 All right, hi everyone, sorry about that. Thanks for joining us today, and thanks for pairing us, C&I, with this excellent presentation from our colleagues at Waterloo. So we are coming from North Carolina State University. My name is Susan Ivy. I'm the director of the Research Facilitation Service, which you're gonna hear a lot about this morning from us. And I'm with my colleagues Jill Sexton and Greg Raschke. Do you wanna say hello? Morning. So today we're gonna talk about facilitating research, competing and data support at our institution, and we're gonna start off by talking about what the Research Facilitation Service is. You'll hear us refer to it as the RFS a lot this morning and why we created it. And then we're gonna take a step back and talk a little bit about how we got to where we are today, and then conclude with some key points and some looking forward. We do have a couple of just two surveys. Polls in our slides. So if you're willing, if you have your phones or your tablets or your computer is ready to respond to those, we'd appreciate it. So what is the Research Facilitation Service and why did NC State create it? So like a lot of your institutions, I'm sure, and like we just heard, NC State offers a variety of research, computing and data services and support. So we'll follow under that umbrella of research, computing and data, but we've referred to in the field as RCD. So we've listed some of those on the screen to give you an idea of what we're talking about. So from our Office of Information Technology, we have high performance computing cluster that's available to all of campus, data storage service and support, things like support for cloud and virtual computing and many other things such as networking and you name it. We also have a lot of college IT units. And so each of our colleges does have an IT unit. They vary in size and scope and what they can provide, particularly in terms of research computing or research IT. The university libraries, we provide support for RDM, research data management, as well as consultation around data publication. We have a data visualization unit that partners very closely with our new Data Science Academy on campus to think about tiering consultation for hands-on data science and data visualization support. We also have six core research facilities. We've called out the Genomic Sciences Laboratory. They're one of our biggest champions on campus for the RFS. They've been involved since the beginning and much more. And so we're really fortunate to have the support for our researchers, but it's also challenging for a lot of reasons. So it's challenging for our researchers that are new to our institution, but also those that have been around for a while to know where to go to find the support that they need. If they're thinking about new research workflows or new technologies, it's hard for them to figure out which ticketing queue, which website, which person to call or talk to. It's also challenging for our service providers. They're in different parts of campus, virtual, on campus, and they don't know often what each other are doing. We've heard from our college IT groups that it would be really fantastic for them to have more channels of communication between one another to learn about how they're approaching common problems within their colleges. And from a strategic point of view, it's challenging for administration to really know what's going on around campus all the time and also to think about emerging technologies and trends and what to expect, particularly in terms of research IT and research computing as things change quickly. So we created the research facilitation service to try to answer some of these challenges. And so we have several goals listed on this slide. I won't read them and it's quite wordy, but really what we're trying to do, number one is provide a single place for researchers to go to if they have questions in terms of anything that might fall under the umbrella of research computing and data. It's a very wide scope. We often don't know what we're gonna get asked, but that's great for us. We actually enjoy that challenge. We're trying to increase the discovery of and access to the services and support that exist on campus, as well as services that might be out in the community. So, and when I say that I'm thinking about the exceed computing platform, for example, or NIH strides, for example. We wanna be a place to help analyze requirements and provide technological solutions, as well. And we wanna connect those RCD service providers across campus, as I mentioned. So figure out ways to increase their collaboration and communication. We want to help when people are planning for cyber infrastructure needs for their funded and unfunded projects, to particularly get in there early in those proposal stages and think about budgeting, think about what's available and what they might need to pay for that's outside of the scope of what the university provides currently. And then lastly, act as a resource for strategic input. So we're interfacing with researchers daily, as well as service providers, learning about what's challenging for them, what they need, and then pushing that information forward to our decision makers on campus. Okay, so here is our one of two polls. So if you go to, let's see if I can read it, I don't have my glasses. Poll, P-O-L-L-E-V dot com slash Susan I-V, I-V-E-Y. Believe it's two, five, four. Two, six, four. Thank you. And this is an old school word cloud. So it should show up. What are your current challenges? These could be similar to what I just said, coordination across campus, silos, but it could also be in terms of infrastructure, such as data storage, which is really common. We're just curious about in the room what people are facing. Coordination, it's a good one. Lack. I like that lack is the biggest word on the screen right now. Staffing, decentralization, and I think you can see a lot of overlap between what we just heard from the previous presentation as well. I think we're all facing very similar challenges. We're gonna move on for time. So how we got here? I'm gonna pass it over to Craig. The simplest answer to how we got here was we hired Susan, and then I stopped doing anything with this, and they were really kind to include me on the presentation, but I can maybe add a little more context than that. We also got here by not, how do I advance the slides just with the arrow, right? There you go. By not being very good at providing computational research support for our university, right? It was very decentralized. There were a lot of resources that Susan just listed off, but none of them were super effectively serving our research community and our faculty, right? Especially at the point of engaging them when they have problems. The contriere's role, the coherence that libraries try to provide and often do successfully provide was really missing and lacking. Our IT office had a lot of services that faculty either couldn't get to, couldn't figure out how to use those kinds of things, right? So we saw it as an opportunity. So we in the library has created a position which became Susan, which was fortunate for us. And then we partnered with our IT office to try to bring their strength in back-end services, some of their computational tools, their storage capacity, those kinds of things, together with our ability to provide a coherent service and a contriere's and reach out to a community to build a coherent service portfolio. That was really what we did. And then we asked the provost for three positions and we got one. I should have asked for seven. That's a lesson for you. Although there was like a lot of debate about what's too much, right? Ask for too much and you get zero. Ask for the rent. Anyway, we tried to get two positions. We got one more to go with Susan. And then the IT office and the libraries each created a position so we could create a portfolio of like four positions to try to build out a service. And a lot of that was what our colleagues at Waterloo said was based on relationships, right? We had built enough relationships out of this kind of incoherent service layer that we had and built up enough trust in relationships. And a lot of that credit goes to Jill so that we could both create positions and take that risk together. We took a position from the provost and we redirected resources. And then from the library's perspective, it was an opportunity, right? It was an opportunity to evolve and grow. And I think that's an important recognition of us. We took resources that could have gone somewhere else. We redirected vacant positions and turned them into research computing, research facilitation service positions because we wanted to move more broadly into the life cycle of research. We saw it as an important evolutionary opportunity, right? And we decided not to do some things so that we could do this. And that's not an easy decision, but it's one that so far I think we're really pleased and happy with. And then part of it too is it's just, I think, more fun and interesting. Libraries are increasingly called upon to solve university problems, right? As opposed to our own problems. And I think it's more fun to try to work at this scale. I'm finding it to be energizing and really interesting. And of course, hopefully it'll be rewarding both in what we achieve, but also in terms of resources as we build this out and tie ourselves more into grants and things like that. So I don't think I said anything that was on the slides that Susan kindly prepared for me, but I think I covered the main ground. And then, okay, I'll leave this up for a little bit. And we did. We heard this from the folks at Waterloo. It takes constant engagement, right? You're constantly cultivating this garden of relationships, of resources, talking. We had all these silos within the colleges, especially the large colleges, bringing those people on board and getting to the point where we could then pilot the service and really offer it to a couple of colleges specifically and build into large interdisciplinary grants and those kinds of things. Actually taking those substantive steps that, again, our friends at Waterloo talked about. You can build relationships and you can do all that cultivation, but you actually have to do something at some point, right, and start to build in and try some things and experiment. And I think that's largely where we are, which Jill and Susan are gonna talk more about here shortly. But there's another poll. Hopefully it's the same address, same deal, right? Yeah, okay, so if you still have that fresh, you can talk about which campus units are currently collaborating with to support research computing needs. All right, the library needs some help. There we go. Let's get in the game. The other piece that I will offer, the core research facilities at NC State were an important element in this, in that we had these large-scale research facilities generating terabytes of data, basically, right? And there was not very much infrastructure to take it from the core research facility back into the labs and then share it out and beyond. So that was something we were able to work with at our university administration, so, okay. And you see it up there. No others. All right, we got everybody represented. Jill, I think, are you at? Susan, Susan's up next. Okay, so very quickly, just wanna talk a little bit about how we launched the research facilitation service. So we thought a lot about the strategy for this, and we proposed and were accepted to roll it out college by college for a lot of reasons. Mainly, we didn't really know what to expect and how much need there was gonna be, or a small team. But also, because, and as you've heard, it takes a lot of time to build these relationships. So we weren't going to be able to really swoop in and sort of get to know the IT groups and get to know the college IT groups and build those connections. You know, it just takes a lot of time. So we're doing it college by college. We started with our College of Sciences. There's a lot of needs there. They have a small-ish college IT group as well. And their ADR, their CACD for research, and their director of IT was very involved in our planning processes, so that was great. And this fall, we've been working with our college of natural resources, and we plan to roll out to their research community in January to align with the spring semester. And just very quickly, we thought you might be interested to sort of see the request to date at a glance. What I will say here is that you'll note that we say we've served seven out of 10 colleges. We are only operational with the College of Sciences, but that's, if people find us, we wanna help them. And so we have actually gotten requests from six additional colleges since this year, this calendar year. And you can see the departments, the core facility, and Greg just mentioned some of the work that we've done to help them streamline their data, transfer to our HPC and data storage. We're implementing Globus for them, if you're familiar with that tool, so we're excited about that. Things that we've been asked about, as I said, data storage and transfer, we get a lot of questions that just say, hey, look at our workflows, look at what we're already doing, how can it be better? We want it to be more efficient. We have some legacy stuff. It's not really working that well. Can you help? Those are big problems, and we're working through those ourselves and trying to coordinate with campus to figure that out. And now I'm gonna pass it over to Jill. So I'm gonna kind of bring it on home. And I think that what's evident from listening to both of our talks is that we're talking about solving technology of problems, but we know that the solution to solving those problems is not more technology, it's people, and it's relationships. And so I just wanna emphasize that in order to be successful at this sort of initiative, partnerships are vital. It's hard at NAR of our universities to be able to find any kind of new resources. And I think as Greg addressed, we worked over time to build up and show the value, show the potential, but building those partnerships was really critical to our ability to do that. We continuously, over the course of several years, engaged with these key stakeholders listed in order to kind of share data about the state of RCD services on our campuses compared to peers to show the potential benefit to other units for the creation of a service like this. I think Susan and I gave a talk with Mark Hoyt, our CIO at NC State a few weeks ago about this topic. And he really emphasized that importance of showing that to your potential partner organizations that this is a win for everybody. So show the value of this to your research office. Show the value to your university as a whole and the ability of the university to bring in more research dollars and help boost the effectiveness of your researchers by removing some of the stressors that they find in doing kind of day-to-day computational work, letting them focus on the sciences as opposed to focusing on administrative tasks or these not administrative tasks, but things that are less relevant to their day-to-day research. I wanna see if I, I think that's pretty good. I think another thing that I would like to hit on is that just kind of emphasizing again, it takes time. I think Greg, Susan and I over the course of several years each engaged with the communities that we had access to or the venues that we had access to. Again, not in an irritating way, but I think in a way to when we saw a window of opportunity where we heard an anecdote that showed the effect that this lack of coordination was having on our research and our presidency state, we each brought it up in those appropriate contexts. So Greg with CIO, the Vice Chancellor for Research, I serve on a lot of campus committees around data compliance, data security, campus computing and Susan as well, interfacing directly with researchers and the directors of research centers, just kind of building support, making that case, showing the value, showing the potential of an idea like this was really critical in our ability to build up slowly over time, gradually show support and get to the point where we are today and hopefully we'll to grow over time. And then I think finally, we wanna address a question that we get kind of on a fairly regular basis. So why is this service in the library? People are like, wow, this sounds really interesting, but why isn't it in IT? Why isn't it in the research office? Why isn't it in the library? And I think that has a lot to do with our ability, just as we stated in our presentation to build those connections, to show trust and credibility. And I think on our campus, and I hope on many of your campuses, libraries are known as great connectors as places where people can go to get kind of answers, figure out where to be referred. And we take that very seriously at our library. And I think we're very good at it, we're recognized as being effective in that way. And so when the idea of forming this initiative was finally accepted and when people were talking about where to put it, I think we were all thinking like, we could do this. But it wasn't us who made that suggestion at first. Was it Mladen? It was our director of research, or vice chancellor for research. And so it just made sense that the libraries would be the place for this. I think another knot in our favor was our long history in supporting enabling services for researchers. So for instance, Susan referred to a lot of those, like our data and visualization services department, which connects very closely with our data science academy to provide statistical consulting, data visualization consulting, et cetera. We have the history of Susan's position helping to connect research data storage, connect researchers to research data storage. We have the long history of the libraries consulting on research data management planning. We have, we are the institutional owners of NC State's ORCID kind of provisioning system. And so we help researchers create ORCIDs, create NIH biosketches and open access publishing consultations, other kinds of data curation services, et cetera. So we show that trust and credibility over time. We provide services that people value and I think that has paid off over time. So just kind of, again, to reiterate the key takeaways here, work your partnerships, build credibility over time, and that results in the trust that you need from your community in order to be successful in launching a service like this. And I think I'll kind of leave it there and leave it up for questions. We've kind of put a few conversation starters that people don't have questions here, but we're ready to take your questions now. I wanted to ask a question about the services, the service request that you get. One of the services, common request that you mentioned was web app development and database development, which depending on the nature of the ask can be like really out of scope for the capacity that you have. And so I wanted to ask you, has this reorganization like changed like your sort of impression of the overall capacity for by having this coordination for the services that you can offer researchers? And then the second question is in cases where you still don't have the capacity to offer the development or data services, has it changed how you manage the basically the process of saying no? Sure, so it's sort of the same answer. That's a gap on our campus that we can't really fill currently. And so oftentimes what happens for us is if it is a gap, we are mastering saying no. But what we're finding is that researchers are really thankful just to have a place to come and sort of ask about that and to sort of express the need and know that we're taking that need and we're reporting it up. So that's actually one of the more requested items that we're receiving. And so prioritizing that maybe on campus for adding support for that in the near future, we would love to see that. And so yeah, right now it's just, how do you say no in a way that they feel seen and heard and know that they're not just talking to somebody that's not going to at least advocate on their behalf for that? Thank you. Sure. I don't know. This way. My question is about the support you provided to your research core. So for the data transfer, what kind of setup did you provide them and what did they then commit to do long-term? Like are they managing access to accounts or is that something that your IT department is doing? Sure, so in terms of the GSL, the Genomic Sciences Laboratory, they sort of had a clunky workflow where they have a bunch of different machines that they have a server for each machine within their lab and they were saving it locally to that server and providing a web URL for access to their clients. And then oftentimes their clients were downloading from there which is a little bit of a security issue and then pushing it back to our central location such as high-performance computing or data storage. So we did some scripting to automate that so that particularly for internal clients was our first sort of iteration of the project. Those would move to central locations where they could go ahead and get it on the HPC or on the data storage. So they didn't have to have that extra step where they downloaded and uploaded. And now on our second iteration of the project, we're implementing Globus so that even external clients that have access to Globus, which many do. So it kind of streamlines that. So internal and external, we're hoping to use Globus rather than what we created. I hope that answers your question. And if you're interested in more specifics, I can get you in touch with our technical team. And one thing we didn't mention is that half of our team currently is in the libraries with me and the other half is in our research computing department or unit within central IT. And so we have different reporting structures there and I direct the service, which is something that's kind of unique, but it really kind of helps us to really be more collaborative. You could advance the slide to the people. Oh, sure. And you can see our team and the little plug we're hiring. We have one. We do have one additional position with us in the libraries. That hyperlink will take you there and you can find it on our website too or reach out to me. Amy? Yes, thank you. So I'm wondering about the equity of access to the services. I know you started with STEM, but are all of these free services or do you have payback models for any of these? Sure, it's a good question. It's a complicated question right now. They're all free. And we support anybody funded or unfunded. We just chose these colleges for different reasons such as their interdisciplinary needs. We also are choosing some because we think we're gonna be challenged. So for instance, the College of Natural Resources has a pretty big laboratory for geospatial analytics. And so we're expecting a lot of big data problems to come out of that, which will challenge us. And we anticipate rolling to a smaller college next in fact for that equity reason. We've done two fairly large ones. So we might hit something like management or something like that. In the future, sustainability, I'm not quite sure if we will be able to provide everything that we do for free. And that's a conversation that we're starting to have, but we haven't gotten very far. I don't know if Greg or Joe wants to comment on that. I mean, yeah, you're right. And this is a good, the financial modeling question from earlier, from Waterloo. It's gonna have to be a mix of funding sources. Some subsidized, some from large institutional grants to pay directly into the service. And then some unit-based, college-based support, I think is gonna have to be the mix. The exact allocation of that mix is gonna be, I think it's gonna be challenging. We're taking somewhat of a leap of faith, right, by starting the service and incubating it so then we can have something to actually charge for into the large-scale grants. But I think that's right. And then you're correct. Some of the humanists and social scientists who don't have that kind of support, we've talked openly at the university level about having to subsidize some level of that. And then saying no to the other things that they want and providing but a basic level of foundational service. Yeah. Hi, thanks. This is really a follow-up to that same line of question. I'm David Millman from NYU. Thank you, that was really good. And we're wondering, are you considering, now that there are new allowable costs, say from NIH, about curation services and preservation services, are you thinking about going to researchers and asking them to put a line in for you? And what kind of, how are you gonna get that trust cooked? Yeah, that's something that we're thinking a lot about. I'm sure you all are within your NIH policy and allowing costs for data storage, data publication, data curation. Right now, I'm not quite sure. I mean, we want to be able to help people budget for those costs, but there's some unknowns. So for storage, if they're gonna use on-prem storage that we provide, we do have a cost for that. But you can only use certain money for that, so they have to budget it in rather than use FNAs. That's why we want to get there early. But in terms of data curation, we don't offer data curation on campus, so that's one of the gaps. And I don't know how to help them budget or where they might find that support currently. I hope I answered all of your questions. Do y'all have any follow-up? I think, yeah, this is on. So I think that's a, one of the key questions has been swirling around our campus, which I didn't introduce because it could have been an entire presentation on its own is the way that we allocate overhead funding. And we, I think, are very conservative at NC State in terms of what allowable costs are and when we're able to allow money to pay for unlike circumstances. And it really hampers, I think, our ability to, for example, grow our local infrastructure on campus as opposed to it's much, much easier for researchers to take money and buy AWS or Azure services than it is to reinvest in our local infrastructure. And I think that's really, really closely related to this question. And we are in the process of it's been a long, years-long discussion with our budget office, with our contracts and grants office in order to understand how we might be able to gain a little bit of flexibility, learn from our peers who are maybe able to be a bit more agile in this way to be able to help support the growth of our campus infrastructure in a more effective way. I think we're out of time, right? Yeah, we are. We are out of time. There you go. I'll come and talk. Okay, that sounds great. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thank you.