finally sold in the market has gone through a lot of prototyping and testing before it has got to that stage. So that idea of trying something, testing it and then continuing to refine it and so the test is also part of it. So these five steps are really iterative so you could start at one end and then go through all of them but you can also go back at different points and immerse in any of those parts and that's really important as well. You know after somewhere along the designing the house process, the designer might come back and say okay did I define the problem correctly? I completely left out their need for a garage or something like that, you know which would not go well but you know sort of come and reconnect to different pieces of that and iterate again and so on. So that iteration mindset is also really important. So just quick things, user perspective is really important in the design thinking process learning about the user and putting yourself in the user's shoes is critical and I'll mention this later as well but who are users when designing a system? And I see as everybody in the system so in the first design challenge that Brian mentioned it's the leadership and the employees. So in higher ed who are the users? Certainly the students who we focus on but it's also the faculty and the administrators and the staff all of us together co-create it's a dynamic system and if we focus just on one group of users we tend to forget that we're all co-creating the system together even though some users are at the receiving end maybe and the others are more in the delivery end. I just put this in there to a good reminder of empathy. Ideation, so with ideation generating many ideas is important it's about quantity. I have a colleague in the College of Design who does toy design and product design he teaches that and his research proves that it's basically not just a few ideas you wanna really push yourself to get as many ideas out because the first ideas are the ones that are familiar to us you know you're kind of bringing up things that you're familiar with but when you push yourself to do more then you're actually getting to the more unusual and creative ideas so continue to generate as many ideas as you can but then the second piece is drawing as well because I think we tend to work with our verbal and our mental concepts and when you start drawing things there are some subconscious unconscious things that emerge and in many of the workshops that I've done I've always noticed there's some spark there that you may not if you only spoke about it that you wouldn't see but you draw about it if you draw it sort of comes up. Of course this is one of the areas where I realize how much baggage we all have about drawing and our creativity you know somewhere in grade school we've been told that we are not good artists or we've told ourselves based on some feedback or just you know are critiquing our own work and I think essentially that's one of the myths I feel that design thinking can explode that you know we're all creative and we just haven't used certain skills in other certain ways and so this is also about going back to tap those skills. So ideation is about drawing. Prototyping is about making things visible so even if it's a rough idea you can make it visible by making and making with things is important. So thinking with your hands is a concept that designers are taught in school like stop talking start making so that then we can see what ideas are emerging. So this is what I would call a low resolution prototype of a Fitbit you know it's made of felt and sewn together but it's testing an idea and then it could lead to the next step. So there's eight principles that we can keep in mind especially as you start to apply these principles of design thinking and you bring groups together to work on creative ideas. First thing is embracing diversity in all forms so can you bring people around the table that come from different viewpoints from different ethnicities from you know different lived experiences as you're generating ideas and radical collaboration like disciplines that don't otherwise mix you know bring them together for example I know there was a hackathon in San Francisco a few years ago where they brought homeless providers and tech gurus together you know and so that was not a group that worked together very often and they kind of exploded some problems and kind of solved them through that way. Making things visible is important mapping. I did a project with the city of Minneapolis around homelessness and the one thing we realized was that there isn't any map of where the homeless shelters are in the Twin Cities and when you actually map them you realize many of them are in downtown and so it sort of raises questions about what if someone's homeless in the suburbs you know what happens and where are the gaps and all. So making things visible really is very revealing. Having empathy is very important. This the next one I mentioned a little bit about having the creative confidence and if we're not comfortable to you know lean into that discomfort and continue to explore that process. Having a bias for action so I think that this perhaps maybe one of the strongest things about design thinking that it's not really just about thinking it's about acting and making things happen even if they're in idea form. Too often we get stuck in sort of what one of my colleagues is admiring the problem and then going away. So then of course being open to failing forward and the reason sometimes we are afraid to act is that we're afraid of the failure that comes with it but if a space can be created for failure to be acceptable and to be actually welcomed as I think designers do I mentioned the car industry too. They have experiments where there is failure you know you're testing your things you're expecting failure before it kind of is finalized. So creating that space is important. I know it's hard in the equity diversity context you don't want to fail at somebody's expense but there are other ways that you can think about it and if it's a community you can off-diverse people working on these issues you can actually hold that space to do so and then committing to iterative action. So I'll just mention a few more things. Who is the user? I think I mentioned this. Everyone in the system is the user. I also put in one of the questions we get is design thinking dead because if you actually Google design thinking you'll come across some of these articles that say design thinking is dead. So I think what I've observed that phenomena is that if you start off with thinking that design thinking should solve all your problems. I think that's an issue you know. There is no one single tool or methodology or something that can solve all your problems. So if you start with recognizing it's a tool that can be used in combination with others I think you're better off. And then the design thinking is dead concept. I think often comes right before somebody is trying to publish their next book or next concept. So it's important to kill something off before the other is born. So I think there's something there as well. And then in my own, with my own colleagues and my discipline and designers I have heard pushback there as well about don't you think design thinking is in this way where everybody can come together, learn design through a workshop and so on is watering things down. And I don't think so because I think our systems are created with complexity by many people involved. And the more people that are using their creativity the better it is for all of us. So we have to get down from our expert high horse as well to open the doors. That's sort of what I feel. So I think we're getting close to the time. So I'm gonna just quickly run through a few slides. These are just visual glimpses of what we've done in different contexts here as well as international. And I did want to point out to this maybe many of you know about this but design thinking for libraries and IDEO the firm I mentioned was involved and there's a whole toolkit. Of course it was planned with the idea about serving patrons and creating experiences for users of libraries. But I looked at the toolkit and it's pretty robust. So you can frame design challenges in any way. It sort of sets you in the process of framing it and it was really done in a very thorough way funded by the Gates Foundation and so on. So here's the design challenges. We'll work on that in the next session and in conclusion I guess the few points I have are so address them using a creative design thinking mindset with empathy as the starting point. Start prototyping solutions, take iterative actions and then I recommend trying the design thinking for library toolkit. Share the results across your libraries and replicate effective model and then begin applying it as soon as you can. So with that I will invite Brian back for any Q&A that you might have for both of us. Thank you. I know the audience has questions. Maybe you're used to being asked questions, not asking questions. Hi, my name is Sarah Park-Dallin. I'm an associate professor at St. Kate's in the library science program. We are the only ALA accredited program here in the state of Minnesota. So it's nice to see you across the river. And thank you very much for your presentation. I read the report with a lot of interest when it came out last year because I worked with Lee and Lowe to do the diversity baseline survey where we gathered information about the publishing industry and found how very wide it was and it's cited at the bottom of one of the pages in the Ithaca report. So I was interested if you know anything or if anyone else can speak to your methodology. So what we did in the diversity baseline survey was we sent the survey to one person at each publishing company and we asked them to distribute it to their employees. So then we were able to ask questions about race, gender, the position that the person held at the company, sexual orientation and disability status. And then I noticed in your report, you sent it to the director who then sent it to human resources and had the human resources person fill it out. Is that correct? That's correct. Okay, so just wondering like, and I understand also that it was based on previous surveys that the foundation had also done. So just wondering if there was discussion about distributing the survey in different ways so that you could also gather information about different characteristics such as sexual orientation, et cetera. I have to say that I did not participate in the creation of the survey. I was just a survey participant. However, it's noted in the report that Ithaca did think about the issue of surveying other employees besides the director to get other perspectives and that is an issue. And I think I see one person who was involved in the creation of the survey. Francis Malloy, do you wanna say anything about that? Let me bring you the microphone. Yeah, hi, I'm Francis Malloy at Union College and I served on the committee and anybody else here who served on it? Maybe if we talk chat, we could talk about it. But Mark, oh, that's right, you did. Do you remember? Because I thought we did ask the question about gender. Didn't we? Right, but sexual orientation. I thought we did that too. Is it not there? I thought we did do sexual orientation. We didn't. It was what HR collected. It was the issue, so maybe HR didn't collect that. Was that it? Oh, here. Can you hear? Hello? Okay, so yes, there was considerable conversation around that and the fact that, right, that a lot of those data are not typically collected by human resources personnel and what have you, campus entities and what have you. So there was some discussion at the end of the day. They decided a few things. One of them was to basically to duplicate, or replicate whatever the appropriate term is, the methodology that was used in the study that was conducted, well, in several other sectors, the museum, community galleries, that sort of thing. So that there could be some baseline comparisons. So that was one of the things, and just the trying to keep the bar for participation low and recognizing the complexities that would be involved if you collected the data in using a different methodology. But so that's from what I remember. This was a few years ago, so. Right, and I think they were very intentional about the directors. They wanted to look at that gap that Brian pointed out, that what we thought and how great we are and the reality. So I think that was important. And then I think they wanted the directors because it was hard to get the data from HR. And that's why I think in some cases, participation wasn't as high. I remember when, what's his name? Shawn Feld, what's his first name? Roger. Roger, sorry. When he presented at the Oberlin Group, he mentioned how some ARL libraries had to like, you know, not sue, but like really like, come on, we need this data. Like it was a pain. They had to really work hard and work through legal and probably those ARL directors here can talk about that. So it was not easy to get. And then when we talked about it at the Oberlin Group, the other concern was, which I always get from institutional assessment people, we're gonna use the data for. You know, that suspicion of, you know, and so, and that's, you know, a huge challenge. So. If I could add to that, at the institutional, it's not libraries focused, but at the institutional level, it's our experience is the same. The institutional assessment doesn't necessarily have disability related data. And so we're working with our disability resources center and seeing what their experience and records are. And then also getting sexual orientation data through some national surveys that are focused on student experiences across research universities, of which our universities are part. So it's a little bit of experimental data gathering. So actually, I mean, Harold, I'm now at the College of Worcester, but when we did the survey, I was at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And my experience with it really colors my feelings about the survey. So I just feel strongly that we need to remember it's an indication of trends from those that responded. And not necessarily a comprehensive view of the situation, but it's an indication. My experience was that Roger actually personally contacted me three times to harass me to get the data. And I had a terrible time getting it. Particularly human resources was not willing to share many of the categories that were deemed important to have. For example, veteran, were you a veteran or not? They don't collect that and they were not willing to allow us to ask anyone. And the other one was the differentiation among the Asian Pacific Islanders. And you know, in Hawaii, that's kind of big. Just to comment on that, what you're all underscore are the sort of limit, data limitations of the report. It's really, as you said, Irene, it's an indicator and it's certainly not representative. And I would love to see a representative survey and report which could be building on the things that we've been bringing up here, such as the issues of attrition. I mean, attrition has been talked about anecdotally in our social media and our literature, the attrition of people of color who are librarians or other professionals. But where's the data on that? And I think that would be a really powerful element to add to a more comprehensive and perhaps more valid survey, valid for the larger numbers of us. Hi, this is my name is Rena Red. I'm at Clemson University. This is not a question. This is more of an FYI for everyone. There are two librarians from Reed College who have done a lot of work on using design thinking for libraries. Their names are Joe Marquez and Annie Downey. And you can find some of their resources on the ALA website. So we can take these concepts and we don't have to reinvent the wheel to translate them into librarians. We can use that. So it's out there. Thank you. We have 10 more minutes. Maybe I'll just say something related to the survey. So while the comprehensive survey is a challenge for various factor reasons, there may be ways and smaller ways to gather information through your libraries and other methods as well. I do feel in diversity assessment, a lot of emphasis is given to the quantitative and not as much to the qualitative. That's one of the issues as well. And so sometimes I feel like our institutions spend a lot of effort in working on the next best instrument and the next best survey. Meanwhile, we don't know what is happening on some level. And we can ask and we can have qualitative ways and small scale ways. So we're having our colleges and so on to do some focus groups around climate and retention and so on. And then that's yielding a much better sense at the college level as well. So I think I'm not saying that we don't need these excellent instruments across our institutions, but we can also do something in the meantime and not wait for the perfect survey. So I had a question about, I like the idea of creating an object and having something tangible to help us focus on what are in the important bits and what's it feel like? Is it soft? Is it hard? Does it have edges? And so I'm thinking about that in terms of ideas, right? So when we talk about making changes in our libraries to do with DEI, those are ideas rather than tangible objects like a chair or a microphone or whatnot. So I'm trying to think through a process whereby maybe in our libraries, when if we were to use this method for helping folks think about how to be more inclusive in our libraries. And we use this tool to help people brainstorm, if you will, and work through the process. What types of things, like when you get to the point where you're making something, like what kinds of examples do you have where you're making something that's an idea? Maybe you can give some examples of that. That's a great question. I think a lot of people are not clear about what could you, because many of these things are intangible and they're not necessarily products that we're talking about. I think at the core of this is that you're really triggering your thinking process even when you're making. But maybe I should back up and say that even in the design context, making things is in two modes. One is representation. So it could be that you have a very clear idea and you're trying to represent it. So you make something that shows as accurately as you can what your idea is. But the second is more explorative, where you're playing around with materials while mulling on a design problem and seeing what emerges as you're playing around. I mean, maybe people have used Play-Doh and you can be doing things and things are forming in your hand without necessarily being intentional about it. And I think I'm referring more to the second process as the way where you have a design challenge and we will articulate it some months here. But you're playing with materials as you are thinking deeper about it, have thought through with empathy, defined what the problem is, ideated. And then you're playing around with materials to see what emerges and how you can advance that idea or narrow from the many ideas you've generated into something that emerges. And it's actually quite magical. And I think it's hard if you haven't practiced it necessarily to think how's this gonna work or does it, will it work? But it does work. So there's a little bit of trust the process which is not always fun to enter into. And I think people do get uncomfortable because we don't know where this is leading. But that's also an exercise I think that's useful to kind of work with your discomfort in the creative process and then come out with some solutions. So I don't know if that's helped, but. So you have a bunch of librarians playing, working with players, what are their brains for? Well, this afternoon, I think we're gonna stop at the ideate because we need about three to four hours to do the full design thinking in even in a compressed way. And so we kept it to just the ideate here. So I have a survey question and I was really happy to see disability listed on the survey. And so part of my question, or maybe all of my question is, how did we gather that data? How is disability defined? As well as what is the distribution of people with disabilities across library land? And what does that mean for diversity, equity, inclusion and all that kind of stuff? Thanks very much. As again, a participant in the survey but not the creator of it, I'm gonna ask those who worked on it, was it Mark Puente and Francis to address that. I did not see any demographic data about disability in there. Just attitudinal data about library directors thought of issues of diversity. Is that correct? So again, because HR departments, I assume we're not collecting that data on a uniform basis and reporting it in its option. Okay, thank you. But that's an important thing for us to consider. And again, the report focused on racial and ethnic diversity because that's the data that we have. But that doesn't, again, my opinion, my take on it, that doesn't exclude the validity of examining other kinds of diversity, disability, sexual orientation, veteran status, religion. All those are really foremost in my mind, and I think as next steps for us. I mentioned that we're trying to identify data around disabilities for our next cycle working with colleges. And when we've started the process, we've talked to the Disability Resources Center and what we're trying to identify is the people or the students, staff and faculty from each college that is accessing disability resource services. And we already know that's probably 50% of the people who actually have disabilities that access those services. And then we're starting to identify what kinds of disabilities are at play. And again, this is not happening through HR, so I just wanted to. So I hesitated to get up here to talk a bit about the design thinking process that we did at the University of Arizona in our library around strategic planning. And so I don't wanna do a disservice to my colleagues who ran an incredible process for us, and it took months. We started back, I wanna say early September, and we are now in the process of sort of looking at the work that we've done through several months. And so what we did was essentially called for volunteers to participate in this process. And we had about 114 people out of our library that's about 118 employees to agree to be a part of this process, which was I think pretty incredible to start with. So we had 14 teams, and we looked at how we wanted to, as a library, respond to how we work with students, how we work with faculty and community users, et cetera. So we had certain areas that we were focusing on, and the teams had to look at, first we did a scan of the environment, we actually went out and talked to students, and we talked to faculty, and we did focus groups, we did tiny cafes, and we did some surveying, we did observational studies in our libraries, kind of sat with the students and watched them, and took notes, and we brought this information together and we made notes, and then we did a prototype of what that student could look like. That was the IDEA project. And at the very end, what we ended up doing was developing a prototype using the idea of what the campus president is all about right now, and he's really pushing this idea of the fourth industrial revolution. So for some of us, we're like, oh, what is that? Go do your research and get behind it and learn what that was, and so it was really looking at where we're going with technology and this kind of thing. So the fun process was being able to sit around and sort of look back at what we had collected in terms of data information and what we were looking at in terms of our prototype, and then we actually got to get our hands on. So we had pipe cleaners, and it was like being back in grade school. But I think the best part, and our group, we ended up doing a robot that would actually work with students and get them to the places that they needed to go that would address like simple reference questions and directional questions and these kinds of things. But also working with Starbucks and actually having coffee on the robot to serve them as they're going, being led to special collections or something like that. So the best part, I think for me personally as an organization was being able to have staff, faculty, administrators all work on these projects through a course of four or five months and the kinds of relationships and the working that you were able to do but also to inform that the end product. So I mean, I totally am a big proponent of the design thinking and we had an outside consultant, Alessia Bate who's in Chicago. Forget the name of her actual and she's a one-man operation. So she helped us facilitate that process. And so from there, we're gonna work on our strategic plan. So thank you for sharing that and hope others can talk to you more. I would certainly like to hear more. I think you made a very important point about it's almost like the process and what it leads to is one thing but the relationships along that. And I think I didn't clearly mention that but I think this is moving from the idea that a few people in the hierarchy at the top have the answers to everything, right? So this is about tapping wisdom from everybody who's involved in the system. And that doesn't often happen and that's why if we can use processes like this to gain that wisdom that's in the system and then use it to create the solution, it's a much better solution. Actors, come back. Thank you.