 ahead and get started. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Cliff Lynch, I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information. And you have joined one of our project briefing sessions for the third day of week two of the CNI fall virtual 2020 member meeting. This week is themed around the transformation of organizations and professions. It addresses a lot of issues around professional skills, teaching and learning, and the nature, the changing nature of professions, all of which is very much implicated in the presentation today. A couple of mechanical notes, we are recording this and it will be available later. There is closed captioning available if you would like to make use of that. There is a chat and feel free to introduce yourself or make comments as we go along during the session. We'll deal with all the questions at the end. Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will moderate the question and answer period. There is a Q&A tool down at the bottom of your screen and you can use that to enter questions as they occur to you at any point during the presentation. So let me welcome and introduce our presenters, Tori Culler from North Carolina State University and Kevin Beswick also from North Carolina State University. And as I said, this talk will be very much about approaches to building up technical skills for LIS students. And I'm gonna be very interested to hear this because it strikes me that this is quite sensitive to what kind of an LIS program you're starting with and I'm sure that's gonna be one of the issues at hand here, but enough from me. Let me turn it over to Tori to start the presentation. Welcome, thank you both for joining us and it's all yours, Tori. Yes, hello everyone and thank you to CNI for having us today. My name is Tori and I'm a library fellow currently at NC State University. And Kevin, who I'm presenting with today is the Interim Associate Type for Digital Library Initiatives and we're gonna be talking to you about a program we ran recently called the Library of Technology Career Jumpstart Program. So I wanted to start with a really high level who, what, when, where, why at the Jumpstart program before we really get into things. So in terms of the what, the Jumpstart program was a free immersive week long experience that helped position first year library school students for a career in library technology upon graduation. And we're gonna go over more about what was covered in each of the sessions that we offered, as well as what technical skills we taught, how we decided on what technical skills to teach and what other types of opportunities we made available the week of the program. In terms of the why, the impetus for this program really stemmed from some observations that we made anecdotally in our own libraries as well as what we were hearing from our colleagues at peer institutions about how it's just difficult to recruit for technical positions in libraries. And that's because LIS students just have really differential opportunities to build those skills while they're in school. So we wanted to help fill that gap. In terms of the who, we ended up with a really great first cohort of eight participants. And in terms of the planning committee, it was five of us that made up the core group, but we had more than two dozen of our colleagues throughout the library is also involved in some way, whether that was helping lead a presentation or a panel or developing some asynchronous content. It really took a lot of people to pull this program off. And then in terms of the when, we held this August 3rd through 7th, 2020. That was our first offering of this, which was a strategic date that was right after students would have been finishing up their summer internships and right before they would have been starting their fall semesters. And then in terms of the where, of course, Zoom, where else? This was originally scheduled as an in-person event though, and we are gonna talk about what went into our decision-making process for pivoting to online, some of the challenges that we faced in taking this content online, as well as some of the affordances that that actually offered. So here is the general timeline of events that led to the successful delivery of the program and for the presentation, how we're gonna take you through things today. All in all, we spent about a year working out the details of the program, though the idea for the program was actually conceptualized quite a while before I arrived on the scene last year. So I'm gonna start with the environmental scan. So this was really one of the first steps that helped to give some direction to our original vision. We spoke to current students themselves, as well as many of our colleagues in our own libraries who hold technical positions and HR and admin and program coordinators at other institutions local to us, such as UNC SILS and UNCG. For this environmental scan, we came away with a few key insights that helped to define the rest of our planning. We learned, for example, that library school students really have differential opportunities in terms of what their curricula offer. Some students have lots of opportunities to take programming and data wrangling types of classes, while others literally have no classes in that vein in their schools. And then in terms of those that work in technical roles in our libraries, we learned that they generally reported having built their technical outside of their formal library school curriculums through things like either internships or part-time jobs. And then something that we heard from both students and program directors at library schools is that, yes, students do want more opportunities that are both baked into their graduate school experiences and also offered extra curricular to help build up their technical skillsets. Students really want a roadmap to help guide them along the process of A, figuring out what types of technical roles are even available in libraries and then B, how to get there. So with our improved understanding of what we were dealing with, we set our sights on forming a planning committee next, which Kevin will talk about now. So our goal in building the planning committee was to bring in colleagues from different departments in our library to help represent other areas of library technology, as well as to bring skills and perspectives in areas like creating and offering technical workshops for people in the word to technology, recruitment, event planning, logistics and execution, developing web content, diversity, equity and inclusion and many more. So we wanted to have a smaller planning team. So we looked for people who had many of these skills and we were able to find people in our library that covered all of them. So here you can see the planning team that we built in the end. So before designing the program, we brainstormed several objectives that would guide our decision making, which we promoted on our website in our application materials. So our objectives were the library technology jumpstart program seeks to increase awareness of technology careers in libraries, increase diversity broadly defined in this area of the profession, impart strategies for learning technical skills, to provide concrete steps forward towards a career pathway in library technology, to create a welcoming and inclusive space where a diverse cohort can learn from each other and to foster a community of professional and interpersonal support. So now I'll pass it back over to Tori to talk about the application process. So the application process is a piece that we spent a lot of time on. Our general goal here was to recruit a diverse cohort of 16 applicants from library schools across the country who were less than halfway through their graduate degree program. There are a couple of things to point out in that goal. First of all, it was important to us to recruit a diverse cohort that represented a broad variety of backgrounds and experiences. Liberation as a profession is made up of mostly white women and tech roles in particular also are made up of mostly white folks and tend to skew a bit more male. So we wanted to open this up to make sure that our process was welcoming not only on the basis of gender and race, but in terms of other demographics as well, such as ability, active background and geography. We tried to approach this by being very clear in our messaging and the language we presented in our application site and by making the application process itself pretty liberator. In addition to the goals that Kevin just outlined on the previous slide, we also presented applicants with a value statement as you see on the slide that directed them to our strategic priorities as a library as well as our library's diversity, equity and inclusion statement. So in terms of the number of applicants we admitted, we saw it six to 10 applicants because we felt a small cohort size would allow us to provide actualized attention. And of course, because this was originally going to be an in-person program, so there were some considerations with cost at first. And we wanted students who were less than halfway through their program because we reasoned that the earlier we're able to reach students more opportunity they'll have to apply what they learned with us to the rest of their graduate school planning and early career planning. So again, we tried to make the application itself pretty low barrier. A complete application package consisted of the online application form and a resume. We specifically didn't ask for a professional reference because we know that that can be an unnecessary burden for people, especially for a program like this. And we tried to keep the questions that we asked on the application form short and straightforward, offering lots of help text so that applicants knew exactly what we wanted to see in each response. In general, what we were looking for in responses was a demonstrated interest in pursuing a career in library technology, a commitment and willingness to learn technical skills, as well as a persistent and creative approach to solving problems. In the end, we ended up with 49 total applicants that represented more than two dozen schools across the country. We did from that pool, 13 Zoom interviews and accepted eight participants to our final cohort. And for the sake of time, I'm not going to be able to read through each of these bios for our wonderful participants, but I definitely encourage you to go back and read through these yourself. We will be posting the slides to the CNI Dropbox. But the point is that we were indeed able to build a really awesome first cohort of students who brought with them a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences and career interests. Okay, so once we had our cohort formed, we had to dive into planning. And again, this was meant to be an in-person program at first. And we were going to do the whole deal. We were going to fly everybody out. We were going to put them up in a nice hotel downtown. We were going to cater all their meals. We were going to show them downtown Raleigh. We were going to give them a tour of our Hunt Library and our main library DHL. We were going to do networking events. We were going to have cohort bonding experiences and social activities. But then COVID happened. And we had to really think about, okay, what does this mean for our program and what are we going to do? We made the decision to pivot to online delivery pretty early on, because we decided that, you know what, if we're going to do this online, we need to just go ahead and decide now in like April so that we can make a really good online experience for people. So that's what we did. And as you might imagine, there were definitely some anticipated challenges of going virtual that we had to deal with, such as having to navigate an entirely different set of logistics about how to, you know, facilitate technical workshops online. But we did find also that there were indeed some benefits of going virtual as well, such as the fact that participants were able to visit the recordings of our live sessions and take advantage of the asynchronous content bundle we ended up producing later on. So we did to find that going online was more inclusive of people who maybe need more breaks more frequently for whatever reason, people who benefit from having optional sessions, as well as people who couldn't spend away from home, because even though we were going to pay for the program, it was all expenses paid right, those in-person programs pre-select people who can take time to spend away from their lives or wherever they are. So hopefully by offering this program virtually, we were able to open it up to more people to attend. In terms of the schedule, an additional benefit to going virtual was that it really helped out our schedule. Our original in-person agenda was really full days. It was going from 8.15 in the morning until past 6 p.m. in the evening, so super full. But holding it on Zoom, there was just no way that we were gonna be able to keep that kind of schedule because of Zoom fatigue and lots of other reasons, right? Including the fact that we had participants who were from all three time zones across the US, but luckily most of the meat of our schedule transitioned pretty easily into online delivery. So as you can see here, we started the day at noon Eastern time, included lots of breaks throughout the day and ended at roughly 6 p.m. Eastern time, including the optional office hours we offer each day. We didn't have to cut a lot from our original in-person schedule and what we did have to cut, we were able to turn into asynchronous content for participants to view in their own time. And Kevin's gonna talk about what sessions covered in a little bit, but first I'm gonna talk about program delivery and how we kicked things off. So pivoting to a virtual program meant that we needed to brainstorm and think through ways to create and cultivate a sense of community virtually. To do that, we relied heavily on Padlet, which is an anonymous collaborative workspace if you're unfamiliar, which helped us to structure our daily routine. So on the first day, we introduced everyone to Padlet and you can see the screenshot of our Padlet on the slide to the right. And this is where we created our shared group norms on the first day that everyone could then refer back to and add to as we went along. And then there was a column for each day where participants could add questions that we would then discuss in our morning check-ins. This could be anything that came up for them throughout the day, maybe a lingering question from a workshop or a panel or anything there just wasn't time for in the session or maybe just something they wanted to ask anonymously for whatever reason. It all went into this catch-all board and we were able to go through them during the beginning of each day. We started each day with a daily check-in. And we had really great participation in that and got a lot of really good feedback on our use of that as well. Also part of our daily check-ins were short games or ice breakers. So each day, for example, we encouraged folks to share a daily GIF that encapsulated their emotional state as it related to the program. And that was a really great way to jumpstart some conversations every day. And we wanted to start off with this kind of tone because we know that being in a new group or environment can be challenging even in normal times. And in particular, with this program and the subject matter of learning new technologies that can be really intimidating for people and really overwhelming. So we wanted to create an environment where people felt like they could have fun and be comfortable with each other and be vulnerable. So that was how we set the tone for everything that was to come, which Kevin is now gonna talk about a little bit. So one of the major types of content we offered were technical workshops designed to introduce participants to a range of technologies and leave them with next steps for delving deeper into each one after the program was finished. So for workshops, we tried to select a variety of technology that were focused on skills that we would like to see in applicants to our entry level positions, but also that are fairly broadly applicable across the different areas of library technology. So we wanted to look at mostly foundational skills, but also choose one that would be kind of a stretch day, like a view of an up and coming area in library technology. So you can see the workshops that we ended up selecting on this slide. So we started with an introduction to version control with Git and GitHub to get participants used to saving their work in a repository early on. And so they can continue to practice work on these skills throughout the rest of the workshops. We chose Python as the programming language to use throughout the rest of the workshops because participants were mostly early on in their journey of building their tech skills. We thought standardizing this was important. Workshop leaders also met as a group several times leading up to the program to ensure that the workshops had some cohesion and connection between them all. One of the main challenges that we ran into with the technical workshops was troubleshooting issues over Zoom. So once a participant ran into a problem that couldn't be resolved in maybe 20 or 30 seconds, we thought it'd be difficult to have someone helping them while the instructors continued with the workshop like we might be able to do in person. Before the program, we made the decision to use Zoom breakout rooms in this situation and include more workshop helpers than we might have had in person. So for our workshops with eight participants, we had about three or four helpers in each one. This ended up working out fairly well but started off with a few hiccups while both participants and helpers got used to the process. So I think providing more upfront guidance to participants about what the process would look like for getting help in this format might have been helpful in smoothing this out. So in addition to hands-on learning about hard technical skills, we thought it was important for people to hear from current library technology professionals about what it was like to work in the field, the range of work that we do as library technologists as well as to hear stories about how people got to where they are today. So we designed the panels to touch on these topics and to include perspectives from a diverse set of staff including early career all the way to administration and touching on a range of departments and roles across the library. So our goals for these panels was to draw connections between the skills that we were introducing the participants to and the work that actually happens in the library and to inspire participants by showing them that you don't need a computer science background to get into library tech and that many people begin their library technology journeys in library school coming from a variety of different backgrounds. So by curating a diverse set of panelists we hope that participants could make connections with some aspect of their own background or experience and that their messages would really resonate with them. So the other major type of session that we planned was looking at the bigger picture of library technology. So we offered an HR session that included our director of talent management where participants learned about the application and interview process for library tech jobs. And we also had a question and answer session with our senior vice provost and director of libraries and our associate director for digital and organizational strategy where they touched on topics like organizational structure, the future of library technology offering a higher level perspective on these. And the program, the jumpstart program also included a mentorship component. So each participant was paired up with a library technology professional. We made the connections based on what we'd learned during the application and interview process and tried to match someone with the match people that had a common interest background or career trajectory. So we asked each mentor to schedule at least two meetings with their mentee one during the program week and one post program with each pair being able to decide if they wanted to continue the relationship beyond that. So as part of the jumpstart program we really wanted participants to be able to begin to build a professional support network and the mentorship component was one way we hoped to achieve this. And as we mentioned before, when moving to the remote offering of the jumpstart program we had to make some decisions about what content to cut from the synchronous program. But rather than cut entirely we organized a bundle of asynchronous content and offered participants this content in a variety of mediums. So in their info packets, participants had access to the content you can see on the slide such as a video Q&A series on navigating the profession and building your portfolio and web presentation slide deck. So our hope is that participants can refer to this content later at a time when it's most directly relevant to their lives. So when they're considering applying for jobs or when they're just starting out in the profession. As Tori mentioned earlier all this content wouldn't have been possible without the help of our colleagues around the library. So over two dozen in total participated as presenters, panelists, workshop leaders and asynchronous content producers. So now I'll pass it back to Tori to talk about how we did a assessment on the efficacy of the program. So in terms of assessment we sent out a program knowledge and attitudes survey a post program knowledge and attitudes survey as well as a post program general satisfaction survey. And we also plan to do a six month check-in video interview to see what people's longer-term thoughts and feelings about the program's impacts might be. No stoneable for us in assessment so far as that from the seven of eight participants who participated in the general feedback survey also one of them strongly agreed with the statement. I'm likely to recommend the jumpstart program to other LIS and IS students. So we felt really great about that feedback. In terms of the open text fields on the general feedback survey we also got some really great thoughtful feedback in terms of both positive and constructive considerations. So in terms of the positive feedback sentiments express included that program felt really applicable to students experiences and was a much needed opportunity that they were glad we were offering. Participants do plan to stay in touch because they really appreciated hearing from our librarians in that it really helped them to make connections between their own experiences and opportunities available and helped to demystify library technology for them. They also had some exciting eureka moments in terms of coming to know and understand some programming concepts and making connections that in their own career and people really appreciated the structure of the program considering that online including for example, all the asynchronous content that we generated that they were able to go back and view later. In terms of constructive feedback I really appreciated folks' honest and thoughtful responses here which included for example, planning for future programs to be born accessible which I think is a great suggestion and something we're definitely better prepared for next time instead of waiting for someone to request captioning for example, I think we're all kind of dealing with this right? We should obviously just offer it as the default. Same for ample break time offering that as the default as well. Another piece of constructive feedback is that people wanted more opportunities for a community and cohort building. People wanted some more pre-work or architecturalization before arriving to the program and additionally just thinking through some of the things that Kevin has already mentioned in terms of troubleshooting the technical workshops. Again, I think these are all great critiques and I'm really happy people were willing to share that with us. In terms of next steps we do plan to offer this program again in a similar format at around the same time next year changes made will focus on that participant feedback that I just went over. But a really big change that we would like to see happen is collaboration with other folks particularly in our consortium of libraries in the triangle and we've already talked to some people that you can chat with Hill about potentially getting that up. Additionally, we are working on a framework for planning this type of event at other institutions kind of like code for live has a framework for how to do a code for live type conference, right? We're looking to get something like that up. And then just continuing the conversation. So we think that there's still a lot yet to discuss here. For example, how can this framework potentially be applied in other contexts at our libraries? Well, we've had a lot of interest from current staff in potentially auditing this program or having a similar program built for them that meets their needs. So that's just one example. But then questions like how do we better prepare LAS students for the types of work they'll be doing in libraries as they graduate? What is the future of library technology? We recognize that this program isn't any kind of magic hero. It's merely one small effort to push things forward but we look forward to discussing it with you all. And so with that, we'd like to open it up to questions. We're happy to talk more about our application process or any of the specific sessions that we mentioned or assessment or anything else. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, Corey and thank you, Kevin, for that very interesting description and discussion of this wonderful program at NCSU. I was really interested to hear about certain particular points. And I've got some questions for you, but I see also that Rosalind Metz did ask a question which you addressed in this last slide, just for the record, I'll read that aloud. What plans do you have to expand this program? Are you interested in partnering with other libraries to do this? And she's acknowledging, of course, that you just discussed that, but she would like to chat about this and we'll have an opportunity to do that later in this session, Rosie, so stick around. And I would also just encourage other attendees if you have questions or comments you wanna share, please go ahead and type those into the Q&A box now. Excuse me. I was wondering if you could chat a little bit more about how you managed to encourage a diverse applicant pool. Did you use any particular strategies to diversify your applicant pool? And if so, what can you share with us about that? Yeah, so we definitely had a lot of conversations about that and how to do that effectively. Again, what we tried to do was be very clear in our messaging and the language we were posting on our application site, being very clear in what our values are as a library system and what our values are and our intentions are behind starting this program. So that was there. And then one of the application questions we asked was, can you please talk about your commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, right? And we included along with that in every question, a lot of help text again so that people would know exactly what we wanna see in those responses and why we're asking the things that we're asking. So with that one in particular, we included a link out to like, never written a diversity, equity and inclusion statement before like, here's what that looks like and here's why people ask those things. And here's again an example so that people weren't caught off guard by that. Thank you for that. Interesting, I think a lot of people struggle with how to message out these kinds of opportunities and reach a broad range of individuals who may be interested in them. My other question also has to do with, and I think you touched on this a little bit but if there are folks like Rosie who might be interested in hosting a similar program at their own libraries, do you have any recommendations? What could you share with them? What tips would you say right off the bat are your biggest takeaways? Yeah, I mean, start planning early. I'm hoping that, or we're hoping that in releasing our, we've kept fairly thorough documentation of the planning process and kind of why we made certain decisions throughout. And we hope that by releasing that, it will help people to offer a similar event. And yeah, I mean, I think one of the biggest things that helped was having a really engaged planning team from a variety of different areas of the library to kind of help bring different viewpoints into the conversation as we were planning. I think that was one of the highlights of kind of putting together the program for me is working with that group. It was really fun and we were able to hear a lot of different opinions and feedback and points of view. So I think to the environmental scan that we did early on was super helpful, a super helpful way to start out because that led us talk to people in tech positions in our own libraries, as well as people from some of the local library schools. So that helped to ground it in our local context but also has implications for what this looks like in the field as a whole. But that was really helpful because it kind of got the word out like, hey, we're planning this program, amongst our current library colleagues and amongst the local library schools. So that really helped when it came time to deliver it because we were able to involve all those colleagues and they knew what it was about and what our goals were. And the local library school students were ready to apply and knew about it already. So that was a really helpful process, that environmental scan. Yeah, and kind of like adding to what Tori said, like making connections with like the career services, people at the library, at a couple of library schools at least, was really helpful in figuring out when was the best time to hold a program, like to ask people to take a week out of their lives to do this. And we had conversations about like different formats for the event and we did end up going with the week. So having that information is really important and then also for like promotion to students and stuff and things like that. It was helpful to have those connections that we made during that environmental scan phase. Interesting, those are some really useful tips. Thank you. I see that Rosie had to run off to another meeting which reminds me that we were a little bit past time. He tells you to check your inbox because she's going to be emailing you. But because of that, and I'm reminded we're at time, I'm going to go ahead and close down the public portion of this meeting by turning off their recording and thanking Kevin and Tori again for coming to CNI and talking about this really interesting program and thanking all of our attendees for making time. For us today, we hope to see you at other CNI breakouts here shortly. If you wanna stick around and have a chat with Kevin or Tori and raise your hand, I can unmute you, please feel free to do that. And for now, I'll just go ahead and turn off a recording and I wish everyone a great rest of your day. Bye everyone. Thank you.