 Okay, so this is a lunchtime session for us in the UK, but I'm recognising I think for our speakers here that it's not lunchtime. So let me introduce our panellists and they're going to introduce themselves and their associations. So, Carmel. Thank you so much, Jane. I'm Carmel O'Sullivan. I'm the chair of the board of call, the council of Australian university librarians. I am in Queensland, Australia. It is not sunny. It is almost, it's 11pm. So it's close to midnight on Thursday night. But right now it's 24 degrees in my house. So it's lovely and barmy. So you can feel jealous of me. It might be a little bit late, but it's lovely here in Australia. So I'm very happy to be here. Thank you, Carmel. Definitely not lunchtime then. Brett. Thank you, Jane. And for me, it's good morning. I'm just outside my window. The sun is just coming up at 7am here in Regina, Saskatchewan, where I am Dean of University Libraries and Archives. And I'm speaking to you today from Regina, Saskatchewan, as president of Carle. In Canada, we refer to this as the land of Treaty 4, the homeland of the Nahiawok, the Anishinaa Pake, the Dakota Lakota and the Dakota people and the homeland of the Métis Mitchiff Nation. And today it is, this morning it is a balmy minus 10 here for us. So. Thank you, Brett. Andrew. Good morning from Washington DC. My name is Andrew Pace. I am the relatively brand new seven weeks on the job. Executive Director for the Association of Research Libraries. And happy to be with you today. Thank you, Andrew. Masood. Good morning, everyone. I'm Masood Koker. I am here in the capacity of Chair of Research Libraries UK's board. And in my day job, I am the University Librarian and Keeper of the President Collection at the University of Leeds in the UK. At the moment it is lunchtime or just after lunchtime for me and it is wet, damp and a bit miserable here in Leeds, but it is 90 degrees Celsius. So it's not too bad. Okay, my name is Jane Harville. I am going to chair this conversation today. Also add my thoughts towards the end. I am currently the Vice Chair of our UK, but also the University Librarian at the University of Sussex, and I haven't checked the temperature, but it's wet on the south coast and feels like we're in a cloud. Okay, right. So for this session, we've pulled things together around three topics, which will help, I think, with the structure. And we've asked our panellists ahead of time to share, to think about what their thoughts might be in these three different areas. So we're going to start with strategic alignment and start with what drivers for engage, what are the drivers for engagement with the SDGs, and do institutions see the library as the key stakeholder. So I'm going to start with Andrew and Carmell. Could you kick us off with your, with your, with your thoughts, please, Andrew. Sure. Thank you. I think the, the answer to the very first question about drivers is pretty simple. The driver of engagements for SDGs from my perspective are first that libraries are an international endeavor, as you can see from this, with shared values shared priorities and mission. So turning to the United Nations gives us an international framework and a set of standards in which to work, and what librarian doesn't like working from a standard. The other driver more pointedly is crisis climate crisis. This is a bit of a digression from SDGs, but I think it's an appropriate comparison. When I came in, I came up with this profession as a systems librarian and as a product manager. And as we like to say in that field ideas are cheap. But there's a simple yet decisive test you can use to determine whether a new idea would be a viable product. So the test is simply this, is the problem urgent. Is the problem pervasive and would be, and would people be willing to pay to solve it. And I think climate crisis definitely passes this test. As to the other questions, national engagement, local engagement are libraries key stakeholders. The answer that ARL has found is a resounding yes to all three from its membership. Sustainable practices are a priority and everything we do work at work or at home in life in general, and ARL has actually adopted sustainability as one of its values. However, sustainable sustainable development goes beyond environmental sustainability alone. So using the United Nations SDGs as a tool for fostering individual and collective awareness and imagination. ARL held this year it's first ever presidents Institute in February 2024 sort of an inaugural event for the new president of our board. The event this year was entitled embracing sustainability libraries leading the way. This explored how libraries and museums contribute to sustainable development and how we can build awareness and actively participate in furthering this work. Participants heard from experts in the field and work together to set sustainability goals for our libraries, our institutions, and also within the association of research libraries. Henry McGee, who is a consultant and founder of curating tomorrow is actually based in Scotland. He noted the event and more importantly facilitated a day long working meeting that had some very positive outcomes for the group. A lot of the work was centered on his opening challenge to go beyond the cliche do less harm, and instead not to forget to also do more good. Henry, Henry has worked primarily in the museum sector. So, you know, in activating SDGs so libraries were a natural extension to the work that that he'd already focused on in museums. The day also included a panel that was moderate moderated by Bart Murphy from OCLC one of the event sponsors. Leo low civil Schaefer Morgan Barker Sarah triple horn had a lively discussion that actually explored the intersection of libraries sustainability and cutting edge technologies so as you can imagine artificial intelligence was a was a big topic, regardless of SDGs being the primary I don't want to repeat what was said at that at that panel, but in terms of is this is this in our lane, you know, our SDGs and libraries lane. I do want to call out the comments that civil Schaefer from University of California San Diego. She spoke eloquently about our lack of attention to digital librarianship and its intersection with sustainability that you know libraries are making decisions daily about digital access and digital preservation. We have a long lasting impact on our digital and carbon footprint. And these decisions are rarely include consideration of sustainable development goals. The, I want to wrap up the day also included some workshops so it wasn't just sort of a state a stage on the stage, kind of presentation, they had working, working workshops that maybe I can talk about a little bit more as this this session gets going on. The other line is that there was no doubt expressed by the participants that this is an important area for library engagement. Thank you, Andrew. That was very, that was very complete and wide ranging. Thank you, karma. What a great way to start. Thank you so much, Andrew. I did want to say that I'm on Gaible land here in where I'm Gaible and Jarrah land in Toowoomba where I am in Queensland and I wanted to pay respect to any First Nations people who are with us today. Participating in this session and pay my respects to elders past present and emerging. I wanted, I'm probably a little more tentative, I think, possibly than Andrew. A couple of things that I wanted to acknowledge is that Australia is tracking its progress to the end to the on the UN SDGs, but it's not really a significant driver for the institution. So I think libraries really are more concerned about the SDGs than the institutions that we are within. I would, I would think would be a reasonable thing to say. So in 2019 call did a mapping exercise on the UN SDGs. That was really again highlighting individual institutions, individual libraries within higher education institutions at work that they were doing. More broadly, though, earlier, which is the Australian Library and Information Association is probably the primary driver of our interest in the SDGs in Australia. And they use the SDGs as the framework for their strategic planning. And also for my own institution, so a University of Southern Queensland library, we've done a couple of mapping exercises and we've produced library stories, which are stories of what we do individually as an institution around the framework of the SDGs. One of the things that I wanted to talk a little bit about, though, was the what what the values and the mission of call is and how they that relates to the SDGs. So sustainability, openness, ethics being participative and progressive are all kind of four things to call. So and we have three services and three strategic programs within our remit of what call does. So we've got an analytics and analytics service, a content procurement service and a professional learning service. But the strategic programs I think align very, very closely with the SDGs. So one of our main strategic one of our three strategic programs is around from decolonization to indigenization. And that's really recognizing the legacy of colonialism colonialism in Australia and the importance that Indigenous knowledge plays. And the complex challenges that we face as institutions in Australia to effectively address that space. And the second and third strategic program, so open access, which is about enabling open access to scholarly communication and then thirdly open education resources, both very relevant to the UN SDGs and I'm particularly proud of the work that Australia has done and call has done around open education resources. So we have a national and international really Australia and our tower at New Zealand collective around open education resources, where we're collaboratively producing free and open textbooks, which will in turn reduce the barrier to access to higher education, address the inclusion in higher education, address poverty, those kinds of things. So I think, and then the last thing I wanted to say by way of introduction is about the university's accord. So this is a new document that's just come out in the last couple of months. So there was a draft accord and now there's a final accord, which has a number of recommendations for government. And it's really quite a broad ranging and sweeping reform agenda and it really tightly aligns. It doesn't mention the SDGs, but it very tightly aligns with the intent of the SDGs really. And it's looking at the significant changes in higher education that are needed to meet our social, economic and environmental challenges. The shortage of educators, which is mentioned in the SDGs, the need for environmental and industrial security, the need for sustainability, the need for safety in the way that we operate as a nation. So that a lot of the things in that accord and the accord probably is the most important document for higher education in Australia for possibly a decade. It's a recommendation to government, so we wait to see how many of those things. But it anticipates a very large increase in the number of students in higher education and the diversity of the background of those students. And that throws up a lot of challenges for us. It also speaks a lot to the research environment and open sites and open research. And probably the last thing I might mention before I hand over is that there's also a fair bit of work or interest, particularly in the media just in the last couple of weeks in Australia around the infrastructure around open science as well. There's interest, there's always been interest from call, but the mainstream media seem to have discovered that that's a thing now. So that's quite interesting. In a good way, I hope. We hope, yes, I think in a good way, yes. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Kamal. Thank you both. I wondered, Masood, is there anything that you wanted to come in on? I could start. I would say that in Canada, at the institutional level there is support for the SDGs, but it would almost be, from my perspective in a lot of ways, reverse engineered. So the universities across the country have developed their strategic plans. They've identified what their priorities are, and then they go back and look at the SDGs and say which ones fit this as opposed to that work necessarily being driven by the SDGs. So that then affects how it rolls out in individual institutions. So in some cases, as we'll talk about later, there is a great deal of engagement in other areas, there's probably less engagement. And for lots of us, I think that reverse engineering continues in the work that we do even within libraries. We align with our institutional goals and plans, and then we identify how that aligns with specific SDGs, as opposed to sometimes having that work being driven by that. There are notable examples that I'll discuss a little bit later. But I think collectively, as an Australia, decolonization is a huge issue for us and working with Indigenous and Aboriginal people. And as a result of that, there are things that are going on nationally among libraries that are very much supporting this kind of work. And I would say nationally among our institutions, libraries probably lead in some areas. But the SDGs are not at top of mind for most of our governments. In Canada, outside of research, the federal government has little influence on what happens in universities, and so it's somewhat dependent on our provincial governments on where their interest lies. And for some of us, that interest is almost non-existent, and for others, it's more apparent. So I think it's more of a patchwork here, but there is very definitely a commitment to supporting the SDGs and to moving those things forward collectively and individually. Thank you for my suit. Yeah, just just building on that. I think there is definitely commitment to SDGs within the UK's government framework, but it's not the most common thing you hear from the government. It's mostly at the moment, it's either about immigration or economy or inflation or other elements that are going on. However, I think institutionally, SDGs have been talked about more than potentially in some other parts of the world. At least that's how it feels to me. Is it part of our direct strategies? As far as I've noted, elements of it are, sustainability particularly is a critical element that features in many institutional strategies. Community and community building is very common. And increasingly, lively strategies also reflect elements of SDGs. They may not refer to them directly as SDGs, but they are absolutely either directly supporting SDGs or indirectly supporting SDGs. And I'll give some examples of that in some of the next topics and themes. What's really interesting, and I'll give you a very localized example of this here at Leeds is about a year ago, we were having a very detailed discussion about what comes after SDGs. And I think this is a really interesting dynamic about, I think we were a bit late, the party in terms of SDGs, and I'm saying this as libraries rather than institutions. We've responded to something that's been delivered, something that the institutions are really keen on. And we have a potentially more stronger role to play in this. But at least now there is an increasing interest in some SDGs, but also what might come after that and how we contribute to that. It's not yet fully common, but that thinking has started to emerge. Thank you, Matthew. Just, I want to move on to what we're doing. But before we do, I just wanted to make a comment around the, I think, both you, Carmel and Andrew mentioned values. And I wonder whether in libraries, you know, we can, we can generally sometimes be a bit modest about what we do, but in terms of our values. I wonder if we can talk, we are able to talk very passionately and engage with the most drivers rather than checking afterwards. Because they, because they align so, the goals align so closely with our values as librarians. That's a comment someone else can come in if they want to, values is one of my favorite subjects. But I was pleased to hear both Andrew and Carmel mention values. I agree. And I think the SDGs are very plain and blunt about what needs to be done and what's not yet done. And I think that we could benefit as a profession for being kind of plainer and blunter about our values and the fact that we're not neutral institutions and that we do have values. Yeah, lovely. Thank you. Well, let me move us on. I wanted to introduce Brett and Massoud to talk about what libraries are currently doing with SDGs. So how are SDGs and their values being incorporated into library strategic plans, for example. Brett, do you want to start? Sure. I can certainly do that. So what we see across Canada is that there is, and I will go back to what was said about values. There are, these are respected. They do align with a lot of things that libraries do. And I think what's been exciting to see in Canada is the way that this has happened in many ways organically with, because there is no sort of overarching driver behind it. So I think that there are some that, there are some of the SDGs that people naturally will align to as what was mentioned before climate, those kinds of things. And certainly libraries have looked at that, but I'm going to speak firstly about one of the libraries that has done, I think the most work in Canada. And that's York University in Toronto. The university itself looked at SDGs as the driver behind the values that they wanted to espouse as a university. And certainly the library has embraced that. And I will put into the chat some links for some of the reports that they've done. But in fact, by doing that, they've been able to identify that there are a number of SDGs where they can support a number of things happening across the world. And both, and also locally within Canada. And I think it's that sort of commitment in that view that has expanded the idea of where libraries can participate. This is also shown up at the University of Victoria, for example, where the University Librarian Jonathan Bankston has worked with his staff. And actually created a fund where the librarians can do projects based on money that became available through the pandemic, but they have to actually identify which SDGs their work will actually support. Also at the University of Victoria, there is alignments between individual researchers and librarians. And again, they report that from the perspective of the SDGs that that researcher is working on. So in fact, it expands where libraries can participate. So I think we sometimes have this very narrow view of where we can make a difference or have an influence when in fact, by working with people in our communities, we're supporting the advancement of those SDGs. I think nationally also there's been a lot of work collectively in different areas shared print is one support for open access collectively is certainly one where we have done a lot of work in Canada but also, given the way that we are licensing for what we've done and what our journals has done and support for those kinds of things through the national body of CRKN our support for SCOS and for third, for developing nations, publishing, whether that's open or otherwise has also been quite impressive. And so we come collectively together to do those kinds of things. Again, we don't. What we do in Canada is then necessarily label those according to the SDGs which we need to do more of. And I think that's one of the things where, as was mentioned, libraries have an ability to actually promote and show what's happening and we don't always do that as effectively as we can. In my own institution, we've done an enormous amount of reporting on our use of electricity and computers and how we've changed people's computers and actually adapted our learning commons to be more responsive to students but also has reduced our overall greenhouse impact. But I'm going to tell you on my site on my library's website there would be nothing that would align that with SDGs and we need to change that. So, I'll turn it over to Massoud at this point. Thank you Brett Massoud. I was talking I was thinking that there's a potential for a really nice international project here where we all start to collect some of this knowledge values driven knowledge that we are values driven work that we do and align it around the SDGs. I think it would be quite an impactful report so I'm just thinking about that. I think firstly I really want to highlight the role of public libraries here as well. I recognize that I'm representing academic libraries but public libraries have done tremendous amount of work in terms of community engagement in terms of information literacy in terms of supporting communities from displacement backgrounds, etc. And they are all significantly contributing to multiple elements of SDGs. And if you read a lot of reports if you read a lot of research papers around that a lot of them have been focusing on the role of public libraries across multiple components. And academic libraries have also increasingly started working on this more actively. And what I'll do is I'll take three different SDGs and give some examples around that to highlight them within the UK context. I'll take STG13 which is the Climate Action STG. And as Brett was highlighting increasingly academic libraries are looking at their carbon footprint, they are looking at how they're like I know for example in my library there are still lights that are not LED that are not controlled in an effective fashion. And these are also looking at their 24-7 provision and what's the right balance between student experience but also keeping very large building open for a very small number of students at 2 a.m. So there are lots and lots of things that are being looked at in terms of the carbon footprint and the carbon impact of running the libraries. But balancing it with the kind of expectations that our students have and our users have at the moment. And not just about the buildings I think increasingly we are also looking at what does it mean to store collections in individual stores. What's the physical carbon footprint around that increasingly new projects are being spun up around digital carbon footprint when we procure a large number of ebooks. What's the overall carbon footprint of that what does it mean in terms of supply chain. And also I think one area which which I really want us to challenge ourselves on is how challenging are we with our suppliers. Are we actually really pushing them on what their carbon plans are what their carbon footprints are and without naming publishers. I think some of the big ones have very nice fancy looking carbon plans on their websites that actually doesn't tell you anything. It just shows their commitment but no action and I think there is this level of responsibility I guess on all of us to start challenging some of that back. In terms of actual examples I think one particular example I want to give us around British Library and British Library has been actively leading work in this area they've recruited a sustainability manager role within their organization. And they have done a significant amount of work in sustainability and carbon reduction features. Similarly many many other library strategies and I'm just going to name a few, not complete by any means within our UK now include either sustainability or carbon reduction as an explicit metric. And that includes British Library as I mentioned the University of Leeds Library Manchester Sussex and many many more. And within our UK as an as a consortium organization. We have signed up to the Green Libraries Manifesto, which showcases our combined collective commitment to reducing the carbon footprint and embracing better approaches to sustainability. But also environmental, digital and financial sustainability all feature in the RL UK strategy itself. One thing that Brad highlighted was the shared collections mechanisms and at the moment there is a very strong active project that's running within RL UK around. What does it mean to build a collective collection, both from a physical and digital perspective. But also what does it mean to have a UK distributed print book collection so that this is not about individual replication and expansion of that carbon footprint but also thinking collectively how we can reduce some of that. I'll pick another couple of STGs. So apologies that you'll have to listen to my voice for a bit. But let's pick STG for it's the one that's really close to my own heart, which is about providing quality education and particularly thinking about communities. And this is becoming increasingly important to academic libraries as their institutions get more and more placed into the civic mission of their cities or their local regions. And I think it's a really fascinating conversation that quite often from sense between the globalization and localization of institutional strategy. And I know that international strategy for example features very heavily at the University of Leeds, but there's very little which talks about the local region. And yet we are an anchor institution in the city of Leeds in the local region and we really want to do more on that front. So there is there's a real interesting dynamic slash tension slash aptitude of making an impact that comes from that. But a few examples I want to give within our UK context is the first one I want to pick is Lancaster University library who've been pioneering the community card offer which basically provides free access to anyone in the community to the libraries and the collections. Similarly, universities of Sheppield and Leeds now provide membership offer to academic asylum seekers and refugees. And there's an increasing sense of we need to work more and more with our local communities who otherwise may not have access to quality education without sometimes having a passport or an ID or all the other barriers that are put in their place. And similarly, libraries are also now offering free courses. So free information literacy, free media literacy, free digital literacy workshops. And that's something that's increasing our time. And also the boundaries or the layers between academic and public libraries have become more porous and some academic libraries now also support public library offers from within them. And one example I'll give on that is the University of Aberdeen library, which has a public library presence and public engagement on that. Bristol is doing some absolutely brilliant work by taking their library to where the local communities are often deprived communities. So it's not about them coming to the kind of really sometimes very. Again, I can say this about Leeds, where you don't think campus infrastructures, instead of that, take the library or take the collections where they need to be. And I think that's a really, really strong way of supporting our communities in that. And that in turn also supports SDG1, which is no poverty because often poverty is linked with lack of access to information data and knowledge. So I think these are all kind of really strongly linked initiators. And one last SDG that I will focus on is SDG17, which is often the forgotten one because it's about partnerships for the goals. And LIBE is one of our really core values is collaboration and partnership. And in the UK, we collaborate very strongly within and we strongly collaborate within the networks like IRLA. However, we've not done this really well beyond the Western sphere. I think we look at this from a developed country's perspective primarily. And while that has been an important lens, I think for, if you really are serious about global SDGs, we need to think more global around that. And by that, I do mean the way we look at how we embrace open access so that we don't shift one set of inequities with another set of inequities because we've been looking at it with a very Western lens. The work that Carmen was mentioning on open education, that is absolutely brilliant. And I know this personally that I've seen Australia with a sense of inspiration around that, but that yet hasn't penetrated the UK academic libraries in the same way. There is some pockets of work that's being done but not entirely in a collective fashion. And I think we need to think about how we contribute more to the institutional partnerships because several of our institutions have some amazing partnerships in Africa, in South Asia, in other parts of the world. But as libraries, we are not fully activated within those partnerships. And I think that goes back to that political positioning and our own voice around SDGs and what we can contribute. That becomes very, very important. One selfish plugin for something I will make here is that at least we started thinking about it from a knowledge equity perspective rather than an open search perspective. Because while openness is very important, openness does not always equate to equitable access, nor does it equate to equitable production. And I think those things have become absolutely important, particularly when it comes to indigenous knowledge systems or other knowledge systems that really need to be a core part of solving some of these global challenges. And one really good example of that is how indigenous knowledge systems are absolutely fundamental in increasing the biodiversity and caring for our land. And yet we have not yet fully embraced those in the way we think about certain things. One last comment on this, I think one of the things that I was asked was, is there a conflict between what we do and or is there a tension between what we're doing this? And I wouldn't say there isn't any, but just going back to what Brett and Andrew and others have said, I think we need to be more direct and explicit about ourselves. We need to be really showcasing what we are already contributing, which will then in turn also highlight where we can do further contributions. The whole SDGs were developed with strong input from the libraries. None of these are actually achievable without quality data and quality information. And there's no one better place than libraries to be those entities of effective, authentic information and knowledge management. So I think we just need to rebuild that perception. We need to rebuild our position around that. And remind everyone how we can be so critical to achieving these absolutely critical goals that are so fundamentally learned our values. Thank you. Andrew. Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on what was said because I think it's reflecting on the, the, the day long Institute that we held around the SDGs I think the participants left the day thinking of themselves as advocates, if not leaders on the SDG space at their institutions, or if they weren't leaders and they were ambassadors for the library's role in institutional effort that was already being undertaken, right? So I think they sort of made that connection. You know, librarians, we have a tendency to rush in where angels fear to tread. Often when there when there are new things going on, but I think the difference here that makes this leadership instead of just blind advocacy. You know, is the having the education and tools that we need to sort of to to participate thoughtfully and intentionally in these things and not to sort of, you know, standing in a corner and screaming SDGs SDGs, you know, climate change climate change, you know, you're having those tools makes the libraries into leaders in their institutions around these around these areas. Thank you, Andrew. What did you want to come in? I was going to do a shameless plug for those that that open education collective that Australia has managed to do. And we really did surprise ourselves very much. We thought that we might get 10 institutions who wanted to publish an open textbook. And basically the idea was and is that we have a collective people pay a very small amount to get access to an open publishing platform. They get training on how to work with academics around creating open textbooks for the Australian higher education curriculum. We developed workflows and some courses and held several communities communities of practice. But what we've ended up is is almost every single Australian and New Zealand, like the university library is a member of that collective now. And there are dozens and dozens of books being produced, and they're all collaborative books. And one of the and they're all digital and they're accessible in different formats. And there's a lot of collaboration between and across universities in areas of the curriculum where they would not necessarily have been that level of collaboration before. And I think it's one of those things where you can really see that this can make a huge difference to students lives and the ability of people who don't think that they belong in university or could afford a university education to not have that bill shock when they arrive and see the cost of the ridiculous cost of textbooks that they would use for one semester and perhaps not again. So I think that's a that's a real leadership that we can we've we've got the expertise and the ability and the and the connections to make that happen. And so where I'm hoping that that's a thing that other countries might be interested in. But of course, we also we don't just create new texts. We look at texts that might come from North America or the UK or whatever, and then put that Australian perspective in and then we can not localize them even more. So for instance, here at the University of Southern Queensland, we've taken a text, put some local First Nations perspectives into that text. And then James Cook University, which is in North Queensland has put its own First Nations perspective from from that those areas perspective into the same text and made that contextualized for them. And that's a really good example of how you can localize and globalize at the same time. And I think this is what the SDGs is trying to get us to do is local action, but make it collaborative and make it have a global impact. And I think there's, there's quite a lot. I think that libraries can do in terms of what can we do collectively that can just spread that local initiative far and wide. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Paul, before I bring my student, I just want to ask you a quick question that's come up, which is, is the OER collective incentivized for academics to generate or create? Yes, we have some grants. So we do give very small grants out to academics, but many of the many of the publications aren't particularly grant based either. So in our own institution, we give some grants in addition. But collectively, we might give maybe 30 grants a year, I think, but don't quote me on that though. But they're quite small. So they're really to pay for a research assistant or a bit of teaching buyout, but not very, not to not a huge amount of money being in that ecosystem to achieve quite a lot. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I think, as Carmen was speaking, I just thought that came to my mind. This is particularly with the open access for monocross initiative here in the UK. And the importance of university presses in there. And one thing that I was going to take back, but also hopefully might also instigate others to take back from this. Is actually before we even ask our suppliers what their plans are, we should start with ourselves. What is our own university press infrastructure, carbon footprint? What are we doing around that? And how are we supporting that in the long term? So I think there's a thought to take back about as we progress on those open infrastructures. We should also absolutely be critical about what kind of sustainability elements that we need to incorporate in development of those. Okay, so on that, before we move on to our final section, I just wanted to lob something in the question that somebody spun. Yeah, I know my studio and I have spoken about this, which is our work with SDGs. And in particular sustainability goal compatible with libraries explorations of AI, where these technologies are increasingly seem to be using significant amounts of energy and water. And I know my studio will have a comment on it because we've spoken about it. Is there anybody else that would like to comment on that? This is AI. I'll say something. I think I was trying to find the link for something that I wanted to share in a previous role. My organization had commissioned a gentleman named Thomas Padilla to explore. This was a couple of years before the explosion. This was published in 2019. The role of machine learning, data science and artificial intelligence in libraries. And we were really looking for something that was about the practice, the applied research of building tools and things like that. But he interviewed several dozen people about this and the theme that emerged from this was something that became the main title for the report, which was responsible operations. The thing that we need to sort of do differently, you know, as I like to say, well, you know, corporations plunder and governments flounder around artificial intelligence. The role in higher education is that responsible operation sort of area. What does this mean for the scholarly record? What does this mean for sustainability? Are we acting responsibly in our own organizations when we build large language models and things like that? And what are we doing to sort of inform our patrons, our users, about the other tools, the other sort of more corporately driven tools that they're using around the sort of data intelligence. You know, what we used to call a bibliographic instruction. You know, are we instructing people with data literacy around those things? So I think it's a huge intersection. Yes, that is the report. Thank you, Massoud, for putting the link in there. So I'm going to sort of, if you're a little away from AI and just look at the question that was just asked by Andy about true carbon footprint and the use of the cloud. And I think this is an area where libraries could be doing more in identifying where both expenses in carbon and savings in carbon are happening. So in Canada, we're currently, we have a shared repository for data, a national shared repository for data. We're looking at the same thing for institutional repositories. Yes, those shared spaces will consume more carbon. But what we haven't done is looked at how much carbon, less carbon, my library is now going to produce because I will be using that shared infrastructure. And I think it's not a, it's not a zero sum game in some of these cases and what we do need to look at and be better able to discuss is where are we making savings and where are we making impacts because of that collective work together. So yes, certainly, where our institutional repository nationally ends up residing will use more carbon than because it hadn't existed before. We're using electricity so we're using it will see a reduction in carbon use, both in terms of the physical instruct infrastructure and also the less tangible things like electricity water and those kinds of things. And so I think we also need to be looking very closely at how those things are balanced, and I don't think we're doing a very good job of that right now it's it's difficult to do that. I'm, you know, I'm not blaming us I'm not saying that we've missed the boat I'm just saying, we just need to get better at identifying where those things are so that we can truly as Andy has indicated. Determine what the value is and where we should be making that investment and where we're making the biggest impact. So I just wanted to add that. Thank you for it. Yeah, I'll be brief about the because people have heard me talk about before but I think we need to look at it from a tactical perspective and a strategic perspective. Yes, the large language models as they currently exist are extremely expensive to run an extremely carbon intensive. But they're also not the future they what they're doing is they're showcasing what's possible rather than what would become the norm. And I think Austin was mentioned this in his keynote yesterday that if you know, still Chicago was to build a large language model, not even at the scale, the daily cost was about 1.5 million dollars. And that is just not sustainable. The future on that, at least at a tactical level would be small scale models that incorporate the same large language capabilities behind them. And they can be run on a single GPU on a single machine and they are far more feasible for libraries to be involved in to be able to experiment with. However, I think when we look at this on a strategic layer, we also need to think about what capabilities does this bring which actually gets rid of some of the other things that are generating lots of carbon. So for example, it's very, very easy to misunderstand that actually the carbon footprint of a building is far greater than the carbon footprint of a machine running for 50 years, for example. So actually if you can somehow just reduce the amount of physical infrastructure that we have and sometimes destruction is also not good because that has its own carbon impact. By storing something in a different way that can then be accessed in a different way in a more intelligent way that might actually help reduce the carbon footprint for something that is already quite high. So I think we need to think about it from a more holistic ecosystem perspective, rather than what this algorithm or this current technology is doing. I think yes, absolutely the current model is not sustainable shouldn't be that way, but it generates the potential of us being able to reduce the carbon or reduce the carbon impact of many, many other things by rethinking everything differently around that. Thank you, Masu. Thanks for your comments. Okay, so last 10 minutes, let's move on to what we might do together to deepen our engagement. So recognising that you'll note that our panel comes from the Global North Association. So how do we engage more widely and collaboratively to ensure that our work has global benefit. Carmel, do you want to start? Well, I'm from the south, but I don't think that I am the that that Australia is the library association that we're targeting with this provocation. I think, you know, the short answer is that knowledge equity and open access is one of the ways that we can ensure ensure that there's global benefit to what we're doing beyond our borders. But I also think it's important to think about that globalization as more partnership and less charity. So think about working with a broader range of library associations and libraries in different places rather than sharing what we do with those people, if you know what I mean. And I loved Masu's idea about an international project around values and SDGs. Okay, thank you. Thank you. So I was just going to add, I guess, one of the things that I've learned in the last six months is what SDGs offer us in terms of a common language, a common framework, common terminology to be able to work together. We also have published a series of open textbooks, one of which was a book around the SDGs, which used the theme of the SDGs for English language teaching. So that, you know, that common thread that everyone can pick up on the common terms, which will I think enable us and help us work more collaboratively together and coordinate and amplify what we do as libraries. So the work around joint campaigns across our associations and across our libraries and our stories, should SDGs should help us with this because of the language. And as Masu said, you know, the idea of us putting together some projects, cultural exchange programs around the SDGs is very achievable, I think. And there will be far fewer barriers to understanding what is needed because of this common language that we use on these common themes. Andre. Yeah, I didn't want to waste the opportunity when I had 100 people in the room to sort of ask everybody was leaving with an idea of what they were going to do at their individual institutions. So I had Henry asked the group, what would you want ARL to do? Okay, what should ARL be doing that you can't do individually. And I mean, this is, it was a longer discussion, but here's the very, very short list of things that came out of that conversation. They want continued engagement. Right. So they didn't, they didn't want to lose momentum on the conversation. They wanted some structure. I think they wanted somebody with some agency. They wanted sort of, you know, structure those conversations. They want collaborative platforms to discuss these things. You know, that's why I threw out that sustainable libraries initiative. I think that's an example of that. They wanted matchmaking. Yeah, what we were calling matchmaking they wanted, you know, someone who could connect two members who are working in an area, and maybe weren't aware of each other. They wanted coalition building. They wanted connection with other associations. So we talked about IRLA. Right. And, and of course they wanted funding. I think that was sort of the elephant in the room of that conversation was, you know, where, where do the resources come from to sustain this conversation around SDGs. Thank you, Andrew. Anyone else. I want to take up on what Carmel said actually about looking at it as partnerships and not charity. And I think this is really critical. So in Canada there is also strong open publishing networks, either at a provincial level or not so much nationally at a provincial level, but we've shared things across the country. But what we've actually found is that some of our French language texts have far more impact in Africa than our English language texts, because they're in the language that those people speak. And so I think one of the things, you know, we can pat ourselves in our back and say, yes, we've made all of these things available but if we're not engaging with communities locally and saying, does this actually meet your need. We're not going as far as the SDGs expect us to. And so in some cases, you know, here in Saskatchewan, we have been doing texts in local indigenous languages. Those languages will not translate across the world. But what we can do is then work with other groups worldwide to ensure that those kinds of that kind of information is translated into local indigenous languages using the structures that we've been able to develop here. And I think that's really that vision that the SDGs have of an interconnected and as Masoud said earlier, a holistic world where we're supporting each other as opposed to people relying on the beneficence of others to sort of deliver something to them. And I think there's a really great opportunity for libraries to take a leadership role in this area because we are used to working collaboratively we are used to working internationally. And I think there's real opportunities for us to expand the reach of the work that we're doing in partnership as Carmel said, with local libraries worldwide and I think there's a real opportunity that we need to capitalize. Yeah, local global Masoud just very briefly, I think we need to add intentionality to this. I think what we need to do just picking up on that absolutely brilliant point from Brad. We've talked about we need to do something about it but we need to be really intentional about it and say okay, who are our partners in this, who wants to work with us on this one and I think the initial platform for that could be our love and then we look beyond that afterwards.