 I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of CNI and what you've joined us for today is a sort of a summing up and synthesis session for week two of our fall 2020 virtual member meeting. We'll be doing the initial sum up and then we'll take comments or further observations from our attendees. I think for this session we won't bother with the Q amp a just use the chat or after I open it up if you'd like to make some comments verbally, you can just raise your hands and I'll turn on the audio or Diane will turn on the audio. So, let me preface this with a few remarks, a few framing remarks. This is something new that we're trying with this with this virtual fall meeting to try and put a little closure and synthesis on each of the themed weeks for scheduling reasons we're not going to do it for week four, but we'll do it for all the other weeks. I scheduled these for an hour because I didn't really know how long they were going to take, and how long it takes really depends to a great extent on how much the attendees have to say. I've, I'm typically aiming for only talking for about 20 minutes of prepared remarks. Second thing I will say is that I've not had a whole lot of time to digest some of this. There were quite a few sessions on Friday, for example. I have seen all the sessions either live or in one case I had to watch video and I've also watched all the pre recorded videos. I'd note this week we for the first time had a few pre recorded videos. I don't know how many people have had a chance to watch them. And I don't know how helpful people are finding those but we certainly will be asking about the value of those pre recorded videos to you in the meeting evaluation that we send out at the end of the meeting although I'd be happy for comments on that now. There were only a few recorded pre recorded videos for this week. There are quite a lot of them for next week because we had a lot of proposals and particularly for next week a number of the more unfairly specific technical fairly narrow technical topics that I knew would be of interest to at least some of our members but given the very limited time that we had for synchronous sessions. I decided we're best handled by pre recording them. The last generality that I'll say is that I don't I'm not going to try and touch on every session really my aim here is to extract some themes and some clustering around sessions. There were some sessions that kind of stood alone and in some cases picked up themes from earlier meetings. But don't fit neatly into any of the themes that that I laid out for example we had a very interesting session on what they were calling compassionate computing. And that really tied back in some interesting ways to ideas like the ones presented by Kathleen Fitzpatrick about generous thinking. On the other hand I couldn't position it tidally with any of the themes that I'm going to I'm going to mention. Another really important one that I want to flag is the research data framework that's happening that's being developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. We had a very nice presentation on that. And that is important certainly for the advancement of research data management but it really is something that is broader and has some slightly different purposes. You might also have wondered why that is not under infrastructure standards and technologies in week three. And it's because the development of a framework is primarily a policy and social process of coming up with a common way of talking about an understanding a set of activities. And it's really not quite a standard. So, with that introduction, let me, or that disclaimer, perhaps let me move on and talk about some of the broad themes. One set of issues that was really pervasive and prominent was about partnerships and relationship building with the Office of Research and the chief research officer. And we saw a number of talks that that explored various aspects of that. Interestingly, a good deal of the conversation there traces its way back to some of the presentations at the workshop after the December 2019. The meeting that was organized by Tom Hickerson and colleagues. And one of the really important observations that I just want to kind of underscore is that we can talk at a leadership level about linkages among the CIO, the chief research officer, and the dean of the library or university librarian. And that is absolutely true at a leadership level, but there's a whole organization that supports the research enterprise that typically reports to that chief research officer and that is a, that is a complicated organization with lots of moving parts and relationships need to be built up there on the operational level as well as at the leadership and policy level. This is a particularly I thought very useful presentation by Nina Exner and Steve Bollinger that that really got at that set of issues. There's also a great talk that was part of the, the workshop that Tom Hickerson organized that I alluded to a moment ago that got into that. And what's pretty much connected to that is a set of conversations about understanding research support services, and indeed, a second subtext here which we've talked about before is about the professionalization of research support and building career paths and really genuinely embedding those as professional roles within our institutions. And we saw some very interesting work presented by Patrick Schmidt and Claire Mitsumoto, which really emphasized benchmarking maturity and level of commitment in a number of areas across research computing and data support. There was also some very nice analysis by Ithaca SNR of research support offerings, some good work by OCLC research on relationships and how those relate to research offerings. There were some nice presentations that summarized work coming out of Cork, a new organization that is very much dedicated to this professionalization agenda. And I'll also just note, there was a nice presentation moving away from really large organizations from Loyola, which really reminded us of how much smaller organizations can do working across these research support areas. I'll also just note that one very interesting thing that's come up a couple of points now, at a couple of points now is what happens to our maker spaces, when the physical spaces get shut down. And we certainly heard some interesting illusions to how people are thinking about that. And I'm thinking that in the spring, we may want to try and put together a panel really looking very specifically at that area, which I think is an intriguing one. And indeed, perhaps trying to look beyond the pandemic to how maker spaces can exist in both virtual and physical modes in the future. There's a lot of emphasis on training and on skills. And we heard about the Northeast Big Data Core, which is a program to really try and push skills out. Data literacy skills, data science skills at the undergraduate level and ultimately into the high school level and perhaps beyond. And we also heard about programs that were more oriented at around graduate fellowships and bringing data science expertise into areas related to digital scholarship, digital humanities and related activities. That to me felt very much in the spirit of the kinds of things that the clear fellows have done over the years. There was a lot of looking at digital scholarship centers and portfolios of digital support services and how those relate to digital scholarship centers. The scope of the services is still enormously variable from institution to institution. There are some particular issues that are very nicely explored in one of the recordings that are specific to biomedical institutions. The things I was really delighted to hear about in the presentation again. This was a, this was an in person presentation last Friday, I believe, from the University of Kentucky was some consideration of how we offboard people from these research support services when they graduate or move on to other institutions. There was a very thought provoking discussion of partnerships around pedagogy focused on historical newspapers, and this reminded me quite a bit of some discussions we heard earlier in this virtual meeting about the digital library of the Caribbean. And some of the research that and teaching that those corpora can support and the role of historical newspapers among other documents in that construct. The presentation this week was from the University of Arizona, and it really looked at collecting local and regional newspapers that were very tied up in regional history, the history of indigenous people in the region, changing boundaries internationally and among those, those first nations here at the tribes. And even how this, this plays with developments in climate change. And I think there are really good lessons that can be drawn here for pedagogical partnerships around digital content. Both in terms of Arizona's experience, and in terms of the, the continued experience around the digital library of the Caribbean that bear thinking about another interesting theme that keeps showing up for me in different places is around the implications of virtualization. And about the ways that changes, who can participate and in what ways about how it changes the nature of conversations. And we're certainly seeing that as we try and understand the implications of virtual conferences like this one, as we puzzle about how we're going to balance virtual and physical events in future as physical events become possible. NCSU gave a really interesting talk about a program that they're running to try and build up information technology skills among library and information science students with a particular emphasis on situating those in terms of the kinds of skills that are needed in libraries, and they had planned a physical program, and then COVID hit. And so they had to sort of rethink the whole program as a virtual program. They had some very interesting things to say about how that shaped and reshaped the kind of people who could potentially participate in the nature of that participation, which really, for me at least raised some questions about a lot of these cohort based models that organizations like IMLS like to fund where an institution will try and build up a national cohort of people with expertise in some area that needs attention and can choose to do that either visually, either virtually, physically, or in some combination and now when they can only do it virtually how that that potentially changes the mix. A final, well, it's not the final session I want to talk about, but a last session that I thought was really welcome and again ties to me in my mind at least to this whole idea of virtualization is a session that was done jointly by Thomas and Skilltype, which is a young organization that's run by Tony Zanders about a really different model for providing professional development that works with both individuals and also institutions and really creates a sort of a structured marketplace in terms of offerings to be made available at scale with an emphasis on on virtual offerings and I'm not going to try and take you through the details of that, but, and by the way it still is very much a work in progress but I found this to be a very provocative and timely session on an area that feels to me like it's been very substantially neglected. I want to just close by noting just a wonderful presentation from the University of Cincinnati, which has a digital scholarship center that is at least in my mind doing things that are a little different than what a lot of digital scholarship centers do and they've been the recipient of a substantial grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, which has allowed them to position as a research catalyst. I don't, I really don't know how to characterize it any better than that. A research partner and a research catalyst for machine learning applications across the University of Cincinnati, and there, they've just recently received second round funding. And in this presentation they really presented what I found to be quite a impressive and ambitious vision of the role that a research, that a research support organization and a digital scholarship center can play in an institution. And I'm sure that we're all going to be hearing more about that, but if you have time and you missed it, it's a session that I think is well worth having a look at the recording for. I've undoubtedly missed a lot of themes. But what I've tried to do is both position the main themes of what we've been hearing in the context of themes that have been developing in this area. In the last few CNI meetings and in our programmatic work, and at the same time to try and highlight some shifts in emphasis or some new issues that have been emerging or that I detected to be emerging in the presentations that we heard during this week. Those are my reflections on what I heard at least as kind of initial reaction. I'd be very interested to hear your reflections on what you heard at during this past week, or I'd be happy to field any questions on the comments I just made, and the reflections that I just shared. And please, you know, as I say, either just raise your hands and I'm happy to turn your microphone on or drop comments in chat. I do want to stress that any any any specific sessions that I didn't cite by name. It's not intended to be a slight in any way it's just that, you know, I tried to organize this in thematic ways as opposed to a play by play survey of the sessions. Roger has a comment and let's turn Rogers Mike on you're on. This is exciting. Thank you. Hi Clifford, everybody. By the way, I love this format I really like the chance to reflect on the weeks, the weeks session so this is terrific for me anyway. I, I couldn't help but notice that in a few of the presentations last week and I wasn't able to attend all of them but in a few of them that I did attend. I was really struck by the way in which some of the other parts of the organization that some of the projects are looking at some of the parts of the universities that these projects are looking at. I'm just thinking about the senior research officer, you know, all the various units that can fall under that structure, or the research data services that my colleagues, Jane Radicke and Rebecca Springer looked at. How complex the organizational structure of some of these collaborative entities is, you know, from I guess from the perspective of a library or from an IT department that's relatively more straightforward. And I don't know exactly where to go with this but I just struck by, you know, if you look at the senior research officer landscape, you know there's a whole variety of different units that can fall under under there but it comes from university to university such such a lot and you know same thing with where we're all the research data services on on campus and I guess I guess I'm wondering maybe maybe formulate this as a question I guess what I'm wondering is in the same way that we've seen research areas, you know, over time become more centralized beings less distributed less departmentally distributed and so forth and more centralized. Do you think we're likely to see a kind of centralization of some of these models and not just centralization but a kind of standardization of some of these structural elements or do you do you expect that the nature of the system is just so different from one another that that that we may still see some some differences. Wow. There's an awful lot packed into that. First off, I think. You're right that there is tremendous variation from institution to institution on the function, the specific range of functions that report to the chief research officer. I'm not even sure that the range of variation there is well understood. In fact, that would probably be a wonderful thing for an organization like Ithaca to try and get a better handle on. I think that you're going to see more differentiation between big and small organization institutions. Just because the scale of what the big institutions have to deal with the really research intensive ones is is going to get more and more complex over time. I think one of the sources of complexity and confusion here is that is that we have not established a set of sort of professional positions and sort of well accepted job descriptions for research support professionals. And as that gets straightened out. I think you may see more uniformity in terms of where they are situated inside organizations. But I think that could take very easily a decade or more to sort out. I continue to be really struck by the parallels with instructional technology and how long that really took to become institutionalized and professionalized in our in our institutions of higher education. So those are, you know, maybe a few bits and pieces of an answer. I guess part of me wonders what whether the monolith of research support needs to be sort of deconstructed in somewhat different ways to. I mean, there's a big administrative side of that and there's a big technical side of that. And both are important and but maybe they belong in rather different organizations. Maybe they, you know, well, I don't know. I do think it's important to recognize that there are both of those things that are part of research support. I don't know if that helps at all with your observation which I think. Yeah, I know that that helps a lot. I mean, we're, you know, we're, as you know, we're, we're going to be publishing some findings about the senior research officer role and some some of the aspects of that enterprise in in just a week or so and I think, you know, I think you're right that there's like, there's like an administrative side to that work. There's a compliance side to that work. There's an equipment and research like, you know, so, so whether those things will continue to be fused together or go their separate ways is is is an interesting question how those bits and pieces might fit together with, you know, research computing or with a CIO's office or, you know, a research library for that matter I mean I'm not sure I quite see what, you know, it does, it does feel like we have some overlapping and in not quite worked out structures right right now in some of our universities. Yeah, and I just say that there, you know, there are some of these around instructional technology to that are still overlapping and uncertain and, you know, there are some libraries that are deeply deeply involved in instructional technology and are doing, you know, frontline operation of learning management systems and all sorts of things. So, you know, that landscape is is still a bit unsettled. I think I'd throw out as part of the research computing portfolio maybe, and that's very much on my mind these days. Although I'm having a lot of difficulty identifying interesting work that's going on and, you know, would just be a standing invitation to everybody that if you're doing things in this area I'd be interested in hearing about them. Is this whole question of making experimental facilities which range from individual investigator labs all through all the way through core instrumentation kinds of facilities. There's a lot more automated and remote accessible network accessible and demanding a lot less are, you know, in person density around them as part of the resilience of the research enterprise. Lynn Fulton has a has a comment, I guess, more than a question in the queue in the Q&A box, which I'll just share and then I will say one or two things about she says your comments are making me think about the responsibility research libraries have to fostering the DPLA. We've not seen many presentations about DPLA in recent years, especially in the sense of indigenous populations. I think we need to be thinking more about what we're making more generally available to the public. And I do think that's true. I think we need to think about whether DPLA is the right mechanism to do that in all cases or whether these things ought to be done institutionally or whether they ought to be done through perhaps multi institutional collaborations along the lines of the topical or geographic ones like the digital library of the Caribbean. I think that, you know, all of those are valid approaches. I think that, you know, the general question is a really worthwhile one. I would also note that forgive me if I get this wrong. I believe in week four. There is a major session that the DPLA is putting on with terminology and characterizations of minority populations and underrepresented populations and archives and related matters. They've got a huge initiative going on there, which I'm looking forward to hearing more about. I've not, I don't really know a whole ton about it, but I was very, I was very pleased to get the proposal and we will be spending some time on that in week four. Other comments. Anybody else like me to and forgive me if I didn't characterize that precisely correctly I don't have the abstract in front of me and I'm going from memory. Anybody else want to make comments or observations, either chat or Q&A or Q&A on this is usually not a shy group. Oh, Joan, I didn't notice you were on how nice to that you could join us. Yeah, that was a, that was really a nice presentation. Thanks for sharing that. And Diane, thank you for getting the, getting the details that the session that Diane just put in the chat is the one with DPLA about their initiative. Other comments, observations. Any reactions, any reflections about CNI's undertakings in the near future, based on what I'm hearing from sessions and where the gaps might be. Well, I really haven't thought that hard about that, Tara. It's a great question and I can sort of toss out a couple of things. One is that I'm thinking in the spring of possibly experimenting with a new format for a few sessions where we, we set a topic for a panel and invite participants to apply to be part of the panel. So, in other words, we get a little more control over setting the agenda of the discussion around the topic. Like say, virtualizing maker spaces, just to pick one that I said a word about before, and try and reach out and, and get people to tell us what they're doing in that area that's interesting. So that's that's one thought that I'm taking away. Other than that, I think that this whole question of virtual and in person mix is going to be extremely important to a lot of things over the coming, you know, couple of years, ranging from, you know, the future of really communication and how, you know, conferences and meetings play into that, all the way through the kinds of conversations that are taking place in the UK. I don't know if you, I can't remember. There's so much going on and I just lose track of things and I apologize. If I haven't yet put this out to CNI announced but there was a major report that came out. I believe it was last week from JISC in the UK on their, their work, trying to understand how in person and online education instruction would be blended in the future as we come out of the pandemic. And that's gotten a lot of discussion in the UK. And, you know, it's interesting because in the UK, because of the way they tend to do things in the UK, they're having it on what they describe as a sector basis. In other words, across the higher ed community. Here we're having this and we're having this conversation or we're starting to, but it's on a much more piecemeal basis at the level of individual institutions or systems and institutions like a state university system or a state community college system. You know, really at its roots, a lot of this is about how do we mix the in person and virtual and what are the implications of the choices we make there. How exactly to manifest that out in CNI's undertakings, other than, you know, we're going to have to figure out how to navigate it and what we do ourselves less clear and something that we'll be thinking about. But great question. Anybody else want to step in here. I am not hearing any more people who want to make observations or ask questions. So let me just note. Before we go and while I give you a moment to think about whether there's anything else you want to say or ask that we're not going week three technically begins not tomorrow, but next week. We're taking a break for the Thanksgiving holidays. As I indicated there are quite a lot of video that of prerecorded videos that are part of week three. And we're going to be making those week three prerecorded sessions available this week so that if you run out of things to do over the Thanksgiving holiday, want to get an early start or whatever. We're going to be making those prerecorded sessions as well. So of course, all the recordings from weeks one and two should be available to you. We think they'll probably will probably make the week three prerecorded stuff available. Probably by end of day tomorrow. So, there's something to look forward to. And with that I don't see any more raised hands. I don't see any more questions I don't see any more comments in the chat. So let me wish you a good holiday if you celebrate it in these coming days, and urge you to be well and to stay safe. And, oh, well we have one more from Tara. I have a couple of challenges that I want to present, especially to research libraries, things we should be making a deeper commitment to in spite of COVID financial losses and pressures. I will say just a little bit about that in my plenary comments on the 14th of December. There are there are, you know, abundant challenges before us certainly. But how to where to double down and how to reassess. I is part of what I want to talk about a little bit in my sort of broad landscape survey on the 14. So I'm just going to make that shameless plug and leave it there. All right. Well, with that. As I say, I'll wish you a good couple of days off and urge you to just be well and be safe. Thanks for joining us today. Bye bye.