 Rhaid i'r cyffredinol i'r reisalu wneud i gweithio i'r rhesyn a'r ystyried Robin Green, y rhesyn i'r Llywog Rhesyn, rhesyn o'r gweithio i'r Llywog Rhesyn i'r Llywog Rhesyn i'n dweud i'r Llywog Rhesyn. Felly, rwy'n dechrau'n fawr o Siarla, dwi'n wneud i'r blaenau cymdeithasol, yng Nghymru, a phobl yn ymgylcheddu cymdeithasol, cyffredinol, ac i'r pwysigol i'r cyffredinol. ILA-members comprise the Association of Research Libraries, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, the Council of Australian University Librarians, the Leibhr, the Association of European Research Libraries and the Research Libraries UK. So, as Matt said earlier, we have a great range across the world of members. Mae'r reoli'r rheswm ddweud yw IARLUS, ac mae'n rheswm gweithio yng nghymru yn ein blygu gyda'r platform yw ddweud. Mae'r ddweud o'r gweithio mae'n gweithio, ac mae gennym ni'n cael ei'r cymdeithas i unrhyw gyda'r Llywbeth Llywbeth Gwyrdartyr, oherwydd allanol, oeson, ac oedd ymddangos i ddim yn ogyrch yn amser o'r rhagorau arall, ac oedd y ddweud i gyd-dynifesio'n gweithio i gyrwch yn ogyrch yn gallu. Oherwydd, mae'r prosescerau a y gallwn hynod y teulu am y flwyddyn wedi gwneud hynny amddans i gynnig iaeth. Oherwydd, gan y cyfnod neu'r ddaf i gael o'r ffordd yw eu jydyldio ar gyfer yr upad fannwyl COVID-19, beth dyma yw anwr yma. Diolch am y gwrthodraeth mae Llyfrgellol Llyfrgell – Genlygaid Llyfrgell – â ddweud yma yma – yng Nghymru, a'r ymarfer yw'r argyfwyr yn y Hylwyr Ffnwyr Fyllwyr, ac yn ddod yn ddod yn y Llywodraeth yma yn y syniadau hiracholau yn ymhyfydigol i eich Llywodraeth. Mae'n gweithio'r ddod yn llywodraeth yn cyfrifol o'r cyfrifol ac yn adegwadau cyfrifol. That quotation and its use regarding the digital shift is so relevant to today. This is one such moment. A period of discontinuity that is already driving profound change in society, our institutions and our libraries. Through recovered retrenched recess, we'll today capture experiences and plans at a point in time to build on knowledge gained. Our speakers will give perspectives mae'r gwneud o'r wandyniad sydd wedi ei hunain yn ysgol iawn, yn y ffisigol sydd yn ymgyrch yn y pandemies, yn ymgyrch, yn ysgol iawn, yn ysgol iawn i'r syniadau eich cyfnod, ac yn mynd i gael y cyfrannu sydd wedi'u deallu rhan o'i ddiwedd yn ysgol iawn, i ddweud am ysgol iawn, ysgol iawn i ysgol iawn, a'r gwneud i'r sgaf i'r byd yn ystod o'r cyfnodau a'r ysgol iawn i'r panthail. a'r hyn o'r wych yn ymddangosol y Llyfrinol Fyfforddolol, efallai ymddangosol o'r modlwch, y cyfnodol yn digital, ac yn ymch Selig, mae'r ffordd o'r newid yma'r prysgol ymaol yn y Llyfrinol. Felly mae'r cyfnodol yn ei ddifigol, wrth gwrs, mae'n meddwl i'r dynnu cyfnodol yn ynchynedig, yn ymddangosol i'r wneud, oherwydd, ymddangosol am y cyfnodol, Iel yng nghymru, y bydd y gallu dyna'r bwysig ar gyfer yma, a'r bwysig ar gyfer y llunio ymgyrch yn y plus rydyn ni. Mae'n gwyrddio'n gweithio'r adroddau, mae'n gweithio'r ddarluniau, i gydag y mynd o gweithio'r rydyn ni i gydag yma, ac yn ymgyrch yn gwneud y cyfnodol, ac yn y bwysig ar gyfer y mynd i'r llunio yma, ond mae'r bwysig ar gyfer y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth yn gwneud. Felly, mae'r bobl yn ymddangos. As you can see from the programme, our speakers have been very deliberately selected to give perspectives on these issues from their different jurisdictions, their different types of institution, institutional contexts, and types of library, and of course, as library directors, how they are shaping recovery programmes and future plans. We expect there will be overlap between the presentations, and this will be significant in building a record of shared experience. There will also be differentiation, and understanding this will also be important. As we listen to the speakers and engage in the discussion in the third part of the event, do bear in mind the various factors, geographic, economic, cultural, societal, governmental and others that have played a part in their journey through the pandemic and how that might relate to your journey. Even the weather plays its part. In the UK lockdown has been during an unusually benign spring and early summer, and gardens will have been places for escape. In contrast, the recent winter was one of the wettest on record. Ten weeks lockdown at that time may have resulted in very different impact on wellbeing and productivity for those working at home. A further aspect to consider is that some of our speakers are at different stages in the pandemic cycle, so what we hear today will for some have practical value in the coming weeks and months, whereas for others it will be acquired knowledge to retain and apply in future when the next discontinuity arrives. And with that cheering thoughts, I hope you enjoy what will be a wide-ranging and stimulating event, and I'll now hand you over to Astrid Varhazen, Executive Director of Libra, who leads the first session. Thank you. Thank you, Welbin. I'm indeed here on behalf of Libra and 440 research libraries across Europe that Libra represents, and I also welcome you to this first session. Libra and our libraries are committed to open science, and as we all know, the importance of open science has become even more evident during the current crisis. I'm excited to start this event with the first session that covers case studies from two continents and three countries with three very experienced librarians. Lauren Pressley from the United States, Vivian Lewis from Canada, and Helen Shenton from Ireland. I will keep track of time and to remind you, you can ask your questions during the session via the Q&A function. The first speaker of this session is Lauren Pressley. Lauren is the Associate Dean of University Libraries for Research and Learning Services at the University of Washington. In this role, she is, among other things, responsible for strategy, policy and programme development, and overall excellence in access services. Lauren, the screen is yours. Thank you. One moment, and I believe you can see my slide now. So thank you, Astrid, for introducing me and to Matt and Melanie for your help in being here today. I'm very excited to share the work that we've been doing at University of Washington and to hear from colleagues across other institutions about what this work has looked like there. To set a little bit of context so that you have a sense of where we're coming from, I wanted to share a little bit about the University of Washington. We are a public institution located across three campuses in Seattle, Bothell, and Tacoma, Washington. We're on a quarter system, so in fact this is our final week of the academic year right now. We have over 59,000 students confer over 17,000 degrees annually and are fortunate to receive 1.5 billion in sponsored grants and research. The UW Libraries within that context has a one library three campus model. We employ 355 staff, 330 student staff. We have 16 locations with 5 million annual visitors and have the largest library collection in the Pacific Northwest with more than 9 million items in the collection. Some local context for what COVID-19 has looked like in Washington State is that we were the first identified state in the US to have a case of COVID back in January. And I put the timeline here roughly just so that you can have a sense of how things escalated within Washington, but along the way there's some other things that might be of interest to this particular audience, which is on March 2, students petition to close the University of Washington, and that petition drew thousands of signatures. By March 6, the University of Washington president announced that classes would no longer meet the following Monday, so faculty had about a day to prepare for that transition. Another important piece of local context is we're entering into our fifth day of protest within the city. We have National Guard presence and we're operating under a curfew. So as you might imagine, the COVID-19 continues to be a significant part of our day-to-day work and figuring out how we'll ramp back up to normal services. Right now it has actually taken a backseat to these local issues that we're all trying to navigate and figure out the best path forward through. Also, a hot off the press yesterday, as I was closing my computer for the day, I got a notice that the governor had announced a change in our state's plan and that public libraries, which were not due to open until phase three for the state, now will open in phase two with curbside pickup. That doesn't necessarily mean that academic libraries will need to offer that service in phase two, but it does mean our faculty may have the expectation that they would have that service. So we're sort of, with that particular announcement, shifting our way of thinking as well and trying to figure out what direction that means that we need to go in and what we need to be prepared for when the state enters into phase two. In terms of the University of Washington library's process, I again put a timeline here so you can have a sense of how the library moved through those early days and see how that may or may not match up to whatever happened at your own institution. But I'll also share along the way that there were some key things that really made a major difference in our ability to shift online. We were able to close buildings, most buildings on the 13th, but we had a few days in which we allowed students in our undergraduate libraries, they were wrapping up exams. So we have a data point where we were very clear with our patrons about how to use the space and how to physically distance and we saw that that was not followed. So that data became a really important piece for us in thinking about when we would be ready to open and welcome people back into the buildings. We also have an organizational development officer who spent a lot of energy creating telework support, training, creating infrastructure to collect projects that student employees could do remotely, etc. To sort of ease that transition so people could focus on themselves and not having to build infrastructure around the work that they do. And we also had to, as many of you may have experienced, had to develop a program to rapidly deploy technology to people who needed them, needed different items to be able to work from home. And this phase that we're in now, and I anticipate it will go through when most people are even on campus, we're receiving daily messages from our dean outlining any changes in the COVID-19 scenario. We're having monthly town halls of the entire staff with an open Google Doc where people can share questions they have before we meet. We're developing rich documentation so people have access to that and deploying tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams so people can communicate informally. We're also mining transcript data, we're aggregating information coming from social media and liaison email to help us define the best paths forward. So we're really using a data informed approach. But first and foremost, through all of this, we're focused on health safety and that message administration continues to repeat as a mantra is to express generosity and kindness to your colleagues and yourselves. We know this is a really challenging time for everyone and we're trying to encourage people to recognize that we do not expect business as usual. We expect people to pace themselves because we recognize that this is a long marathon ahead. So to have a sense of where we're coming from as we shift into looking at returning to campus, we have very easily moved most of our research and scholarly communications operations online. A lot of this is because, like you, we've been doing a lot of work preparing for digital and remote interactions with the library for decades. We've had an Ask Us Chat client since 2002 and have offered a lot of remote and virtual consultations. The biggest shift in this space was moving events online. We, within days, transitioned things that were going to be in person online and have actually found participation has increased. So that has encouraged us to think about when we return to campus, should we be prioritizing some of these events in an online environment, even once we're all back in person, because people were able to find ways to fit that into their lives in a way they might not have been able to fit normal drop in events into their schedules. In terms of teaching and learning, we had a huge amount of infrastructure developed to support online learning, although most of our experience had been going into classrooms and doing face-to-face instruction. So the transition really was more on our side, the practice of asynchronous and synchronous virtual instruction. We plan to, even if we are on campus in fall, to continue to recommend faculty to use online learning and use remote course materials, because we are worried that there's a chance that we'll come back in some capacity and then have to leave again, or that some students might choose not to come back and just take online classes for the fall. And we want to have an equitable teaching, learning, and course materials program so that no matter what happens, everyone has access to the same materials. So we're working with faculty to think about when they can find an alternative to something that might have been in print, or is there a way for us to acquire an electronic equivalent of the source that they would prefer to use. In terms of thinking about reentry and the workforce, we are definitely still fully in the everybody is home. Washington State is beginning to let people into phase two, but it's the King County area where UW is located is still solidly in phase one. So that means really you're only supposed to leave the house for essential activities and we do not consider any of the work other than checking for weeks and facility issues. Everything else is considered an essential and can be done from home. We are anticipating a phased reentry in which we allow people to return to do basic stuff to prepare the spaces for when we are able to offer some services. We have some stuff that are eager to get back and we have faculty who are really ready to have access to collections. So we are trying to lay the groundwork now to allow those staff that are ready to go back and able to provide those basic services like curbside pickups that faculty will want. We're also looking at how once we are in a place where we can reopen, what are the things that we can do to require the physical distancing and PPE that will be necessary. And that, as I'm sure many of you are navigating, is a challenge both in terms of how does one acquire it in an environment where it is not widely available, how do you work within your institution where many departments will have demand for the same materials, etc. So that's something that we're still in the early days yet on. Those Seattle entered into this earlier than most of the country. We've taken a very, very evidence-based and conservative approach to reopening. So I suspect that we'll actually be later than many places within the US. In terms of the University of Washington Libraries approach, I put our general operating principles and things that we're regularly bringing up in our conversations here so you can see. I think in terms of our mind within administration, we are very cognizant of the questions and concerns staff have. Communication is a key piece of this work. So we're both trying to frequently find ways to communicate out and create infrastructure to hear the concerns that staff have. It's frequently the same concerns, but we just need to reiterate that we hear it and that it's possible to share that with us and that we will incorporate this thinking into our plans. We also recognize that there's an equity issue in this, that not everyone will be safe returning. People have different health issues. People have different caregiving responsibilities at home. Many people on our campus rely on public transit to get to campus and that in and of itself might be a health risk. So we're cognizant that we'll need to be very careful in the plan that we create so that the people who do come in can come in safely. Within my role, something that I'm thinking about a lot also is on the cultural side of the library, how to help staff navigate this unimaginable ambiguity that we can never have planned for. We're also identifying ways to help the community while continuing to offer extreme flexibility. So we're looking at things such as can we circulate the portions of the collection that people can't access online in a way without allowing people in the building. Are there ways that we can offer some of the tools that we've typically offered in person through a virtualized environment? I will say that one that silver lining in this entire process has been a focus on generosity and flexibility amongst library staff. We're learning a lot about the loads that our colleagues are carrying even in the best of times and we're working together to support each other to the best ability that we can. So I'm hopeful personally that that generosity will extend to a time on which we return to something that looks like it's approaching normal. Although that might be, in our case, at least past fall. We are anticipating that in fall the return will definitely be a phased approach and our governor frequently references the idea of a dial in which we might open up a little bit more and find that we need to dial the dial back. So we recognize that even if things begin to look normal in fall, we have to be ready for the dial to switch back as well. So those are my primary comments from the University of Washington and I thank you for the opportunity to share these with you today. So thank you Lauren. Before we go through the second speaker, I remind you to keep posting your questions in the Q&A function. I'm now happy to announce our second speaker, Phefion Lewis. Phefion is the university librarian at McMaster University Canada. She has decades of experience in academic librarianship and is an expert in strategic planning, library assessment and information literacy. Phefion, the screen is yours. The restoration of in-person services. First, I thought I would give you a little bit of context. I speak from a Canadian perspective as a member of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, CARL, which is the voice of the larger research libraries in Canada and a very proud member of IARLA, I should say. Canada, I would say, has been reasonably successful in flattening the curve. We've moved relatively quickly with closing our economies and we tend to be fairly compliant when it comes to following rules and all of those things play fairly well in the time of the pandemic. Now we are in truth a series of regional epidemics and some provinces are largely untouched while others have been hit much harder. Ontario, the province within which I live and work, remains under a state of emergency at least until the end of this month. My institution, McMaster, is a mid-sized research intensive university with about 30,000 students supported by a system of four libraries. The university has a very strong focus on global health and well-being. We are known as the birthplace of problem-based learning and evidence-based medicine. And I would say that this focus has permeated the narrative of our reopening discussions. So on March 18, 2020, I made the difficult decision that many other people on this Zoom have made. That was the decision to close the physical libraries and to direct the entire staff to work from home. And the language that I used was chosen very, very deliberately. We have closed our physical locations, but the library remains open, so collections and services have remained online. And I would say that the staff have done some extraordinarily heavy lifting over the last 12 weeks, delivering and enriching the digital library for our users. We negotiated an agreement with the Haudi Trust. Lauren mentioned something very similar to roll out the emergency temporary access service. And we purchased access to about an additional 400,000 electronic books, and we expedited an implementation that was already underway for a new e-reserve system. And at the same time, we started focusing on our staff. We delivered chairs and headsets and their office plans, and at least one goldfish delivered to staff members' front porches. And we began a process of daily and eventually moving into weekly email updates to the staff, and weekly all staff meetings were virtually every single staff member joins. We created what we describe as the library job jar to keep all of our staff working productively and to have some fun while they're doing it. So last week, the university announced that for the sake of the health and safety of our community, the entire fall term will be delivered online. And that message, as you can imagine, made it very clear to all, including the library staff, that our physical return to the library is still very much in the future. We have time to plan well, and that's the good part. Now, I want to be very clear. The work that we're all trying to do right now to reopen our physical libraries is incredibly hard. And I thought about why is it so hard? And, you know, we're planning basically to an uncertain horizon. We don't know where the pandemic is heading, how long it will be with us. And frankly, many of us across Carl and across the world were facing budgetary concerns even before the pandemic began. And so the COVID is really only adding to these woes. And to make matters worse, it's likely that some of the steps that we take now will need to be undone when a second wave of the pandemic arrives in the fall. And it's actually very hard to move a digital first policy when senior university leaders, bless their souls, continue to think of the libraries as the traditional book. And Carl, members mentioned a week or so ago, sometimes it's really hard to be the heart of campus. As well, the age of our buildings limits our ability to enforce physical distancing, the size of our corridors, the air ventilation systems. And finally, and probably most importantly, our staff wants certainty. And we're just as leaders not always able to provide that to them. So how do we make these decisions? My leadership team and I began the process by composing a list of core principles. And here's what we've come up with a working draft. We think about the health and well-being of our staff and our users first. We'll think about the alignment with the larger university about basing our decisions on the best evidence that we have at the time. And we'll think about communicating our decisions clearly about being able to change our direction to retrench on a dime. We're also thinking about the issues of equity and inclusivity and Lauren mentioned some of these to you as well. We'll care about using our budget allocation wisely and will routinely reflect on what we're learning about ourselves and about our organizations to plan for the future once this pandemic arrives. The pandemic is behind us. Now alignment, we've also spent a lot of time talking about alignment. I'm just trying to get my screen to move here all of a sudden. Ah, thank you. We spent a lot of time talking about alignment and I thought I would just bring some clarity to this. I routinely have to remind myself and my staff that the library is part of a larger university and we simply can't go rogue. We can't impose our own testing protocols. We can't impose our own HR policies that diaper too far from the central norms. So we're currently shaping discussions around three very, very broadly scoped scenarios. What I would describe initially as the return to research, the early return, and what I like to think of as not the new normal, but the next normal. So in terms of opening research, like other large Canadian research universities when the pandemic hit, we closed all of the research labs other than those specifically working on COVID. And we're now working to bring those big labs back. And so the push across car libraries is to ensure that the libraries included in these really pivotal conversations. So for McMaster, we're now moving to spin up to additional services to support research, a curbside pickup service and a free archival copying service, both of them targeted specifically to McMaster faculty, graduate students and postdocs. But at some point, and we don't know when the number of active COVID cases in our area will drop and the university will decide to welcome back some critical number of students under some very controlled physical distancing protocols. Perhaps we'll invite back all of the graduate students or perhaps we'll invite back all of the classes with under 50 students. We don't know. But this is the scenario that we like to think of as the early return. So we see three key steps involved in the early return. First, depending on which and how many students are coming back, we'll need to determine which services we can provide and how they will be delivered. Our intention at this point is really to take a digital first approach to continue to build our digital collections to deliver print as a last resort. We'll roll up potentially some additional services. I'm assuming that ILL will be first of the gate and will be ready to retreat at a moment's notice. As it's been said to me many, many times, don't roll anything up. You can't dismantle in less than 24 hours. And then we'll have to prepare. We'll have to think about how we welcome back modest numbers of staff who perform critical functions while still maintaining social and physical distancing. We'll configure their workplaces. We'll decide how many of them can come back on any given day. We'll implement the university's driven protocols for elevators and corridors. We'll negotiate the cleaning schedules with our campus facilities. We'll install the signage. We'll want to have our staff come back healthy, but we want them to stay healthy. And then we'll have to think about the public spaces. And so here we'll actually have the most contained public area for openings possible to reduce the number of staff that are required to support them. And also to help us focus our invigilation and our cleaning protocols in the smallest space. So we could start with opening our self-contained learning commons, for example, with dramatically reduced seating capacity and the flexiglass barriers at the service desk and appropriate signage. But we could live in that middle space with a subset of our total campus population for some time. And you will notice the slow approach that McMaster is taking to return. It could be January. It could be the next summer. But at some point the pandemic will end and the university will welcome back the entire community or close to the entire community back to our campus. And we call this scenario the next normal. So this is where, admittedly, the planning displays a more aspirational tone and leads us to start thinking at a more strategic level about what we want after the pandemic is over. And the truth is we pride ourselves in already being digitally savvy and already having transitioning so many of our services to digital. But, frankly, there is so much more to be done. And, frankly, as well, many of our users never got the memo in the first place. And they still thought, they still think of us as that traditional book repository. And they're charmed by all these lovely things we're doing. The pandemic has forced us to up our game. It's forced us to move to take a digital first approach to just about everything we do. And our communities are taking notice. I think the future is directing us to dramatically increase our investment in digital content to really push the open science agenda to assert our clear role with bibliometrics and research data management, artificial intelligence, virtual reality. But it's even more clear that we need to be hiring for deep tech skills throughout our organization. We need to become, as one particularly brilliant RLUK colleague mentioned on last week's digital shift manifesto webinar, we need to be trusted to work outside our traditional professional boundaries. And it's becoming increasingly clear that as we move forward, our workplaces can, will and must change dramatically. We've proven that remote workers can be extremely productive and many of our staff are interested in having flexible work arrangements continue after the pandemic is over. I hope we'll see more focus on work-life balance, more focus on online professional development and a greater attention to enriched communication platforms. I believe research libraries in Canada and around the world are more than up to the task and working together across the global library profession through IARLA will only make it all productive. So I will close with words from Margaret Drabble when nothing is sure everything is possible. Thank you so much. Thank you, Fifian. Our third and last speaker for this session is Helen Gentam, librarian and glitch archivist at Tfynig College Dublin. Helen also has extensive experience managing libraries. Apart from joining Tfynig College she helps positions at Harvard Library and the British Library, among others. Lots of tears you've hosted deliverable funds in Dublin and I'm now happy to announce her as today, today's third speaker. Helen, the screen is yours. Thank you so much, Astrid. So I will welcome you again to Dublin. I thought we might need cheering up and this is where the Liffey which is where Guinness is made on the next one please, Matt. And the river is spectacular and this is the Samuel Beckett Bridge which is even in the shape of a heart and the next one please. And Silicon Docks which was, this is Google and Facebook and so on LinkedIn which was instrumental in the recovery of the economy after 2010 which is very relevant I think. And is where the second campus of Trinity is going to be and the next one please Matt. And this is Trinity, the key points about it is that it is absolutely city centre, it's residential, it's research intensive and the next one please. The libraries as ever at the centre, there are more libraries but this cluster is the 18th century long room and then we've got a series of 20th century libraries, the next one please. The key point is it's a city centre campus and we welcome 2 million visitors a year onto campus. Some of them are commuters but a lot of tours come and one of the reasons they come is the next slide please Matt. Is the old library, we welcomed nearly a million visitors the next slide please to the long room which is regularly called the most beautiful room in Ireland and I miss it like anything. And the next slide please and they come visitors come to see the Book of Cells, it is sublime as James Joyce said it is the most Irish thing we have and the next slide please. But also we have contemporary libraries and for those of you who've been watching normal people, a starring role was our libraries particularly the Barclay library, the Brutalist library there on the left hand side. So we've got a whole mixture of libraries, next one please. We closed on the 12th of March with five hours notice, since then all staff have been working from home and we just have a minimum on site security presence. Trinity's priority from that date till now has been the academic continuity for students, the focus was on getting the cohort of students through this year. So we flipped, as others did all of our teaching online within a week, and we flipped 752 assessments and exams largely online. The next one please. Our immediate response was to accelerate access to e-resources, we put out a call out to the teaching staff, traditional e-book resources, we did virtual consultations, lots and lots of entry routes for enquiries. We put a lot of tutorials on how to access the e-resources and links to other e-resources, we pushed out the publishers free content, such as JSTOR and Cambridge University Press and so on. We also repurposed a lot of the digital content we already have, we had a rich series of online exhibitions, we pushed those out. We also had MOOCs of the Book of Kells, A History of the Book and so on. One of the issues was because all the students, it was a residential campus, the students all had to get out with eight hours notice as well, which meant a lot of our books disappeared. Fourth years when they graduate, they cannot graduate if they have not returned their books. So one of the things we've done is we've worked with the Irish Postal Service. We send out prepaid envelopes to get our material back so that they can graduate. The next one please. We also accelerated digital in the immediate short term. We have 35, actually it's nearly 50 of our staff who are working at home. We redeployed them onto accelerating the inventory to enable a major program we've got for the old library. That will bring a lot of hidden material accessible and with sort of caught the zeitgeist of digital first, we're about to launch one of our major programs which is called the Virtual Trinity Library, which is a digital research entity. It's the flagship of the first ever capital campaign for Trinity and there is enough kinetic energy in that to see us through with some good news stories for about six to 12 months. Next slide please. At the same time as we were doing that, I could see that all these different stages were going to come down the line. So the leadership team right from the beginning, we drafted some criteria for future library decision making. So it was obviously problem solving. We had to address the government guidelines, but one of our key criteria was to accelerate or do what we wanted to do anyway, our strategic directions. We wanted to be innovative. So the old library is already we're bringing in crowd counting technology, for example. Would it solve another problem in Ireland? We've got a huge demographic bulge coming up. So if we don't have so many international students could we actually then address the bulge in national students. And this could we capitalize on dissemination advocacy because I could see the financial implications coming since then this is a public record. It's a public record. We are down 40 million euro in this financial year. We're down 80 million euro next financial year. And I knew we would have to be making the case for the value of the library all along right from the right from the beginning. Access was obviously to maximize access for our users but minimize risk for staff and users. In terms of resources, we didn't want to spend a lot, but we wanted to preferably save money. Not spend a lot of money. Be collaborative. So that business with the Irish postal system was freshed out with the other Irish universities. It's very collaborative here. We tried to do it through the public libraries actually. And we also wanted to engage staff to have that sense of shared community in the problem solving. And then whatever we did as others have said, we wanted to easily reverse it because we're anticipating a spike. Next one please. So the government did on the 18th of May. This is the national reopening phase plan. There's the five phases. The university Trinity is producing the same. I have a draft one of the library. I'm not sharing it today because it hasn't been socialized with all the staff yet and therefore it wouldn't be appropriate. But we now have, we are working on this five phase resumption of activities. Trinity, we're calling it resumption of activities. There's a group chaired by the president, the provost that I'm on. Next one please. The first, having got the students through, now our university priority is the phase resumption of research activities, particularly the PhDs and the master's dissertations. Then preparing for the new academic year. I've just come from council. We have agreed. We've just decided the 28th of September. We will be starting the new academic year. And then we've also set up a group again under the president provost called Trinity futures, which is the never waste a good crisis concept. The next one please. So in terms of our researchers, we've accelerated access for more content to them. We put out a call for more ebooks specifically to the researchers having done the tutors before. We're giving, we're planning to give access to what they need is physical access to the physical material. So a click and collect or whatever. We're also looking at scan and deliver. We're also can we flip the postal service that we've got rather than bringing our undergrad books back. Can we send out material to our postgrads? And it's around that inside out library. I always liked the idea of center people and centrifugal. One of the particular issues we've got is that we're a UK electronic legal library and you could only get access to this richness of material on site. So can we get access to those that material. And then there is such a groundswell of desire to have sanctuary actually particularly from researchers who have challenges in their home lives and poor connectivity. Next slide please. So this is sort of a library like lots of people. We've we've got 3000 spaces to two meter. It's here. It's two meter social distancing. We know it's a it's a minute maximum of 20 at least 20%. We at least 80% reduction. We're looking into cellular working hard working and so on that everyone else is doing. And then this incremental access to space. So there's no access, limited access, limited access but no access to offsite storage, limited hours and so on through to full access. The issues we're finding is very much around. Even that's complex enough, but it's the interdependencies with all the university induction because we're the city centre campus. We have to do health declarations. I'm an essential worker. If I go on campus, I have to do all these declarations. We have safe zone apps for because like Imperial we're a centre for research for COVID-19. And there there's an issue around single workers and so on. So it's this challenges around the what I've called the rings of the onion. And how do I get from home? The travel people do not want to go on public transport. Then we've got the city. Then we've got the campus. Then you've got once you're in the campus and then you've got the libraries. And we've also got challenges around the old library. It has two functions. It has reading rooms for the research collections, which people then will spend a lot of time working on. And we've got all the issues around museums and galleries of opening up a centre and the shop. And we've got enabling works. For example, this crowd counting technology was going in anyway. A new book of Cells case was being done anyway. Next slide please. So then preparing for the new academic year. We are going to be hybrid. We're explicitly online and face to face work because we're saying we explicitly value face to face. That's not only for the student experience, but it's also because that's what we're hearing for the international students as well. So, and I was thinking where have I already recently we've had this debate. I've got this deja vu. And we had, we just refreshed completely. We organized, redesigned the Trinity education, the undergraduate curriculum. And we have this debate about what is the value of face to face of onsite experience. And it was all around the value of co-curriculum activities. And even then before that, I remember we had the debate at Harvard. When Harvard and MIT were setting up edX about and and there was the debate about if you go the full hog with MOOCs. Well, what is the value of residential experience? So I think we've had these these arguments before and have ended up with hybrids. The next slide please. The organizers asked us to say what's on our minds. So that was a lot of what and there's a couple of things that's really on my mind at the moment is the how. Crisis are the easy bit. We've all just had this shared experience. And now we're going to go into fragmentation. We're going to go into fracture. Right from the beginning, I knew we needed resilience. I'd sent out twice weekly emails to all staff. I think it's up to number 20 now. And on one of them, I embedded a video where I spoke about resilience and staying power and the need for having a slog strategy. And a lot of colleagues have also talked about compassion and empathy and mindfulness and so on. But the thing about the Irish situation that really, really bothers me is that the country really went bankrupt 10 years ago. Recently, we've been the fastest growing European economy and we've already got a recruitment freeze. We're going to have there will be lots of pay cuts and so on. And it's how do you and so there's very recent memory of that. I've still got staff whose mortgages are underwater. So we've got got to keep everyone the morale up and and and it's not now, but it's in six months a year, two years. And and so the whole why I didn't share that and the Trinity Library plan is because for every activity we're setting up a task and finish group to involve colleagues. And the second point about that cliche about never waste a crisis. So Trinity set up Trinity futures and I'm going to we're starting on library futures, but we're so in the weeds of doing the throws that are urgent now. I'm concerned about how do you there's a disconnect at the moment. And even one question that we had from the Trinity futures, which was how many stock of work at home. Work remotely or work 5050. And so we just very quickly back in the envelope work that out. And then the question was, and what would you use any space that was released for the ideas that came out were fantastic. Everything from a digital scholarship center, open scholarship center, a low distraction study center for students with sensory disabilities, a one stop genius bar, a public events space for cities and science conservation on view writers and scholar center. So we got so they've got all these seeming opportunities, but we're in the throes of doing. And so that that's, that's one of the things that's on my mind. The last slide. We hosted the Libra conference last year. We should have been doing ifla, but please come back to Dublin in two years time. Thank you. Good day, and for some of you. Good evening. My name is Mary Lee Kennedy and I am the executive director of the Association of Research Libraries. I'm calling you back to the next session and I look forward to the three leaders who will speak with us today. Just a brief note on the Association of Research Libraries. We are a member organization of 124 libraries and archives in major public and private universities, federal government agencies and large public institutions and Canada and the US. It is my pleasure to chair the session today with three incredible leaders Jessica Gardner from the university who is the university librarian and director of library services at the University of Cambridge. Chris Banks who's the assistant provost and director of library services at the Imperial College University of London, and Jill Ben who's the university librarian at the University of Western Australia. I also invite you to continue to contribute your questions to the Q&A function during this session that is focused on libraries in the United Kingdom and Australia. Our first speaker will be Jessica Gardner. She was appointed in April of 2017 as university librarian and director of library services at University of Cambridge. She is the second woman in history to hold this position. Jessica, many of you will be familiar with, is a committed academic librarian who has been dedicated to services that enhance student experience and provide excellence in research support. Jessica, over to you. Thank you so much and thank you Maryleaf for the lovely introduction. It is such a pleasure to join everybody. Never has this kind of international partnership been so important and we're very lucky to bring us all together. Like many, I'm working at home. I'm in my kitchen. I apologise if my husband starts going back and forth. This is the reality of working from home. So please bear with me. I'm going to talk about the UK context and I'm going to set that out a little bit on behalf of Chris Banks at Imperial and myself and then go in more deeply to information about the University of Cambridge, which is quite different in some ways from Imperial so we thought there'd be a good pairing. So in terms of the UK context, a few facts here, I guess, helpful to know that in terms of universities and university libraries, most of them were in lockdown in advance the 24th of March in the week proceeding and certainly by at Cambridge that was on the 18th of March 2020. It's a matter of record that the UK has one of the highest international death rates for COVID and that is devastating. So far that count is about 39,000 just a little bit over at the peak in April that was about 1000 plus deaths a day affecting of course whole communities. By Saturday just past the 30th of May the recorded death levels were 205 so coming down. On June the first this week on Monday was a significant milestone for the UK in terms of some of the easing of lockdown, which the government began to trigger a couple of weeks ago. For the context of libraries, I think it's worth stating that the government roadmap has a step three, which we will enter not before the 4th of July, and only if certain safety measures are met. And that triggers the reopening partial reopening control reopening of public libraries doesn't necessarily mean university libraries but as Lauren says this is going to increase the expectation levels and communities of which we are apart. I think there's a couple of things that is worth mentioning about the UK context before I go further. First is that universities in the UK mostly public institutions government funded partly at least mean we're subject to a very, very strong regulatory framework around to give on students. And we have been asked as universities provide clarity for students incoming in the coming academic year in autumn or the fall with clarity about what they can expect. There are a number of ways to do considering the level uncertainty we will face, but you can see how that creates a particular kind of pressure at the moment for our home universities. And the second kind of UK EU fact is that copyright is very different here to that in the States and schemes like Hattie Trust emergency temporary access. At the moment it's not clear how we could utilize that though some of us have certainly been looking the Cambridge context. It is an ancient university and I mentioned that simply because we've been through pandemics before both the black death and the Spanish flu and at least one a century. I mean that with no complacency. This is devastating. This is a crisis which we are all living and working through. But it does give a sense of where will we be. What can we hope for what will be different. And I think that is a helpful part of our recovery planning for all of us. I also want to emphasise. I mean like Imperial like everyone on this call we are a research intensive university with a very very strong breadth of academic coverage from sciences through to arts and humanities medicine and social sciences. And I mentioned that because there's a very strong physicality to what we do in this setting. Of course our journey through recovery and the library in its normal operation is strongly digital. It is an awful lot which we cannot replicate through remote delivery. And the scale is significant. So you're looking at a picture of the university library, which is a main site for Cambridge library services. It's vast. It sits in a large public ground. It has 22 lifts including book hoists and it's the single largest building on the university estate containing on this premises alone 8 million books in a major special collection. We also have a very widely distributed network of other libraries that fall within my responsibility including 31 separate subject faculty departmental libraries physically embedded in faculty buildings. And this conditions necessarily how we will go forward and the process for phase recovery. In lockdown everyone of course has been going through rapid acceleration of digital and that's been tiring inspiring and liberating in different parts. But there's a whole physical story which we have to address too. Now again the institutional context is slightly different perhaps than some others. Cambridge education is based around a very very strong in person student and supervision model which includes students taking part in the core of their experience in very small groups of visions one, two, three people, the tutor, as well as all the gamut of seminars, seminar groups and lectures. The university cherishes that part of the education office. It's been able to create alternatives through teams and zoom and that's worked in many ways very very well. But we have a commitment that doesn't mean so we can do it for everybody but we have a commitment to have as many students back in Cambridge as possible for the new academic year and to be having as many facilities running safely with safe occupancy and social distancing protocols. All this is subject to all the rigorous safety checks and indeed the government easing of the lockdown but I thought in terms of context, there is an expectation for us that will be back in some form on campus by that point. And in this summer there is a phased reopening of research labs and with that a limited phased reopening around some physical library collections and I'll come back to that. What is the library mean doing? I mean versions of what we've heard wonderfully from Lauren and Vivian so far. I mean our tagline has really been about keeping the libraries open online and bringing the library to you and at the heart of our recovery plan safety but keeping people teaching, learning and researching. That enhancement to digital services and resources to be all touched on online content increasing through purchase and temporary access arrangements, accelerated online reading lists, online induction skills, online chat, online inquiries, all core to what we were doing already but amplified and accelerated in this time and we won't go back from that of course. That has been part of the opportunity that we have seized but we are moving to reintroduce or at least expand access to physical collections which are not available remotely electronically. And through this, never more important in our times, both in relation to Black Lives Matter and digital exclusion, striving for how we can approach what we do with inclusion. And I think that aspect of digital exclusion that has and have nots is going to be one of the things that changes how we work and the priorities and the emphasis for all time. In terms of how we are doing it, like others, we've been using scenario planning and I found this really, really useful, particularly as I'm lucky enough to be a member of the university's strategic recovery task force. So able to think about how I align what the library to do with what the university is trying to do. But one of the benefits of that as well has been this close kind of thinking to the different matrix, different professionals, different expertise experts around me to be looking at things in different angles. And scenarios have been so helpful in terms of just stopping one from going down a narrow route and keeping in mind the uncertainty, the need to be able to retreat, the need to be able to change, as well as thinking about what is common to all those scenarios. And for us, as so many in libraries, one thing that is really common has got to be ensuring a very strong digital layer of content and services, whatever else we do. The leaderships we mentioned a couple of times and I have found like others is to be really important to think about one's own contribution in this space. The need to be even more visible even if remote the compassion and the kindness and the generosity which is essential to each other and to be able to model that with others and with our teams. But at the same time, a willingness to rely on a much more distributed authority in classic kind of crisis management, trusting expertise, functional experts. It may not be about rank. That has been a good lesson and we've gained a great deal from it. Through that, a focus on community and welfare and a sense of being collectively in something together. A pause briefly on this slide underneath all the phasing and all the planning that we're doing are some rigorous detailed safety tests which are being used across Cambridge. A test one to ensure we can open up every one of those 350 buildings that in many cases were closed completely. The main university library had a skeleton staff for facilities and security present throughout and that has made our position now much simpler. But a test to rigorous safety tests that will make transparent to our teams about the risk assessments and safety plans for getting activity restarted in whatever measured controlled partial way that is possible. We have a phased recovery plan very much in the knowledge that our movement through these phases may not be linear. It may be very slow or it could leapfrog and combine phases. So at all times thinking about the flexibility between this. Now I'm just going to talk about the university library that main facility alone because the faculty departmental library is fit under this framework but each according to their site will have slightly different processes through it. So we're actually at this preparation stage at the minute. We're looking ahead in line with the government roadmap in the UK to potential time if safely it is triggered in early July or mid July to be beginning to put some of the services that others have talked about. Click and collect is our term for curbside collection but also a skeleton staff on site serving that and scanning and delivery services and external book drop returns. And these are what we're calling zero or no contact phases and that could last a long time. But at the same time we're thinking about the protocols the arrangements or the work needs to go underneath to move through further controlled phases to continue to expand access to collections not available electronically. And it is about content here. It's not about space at this point. We're not trying to open to be a study space. We're looking at how we can phase in enhanced access material to help research to continue and to plan ahead for teaching. And then that kind of resetting, you know, what does the future of our libraries look like? I think I think we have really grasped the sense that there's no return to normal exactly as we were prior to COVID-19. The summit will be very hard. But I think for many in the conversations we've had across staff in different kind of consultation forms that we've had that there are elements of this which are going to make working lives better once we are through the other side. It's a much more flexible approach to how we approach our working lives and the inner university has been very strong on being present. Great opportunity to think about how we might combine a combination of remote working and stop commuting in some cases will be a great relief where it is possible. A different balance point with digital and physical, I think is one of the biggest takeaways for us. We have accelerated rapidly in a way that I never thought we could and a way that I think was hard for us before this. I'm making no virtue of where we are now, but it has given us greater potential to think above the physical estate. I think that is also true nationally and I think that something as RLUK will want to come back to thinking above the campus outside of our physical estate. What opportunities does that open up for us for collaborative venture? Certainly it's making us think locally as well. We're thinking of course about the long haul and the long process globally that we'll be dealing with significant financial challenge and a mental health aftermath of COVID-19 that is going to be with us for a long time and that compassionate leadership, that kindness and that generosity must be how we lead as we go forward. I think we're changed by this and sometimes that is hard and other times it is about how we may be willing to think differently. I think there's possibilities but at the moment I must admit we're in that very hard stage of trying to work through the complexity of phasing a reopening plan in a way that is safe, it must be above all else, but also one that really helps to bring the libraries to all our students and our staff. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Des, that is fabulous and I think sets us up very well for our next speaker who is Chris Banks, the Socialist Provost and Director of Library Services at Imperial College. Chris has a particular interest in open science and open scholarly communications which speaks to the one of the opportunities before us that we may be able to accelerate during this challenging time and is enjoying many publisher innovations which have arisen from the UK and the open access policy landscape. So Chris, I hand it over to you now. Thank you very much. So I'm going to talk about lifting lockdown in London and recovery and reset. So Imperial is a very different institution to Cambridge. We focus exclusively on science, engineering, medicine and business so we don't have the strong social sciences arts and humanities that many of the other research libraries have. We're here a little bit closer. We're the little red blob over on the left hand side. We in fact have seven libraries altogether, one in South Kensington and five of our libraries are actually in hospital settings. We are landlocked. We have an incredibly, so this is the South Kensington campus and we are very, very densely populated and landlocked. It's a very, very busy campus. So we're in a densely populated capital city. Very few students or staff live within cycling distance, let alone walking distance of campus. Our main campus is at the heart of one of London's busiest tourist spots. That's London, South Kensington's Albertopolis. So it's Prince Albert. And as I said, five of our libraries are in hospital settings. So life after lockdown, we were the last of the front facing services to close our doors, the library was. There was a feeling within our senior management at the time that the library being open was a symbol of the university being open. And I'm very happy to talk privately to others about the experience that that gave us. College has not closed completely. Covid-19 research has continued through lockdown and certainly in the UK imperial research has been in the news for a variety of reasons, most of them good. This is the one green space in campus. It's very empty at the moment and you're looking at our central library, which is the main and the largest of the libraries. So our impact of lockdown has been, as many of you, the rest of you have said, on study spaces, on access to equipment, on our physical collections and for the National Health Service staff and other non-university users. It's meant a very significant reduction in the access to our collections because they often can only use our online collections on site. And it's been very bad for plants. Now, just to give you a sense of the print, our print collections in terms of in the context of our UK library. So this is the total catalogue print collections of our UK libraries and Cambridge and Oxford are right over on the left hand side. And there's imperial print collections. We are very, very heavily digital. Even in London, we have one of the smallest print collections. So in terms of our readiness for lockdown, we have significant digital collections. Over 91% of our budget is spent on online content. We have a long standing flexible working from home policy and many of our staff are used to working from home and have been set up to work from home. We had already been using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint for some considerable months. And we already have prepared and delivered a number of online courses to match in with some of the online only course delivery that some of our Imperial colleagues are doing, particularly our global masters in public health and also our business school international business school courses, which are primarily online. We had a business continuity plan. We had just spent a year working about it, working on it. And in fact, we were about to run our first desktop exercise. We had a date in the diary. It was on pandemic preparedness. In terms of what we've done there for our sustain, many of our services are sustainable and they've moved sustainably online during lockdown. For collection development, we are further sourcing electronic where possible. And we've also got an agreement with one of our suppliers that where we can only source print that the supplier will send the print directly to the student. So that's been a useful backstop for us. All of our inquiry teaching, training and advice services have moved online. We've been scouring all of our reading lists as we are about to roll over the leganto reading lists. We've been scouring those for print so that we can work with colleagues on alternatives. And our research support colleagues have been very, very active, particularly for some of the COVID-19 researchers, both getting them access to some of the more difficult databases so that they could do some economic modelling right through to helping publish preprints of some early papers. So report nine, which is one of the ones that made the press a lot. I think has had more downloads in its first month than any other single item in our repository has had in its lifetime. At the moment, college is working on ramping up research. Individual safety is paramount with being cautious. There's a lot of work about building readiness, including buildings that have had no people in them at all, as many of yours have. And looking even at making sure that all the water systems are completely flushed through so that we don't have any worries about Legionella or anything like that. We've just completed a two week set of pilots, which have been aimed at testing some research activities and a lot is being learned from that. There are some particular research projects which actually use up to 12 different lab spaces with lab equipment. So it's very, very complex. There's not a direct correlation between individual research research activity and a research lab. We're learning about the new normal and managing expectations and there's also some early work on piloting COVID-19 testing for those returning to campus. As I mentioned, we have five of our libraries are in hospital settings and a number of those also contain a large number of research labs as well. We have our own testing facilities and we are piloting a scheme, which might mean that on day one of returning, the thing that you do is collect a test kit and then overnight you get your test result and then people can return to work beyond that. We're also using a lot of data to support decision making. So this is just a picture of a year's worth of activities in teaching spaces and from that it's just the top 15 events by month. You can see the big yellow blobs in the middle in August and September are our major conference seasons and then you can see the green. So this shows us the type of activity that goes on in our teaching spaces. We're also looking at actual occupancy of these spaces rather than planned occupancy. We can see, as probably many of you are familiar with, that over the term the numbers who actually rock up to lectures diminish over terms. So we've now got a year's worth of data from an occupancy monitoring project that I launched a year or so ago as part of my space role. So we've got a lot of really valuable data to show what actually really happens on campus, which can also help with our planning. We've developed some dashboards that can take data from our estates plans. It can take data from our timetabling system, from our room booking system, and from actual occupancy. And it can look at what social distancing modelling might look like. And it's emerging that we probably have to reduce our on-campus activity by about 75%. But of course everything is interconnected and we can't think of things in silos. So people may be in practical lab sessions, they may be collecting books, they may be printing assignments, they may be eating, studying, they may be moving around. We need to think in terms of overall how much can our campus manage. We need to think very much about the flow in and around our very landlocked campus. Our campus that very rarely has two way or two sets of staircases into the same large space. So it's dramatically reconsidering what we can do on campus and prioritising activities that require some kind of practical in lab activity. In library, one of our big challenges early on was just selecting the scenarios that we worked to. There were so many, many possibilities that we might have worked to. But in the end we came down to three ramp-up scenarios. So we're now in the closed only, we've got everything's online. We then have what we call an Occupy, which is where we manage all of the shelving. All the stuff that was returned before we left and is just sitting around on trolleys and all the stuff that's in halls and such like. And we're also looking at a scan and send service, plus possibly an RFID project because we were shortly to RFID the whole collection anyway. And the technology we're looking at has the possibility of students self issuing using their own mobile phone technologies, which would avoid all of that multiple people touching the same screen in order to issue them materials to themselves. Then our next phase would be an open, I think that's what you're calling the curbside, but it would be a click and collect service. And then finally a socially distanced studying environment. And we're currently working our way through our plans of all of our buildings to mark out what spaces we think we could open up for study purposes. A huge amount of work, as others have said, in supporting our staff and in managing those longer term expectations that many of us are going to be working from home for an awfully long time yet. We all, in London, we have to ask ourselves, why would we get on a piece of public transport and potentially risk others or risk key workers not being able to use the public transport. So we're thinking very hard about that, but also working very closely with some quite significant mental health issues, I think as Jess has already. And then I think we have a real opportunity to reset our relationship with the publishers. We need to, I think, tear up an awful lot of our current agreements that are based on historic prints bend that are based on factors that simply no longer pertain. And that need to look at the reality that our finances were going to be very, very significantly changed over the coming years, and it gives us a real opportunity to reset that relationship. The UKRI, which is one of the main, the overarching body over the UK funding institutions, is having a fundamental reassessment of its open access policy. And that combined with COVID gives us a huge opportunity, I think, within the UK to reset those relationships with publishers. We do look forward to seeing our lines again and getting back on campus. But in the meantime, we can see them virtually. Thank you very much indeed for your time. Thank you so much Chris. I'm now going to introduce Jill Ben, who's the university librarian at the University of Western Australia. Jill has significant experience in the leadership of libraries and higher education. And an excellent understanding of the needs of teachers, learners and researchers. Thank you everyone and thanks for having me. It's great to be part of this event. And I'd like to just encourage our Australian and New Zealand colleagues who it's very late for or very early, depending on your perspective at the moment. I'd also like to acknowledge the challenges just being faced by all of the colleagues on this call and the tremendous innovation that's been displayed. And especially our North American colleagues at this difficult time, our thoughts are with you. So very briefly for context, the University of Western Australia is one of Australia's oldest universities. And had a fairly traditional, mostly face-to-face teaching model, at least pre-COVID. It's a research intensive university. It's ranked in the top 100 in the world. We've got 25,000 students and we're located on the beautiful position of the banks of the Swan River here in Perth. Additionally, just for a little bit of context, we're in a really different position here where I am in Western Australia. While there have been very significant disruptions where we are, we haven't experienced the same health crisis that we have seen in other parts of the world. In late March and early April it looked like we would be experiencing that and we could see what was happening internationally. But as you can see, over time the curve has really flattened here in Western Australia and in Australia more broadly. And that's largely because of very strict lockdown measures which have affected our university campuses. As well as mandatory government quarantine measures in hotels that are enforced for returning citizens as well as border closures. And at the moment you can't freely travel within Australia, our borders are largely closed. So for this reason, I just wanted to give you that context because I'm very much going to be focusing on the recovery aspect which is where we're moving to today. I'm also going to be talking mostly about the institutional context. But I did want to point out that the Council of Australian University Librarians who is made up of the 39 university libraries around Australia as well as our age New Zealand colleagues has undertaken a survey of its members which shows what the current scenario is in Australia. And so if this is something you're interested in, I might put the link there. But I think what this data shows is there's a lot of diversity in the Australian and New Zealand sector. Some libraries have closed and are still closed, at least their physical buildings have closed. They're very much open online, while others never fully closed. And UWA is certainly in that position. So like many of you, we had some initial rapid cases around sort of mid-March. And a range of lockdown measures were then came into place at the direction of the federal government which were enacted by state governments around the country. At that time, I refer to that as stage one. It was about restriction and very much about library reinvention. Very rapidly moving our services online. This is our video kiosk in one of our libraries. I actually took this photo today, but this was rapidly implemented as we realised we had to do something quite different to what we'd had before. In this first stage, about 90% of UWA's library staff began working off campus and that was done in a matter of days. I think it showed the preparedness for digital delivery and dexterity that we had been working towards for a number of years that that was fairly seamless. For stage two, I've called this cautious recovery and that's really the stage that we're in now. So in stage one, we did close three of our six physical libraries and that meant we were able to better manage the physical distancing requirements that government really insisted that were necessary for libraries, academic libraries to stay open. Public libraries around Australia, of course, were closed. So on the fourth of May at UWA, those closed libraries reopened, albeit with some restrictions which I'll talk about in a moment. This included 24-7 access to support students during our examination period. About 80% of our staff, I would say, are still working off campus, but we are starting to reinstate some services and, as of Monday, that will include our document delivery and interlibrary loan service, which we've paused during this time. And then we really are now planning for stage three, which I've called Reset and Restore, and pending a second wave here in Australia, we really will, I think, start to see some of the restrictions lift and I think we'll probably see about 85% of our staff return to campus. So much of the focus over the last nine weeks has really been about managing the risk because, as I said, we made the decision to keep some of our university libraries open during this time. And these are just some of the measures that we had to put in place. They range from reducing the number of seats, ensuring that only our UWA staff and students accessed the building. And that enabled us to limit the numbers of people in the buildings, as well as ensure contact tracing in the event that we did have a positive case on campus. They included lots of other measures. I won't go into them here, but I will say that it was quite challenging at some stages for students to adhere to what was required from a physical distancing perspective. And the library staff were quite creative with the signage, as you can see, in terms of the 1.5 metre message. Absolutely critical during this phase was out the support of security staff on campus who were in the libraries and are still in the libraries, ensuring that students are observing the physical distancing requirements. Initially, there was a big drop-off in the number of visits to the libraries. We would experience about 75,000 visits a week to the six libraries at UWA. You can see there a big drop-off as the number of cases in Western Australia started. But as the curve has flattened, you can see we're having more and more students returning to campus. And that has posed some challenges that we are actively managing. The other amazing thing is just the incredible increase in the use of our digital services. During this time, we have opened up some of our services traditionally only available to our staff or postgraduate students, like digitisation on demand to our undergraduate students. That has seen a lot of demand, as you would expect. A lot of, as others have talked about, demand for textbooks in digital format and incredible increases in things like our chat and online inquiry services during this time. So, we're really now in this recovery phase at the university. And this is very much being led by a university recovery management team. When we were heading into the lockdown measures, the library didn't really have a visible role at university level. But I think because of the way in which we've demonstrated we can manage this difficult scenario, we've been invited onto a number of the work streams of this recovery management team. And this has been fantastic because it's been an opportunity for us to show leadership, but also contribute to the direction of recovery. And we're represented on the four work streams there, and I'm leading the venues and events stream. The recovery is very much being managed around these five core principles, safety first, an incremental return to campus, giving people choice about whether to maintain their flexible work arrangements and timing, and acknowledging that we're not going to get everything right. We're still in a very ambiguous and complex situation, and we need to learn from experience and revises we go. The university has created some really fantastic tools, and they're really guiding the university library's planning for return to work. These include a leader guide. All staff now are expected to complete an online induction, whether they're working on campus already or planning to come to campus. Completion of that is being tracked. Safe occupancy assessments have been conducted, so we know exactly how many people we can have in any space at any one time. The library's actively managing that through our people counting system, our automated system to ensure that we have the right number of people. And of course, that is challenging because those requirements are changing at a state level, and we're having to revise those as we go. We also have been required to develop what's known as COVID-19 safety plans. That has been a tremendous thing to consult with staff on. You might have noticed we have something called COVID Take Five, so every morning everybody who's working on campus gets together online and talks about what are the five things that I've noticed in regards to health and safety, and this is giving our staff an opportunity to raise issues that then we're actively managing around safety. And the other really fantastic thing the university has done is define a return to campus framework. This is very much aligned with our state government phases, and it's starting to give staff some certainty about what they can expect. And for the majority of our staff, we are saying to them now, you know, pending a second wave, we're not expecting you to be back on campus until late July to prepare for semester two, so that's been a really fantastic thing to work towards. So there's certainly, I think, some challenges in recovery. While the number of cases in Western Australia is low, there are some still. There was one case today, so it's not completely eradicated, and we have to be ready to roll back as others have said. But at the same time, we also have to try and instill some level of confidence that we have the management mechanisms in place to be able to start delivering our library services once again. I've talked about the changing federal state requirements that has certainly been very challenging. Going into lockdown was relatively easy because it was just a matter of working to whatever the guidelines were at the time. Now these keep changing, the dates keep changing, our planning needs to be agile. The financial recovery is going to be very significant around the world, but certainly for Australian universities, we've relied heavily on international students. And because of travel restrictions, it's very unlikely that they'll be able to return. This is going to pose a real challenge for us, and so we'll really have to think through what are the strategies for that. And there's a number of things being proposed at my own university. These include things like the potential for all staff to work a nine-day fortnight and to take a 10% pay cut for 12 to 18 months to assist the university in its financial recovery. This is going to have a significant impact on the way we deliver library services, and we're seeing a lot of recruitment, moratoriums, restrictions in lots of different budgets as well. But of course I think there's going to be a tremendous array of opportunities in recovery, and I think other speakers have covered these more flexible ways of working. A few years ago we refurbished our main library and we moved 50 staff into another library. I can't imagine ever doing that again. We will just move those staff to working from home. We've seen such tremendous innovation and agility from our library teams. It's just been so inspiring. And how do we keep hold of that and ensure it continues for the future? And I just can't see us going back in terms of our virtualisation of services, particularly based on the increase in use of some of those services. And finally, I think that opportunity for leadership, the opportunity for the library really to play a role at the most senior level of the university in this recovery is something that we really need to take up. So that's a very brief overview of what's happening, and I'm very happy to be contacted if you'd like any more information. Well, hello. Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. My name is Lorraine Harrycomb, and I'm the Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries here in Austin. And I too want to just say thank you to Ayala for inviting me to participate in this section of today's webinar. My role will be to open up some of the questioning as well as to talk through the Mentimeter, which is now displayed. Hopefully you can all see this. I just want to say a few quick, make a few quick comments. And that is that I'm so impressed and appreciate and want to acknowledge the resilience of librarians despite the crisis. I know it's like this are so important for us. I always think of the library profession and librarians as oxygen. We don't think about it, we just share ideas, and it's okay to do that. I think we are so unique in that way. So despite the rapid closure of library facilities, we were probably better equipped than anybody on our campuses to move on to the platform. That's in part, thanks to the historical investments that we've made in technology, in e-resources, in professional development of our staffs, the expertise they bring to the table, and perhaps most importantly the trust partners that we are on our campuses. I think the campuses and the faculty joined us on the platform. We were there and then they came. And I think it's such an opportunity for us to leverage despite the challenges to move on towards reopening in a refashioned way. So with that, I am going to turn to question one of the Mentimeter. This is just giving us some demographics of who responded to the Mentimeter. Not surprisingly, we see most of the RLUK colleagues here followed by several of my ARL colleagues here in the United States. So welcome to you all. This is very easily understood. Next slide, please. I'm trying to get to the questions as quickly as we can. These are some of the, well, not unexpectedly, many of the colleagues today come from libraries at research institutions. Thank you. Next slide. I think as we listen to today's speakers, it's not surprising to see that a phase that the opening is probably the most popular approach in thinking about opening up of facilities on campuses again. And this has both to do with the experience we've had in moving very quickly to online and now having more time perhaps to plan for what a post or a continuing COVID landscape might look like for us in terms of operations, our services and our spaces. Next slide, please. This question referred to what would be the priorities to focus on and it's, as you can see here, it's all over the map, so to speak. But we do see that spaces seem to dominate a little bit here. We've heard several people speak about spaces that we have invested in over years, very exciting spaces to create the hubs and the gathering spaces. And now we need to rethink what those spaces might look like in a post COVID environment or in a continuing COVID environment. Clearly, the financial situation for all of us weighs heavily on our minds and will definitely dictate impact and shape what we will be able to do, but what an opportunity. Doing this is not unusual for us as librarians. We are routinely struggling and wrestling with making decisions with reduced budgets. And so I'm pleased to see that we are all in the same, we are all in this together when it comes to figuring out how to reimagine what we might do with reduced budgets. Even as the sentimentimeter is dynamic, we see the same priorities reflected here. Next slide, please. To what extent you feel that perceived role of the library has changed. This was surprising. The majority last night when I looked at this, the majority of people felt that it was just too early to tell. I think now today we see that there is a sense that the perceived role of the library has changed and that preformed notions are challenged. I think we have an opportunity here to expand and enhance that narrative and that perception perhaps on our campuses. Next slide, please. What impact do you expect COVID-19 to have had on your library operations and services? Over and over today we heard in different quotes and in different presentation the opportunity for the library to really step up and to become a catalyst to accelerate some of the changes we have planned and to now execute them and implement them in a much more accelerated fashion than before. Next slide, please. This may be the last slide. I think this was an opportunity just to provide some comments on other ideas that people wanted to share. I think you can read here. I don't want to take too much time here because I really want to get to the questions. But has there been a wholesale change in attitude among university administrators and libraries on working remotely? I would hope that this is true. I wish I could take credit for this, but a colleague of mine once said, this is an opportunity for us to make sure we are at the table and not on the menu. I hope we can leverage that opportunity given the wonderful work that libraries are doing to really continue to embrace the core values of supporting the mission of teaching, learning and research on our various campuses. Okay. I believe the slides will be made available and this mentor perhaps too. So I am going to now go to the questions. We have 18 questions. We probably not get to all of them. And so I'm going to select some. Some of them are very specifically asked of some of our speakers. And so I will select the first one here. I hope I'm doing this correctly. Let me see. Which question are you seeing now? Hi, Lorraine. So how are students being consulted about reopening of library spaces? Okay. I haven't heard a whole lot around surveying students. We heard a lot about what faculty need and what students are using. But I wonder if any one of you would like to speak to how we are engaging students? Any of the speakers? I can certainly speak about it from an imperial perspective very briefly. We have students on every single one of our task forces that are working on all elements of reopening up campus. So online readiness student experience. There are task forces for all of the on-campus experiences. So we have a really good and engaged group of students working with us. And sometimes co-chairing the work package. Anybody else would like to respond? I can say from the University of Washington that we, I mentioned briefly, have had a participatory design group of students, six students that we've been paying to participate in that project, focused solely on online but we've been getting a lot of feedback from them about reopening physically as well. We also are enlisting in all of our advisory committees so the graduates do that on a graduate, etc. Thank you Lauren. I'll just start from Cambridge. We've been working with our graduate union and our students union and doing focus groups with postgraduate research students in this stage given the time here we are to try and really gauge where we can focus our attention. I can just add from McMaster that like the previous speaker, the focus has really been on our graduate students or undergraduate students. You know, they're quite satisfied with the demands of graduate students for access particularly to collections has been the most pressing issue. With the undergraduate students we've been interacting with them on social media and having some conversations with their student government. Thank you. Lauren, I'll come back to you. I'm going to ask you specifically for you, Lauren. Are there any services that you haven't been able to offer besides access to physical collections and access to building or study space? Do you think that people are attending virtual events because they have time in a way that won't exist when we go back on site? Wonderful questions. So yes, the collection does seem to be the primary issue, particularly special collections. We are hearing a lot from folks around that. It has encouraged us to think differently about how we might be able to make at least the content of the materials available. So it will likely shift our thinking as we return. In terms of people coming to events, that's sort of part of the question. The things that we can't offer in person might not look exactly the same online. So these events often look really different to you. So a piece of it might be that it fits into people's lives more easily. That this version is better for them than the in-person version might have been. But also even at the moments where everyone was most crunched to develop their new online curriculum or whatever it was that they were doing, we still were seeing much more turnout for things not connected to that work at all. We had a publicly engaged scholarships symposium while people were transitioning their courses and we had an outstanding turnout that was much better than our physical registration had been. So I think that, yes, probably more people, but because of this moment, and people might have the time, but also we've still seen more than we would have anticipated. I think this is a trend that we see all over in terms of even faculty who would never sign up to come and be seen to take a class in a physical space and now signing up because it can be done asynchronously. And they could be less visible or more invisible. Excellent point, yes. Babin, I'm going to come back to you. This question is specifically, you prompted this question. The post-COVID strategic slides talk about building expertise in artificial intelligence, VR, and data science historically. It's been hard to recruit deep technical expertise into the library sector. So, and part of that reason is we can't pay them enough. How do you think libraries can position themselves to be as appealing as possible to those kind of expert practitioners? It's an excellent question and one that we spend a lot of time thinking about here at McMaster and I know in all of our institutions where we found some success is in partnering with high performance computing, which is one of the premier research groups on campus. And so, for example, we have our two newest hires that we're doing right now, one for research data management and one for bibliometrics. We're partnering with that other institution on campus and that's really helping us. We're also trying really hard not to create these as library-focused roles because we're satisfying campus-wide needs. So, we're using generic job descriptions that are used by central IT that are for business analysts and then just catering them to the library world. And in doing so, we're able to use the same pay scales that are used elsewhere on campus to attract people with good tech skills. It's an excellent question. Thank you, Viviane. Another staffing-related question here. Do panel members anticipate a need to amend staffing structures to take account of the next normal where digital has even greater importance and budgetary constraints mean that it may be difficult to get permission to recruit staff who may be under-employed on physical space management? So, we're talking about staffing structures that may change in the next normal. Viviane, I think you were the one who introduced the term next normal. So, it might be my job to start it off then. It's an excellent question. It relates in some ways to my last response in terms of even where we're putting our emphasis in our new hires where the roles that we're pushing first are the digital roles in part because we can on-board them in a remote way. It's impossible to on-board someone to do physical work. So, it's pushing some of those roles to the background. At the moment, we're not envisioning a change in the structure, but we're certainly envisioning a change in emphasis. And we're envisioning, looking at some of the job postings with a new set of eyes with an expectation that this work will be being done. It has to be able to be done remotely because we don't anticipate that we're going to be able to move away from this pandemic any time soon. I think we will have hello. I think there's probably an acceleration of the direction of travel we were going in anyway in terms of skilling and so on. Being pragmatic, one of the things we've done for people who haven't been fully occupied, working from home, is we created CPD, frankly, to do more work on that. Thank you. Any others who want to respond? Yeah, I'll just add the rain that at UWA, we've had a scheme called Job Match, which has been about trying to match up skill sets across the university for roles which might be vacant where people aren't fully occupied. And some of the thinking is that that Job Match scheme is going to be going on in the future. It's going to be occupied. And some of the thinking is that that Job Match scheme will actually continue post-COVID to just look at where the resources are required as we recover. Thank you, Jill. Okay. I'm going to this next question, which is digitally is great. Nobody could deny it, but in our print collections, our print collections are also at the heart of what many of us do as our inspiring democratic welcoming spaces. How do we ensure that our print collections and our study spaces don't become neglected in the months and years to come? I will say huge investments in spaces, as I said earlier, certainly in our collections as well. I'm at a library with more than 10 million items myself. And we have, like many others, built storage facilities. But still, faculty would like to have access to that. We know there are book disciplines that rely on that and there are librarians who absolutely want to return because they want to work with their materials. Anybody want to take on this one? I was just going to add that perhaps one of the things that begins to shift in our minds around this is a completely agree with you, Colin. Our physical physicality matters enormously. It matters to disciplines in different kind of ways. Outside the arts, humanities and social sciences, but particularly within that set of disciplines. And I think the one of the things that changes is actually thinking, you know, how do we open up those possibilities in different ways again? So I hope that we reach a point with this virus where we're able to sufficiently phase in opening that we can have access in a physical way to that material. And I'm sure we'll get there. But also I think it should make us think about our digitisation programmes, how we engage with these collections online in different ways. And actually both of those things are kind of amplified versions of our strategy anyway because of the opportunities then to reach new audiences online. So I don't think that replaces the need for that in person. But I do think this crisis has also opened up some thinking about how we might actually extend access to just for those reasons you say because they're so important. Anybody else like to respond? Yeah, I'll just add Lorraine that, you know, one of my biggest fears is lots of emotional decisions that were made and one of them was the point in time where we restricted access to our libraries just to our staff and students. That was a really hard decision to make. And at the time I thought, is this the end? You know, we've seen such tremendous use of the library and is this the beginning of the end? And, you know, as our classes all went online and we saw that return to the library, you know, all of our classes are online at UWA, but yet we had 22,000 visits last week. The students still want to come despite the fact that classes are online. So I think, you know, we've had, while most students are pretty happy with the virtual kiosks in the libraries, they're saying we want someone to talk to. So we're really trying to leverage some of that data, some of these experiences from our students internally within the university to promote the important role that we play. Thank you. Lorraine, I also think that we, all of us, I think, have had to approach this in not a panic, but a rush. And if we'd had some time to plan the measures in terms of continuing access to stock and so on, yes, there are national rules and regulations that we have to follow. But we may well have taken a different approach from what we've had to do, which has effectively just gone straight into shutdown. And that would be something I think that we would want to think about for the future as we have other incidents of this sort of situation. How might we address the physical needs? And I think that that is something we shouldn't forget, even though we're moving as fast as we can to the digital. Thank you. I'm curious to see how impressed I was with my colleague who spoke about their pandemic work before the pandemic had started. I think we are all quite envious of that individual's labour. Yes. OK. Jill, this one is for you. Many including you think, many including you, I think, have mentioned the benefits of working from home. So I'm curious as to why you've decided to bring back so many staff on site. Are there particular reasons for this? Thank you. I think actually some of the demand to come back on site is actually coming from our staff themselves. And one of the principles that we have in terms of the university recovery is about choice. I do think that we'll see 85% of our staff working on campus in some capacity. But I think many of them will maintain some time fraction working from home. And I think that, you know, as time goes on, I think we'll see more working from home. I think it's being particularly successful for lots of teams and individuals, much more successful than we thought. So I think we will maintain that. But as I say, we've got lots of requests. In some instances, we're having to say to people, you know, you need to wait a couple of more weeks until we can be confident of a safe environment. Thank you, Chell. And this question, I'm looking at the time, we have exactly five minutes left. So I'm going to post this question because I think it relates to another question earlier that was asked from Vivian, which I did in post. So let me post this question and read it because Vivian, the question earlier, had to do with curbside pickup. What does that look like? I've heard click and collect, which I like, as another way of stating what that looks like. So for any panelist, we're receiving a lot of pressure from some faculty in regards to stack access as back to the disciplinary needs. There's inconclusive evidence on the virus and quarantine time for print materials. So we are taking a very conservative approach for returns. But stack browsing is much more difficult to plan around. If any participants began wrestling with this aspect of access, and even if it is still several months down the road, how do we plan for that browsing in the stats experience? At the University of Washington, we did curbside pickup for about three days before we fully shut down. So as the buildings were closing, we had a good sort of trial run. As I believe Robin was pointing out, it was very rushed the way we did it. So we've had plenty of time to evaluate how that went, and we're going to use that information when we inevitably open up curbside before the full building opens. The browsing the stacks is a really interesting challenge. We haven't gotten that pushback yet, mostly because the pushback we're getting is the demand for curbside pickup. So I'm anticipating that once we roll that service out, we'll begin hearing that same complaint or need really from faculty. One thing that has struck me, I'm relatively new in my role within the UW libraries. I was director for the Tacoma campus previously, and one thing I have learned since getting to campus is that if faculty want materials, they get it much more quickly from our remote service than from our building, because our building is sort of a labyrinth and complicated to navigate. So I've begun working on talking points around how we can get the materials to you faster if you request, especially if it's already off site. So we're using this as an opportunity to talk about speed of access, which is not the same issue as browsability, but I have found that that's resonated with a number of the faculty I've spoken with. Thank you, Laurence. I can say at McMaster we had at least one request to tour the stacks from an individual who promised to wear his own hazmat suit. Fortunately, most of our users are not that desperate, and I think our ability to do some chapter and scanning has helped, but the desperation is there. Thank you. Anybody else? We may have time for one question, and this is one that maybe I can try. Mary Lee, Vivian. I'm not aware of any UK libraries who are open at the moment. Lucy's asking this, wondering if US and Canadian colleagues could comment on how many libraries are open in their countries. I'll start off, and I'll ask others to jump in. I know we have several colleagues from the ARL here. As far as I know, most of us are in planning mode for the fall, either to come back as our universities reopen in hybrid or potentially physical mode. Most of us are closed still, and certainly for my own institution, we are totally online this summer. Summer school starts tomorrow, and our fall semester will start in August. We do not anticipate opening until later this summer, just for curbside pickup, for example. Others? I can say in Canada that there are a few that are in the process of planning to open small portions of libraries. In particular, it seems to be a need to provide individuals with access to internet. It seems to be a big push, but it's certainly starting to happen in areas of our very vast country that had very few instances of COVID. Are there any others who want to comment on that? OK. We're right on time here, so I want to thank you all for your excellent responses and to those who posed the questions for your excellent questions. This has been an excellent webinar for all of us, and it's wonderful that we could share this globally via technology, and I was happy to meet so many new colleagues this morning myself, and I want to say thank you and wish you all well as we continue this phase of reopening. I'm reimagining what we might come back as. Matt, over to you. I think he's actually over to Robin. Well, thank you, Matt. I think Lorraine has just nicely ended effectively, but just to say, just to echo my rates, a huge thank you to our speakers and session leaders for the fascinating and very valuable presentations and discussions and which have drawn out such that a range of experience and different approaches is exactly what we thought when we planned this event. And I just also want to take the opportunity to thank the E-Research Libraries UK executive team who facilitated the event and to say that we're, of course, to remind you that we'll make the full recording and the survey results available online. So we now return to our local recovery programmes enriched by this exchange of experience. I think we should also remember we need to focus above institution and Jess made this point very strongly. I think I'll collaborate with approaches to reinforce our wider information ecosystem and I'm sure that will be a fruitful area for IRLA to progress. And I want to thank our participants, everyone who came today on behalf of IRLA for attending the event. I suspect we might gather again about perhaps a year to 18 months at a similar event this time to explore the changed library landscape and evolved services that have sprung from this difficult time.