 My name is Masood Khokhar, I'm the University Librarian and Keeper of the 10th Collection at the University of Leeds and the Vice-Chair of Research Libraries UK. I will be chairing today's roundtable session on Charting New Territory, Mapping the International Skills Landscape for Research Libraries in the Spirit of Openness. It is a really exciting session, one that's really close to my heart and I'm so glad we have an amazing set of analysts for this discussion and I hope the audience will join us in that discussion as well. But before that, a little bit of context setting and housekeeping. So the first and foremost thing I would say is if you're joining this session via feed loop then can I encourage you that you can either close feed loop or mute it and join this roundtable via zoom. You can access zoom by clicking on the gray box within feed loop which often states click here for additional live stream options. Joining directly through zoom gives you direct access to this panel, to the discussion but also enables all the other features that we need for this session. Right, so setting the context for this session. So firstly we've been talking about skills for a very long time and we know how important it is to make sure that our staff have the right skills for accelerating the direction that research libraries are going in. But we also know that the pandemic and the digital era and a huge range of other factors have really changed the role and remit of research libraries over the past few years and that requires a different set of skills and competencies and we need to enable that in our staff workforce now and start taking this more seriously than ever before. But this can also create different challenges individual institutions can often find it difficult to know where to start, how to develop it in a systemic fashion and often we start thinking about this whole landscape in a collective fashion which is one of the real benefits of working in such a collaborative profession like academic libraries and information professionals. It's also really important to take into account the international skills market while we're discussing the skills shortage and the needs that we have. And that's why I'm really pleased that we have a global set of panellists in this discussion really talking to us about what's happening in their own local regions about skills as well. And it's not just about acquisition of staff but it's also about retention, it's about also about management of those skills on an ongoing basis. And I'm really pleased to say that our UK has been doing a lot of work in this space including joining the ARL PD Bank, creating a collaborative transatlantic skills exchange program with Clair's data and digital scholarship working group and through our fellowship schemes with both AHRC and the UK National Archives. But we want to broaden the conversation today. We want this conversation to be a really inclusive conversation. It really opened an honest account of where we need to do more in terms of our skills enablement of within our staffing. So nature of today, this would be a highly interactive session. It will take the form of a virtual run table. We will have six panellists throughout available in this discussion from across the research library community who will share their wisdom, their insights from both within the UK and from North America. They will shortly introduce themselves as well. But we are also really hoping that you will join us in this conversations. There will always be space for two members of audience to join us and share their own thoughts, their own reflections, and their own ideas about what we need to do more. So please do feel free to share your institutional experiences, your personal experiences and the collaborative opportunities around skills sharing within the research library's landscape. This session is about conversation. It's not a broadcast session. So the level in which our panellists will talk will be quite minimal. And therefore we wanted to really generate an active debate on this topic. It won't include any formal presentations, but will include a series of free-flowing conversations about skills development and the knowledge sharing between international research libraries. The session will be structured around three key elements. The first of which is viewing the landscape. So what is the current skills landscape for academic research libraries and how is this changing? Mapping the terrain, what are experiences of navigating this landscape and what are the opportunities and challenges that it provides to individuals, to institutions and to communities of practice, including research libraries? And lastly, we will be charting our course as in how can we work together? How can we work together as individuals, institutions and communities to capitalize on our shared experiences to form collaborative approaches to skills? This is not any one single individual responsibility. This is all of our responsibility. And it would be great if we can harness all the conversations today to reach some tangible conclusions which we can undertake within research libraries in the UK, but also across the broader library and information profession. Our panellists will explore each of these themes from their own perspective. But as I mentioned, really invite contributions from you in this landscape. Please, please come in and talk about what your experiences are. And if you experience any issues via feed loop, please, as I mentioned, do join via Zoom. If you have a question, you can post this via the chat function in Zoom. And if you want to join us at the round table, please just raise your hand using the raise your hand button in Zoom. And that will allow us to bring you from the virtual audience into the live audience. And there might be a moment as you transition in that. If you're on Twitter, please use the hashtag for the conference, which is hashtag RLUK2222. And at this time, I would absolutely love to invite my fellow panellists to turn their cameras on, to join this conversation. And I will invite them to provide a one and a half minute introduction to themselves, their institution, and their work in relation to skills landscape. So I will go through the round table in the order in which people are being on my screen and ask Brian to introduce first, then Jason, then Fiona, then Kirsty, then Lee, then Alenora. Well, thank you. My name is Brian Keith. And I'm the associate dean for administrative services and faculty affairs at the University of Florida Libraries. And so the finance, budget, human resources, training and development facilities, and those sorts of services, centralized report through me. I also provide leadership to the diversity, equity, inclusion and justice programs of the libraries, our grants management program, faculty development mentoring, professional development travel, and our graduate student internships and our undergraduate fellowship programs. The Smathers Libraries are the official name of the UF Libraries. And we employ about 400 people, including 75 library faculty members. But we also have additional folks that are really providing interesting things for us to think about in the world of skills. UF is one of the most diverse academic institutions. It's almost, it's also one of the larger ones in the United States with over 50,000 students. And it's a research intensive public university. And I'm also one of the folks that came up with the idea and has been leading the ARL PD Bank, which will soon be renamed the Research Libraries PD Bank in recognition of the fact that it extends far beyond ARL, including the RL UK. We're very happy to say. And so thank you. Thank you, Brian. Jason. Good afternoon. I'm Jason Clark from Montana State University Library in the Rocky Mountains of the United States. A little background about this. So the institution I come from is a mid-sized, about 60 full-time staff of public university, land grant university with a high research ranking, which is a little unusual for our, just our local peers, institutions, a little more research focused than other folks in the region. My interest and particular, I suppose, what I can contribute today is I'm coming into discussion as a teacher, workshop leader, and facilitator of the ClearDELF, that's Council of Library and Information Resources, Digital Library Federation working group on data and digital scholarship. I've also been an active teacher for the DELF around data, librarianship. In particular, that working group has sparked a number of ideas around networking and skill sharing, and I will drop a few links as I talk later around the RL UK and ClearDELF skills directory, which is a collection of folks who have opted in to talk about their skills and share knowledge, internationally. As far as my day-to-day work, I'm really interested in data librarianship, data services. The, my title is Head of Research Optimization, Analytics and Data Services at Montana State University Library, and I'm really interested in connecting data to stories and integrating library expertise and our services into forms of the research enterprise. Thanks, really excited to be here. Thank you, Jason. And then goes without saying, that's a really exciting job title. You're all a bit jealous now, right, Fiona? Thank you, Masoud. And Jason, that does make me feel a little bit puny by saying I'm an Associate Director of the Library at the University of Sussex, which is a medium-sized research university on the south coast of England. My role includes managing a team of around 50, altogether about 80 in our library. And I'm really, really interested in the idea of how we create a flexible agile workforce, but also acknowledging that that workforce needs to evolve and keep up with the changes that are coming with a digital shift. So one of the pieces of work that I've been doing as part of RLUK with the Associate Director Network is looking at a strategy for our workforces of the future, which is feeding in a huge amount to the work that I'm doing with our own HR systems to think about how we recruit, how we diversify, how we are more inclusive in how we bring our workforces together. Thank you. That's great, Fiona. Thank you so much. And Kersti, please. Hi, so I'm Kersti Lindstadt, I'm Director of Library, Archives and Learning Services at the University of York. And we're a, I would say, mid-sized research intensive Russell Group University. And I suppose my interest comes from several areas being involved as co-chair of both the Digital Scholarship Network for RLUK, but also for Liba, looking at digital scholarship and digital collections. So I've had a long-standing interest in collections, but digital, and therefore also the kind of people side of how do we make digital happen and how do we embed digital within our workforce? What skills do people need in order to take advantage of some of these new technologies that are coming along and some of the challenges that new technologies place on us and how we develop in order to respond to those? So looking forward to the discussions. Thank you so much, Kersti. Over to you, Lee. Good morning and good afternoon. I'm Lee Bonds. I'm the Digital Humanities Librarian at the Ohio State University. In that role, I consult with Arts and Humanities faculty and students on research and teaching. I teach Digital Humanities Praxis in pedagogy, collaborate on projects, and coordinate the campus Digital Humanities Network. Our library serves a rather large land grant to R1 campus. This year, Ohio State has a total enrollment of just shy of 68,000 students, 17th, a little over 17,000 of which are in the College of Arts and Sciences where the Arts and Humanities Division lies. For the last two years, I've served as the co-chair of the Association of Research Libraries Digital Scholarship Institute, working with a team of instructors across the United States to design curricula on a range of Digital Scholarship coaches and topics focused specifically on developing librarian skill sets. I'm currently collaborating on a project exploring my Ohio State College's involvement in research partnerships to better understand their roles and contributions and specific skills they've either found useful or they found they need to develop further. I'm very interested in applying these experiences to collaboratively developing a DS competency framework and training curricula specifically for librarians to support their work as research partners. Excited to be here. That's lovely. Thank you so much. And Eleonora, please. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Eleonora Gandolfi and I'm the head of Digital Scholarship Innovation at the University of Southampton in the UK in the South Coast. The University of Southampton is an its size, research-intensive university and I'm also the co-combinator with Corsi of the Research Library CK Digital Scholarship Network. I've been and I'm also part of the Research Library CK and HRC Arts Humanities Research Council Research Engagement Programme steering groups. I've also been a recipient myself of the Research Library CK and the National Archives Fellowship. So I went through the process of applying and being successful there. And I've just recently finished a PhD on the Development or Transferable Digital Skills through a lifelong approach and community engagement and how those skills and methodology can be embedded in traditional education. That's wonderful. Thank you so much to all of our panelists and I'm sure everyone will agree that this is going to be a really exciting and really enriching discussion today. Just the amazing vast experience that our panelists bring to this discussion is just brilliant. So as a quick reminder, this session is using the virtual dining table analogy. So we are going to do this in three parts. The first part is viewing the landscape which is a bird's eye view of what's the current landscape. And we will touch on topics like the great resignation, the great restructure, how to retain talent. Following on from that, we'll look at mapping the terrain which is our current experience of navigating this landscape of skills, what opportunities and challenges does it present. And lastly, we are going to look at charting our course. So what have we learned and how do we shape our future individually and collectively together on that note? And as a reminder, this is a really interactive conversational session. So audience is welcome to join at any point. If you have any questions, please add that in the chat. If you want to come to the virtual dining table, there are two empty seats all the time. You're very welcome to join us at any point. Just raise your hand using the Zoom, raise your hand function and join the virtual stage. So it's a real pleasure to actually start this discussion by talking about that broad landscape, viewing the skills landscape. And I wonder if I can instigate the very first question on that and invite Brian and Kirsty to start that and then invite other panelists to join the discussion along with our audience members. And I'm wondering if you can start with how would you characterize the current skills landscape for research and academic libraries in the UK and in North America? So if I ask, if I go to Brian first and then Kirsty in that order. Okay. Well, I guess I would describe it as exciting and challenging. And when I use the word it, I'm talking about skills and I'm really talking about skills, knowledge, abilities, experience and background. So I think what I'm seeing is going to be similar to what everyone is, which is an emphasis on digital and data. We have positions like data management, bio informationists, informationists. We recently had a natural languages programming position awarded to us by the university, a big focus for the university's artificial intelligence. And so the notion that these positions would have existed in our library five years ago, 10 years ago, it's just a radical change. And so part of what we're seeing in terms of backgrounds is we're seeing people pursuing alternative academic careers. Many of the folks who are filling those positions have PhDs, so they're bringing that experience. And so that's changing the skills landscape and the way libraries work, just because of those backgrounds and they're complimenting the traditional masters in library science, which has been the currency for our positions for decades. We're also seeing the need for skills in what we in the United States call library assessment and basically the idea of evidence-based decision making being incorporated at all levels within the libraries. Everything that we do, including what we would have traditionally called tech services, things like cataloging and acquisitions, those are really technology positions now in addition to those traditions. And so for example, you see cataloging becoming metadata. That's the growth in that area for us. And you see some of the cataloging functions transitioning from what we would have had librarians doing to what staff are doing. And so we're also adding roles in things just to make the enterprise work and to expand our impact like exhibits, grants administration, programmers, social media, and they're bringing their own unique kind of professional norms too. So I think that's impacting the skills landscape. Also a big thing for us, as I mentioned in my introduction, is diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. And our library personnel are expected to contribute to a workplace culture with those things, but also to incorporate it into their work. And so that creates a need on our part to position people to be successful in doing that through training and professional development, but also systems that support skills in our measurement and understanding of skills, things like evaluations and selection processes have to catch up with that. And so for all of these, part of the challenge is we can't cover all the bases we need to and expect to have in-house expertise in all of these areas. We're focusing in some, we're creating positions in some, but our personnel really need to benefit from international, national, regional engagement where skills are shared, learning is shared, and those sorts of things. And so that's kind of on the outside of the library, but even within the library, it says we're bringing these positions in. And we have a data management librarian who is fantastic. We also have 6,000 faculty and about that many graduate students. And so the idea of leveraging those skills and having it work its way, that knowledge work its way through the library system is kind of the exciting, but also challenging thing that we're seeing. So I can talk on and on, I'll try and resist doing that and I'll pause here. Yes, I was going to say I'll pick up at that point and try and kind of add some sort of UK color to where we are currently at. And I suppose one of the interesting things that you commented on was those Altaq careers. And while we're seeing a similar trend in the UK, it's perhaps not as strong and hasn't made its way as strongly through to kind of roles and positions within libraries. But I think just like the US was seeing a really changing and quite challenging landscape of needing lots of different things coming in. So although we still got our traditional library skills that are required, we're needing more skills, different ranges of skills and they're therefore bringing different and new professions into skills. And I suppose I'm sort of part of that having come from a slightly different background moving through into the sort of library sphere of things. And again, I think the sector is much more aware that we need that vast range of different skills in order to be able to deliver what we need, especially I think COVID-19, the new kind of move towards working from home has meant a huge shift onto digital and digital skills. And I think we're all grappling with helping existing staff gain those kind of digital skills to really be able to cope. But also we're beginning to recruit differently because of that with a different eye to those digital skills that we need. And I think that's also brought with it that sort of changing role of the library and that sort of wider landscape and you touched on research and we've got research data and people's job titles now. The publications and research landscape is changing and again that needs us to work in different ways and have different skills. So therefore we are embracing having developers, programmers that kind of metadata field has become much more technical and in the future as automated metadata creation moves on, we will need again a range of different skills to help support how that metadata becomes available and discoverable. But I think for all we still have a really strong human element that we need to provide and that sort of human contact interpretation and touch point that kind of connecting people to those collections and making them discoverable in a sort of human way that we can work with. But on the alternative side, we've also got another range of skills that we need to bring in around about sort of data science but also converting our kind of huge content that we're working with into collections as data so it can be machine readable. So that becomes a partnership between humans and machines so that we can get more and gain more from those collections. And I think Brian, you touched on this sort of diversity and inclusion. I think with millennials, kind of increasingly coming into the job market, we're also seeing that kind of wider shift towards what people want from work. We've changed what we want from our working environments and that brings us to means that we bring different attitudes to work and what we want out of work. So again, we've seen that huge shift around about staff being much more active and activists within the workplace. But I suppose it's also led to those huge challenges of people really rethinking what they want from the workplace. And so things like the break designation, the sort of changing environment of different skills mean that we're increasingly competing in a market where staff have much more choice around about what they can do and what they want to pick and choose. And I suppose one of my other reflections based on conversations that happened recently was just around about the fact that as librarians, we've got a skill set that is really valuable to research data, data science and those other kind of areas that we sometimes underplay but need to promote much more. And that's another sort of changing part of the sort of landscape. We are a much more valuable commodity to the wider world as it starts working increasingly with data because we actually understand metadata, how to make it discoverable. You can have as many research data sets as you want but if you can't find or work with those and reuse those, then they don't have as much value. So I think we're in a sort of really shifting context but not just as our sector changing. I think lots of other sectors are changing and suddenly needing new skills and perhaps we are the new developers in another environment. That's a absolutely wonderful start to this conversation full of imagination but also full of opportunities and challenges. And I wonder at this time if I can invite other panelists to come into this conversation and share their thoughts. Does any of this resonate with you? Do you have slightly different viewpoint? So I was saying not from this and then Eleonora, do any of you want to come in? I'll come in and say it's quite hard, Mesud, to say so without actually saying what we're going to say later on in the session because I think everything that both Brian and Kirsty have said resonates. That's a view of the skills, I'd say. It certainly resonates in terms of how we map that landscape and the challenges that are there. So I'll say no more on it just now. That's great, Fiona. Thank you for coming in. And while I'm going to give a chance for Jason and Eleonora to think a bit more, notice Susan has joined us. And Susan, do you have anything you would like to add to that, please? Yes, I suppose I was interested, as you were talking then, both Brian and Kirsty, about what this means for roots into the profession and what it means to be a librarian because you talked about, yes, the skills of a librarian, the metadata, the cataloging, but much broader skills as well you picked up on, Brian, in terms of natural language programming and that kind of thing. So I wondered what your thoughts were about how we expand sort of those roots into librarianship or what it means to be a librarian. Yeah, I mean, what a profoundly interesting question. I mean, you really, that's a great one. I think what I would say is, it's unknowable what librarianship is going to be like and how it's going to continue to change. I guess the fundamental part of it that we would kind of rely on are the professional principles that were developed over a long period of time. And in a field that experienced profound change, our first, I was speaking with someone recently about the first branch library that did not have a card catalog and what a bold step that must have been for those folks in 1987 when it opened up. And so I think the underlying principles that are the foundations of a library science program and the development, not only of those foundations, but also the skill sets that Christie was talking about that then get incorporated into work that we can't even think of or weren't thinking of five years. One of the things that I think is interesting is how these different positions and these skills fit into a system that was based on branches and technologies or tech services unit organizations and how we're trying to do that, how those services are discoverable by our patrons and those sorts of things. And we have a science library that has about 20 librarians. And some of those are PhDs with chemistry. A lot of them are masters in library sciences. Some have both advanced degrees. And I don't know what our science library would be if it had, at what proportion, it starts being a very different science library if that proportion got beyond 50%. But we haven't reached there yet. So I don't know if that's a, I think that's responsive. I don't know if it's satisfactory. I'll let Christine do a better job of responding to your prompt, Susan. Don't know about better job. But I suppose I would say, as Brian was just saying, is those underlying principles are still necessary because actually all of this is about discovery of knowledge. And it's just that the discovery of knowledge and how we do it has changed. And we need some of the sort of key elements and foundational elements of what librarianship has always been. But then, yes, we do need to evolve and kind of bring new approaches and techniques into that. And I suppose if I were looking at it today, I would also say we're in a world that is ever changing and has experienced really fast change. So that kind of ability to change, which I think most librarians have, because they've seen so much change and new technologies coming in in their lifetime and have continued. Yeah, and it's a learning profession. I think that's one of the other underlying principles. It's a profession that's keen to learn and has an inquiring mind. And I think actually there's librarianship principles with that inquiring mind, but then also new techniques and technologies brought in. But what we train people in today will have changed in 10, 15 years' time. So actually what we're training much more now is for sort of attitudes and aptitudes and approaches and that recognition that this will be a changing profession from now on and it will pick up on speed and it's change. That's great. Alenora, I'll bring you in now and then I'll pick up a couple of questions from the chat for the panelists. Yeah, so it's just a quick reflection on everything that's been discussed and on the question that Susan asked, because it's clear to me, I mean it was clear before, it makes it even more clear now how interdisciplinary our profession has always been, but it's even more visible right now by bringing the expertise of people coming from a pathway that is different from a traditional librarianship training, as for example I did. And I definitely come with skills that are complementary and this is not the one is better than another one, it's just to reiterate how the libraries are becoming more central as a place where innovation is happening by bringing and collecting and collating everyone in one place which could be physically or of course virtually right now has been seen in the last few years. And it's just making it even more visible to the rest of our academic and student community as well that we're not just a place filled in with a lot of books like a lot of colleagues in the faculty sometimes refer us to, but just a place where innovation and research is happening, where skills are developed constantly. So I think it's just even more exciting place where to work and be. Thank you Alenora. I noted Jason you had your hand up for a second. Do you want to add something in response to the questions Susan asked and then I'll move on to some other questions. I was going to maybe start to address Kyle's question but I don't want to jump too far ahead. That's not a problem. I was wondering if you can pick Kyle and Stuart's question in the second part which is about what do we need to do in terms of actions and I wonder if you can pick Hope's question now which is related to what Kirstie was saying which is on the note of librarianship being a learning profession. And if you think about it holistically do we really need to think differently about how we promote librarianship how we advertise it how we talk about it and what do the panelists think about that? So Fiona and then Kirstie. I really agree it really resonated with me as well Kirstie when you were saying that because I think as librarians traditionally we've not valorized our assets we've not shown off what we are really good at and we've always seen ourselves as sort of supporting roles and that's changing so much it's changing so much that I fear we could end up getting left behind by another people come into that sort of into the gap that's left but we do have this amazing skill set and we are a learning profession we learn ourselves but also I think we've got so much to teach other professions as they're keeping up with it as well so it resonates with me too and I think it is just that ability I think because we work with knowledge and because nowadays in order to really unlock that knowledge you need those digital skills I think that's what puts us in a really unique position and I think actually everyone around us is beginning to recognize that in order to work with this huge kind of body of knowledge that's out there be it research data or whatever is on the web that some of these librarian skills that are quite traditional but so applicable in the modern day world are really really valuable and I think if we can share it around about that more and more that actually being a librarian as a kind of you know some of the skills we have a key in order to navigate the modern world and what an amazing profession we are that that would you know start maybe change some people's perceptions and I think you know with the news being very much around about a certain in the UK about the public libraries closing there being less resource and less funding it's become a less attractive career path perhaps but I do think it unlocks a lot of where we're going I have a slightly different take on it but that I completely agree with these but I guess I have a different perspective to share one of the things that I don't think we've talked about is how those principles of librarianship you know are taught to people who you know come in with a PhD in chemistry or data science or something like that and obviously part of it's on the job training there's conferences or associations and those sorts of things which are really important you know just participating in the culture but I have long thought that the masters in library science that you know those programs you know that if they could expand to have some sort of accelerated shortened opportunity for someone who finds themselves with their career in libraries to compliment their you know whatever their advanced degree is or you know specialization without it having to be a two or three year investment in tens of thousands of dollars and those sorts of things so I think there is something for you know the folks that are that are running the professional programs to help us as a field you know evolve Brian that's a fantastic segue into the next question which is more about actually mapping the terrain so what opportunities exist for us as individuals, as communities and as institutions but also what challenges does it present but before we delve into that and the questions that we pick up from the chat William has joined us very warm welcome William do you have any thoughts or questions or comments to add well first of all I'm going to team resonate that this all really resonates and obviously I have the opportunity to work with Fiona but I think I really just wanted to lob into the discussion the other end of the spectrum so to think about the roots into the profession one of the challenges that I think we have in is the challenges around the sort of leadership and around what are some of the skills and the needs for the directors in order to actually manage what becomes a much more interesting a much more diverse range of a range of staff and a range of different skills perhaps with different elements of awareness of those those kind of principles so kind of reflecting there Brian as you were saying yeah being able to look at how can we transition staff who have for instance chemistry degrees into you know some of the work that we want to do around research and support and librarianship but without them doing you know some three years master's course or X, Y and Z so I really just wanted to throw that into the into the discussion pot That's lovely William and also links with something that I think Alice picked up in the chat and Brands mentioned about what's on the job training and how do you release capacity for staff to also learn on the job so that would be a really interesting theme to pick up but I wonder if I can give a chance for Fiona to start the discussion on this and share her thoughts and then I'll come to you Jason after that Thank you Masood that show is going to start by saying that reading through the questions and the chat and listening it's made me think that there's probably more challenges at the moment than opportunities but I'm going to start with the opportunities and I think the what I think is really exciting moment particularly with the idea of this digital shift is that we can navigate this landscape together we have the opportunity for collaboration through things like the PD Bank through conferences such as this on networks to be able to learn from each other and what's exciting is that we're not simply looking to our sector to do that but we're looking to other countries but equally looking to other sectors as well and I think there was mentioned made earlier about from Susan's question about how do we recruit had we bring people into this and I think we have that really exciting way of making librarianship or libraries so much more than people assume they know them to be and that's again about the valorisation of it and to do that though that's where the challenge is and I think in terms of sort of mapping that terrain we really need to not just scope the skills we have but the skills that we are teaching library students indeed do we need to look at library courses in the same way which should we be kind of diversifying much more in terms of how we recruit and looking to different courses and different sectors to bring people in to our workforce to fill some of those gaps we certainly need to also I keep using the word valorise today but to valorise our the skills that we do have so again reflecting on what Kersti was saying earlier about the expertise that we have in librarianship being able to really push that in the direction that can take advantage of the digital shift and yes that might mean some upskilling that might mean a lot of upskilling and we do need to navigate and again this is something that appeared in the chat earlier how we give people time to do that as well as doing the day-to-day job I think the way that we do that is by saying this is your day-to-day job and we incorporate that training in everything we do but also incorporate it in our strategy because when it becomes our strategy we will just build it in and just because I know my three minutes are almost up I'm going to refer to something that Stuart Dempster mentioned in the chat as well which I don't have an answer for but we're seeing all over the place and that's in terms of recruitment much as we want to recruit inclusively and equally and recruit skills it's very hard sometimes to do that in a landscape where our resources are so limited and we're seeing more and more particularly around digital skills that salaries aren't necessarily matching what people's expectations are when we're trying to recruit as well so I'm going to leave it there I don't want to leave it on a down but I'm going to have to I think I'll do the positives after That's brilliant for an end great great introduction and start with this discussion and thank you for picking up a question as well that's wonderful Jason if I can come to you and invite you to share your thoughts Sure, thanks I dropped one of the ideas and I think you heard it pretty clearly from Brian and Kirstie related to I just want to remake this point computer science even before the pandemic that digital shift the expectation that computer science might be part of librarianship that was already that movement had started and you can look into places like industry where you have the expectation that you might be a journalist and a writer but you also have to be conversant with how to do web scraping or text mining or data visualization and it's the same kind of holistic pressure that's happening I think within our profession so I'm just kind of bringing us back to what does that pressure do or what are we seeing in terms of what's happening as we respond to that maybe it's not pressure, expectation I'll call it an expectation and three things that kind of come to mind as I was looking around and kind of understanding what our various organizations are presenting as workshop or training opportunities and the things that strike me are around this the first idea of there is a movement to create more networking more internal ways of sharing and building this knowledge together so there are smaller in-house opportunities where I think Helen Williams is on the call she's at London School of Economics but we had a conversation about a kind of think tanky data shaping community or data shaping practitioners interest group that she built within the London School of Economics Library where they were able to sort of talk about what's happening in data what are some expectations where would we look so there's this kind of internal network that's happening in libraries that's one of the opportunities one of the responses even further out you have obviously the training the training opportunities that we're seeing professional development opportunities and even beyond that the internal examples you've got international collaborations like something in the I mentioned in my intro the ROUK DLF and there are a couple links right there this idea that we have we have a set of skills between our international organizations I think that's another one of these responses and opportunities and this is a means to sort of elect into and share what you have knowledge about to to a community and kind of connect and the reason I'm able to say anything about Helen Helen and Williamson her work at London School of Economics is because I connected there she is I connected with her during the during one of our events our ROUK DLF event so and then I want to one other as I was thinking through this the other thing I think I'm seeing a lot more of especially in our my environment is how do you supplement expertise and even how do you embed or find ways to get librarians within trained on research funding and or embedded within research grants so supplementing expertise you heard Brian talk about alt AC careers and postdoctoral candidates and PhD PhDs with specialties that enhance our work certainly that's something that's something that's been a response and an opportunity but even further there are ways that I'm seeing people like our we have a data curation librarian here who's actually embedded 80 percent time on a research grant one of the primary research grants on campus I want to flip to that doesn't really scale you know when you heard Brian talk about 6,000 faculty members but it does create a different view of the profession when Denise is in these environments and she's talking metadata and data management and she's doing some data mining that value of librarianship is expressed are very strong and it's able to be understood by researchers the last thing I'm going to travel one more idea and actually it's called idea hold on but you'll see a number of our granting agencies are starting to fund professional development and what's interesting about this professional development is this was particularly interested in the professionals that are working and not able to go back to school or not able to really don't have time they've already established themselves in their careers but also looking for representations of DEI making sure that the right people are going to get training and working across public academic and special libraries so I'll leave it at that lots of ways to respond to this and I think this is this kind of landscape of what we're seeing that is brilliant and actually there are so many hidden gems in there which allow us to focus on our next discussion about where do we chart our future together which we'll come to in a bit but a few things I picked up from from your conversation and the chart I think there is a really interesting dynamic emerging care about what's the profile and value of the library and how we advertise it but language do you use what terminologies do we use so that we can shift away from that service provider role particularly here in the UK to a partnership role with the academic faculties there's a really interesting dynamic on pipelines and actually what what our culture looks like when we are diverse pipelines and actually is this just library schools or is it about other pipelines especially with the digital skills needs that we're talking about and then there is a really interesting point Jason you made about research grants and actually the culture and it links back to that profile side of things as well if the libraries are not considered as partners you're not considered being a co-investigator or PPI in a research grant either so we don't get the benefit in the same way so there's a really interesting dynamic that's emerging there so thank you for sharing your thoughts I've noticed that's here that lovely to see you again what do you like to share your thoughts and comments yeah hi thank you I thought I would because LSE's been mentioned a couple of times I'm actually obviously I have a role which is associate director of digital scholarship and innovation but also I'm chair of our training and development working group in the library so we've been doing that for a couple of years since from COVID so looking right through in the last two years and we started by asking staff what skills they want to develop what gaps they thought they might have so we collected all this together and then we try to match staff who have those skills to see you know well can we match those up are there areas where we actually don't have this expertise at all and so how can we develop it and one of those ideas out of that came we realized there was a big gap around data manipulation finding better ways of working how can we use technology to help with our processes make things easier to free up extra time to do these new services and new skills as well and this is where my colleagues I think Helen and Fabby have been mentioned set up this data shapers community of practice which I think has about 14 members across the library now where they talk about you know problems that they have and how can we fix it and people are developing different skills like one staff member has done Python training and then shares their skills and where we have a big gap perceived gap we we've paid for an external trainer to come in but obviously what we're thinking is this is probably replicated across you know international situations as well so how can we scale this up and we know that the international skills exchange that we've mentioned has been very beneficial in making connections on an individual level but also on an institutional level but I would be interested in how can we sort of set up this opportunities at a sort of a larger scale and also how we approach it here is we do give staff time to develop these skills and I know that's not always possible so we try and do it in short bursts as well and informally so there's a lot we approach it in several different ways so I suppose that's my question really maybe that comes under the third part but how do we scale this up and if we are in a position where we are struggling to recruit how not either because of resourcing we don't have new posts or if we do we're not necessarily being able to attract the people that we need how do we approach that as well internally I think that's my question on my observations thank you that's a very astute observation but and I wonder if I can link a few things together and let Yvonne come in and share her thoughts as well but a couple of things that I'm picking up from the chat and linking it with Beth so firstly the question about specialized skills and firstly it's very difficult to bring them in but if you bring them in how do you ensure that they are not siloed within the library and that they are basically transferred between and shared amongst the staffing as well then the question that Ali asked and that's linked with under-resourced staffing models and what approaches we can take into the short bursts training but how do we sustain that in that kind of environment and I wonder Yvonne if you want to come in and add to that and then we can bring it back to the panelists for their views on that Yes, thank you Massoud I just wanted to come in really to take a slightly different perspective on the views of things a lot of what we've spoken about this afternoon has very much been focused on what can we do within our individual institutions what can we do when we're kind of recruiting people into our place of work or working with people being trained to kind of join the profession and so forth I think we also need to as Beth was saying there are various communities of practice and there are various communities around particular areas of librarianship that we can take advantage of in terms of this kind of peer-led learning and training and so forth it's always been one of the areas that I've been lucky enough to be involved with certainly around the work with the repository community and with the UK Council for Open Research and Repositories it's an area where there is a lot of kind of peer learning which comes out of necessity from people being kind of having fewer colleagues within an institution to talk to you find your communities across sectors again and also we have the various communities such as the Mercy and Collaboration and the various other scornal communities where we can build learning and kind of build peer learning across institutions rather than just within one That's a really good point to go on and just for knowledge of others who are outside of the UK Mercy and Collaboration is a regional collaboration and there are multiple collaborations of that nature here in the UK and what it reminded me of on straight off is we really encourage the same kind of collaboration same kind of peer assisted learning for our students because we know that the trainer that active model simply cannot work even with active learning that can't work so peer assisted learning has a really important place there so why are we not thinking more of that for ourselves so thank you for sharing your thoughts and your ideas and Lee I'd love to hear your thoughts on that Sure So in addition to learning within the organization I also wanted to kind of point to learning outside of the organization we developed a program here at Ohio State where faculty members librarians in both subject librarians area studies librarians and special collections librarians were given the opportunity to attend workshops mostly digital humanities workshops that were offered in the summer so they're usually a week longer whether they're at the digital humanities summer institute at the University of Victoria or at U Penn's dream lab we had librarians go and attend workshops on image analysis on you know a broad overview of how digital humanities approaches are being applied to Japanese studies we had others that went to specialized workshops on you know digital humanities and Slavic studies so these workshops gave those faculty those individuals a kind of an understanding of a digital scholarship approach or approaches within their disciplines that they were working so when they come back they not only have built a network with other researchers that they've attended these workshops with but they are also better positioned to collaborate with the researchers in their departments on campus and so that level of engagement I think is really important to foster sometimes bringing you know people in to do these workshops doesn't really meet everyone's needs you know you can bring in someone to do text encoding you know a text encoding workshop but that's not necessarily going to you know that's not necessarily what maybe you know someone who's working in the arts you know is it's going to need so it's trying to determine where is the what is the best approach to take to meet librarians where they are and to kind of foster their learning alongside others within their disciplinary areas thank you very much so we have a couple more minutes on the topic of mapping the terrain and I'm wondering whether any other panelists would like to come in or an audience member wants to join in and share their thoughts Christy I mean I think that's sort of bringing in that digital scholarship perspective and getting people to go out and experience what different elements look like and kind of undertake training and other disciplines I think is a really important element that we need to be thinking about much more and again looking at data science that was something that that Edinburgh had looked at and you know getting librarians trained up in data science to sort of see how do these disciplines work and operate where are the commonalities what elements can we bring back but what can we also sort of take back out again and I think that is that collaborative looking outward as we sort of started this morning it's about you know sharing and making that knowledge porous and going out which is an important part and for that we need to embrace outward knowledge to bring in and vice versa as well so just really echoing the last speaker a little bit yeah Eleonora I think Fiona I though depends on before me I was just going to pick up on Hope's last question in the chat but you go Eleonora if we've got time I will do it was just to add another reflection there are a lot of the times the training is not always a training to become the super expert that would do the super deep research the training it just recognising that not everyone would need the same level of training and sometimes it's just to have an understanding of our students and academic staff all visitors community in any case access or what they would need so that we can make work in the agile way as Fiona mentioned before in terms of responding of what our users really need from us it's just to try and to understand to you what language are we talking about are we referring to the same information are we talking about the same things and again sometimes it's just explaining to our colleagues that we don't want them to become the expert in you know data mining or app creation they just need to be able to understand what the other member of staff talks about when and it's just about the communication and improving the communication and just have this shared language which sometimes I think it's not always clear when we're talking about training and is that level of being inspired by colleagues I have a general understanding versus you're going to be doing this for the next month that's a really good point I don't know because speaking the lively language I think Lazarus was talking about this earlier doesn't always help in that way just recognizing what the needs are of the end user and how can you support them in the most appropriate fashion is this quite critical Brian and then Fiona I'd love for you to come in and briefly as well so Brian if you want to go first yeah the only thing that I would add is beyond the training element is the capacity of librarians library faculty library personnel in general to engage in in research and self-directed research with the expectation that that actually take place that's part of the system that we have at the University of Florida because our folks are by and large tenure track faculty I wouldn't impose that on any other institution but part of the benefit of that is the expectation for people to produce scholarship and you know the by-product of that is I mean it really incentivizes learning and we see people you know who are using social network analysis and their work and those sorts of things and and it's a by-product of that expectation and its self-direction what comes with it which kind of gets to one of the questions about capacity is you know our folks have a minimum of a 10% release time and you know that is a reduction in the amount of day job contribution and effort but the notion is that there's long-term benefits from that Thank you Brian and actually before coming to fear next I may add my own thought I think we are really bad at that if I'm speaking on my own behalf as well we are really bad at actually generating a proper workload capacity monitoring because we say or go and spend 10% of your time on something but we have still the same levels of expectations from everyone and we still want all the projects to be done on timelines etc so I'll be the first to put my hand up and say I think there's a long way for us to go in terms of recognizing what that means and actually releasing that capacity appropriately Fiona you've been waiting patiently for some time do you want to come in now Sure it's as I'm reading down the wonderful things that are coming through in the chat there are more and more things are coming out that I would like to comment on but I just want to pick up on something that I think Ellie and Hope have picked up on which was about under staffing limited staff capacity per CPD and for development and what have you and I think this is really important because as our processes become more automated increasingly we are going to need staff who have different skill sets and I think often that falls to our staff our more junior staff who don't necessarily have the time or the same element of freedom to be able to go and do that training and it's something I don't have an answer for but I would really like to maybe spend some time looking at and I wonder if that's something that within RLUK we might be able to do possibly within the ADN just sort of share ways that we can enhance learning opportunities I'm really interested in that peer assisted learning for example and just as a network be able to try develop something that will share that load across and if other people are interested in that then maybe you know get in contact with me may try and set something up there's an offer but a wonderful set being to our third part of the discussion which is about charting our course and what opportunities might exist at an individual institutional collaborative and community level to navigate this landscape and for our collective benefit so I am now going to invite Lee and Eleonora to share their thoughts on this topic first and then open it up provide a comment and discussion Eleonora if you want to go first I'll let you I'll do so much of what I had planned to say has already been said so I'm going to briefly go through my notes that I have here to see I will say that I'm going to reiterate a lot of things but it seems like I can't say this enough about this the new focus of librarians as research partners rather than just service providers that's a that's an incredible cultural shift I think and bringing with it incredible opportunities to engage more deeply into the research that is occurring on campuses and in my just to give you some sense of where I'm coming from I'm one of those you know alternate academics who came you know came into libraries my background is in English literature so it was an easy transition into libraries in that in that regard and what I've noticed is that often you know I feel that and this is just my observation that librarians curators and archivists because they have seen themselves as service providers they don't really have a strong sense of how unique and invaluable their skill sets and knowledge bases are they bring a lot of experience to research partnerships particularly you know in areas around information literacy organization retrieval access to digitization metadata content management project management scholarly sharing Christy outlined some of these earlier but all of these skill sets are integral to digital humanities projects and so those roles are often the gaps that faculty you know don't have as well you know they don't have the same skill sets that the librarians bring to these projects so they're they're quite complementary I'll add that there are you know newer roles in libraries that you know like Brian mentioned earlier my own you know role in digital humanities jasons and data these expand the library skill sets and knowledge bases even further and they provide additional opportunities for the libraries community to be involved in research partnerships I do you know I partner a great deal with my colleagues who are subject librarians in the arts and humanities and our you know we compliment each other in these research partnerships that we're that we've formed working on faculty projects I'll say that you know this digital shift has added you know brings incredible opportunities to apply these skills in new ways and to develop complementary skills there you know have been several reports you know released I'd say in in the past five years and I won't go through them all for lack of time but I will let's put links in the chat momentarily but whether they all emphasize is the need for research libraries to develop internal talent and that relying on new entrance into the profession you know just is not going to suffice particularly when these skills and competencies are in such demand as everyone has already said the specific skills sets are gaps have been explored by you know both ARL and RLUK and both have charted diversification of DS activities the changing role of research libraries from service to active partnership and the increasing variety of digital skills and competencies required to enable this this transition one last remark I'll make which also reiterates a lot of what has already been said is that this work meaning you know developing developing competencies for librarians and developing a training you know curricula for librarians and programs around this it can't it cannot rely on volunteer labor and without the library's communities support so because this work will be transformational transformational we really need to leverage funding agencies like the HRC the NIH the NEH and the IMLS to develop this kind of program fully we also have to have buy-in and commitment from library's leadership members in ROUK ARL and clear not only to prioritize and implement it which touches on what some of else of what Fiona has already said but to advocate for the well-deserved recognition of librarians as researchers and research partners on their campuses and to give our colleagues time to learn to practice and to partner in lieu of rather than in addition to less impactful work that they have already that they've been assigned yeah so with that I'm going to pass it over to Eleanor Thank you so much I find it really difficult to come at the end of this quite extensive discussion as Lee I thought I've planned everything out and most of the things have been covered in the discussion before and after Lee after your your chat I have even less things to say because you're covering all the points I've put out there Well I think I can add to the conversation it's really the recognition on how what is the contribution that we actually make to the research and educational environment and just to remember this and invite colleagues to remember what is our contribution not only as a service provider but as a partner because that is the I think the key that unlocks the push to claim back the seats at the table as a partner and not as a service provider to just reminding people where the skills are sitting and that we do have skills so maybe most of our colleagues and the faculties might actually are aware of because we might not promote them quite as extensively as we could so a lot of the times it's just as Lee mentioned it's just those skills are ready in most of the time so just so ready within our libraries and our colleagues there is also just from my personal experience it's just to remember they're not all events or where you're working actually are suitable for all different institutions because of course we might have it's like different priorities it's like the different expertise and it's just a bit away on some of the comment picking up some of the comments about the experimenting and piloting and just remember there is no failure it's just a minor work at this point in time in our own institution for a number of reasons which is to be time commitment to the staff that have the skills that might not be at the time available it could be a lack of infrastructure support and having at that point a conversation with the directors of the library the associate directors or colleagues to make sure that those things are in place to for example for example free up time to improve the workflow to then as again Fiona and Chris they were saying before in terms of having a little bit of time in space and some of the comments to then focus on for example research project and then recognizing that each of us has a different career path and the wonderful library world is wonderful also because we have all these skills and expertise that are coming together there is a this sort of community and we're not there is no or there is an overlap by in a sort of sharing skills the other things is just to remember there are a lot of opportunities out there of many of the other panel itself remember in terms of training schemes there are more former or more informal and as a line manager if doesn't matter how big is your team it's just to remember to free up some of the time or how do you actually embed those experiences and opportunities how do you make the most of your link and network to make sure that people then the rest of the team or in the library community will actually have some of the same opportunities I just bring an example so in terms of some of the results of my fellowship with the National Archives was just you I had the knowledge of another scheme there was an informal scheme that was run at that point in time so I suggest someone in my team to then apply and it's this informal conversation that kind of create the network to support innovation but also this informal skilling of our workforce and I think I close out there and the other things you just remember that there are a lot of expertise if it's not in the library in other libraries but also within the academic community so let's not remember a lot of the times just send an email to colleagues and say would you mind maybe sharing something with us would you mind just coming in and maybe talk to someone 15 minutes just how do you use this software for example for network analysis or can you help us so that not only we are seen as a partner in the research arena but it's also we are driving the research agenda for the faculty and that I think my experience have helped shift in this conversation and unlock this conversation that's really enriching Alenora and this is amazing considering you were going last and you had such amazing insights so fantastic thank you so much Kersti do you want to come in now I managed to unmute myself I was just also thinking although we're sort of struggling to bring people into the profession we also have to remember that we're a very welcoming community libraries are really interesting places to work and that we really benefit from diverse professions joining us and being part of our library services to help kind of deliver everything that we need to deliver to our wider communities and that that keeping that openness of mind as well and allowing that kind of sort of porous nature to continue is a really important part and a really important part of us learning and maybe gaining some of those skills that we don't always need I've learned a lot from the developers that I've worked with and other professions that I've then been able to apply and sort of bring on so I think that sort of natural way of bringing in new skills and again ensuring that there's I think in the chat there's been a number of different kind of community groups sharing information in the organisation or the wider institution and we just need to also bear in mind that there's really important tools that we have available to us Thank you Kirstie so there's a huge amount of amazing chat going on at the moment and there's a lot I can pick up on but one thing I think it would be unfair of me if I don't mention the RKHRC Research Fellowships that we've just introduced the idea of it is to actually generate capacity for our staff to be to develop their confidence and their capability doing independent research and developing their skills in that process and their fellows skills in the process as well and that comes at the expense of 20% cost to the library so I think that's a clear declaration that there is investment but we need to do more of that and we need to do more across the library rather than just in certain parts of it One of the questions if I may be selfish and pick Alan's question from the chat because I think that's really relevant which is what's the role of the international in all this discussion of change so Lee you were talking about IMLS doing certain things on this in terms of grants we know HRC here we know that in the past there have been typical collaborations between the two can the panelists think of more ways in which we can really harness the international power here Well I'll start by talking about the ARL PD banks and to be research libraries PD Bank which was the idea of it was built for the association of research libraries and then it's expanded because the system itself can support that capacity and so I think part of it is the just perceiving beyond the local use case of the systems that we're creating that are multi-institutional and thinking about ways in which they can expand beyond that I think the person's question also makes us think about the skill sets people need in order to be engaged in more international collaborations and there's probably people who've thought more deeply and could give a better answer on that but it made me think about the skill sets that we need to focus on in leveraging the capacity of research libraries and the systems that we have to support communities that are closer to home and doing those in ways you know we're all focused on decolonizing but I think that there's more proactive activities where you know the the communities or the states or territories or provinces where we are would benefit from the systems that and the skill sets that the folks who work with us have and you know I think digital infrastructure really lends itself to that sort of scale too so Thank you Brian Alenol Yeah it was just to add to what Brian was saying is of course we are now transitioning in a sort of the new normal going back to work into more physical and and it's just to make sure that we don't lose everything we gain in terms of opportunity within the digital that opened for example some of the work there of the research libraries UK it's done around the international and skills a swap and the work that's been done within the digital library federations work there and it's just to make sure that the fact that how can we match without duplicating this hybrid and the online versus the physical and I think we're just trying to navigate how do we make sure that we're not losing both of them because there is so much we can learn by being on an international panel just having a chat in a more relaxing formal environment and but everyone who is attended some of the work there some of the transatlantic skills exchange events colleagues have definitely benefited even from just the two minutes quick chat with someone that you never met from someone else just just to realize we're all in the same boat we're all tackling the same challenges and it's just to share perspectives within the same topic and it's just to make sure that we're not losing everything we kind of gain with the digital shift that is a really really good way to close our dessert part of the dining table and actually think about the benefits that we've just received I mean I can't speak on behalf of everyone else but just being here listening to all of you my dad is completely full now because I've been taking so many notes but also the extremely rich chat with people sharing different views and inspiring in many ways is absolutely fantastic and we couldn't have really done that at this scale without the digital capability and infrastructure so it's fantastic I wonder if I can ask the audience whether anyone would like to come in for a final conversation or share any final thoughts or questions and I will also then leave you with a couple of probably not necessarily provocative but more holistic conversations about what we can do next and the first thing I was thinking about was we've talked about skills very much in a very technical, specialist capacity but there are far more ranging skills in terms of how we communicate how we position libraries how we scale the kind of effort we are doing and there's a little bit of thought process behind it's not always about trainings but it's also about having a growth mindset and how do we develop a culture where that kind of growth mindset is also included so it's not just someone is giving you permission to do something versus this is important and this is why we need to do it and this is important for the vision so that kind of multi-level skill and growth mindset across the board I think that would be an interesting one another thought that was running through my mind was COVID-19 and I don't know how people are feeling about it but my reflection is that people are really tired because they've been firefighting for a long time and they've been working hard and actually coming out of that mode to be able to say actually it's okay to relax a bit is quite difficult while it's very difficult for us to say actually we've been working at that capacity for quite some time but that wasn't normal and actually redefining that normal back to what normal looks like is also a psychological shift not just a physical shift and there's an interesting dynamic on that about how do we revert back from that constant acceleration mode into something that's more stabilized and how do we bring staff in that journey with us so they can release or we can all collectively release that capacity for learning and development and then the third thing I was thinking about was what are we doing basically on a day-to-day role job basis because one of the most enjoyable things about your job is that you're learning through it and actually are we really analyzing that we are doing a lot of repetitive things or are we just growing because we are trying to match scale and actually there might be better ways to match that scale or not do it so I think those are some of the really difficult questions that we need to ask about can we do this at scale is it through staffing or is it through completely specialized skills on machine learning or artificial intelligence or something else so I think there's some really interesting dynamics on what does that mean for our workforce generally and what kind of mix of workforce we might have in the future