 Hello everyone and welcome to this Adam Matthew digital presentation on transforming inquiry based learning through the library. Thanks so much for your time today and being with us. My name is Ben Lacey and I'm joined by Nea Phillips, Maureen Marianski and James Anthony Edwards. Nea is going to introduce the speakers, the session and some housekeeping very shortly. But first of all, I just wanted to provide a quick word about who Adam Matthew digital are for those who are less familiar with our work. We partner with archives around the world to digitize their collections and present them online. These publications contain millions of pages of primary sources from the medieval era all the way to the 21st century. And today we're going to hear about how libraries can use collections like these to transform teaching and research. Thank you so much to RL UK for providing this ability for us to present to you today and everyone at the conference who's put this on it's been fantastic so far. And I'll now hand over to Nea to introduce our session and just go to the next slide please. Thank you. I'm just going to apologize in advance today is the day that my neighbors have decided to have their roof repaired so apologies very banging that you might hear the joys of working from home right. So yeah briefly today they'll introduce themselves as we go through the session but these are today's speakers who'll be joining us. So we have Maureen Marianski who's the education and outreach librarian at the Lily library based at the Indiana University. My name is Anthony Edwards who's the university librarian at the University of Exeter home shore many of you already know. Ben is our head of outreach Adam Matthew digital, and I'm the UK Island Nordics and Benedict sales manager here at Adam Matthew. I also wanted to say thank you to Caroline Gale who has worked on this session with us Caroline was unable to attend today, but has been invaluable with the session and are a wider work with access we just want to say thank you. So very briefly the session outline for today will be sharing a pre recorded discussion with Maureen from the library. Obviously with Maureen being based at Indiana we didn't want to get her up at the crack of dawn to join this so we filmed this a couple of weeks ago with her. We'll then follow on with a live discussion with James at the University of Exeter. And finally, there'll be time for a live Q&A at the end so then just have any questions throughout the session please do use the zoom Q&A function rather than the chat just so we can keep an eye on those questions and not lose any of them. Also, even though Maureen isn't attending today if anybody does have any questions specifically for Maureen please do still ask those questions. As Maureen has said that she's happy to answer any of those. So we can kind of pass them on to Maureen and then and then connect you with her. Similarly, if we run out of time at the end of the session, Ben and I are going to be at the Adam Matthew booth in the exhibit hall on kind of the joint live feature so if you have any questions that you don't get answered during the session please do pop by there after and we can answer them for you. Great, so we'll get started with that first pre-recorded discussion with Maureen. So I'll hand over to Ben now who's going to share that with you guys. Thanks all. I would like to introduce our guest speaker Maureen Marianski from the Lilly Library. The Lilly Library is the principal rare books manuscripts and special collections library of Indiana University Bloomington. In 1960 it holds over 450,000 rare books and 8.5 million manuscripts ranging from medieval manuscripts and early printed books to modern literary archives and mechanical puzzles. The Lilly is currently closed for a major building renovation that began in 2019 and is expected to reopen in late summer 2021. Maureen is the education and outreach librarian and coordinates the Lilly's extensive instruction program. Pre-pandemic Lilly librarians hosted 200 to 250 class sessions and tours annually for IU undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as grade school and community groups. Maureen, thank you so much for joining us today and thank you for your time. Welcome to the session. Thank you. Thank you for having me. No problem at all. If it's OK, can you start by outlining the type of instruction that you would have provided pre-pandemic, including an overview of the primary sources immersion program, which is, I know, a significant part of your work. Absolutely. I'm happy to. So the bulk of the Lilly Library instruction program and our poll approach to teaching with our collections is really based in active inquiry based learning. So very much wanting to get physical materials into the hands of students and allowing them to interact and engage directly with the materials has a lot to do with wanting to increase engagement. And also focusing on, you know, critical thinking skills and archival research skills. It's also grounded in the history of the book and the book is an object. So the physicality, the materiality of our collections is really, really important. So thinking about how our items were created and used and then who created them, who use them, who collected them and how their evidence of lives lived. So we kind of infuse everything with encouraging curiosity and lifelong learning and kind of breaking down the barriers and demystifying the spaces of special collections libraries and archives and making them very welcoming welcoming spaces for students. A vital element of this kind of teaching it takes a lot of partnership and communication with faculty members and with instructors. So that's that's like a key component of all of this is the relationships that we build with instructors. So the primary source immersion program. We've done a few rounds of it. It started in 2017. And we've had three years. It's a grant program that my Lilly colleagues and I working with colleagues in the library is teaching and learning department, as well as the university archives created this kind of three day workshop program for instructors. It's open to faculty as well as graduate student instructors to redesign a course into more closely integrate primary sources and the collections at IU into that particular course. So they go through a three day workshop in which we bring together repositories from across the IU campus and this. I mean that this is not just the libraries we have colleagues from the Museum of archaeology and anthropology from the Kinsey Institute from the black film center. So all of these colleagues coming together and sharing what kind of teaching they do with their collections and how they can partner and work with faculty. And it's been a wonderful program for people to start building community around teaching with primary sources. It's kind of an identified gap informal training of learning to teach with primary sources and incorporate them into into classes. So it's been a really nice we've had great feedback from instructors about just how important and how wonderful it is to have to bring people together from different disciplines and different repositories and they're able to learn from each other and it can be a site of you know professional networking but also exchange around pedagogy. That's great. So it's such a great program. And can you tell us a little bit more about how, you know, in the situation we found ourselves in in the past year how you've managed to transform that to an online environment and maybe we talked a little bit about kind of the physicality being so important how you managed to kind of replicate that digitally. Absolutely, it's definitely been the challenge of the past year, job wise at least, for me, and it's kind of compounded so for us that the challenge of the pandemic, coupled with the challenge of our current renovation because our collections and our staff are kind of scattered across our campus has meant. And for me it's meant a lot of creativity so those challenges, we've had to think very differently so I'm very reliant on at first, just photos we had taken of the collection in order to kind of present them and and talk to students about them but also some of the materials that we've digitized in house, as well as through databases, like Adam Matthew. My philosophy the whole time has been to try and come up with the simplest and easiest option not just for me but for students so that we don't want to over complicate anything we don't want to throw up more barriers right. We already have some that we're working with and kind of limitations, we don't need to, we don't need to over complicate or overthink right. So, we've used zoom a lot we've used we've wanted to make sure we can still get that active learning element into it so we've utilized breakout rooms and group work, and kind of translating the activities that we had trying to translate them into a virtual and I've done it very simply with use Google Docs and where the students can collaborate and kind of answer questions together in the group and then I can kind of keep an eye on it and see if people are stumbling out is one room having issues and I can kind of address it from there. And all of that is also then using links to either digitize materials in a database in house digitize materials. I recently did one with medieval manuscripts where I took all the pictures so you can see my hand in the pictures and things like that. And that's what we were able to give them and so I have a folder of images for students to work from so again it's, you know, being just come up with a creative solution and kind of go with it. I've also had a lot of success with the, the padlet program or tool. And that has been really wonderful because I'm able students again can kind of collaboratively comment on images and I can streamline and simplify all of the activities, and the questions that I'm And yes, the materiality that the physicality that has been a huge part of figuring out how to teach this year. And one of the solutions that we've kind of come up with is is using a document camera and so since we do have access as staff members into our building. We've been able to go in and just set up with a document camera and so I'll have students work with the digitize materials and come back for discussion and I will have the physical materials and they can at least see me manipulate the materials and give them a sense of size and scale and put it under the document cameras zoom in where we need to and kind of just start having the conversation about what is gained what is lost with digitization and kind of the comparison between digital surrogate and the physical item. So that's kind of been my approach for this year. It sounds fascinating actually trying to deal with those challenges and yeah rising to them as well which is really good to see and being able to maintain that element of the physicality and just getting students thinking about what is this item how has it been saved and preserved. And then maybe kind of connecting that with the digitized surrogates as well. Which is really good to see. So you did touch on very briefly there about the role of digitized archival collections within that instruction as something that you point to as part of it can you say a little bit more about that and the role that digitized archival collections play. Absolutely. I mean, it's their vital. I wouldn't be able. I don't think I'd be able to teach in any really meaningful and active way without having access to digitize digitize materials whether they're digitized in house or we're working through a database. I'll mention I'll I'll mention an Adam Matthew database. I actually I use it a lot and I've used it a lot in my own research to is the London low life collection and you know I've worked with a wonderful we have these intensive freshmen seminars that happen a couple weeks before the start of the fall semester and it's extraordinary it's about 20 incoming freshmen so not only are they new to the lily and we're introducing them to everything they could potentially use at the lily. They're new to IU they're new to college. So, so it's an extraordinary opportunity. And we have a class that comes in all the time and we happen to use a lot of London low life material and have the physical items. And this time around, one of the things that has been challenging is because of the pandemic plus renovation. This is the innovation, this of it all. Usually when I end a class session I'm like and come back like if there's something you've seen come and explore it and you can come to our reading room and you all you need is curiosity to come access all this, these materials and I don't have that kind of hook that I can leave them and what I was able to do for this is I introduced them, you know I introduced them to a specific item the swells guide and I had it physically for them to look at and then they were able to explore the digitized version. In breakout rooms and then when I left them I was able to say everything in this database is from the library and I know you can't handle it in person, but you can explore. And all of these different materials in the database and that's been really important and I'm not always able to do that with every subject area so it was nice to have that opportunity with that class and that collection. That's really exciting. I, and especially because it was a freshman class I think that I'm really struck by that because sometimes people are a bit hesitant about using archival collections or primary sources generally with first year undergraduates so did they react quite positively to that experience. Oh, absolutely it's. It was one of the best virtual sessions that I've had they were so enthusiastic I actually I very much underestimated the amount of engagement and how much they would talk this is another thing that I have come to realize over the last year is in the virtual because they can ask questions in the chat and they don't necessarily have to unmute they don't necessarily have to physically speak. Students are very chatty and they have a lot of questions and I love it. And this was one of those examples and they were so enthusiastic and so thrilled. I'm really lucky we have some of we have amazing faculty at IU and a lot who specifically work with first or second year students and really advocate for them being able to come in and use our materials I mean it's open to them regardless but it's sometimes it's that intimidation unfamiliarity issue of kind of getting them in the door and getting them to work with collections to bring them in very early in their college career it can kind of set the tone not just for their four years, but you know, I'm again I'm a big advocate of lifelong learning and that this isn't just about the research paper you're writing this is about how do you approach and critically examine these spaces and these materials and cultural heritage and how does this enrich lives right. I kind of see that as like, yeah, bring them in first year let's let's start having some conversations. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I love that. And so nice to see that, you know, actual virtual learning environment has enabled students that may be a bit cautious you know about raising their hand and kind of getting involved to really engage in that way and that's you know, definitely one of the positives from the last year would you say, there are any other kind of positives that you found in the last year and maybe things that you would, you know, continue post. You know when we're back in back in person and you know when the restorations finished and kind of those roadblocks are removed. Yeah, absolutely I think for me my, the biggest takeaway for me is a spirit of creativity like I was talking about and also experimentation so by necessity that we've had to kind of embrace that this year but it's been kind of. I was talking to a colleague about this the other day. It's weirdly increased my confidence in in my ability to do because I've had to kind of deconstruct what I've done so awesome for some for several years. In person I've had to really deconstruct it and rethink a lot of things and, and I don't know it's been kind of freeing. And it's also I'll go back to kind of talking about partnerships with faculty I think it's made those stronger I've, you know, faculty members I've worked with several times you know we've kind of had to go back to the drawing board and be like okay how are we going to figure out a way that is engaging and exciting and meaningful for students and and fair play to them they've been amazing in terms of like I don't know let's just try something so I love that spirit because I think. It's really easy to like find a one way of doing something and you just kind of keep keep keep doing it and you don't assess and taking the feedback and I think that's a vital element of this kind of teaching and and any kind of teaching that teaching is a practice and you're constantly, making in the feedback and assessing what you've done and making changes and adjustments and sometimes they're big and sometimes they're small. So, yeah, for me that kind of creativity experimentation flexibility has been has been really key. I think the technology aspect of it to I've never really. And this kind of goes along with the renovation, because we are going to have new and updated technology in our classrooms and we haven't had that we really haven't had the capacity, even if I wanted to. I think to incorporate some technology so I'm excited to see like using a document camera in an in person class and maybe we can zoom in and really focus on certain details or have a different kind of conversation where everyone can kind of see the item on the screen instead of trying to crowd around which for some items if it's really tiny that's not always possible. So I'm excited to kind of take what I've learned technology wise and see how it how it could translate back into the in person environment. And this is a more personal point of view on the there's a wonderful the teaching with primary sources community and collective website that is kind of a national community of librarians and archivists and cultural heritage professionals who teach with their collections. In the early on last year we were able to start having like community calls and support each other so there's there's just been a lot of community building, and just, again, a lot of generosity and support and experimentation and willingness to to share information and share knowledge and help each other and I hope to see that continue and and I'm pretty confident we're all very adamant we want that to continue so we're going to kind of fight for that I think. That sounds really positive and yeah what a good takeaway to have from a very difficult year and a very challenging year for lots of people. And that community element I think really speaks to the fact that library professionals across the world have really risen to that challenge and performed amazing feats under very challenging conditions. Thank you so much for your time marine that's been fantastic and I'm sure that people will be interested in your work and maybe if we have some questions we can direct them your way as well so that the conversation can continue. Absolutely I'd be happy to talk with with anyone. Wonderful thank you. Thanks marine. We're now move on to the live section and live discussions so I'll hand over to Nia for that. And welcome James thank you very much for joining us today and for taking the time. I'm sure lots of people attending today already familiar with you and the library at Exeter but just to kind of kick us off could you briefly introduce the library and your role at the university. Yep. So I'm universal librarian. University of Exeter library is an interesting one. The the bit I'm responsible for is let's start with the university. The university's got three main campuses to an extra city one in Penren just on the outskirts of Falmouth. And so we split our operations across quite a big distance which is relevant to what we'll talk about after I'm responsible for what happens in Exeter. The kind of overall approach and what happens digitally because we do obviously for all our students they get everything digitally. And then the the Cornwall campus is a shared campus with Falmouth University which gives it a very different feel to the extra campus but it has that shared research led learning approach. In terms of the library service. We're fairly similar to a lot of kind of research intensive library services and the only difference which a lot of people have heard me banging on about is we have a very, very small team. Indeed. But we have we have your usual run of modern collections we have some really strong special collections, which will come to but in areas like Southwest writers so we have the manuscripts of Lord of the Flies we have definitely demoria's papers, a really strong Middle East collection. We also have a fantastic digital humanities lab and digital humanities team which which, which is very, very work in a matrix management and extra, and the digital humanities lab is very matrix managed so I managed the head of digital humanities, but also in that team are it people technical services people and academics from humanities so we spread ourselves across most areas and you know like everyone else take the lead on things like research data and open access but yeah we we cover we cover two counties, as well as people in countries all over the world. Thanks James it's a small task then. Something that we've been thinking about quite a lot is the libraries 25th century research library projects could you tell us a little bit more about that project and kind of where it came and came from and kind of where you're at at the moment. Sure, so this this was, it's been a five year project it's got about four months left to run, and it came out of our previous research strategy which again is just coming to an end. One of the things I should have said about extra is we're very much a transition point at the moment because our previous VC Steve Smith who a lot of people have known from his UK working things retired last summer and we had a new VC Lisa Robert so we've got a lot of, not only because of COVID because of new senior leadership we've got a lot of change coming, but the previous research strategy had a set of funding with it. I wasn't in post at the time but it kind of the bit that was seen as a humanities element was this 21st century research project research library project. It's got three different elements to it the the smallest the least developed but potentially one of the ones that really needs and looking at is around linking the university archive into local archives. And there's been some workshops but there's with our with our civic university commitment there's there's real potential to do more with that element and I think that's one we have to look at more. The two bits which have money, which is the bit that always makes things work were investment in primary sources and investment in our special collections. I'll touch on special collections first and then I'll come to the primary sources to our special collections team before this I think had about three people in it, and we doubled it. The total funding, not just for the staffing but for the resources was about one and a half million over five years but it varied across time as to when that money came in. But those those project catalogers were working on Middle East collections, they were working on the archives of the Northcott theatre which is the largest theatre in extra. And they're working on a charity called common ground to do lots of arts and environmental stuff cataloging those collections, blogging about them doing social media. It made a big difference because we had such a tiny team that putting that many people and means we've been able to look at archives accreditation we've up to our social media presence. So it's been a real shot in the arm. The other element was investment in primary sources and back at the about the start of the project we did a benchmarking exercise. So we had a lot of colleges saying you know essentially, if you can have what you wanted out the library what we missing. And the bill was about 11 million pounds in 2015 prices. We haven't quite managed to do that. But what we have had it varies year by year but we've ended up with about 300,000 a year to spend on primary sources. So it's it's predominantly humanities social sciences, but we have humanities people in our social sciences college. We have humanities and social sciences people in our business school geographers have been have been buying things. What that's really done is to the special collections arm was a big shot in the art director special collections. But what the 21st century library funding has done is really gives a fresh direction this all started under my predecessor Claire Pound who really took us down a much more digital route than we have been before. And 300,000 a year to spend is good. But what it's really done is enable us to open up additional funding. So, you know one of the things we did summer 2019 was to buy the other Matthew complete so we were first in Europe to get everything that you publish. And the way we paid for that was using the 21st century library money but also then using that to draw on library funding and to get qr funding at humanities college. So it's really been, it's been a shot in the arm we spend a lot more than we get from the project on primary sources. And that's broadly the three elements this this smaller regional archive engagement piece. A real increase in what we're doing about special collections and that's flow through to teaching and research, and then really investment in primary sources. The whole thing was structured as a research funded project. So it had to be about the benefit for research. I've obviously seen the benefit for education as well because you, you don't do one without the other and we've seen the best use come from people using for both. That's great such an amazing project and really nicely got those three different arms and kind of focuses to it. Obviously you're kind of coming to the end of the project now but how would you say that the project and the work of the project and you know having those extra resources and the extra funding. Would you say that it's put external particularly good stead for the challenges that we've been experiencing over the last kind of year. And could you tell us a little bit more about where you go next you know what happens, you know in the next few months once once the project had ended. Well, so I think taking the special collections part to start with that was essentially about cataloging on catalog collections. That's had a big payoff because I, yeah we've invested probably 500,000 on the back of it the Northcott theatre got 175,000 pound arts council grants, which we've got some of the funding from to do further work around their history. But we're also looking at a big about one and a half million pound digitization project for the Middle East collections which are one of our real strong points so it's really helped leave her in additional funding. And if there's one thing that DVC research is like it's it's spending money and getting more money on the back of it. And then I mean the primary sources, the primary sources have always been really important you know the Cornwall campus that I talked about is two and a half hours from Exeter. Now if you think how far extra is from everywhere else in the country, two and a half hours from Exeter is just like you know, go over the Tamar keep going, it's a lovely place but it's a long way from anywhere. And so being able to tell potential PhD students and researchers that we have access to these collections they don't have to go to London to get them. That's been a real boon and it's really paid off during COVID, and it's made a big difference dissertation subjects. Yeah, we have a very small it's about 5,000 pounds a year fun to pay travel costs for students undergrads and PGT's to go to other libraries. And obviously nobody's been doing that, but they've been able to get access to the primary sources and structure their research around it so I think we really would have struggled because we don't have quick and easy research. We have quick and easy routes to get elsewhere for primary material. And I think what we will see is even those people who chose to go to London because actually they quite like to go to the BL and then do a bit of shopping on the back of it. We'll in future just be staying in Exeter a bit more. I can't discredit train links and the importance of that right. Yeah, really great to hear that you know it's really opened up different pathways for students who wouldn't be able to get access to that content normally, especially in the last year. Yeah, I guess, you know, thinking about the pandemic. Again, would you say that that's had any impact on kind of the next steps for the project? Has it kind of informed some of the decisions that you'll be making around what happens next once the project ends or kind of just firmed up some of the decisions that you'd already made around that? I think the pandemic has probably highlighted some of the things we need to do next. The areas that I'm really looking at are particularly, so special collections, we already know that a big issue is digital archives and we've got a big issue around digital preservation. And the pandemic has helped us with that because now everybody is much more aware of data. We've got a better way in and we've just done a piece of work around our whole research data management piece. So it's helped with that, but around primary sources, the areas I'm really looking at next, how do we integrate, and it was really interesting to hear, you know, the last set of integrations to talk about that. How do we bring our primary source for collections closer to our special collections? Decolonisation is big on our list. And that we're hoping to get some funding for projects across the colleges and the primary sources will be part of that. And then the other one that we're working on at the moment is for our digital humanities, and not just our digital humanities lab, but for digital humanities generally in the university, we're working on a new strategy. And the big question there is what does digital humanities education look like? And one of the things I'm going to be looking for is how do we integrate the primary source collections into digital humanities education? So it isn't simply here's access to primary sources. This is how you interpret a primary source. But actually, how do you get under the skin of that? And you really do that, that digitally enabled research saying how do we support our students to learn text and data mining? We've got real strengths in 2D and 3D imaging. We've got real strengths in geo location. How do we bring those in? How do our primary source collections relate to what we've created in-house? Some of which is digitisation of other people's items, some of which is digitisation of our own collections. There's real potential there to really shake up our digital humanities education and that's a very, very live conversation at the moment. It's really exciting. Yeah, it'd be really great to get that, you know, more students and kind of more undergraduates involved in that type of work. Speaking about kind of the students kind of element of it. And, you know, you mentioned that obviously the first university in Europe to kind of access to the entire Adam Matthew portfolio. Could you tell us a little bit more and maybe some feedback from some of the teams that, you know, in your department about how having access to that material has transformed the library. The learning experience of the students and the library's patrons. Again, apologies for the banging background. It's made a huge difference. I mean, the feedback from the academics is often around third year students, dissertations. The best ones are built into their courses, but it really helps those students who want to stretch themselves to step off the reading list and really go and dig into things for themselves. So I think we found, you know, our whole thing, our education strategy talks about a research education ecosystem. And that's exactly what this is about. It's helping those students who want to push themselves that bit further to be able to go and do that original research. And from a selfish longer term point of view, you know, the more we can excite them with that, we can turn undergrad students to postgrad taught students, we can talk grad taught students into PGRs, and we can keep them with us and extra because they know they'll have the resources they need. Some of the ways we're supporting to do that is we use LibGuides heavily. I mean, I've touched on the staffing bit and I won't, you know, the way we responded to what is a 43% reduction in staffing over about seven years is to go very, very digital. So we use LibGuides really heavily. So we have themed LibGuides for our primary sources around country, around date, around format, and then around theme. And then we have, yeah, we have a kind of a LibGuide for the Adam Matthew collection. So we try and give people multiple ways into the sources. And that that seems to be working really well and in many ways the pandemic has made that a little bit easier so the liaison team have found it easier to teach over teams. And they did previously and we had a whole discussion when we went to lockdown, you know, do we need to provide rooms at two meter distance to deliver face to face teaching and the end we said, you know, it's just a lot easier. Everybody's got teams. Let's just go to teams. And we have done and it's made a big difference. It's really interesting actually following on from that if I can jump in. I was actually going to ask about any advice that you would have for library liaison teams or people who are working on that instruction side at the library for embedding primary sources including digitized primary source content into research led teaching. I guess you've touched on some of that with the LibGuides but if you could speak to that a bit more I think it'd be interesting. I think the biggest part of it is the engagement. So the way we go about choosing these is the whole project has a steering group which is chaired by one of our history profs. And Caroline who would have been here but the fact she's off work writes out to every college to say, you know, it's time to tell us what you want again, and we end up with a big wish list this year's wish list is about two million pounds worth. So it is a wish list and you will get everything on here. But I think going out and talking to the academics about what they want and they can't just say, we want this they have to say we want this and this is why. Because then there's a kind of short listing scoring process and the steering group agree okay we'll buy this we'll buy this. And then we get into negotiations okay where do we pull in library funding can we get any other money from the colleges. The engagement in people thinking about what they want and why they want it really helps and we have seen one or two resources they've not been a lot where somebody's written in saying, we really want this resource this will be amazing it's got all this stuff. And then we send them the price tag, and they go, yeah it's really amazing but thanks not that price. We have literally had people and this was pre pandemic we have literally had people say, actually maybe we could send people to London for really quite niche resources, but generally our approach has been to to accumulate those requests I mean as we did without a complete yeah we have a number of requests that year, and actually went you know what we're going to be better off buying everything, rather than buying little bit. And that's generally been our approach we tend to go in, you know it's like intrapenie intrapound. And we just find better value because with ebooks with print books we can do into library loan. So it's really helped us and actually having that choice there, trying to try to tailor it to the research we know is happening in the education we know is happening but also being able to let people explore new areas just means that people keep coming back in for more. Yeah, absolutely. And there you go there's a challenge for any special collections teams out there about transporting documents. So you've got that great system in place for analyzing what the kind of research and teaching needs are. Can you then tell us about the ways the library helps promote and raise awareness of digital archival collections once they've been purchased and especially with helping faculty find the most appropriate for their use. Yeah, so again we run a lot through the live guides and through engagement on the education side with director of education and using our liaison team to go out and talk to people and to push through those kind of those channels it's been a lot harder during the pandemic. The pandemic has been largely focused on getting the reading lists. Done. Yeah, that's been this year's focus but previously just being able to go out and talk to people. And because this is I mean I came into year three of a five year project. So he'd already had a good track record it had that name recognition that we have pushed people talk about what we've got academics talk about what they've got and that that word of mouth has helped. One of the things we'd like to do more of is being able to get out to new academics and say this is what we've got and again there's a, there's a capacity question there's a perennial how do you know when a new member of staff has started question. You know there are, there are ways and what we try and do is make it as clear as possible to everybody. What's there. Yeah, that sounds good. We concluded the recording with Marine by asking about any positives that she had to take from the past year. So I wonder if we could put the same question to you and ask if there's any elements that you'll be retaining and taking forward post COVID. I think the shift to doing a lot more on teams will be here to stay. Certainly for our open research team, we won't be stopping doing face to face but the whole university like every university has to work out its balance of online face to face hybrid. I think the pandemic has made, we were already there with digital we had until a couple of years ago, the biggest collection of ebooks in the Russell group and then Edinburgh went and bought a load. So I've stopped saying we have the biggest loaded collection in the Russell group and I now say size doesn't matter, it's wherever they get used. Because that is one of our real areas of focus will be on how do we develop the collection in effective ways? How do we provide something that's distinctively extra? It's a real challenge around digital resources because once upon a time you could have a massive physical library and replicating that library meant getting hold of loaded books if probably weren't available and building a big enough building. Now if anyone wants to replicate what we've learned they just need to say just but yeah they need to persuade their university to open up the purse strings and actually the rest of it is very easy. It's a simple matter of saying yeah we'll have that so out the license and away you go. So this isn't something that can't be replicated but it's something that we find real advantage from and it's we've just had a new associate dean researching humanities. He was head of languages and he's super excited and dead keen. So this has got real backing and I think the special collections bit as well has been transformative for the attitude towards special collections. They were a bit underloved. They hadn't had the resourcing and actually seeing the benefits will help with the next stage which is trying to work at how to build them an entirely new building because they've run out of physical space. Yeah I really like to hear that because special collections are so important and I think sometimes they are seen as a separate part of the library and it's really good to think about the library as an entire system of support for research and teaching and I think maybe that's sometimes where it gets missed off so that's really good to hear. Thanks so much James that's all of the questions that we had for you. Obviously we do want to turn over to the Q&A as well if that's okay. A couple of comments in the chat first of all though Masuda Green with James about the importance of things being used and and having these collections is only useful if they're being used. I'm going to make a shameless plug for the outreach team at Adam Matthew at this stage and say that is very much what we are all about. It's our entire remit is to work with librarians in order to increase awareness and use of collections that are most relevant to faculty and students so please do get in touch if you have any requests or you would like us to share tips because this is how I know Maureen for example is delivering sessions for the primary source immersion program for Indiana so we like to help out with that integration and that use. So if we turn over to the Q&A and James if it's okay to start you mentioned investing in people right at the start of your piece and we heard quite a bit yesterday about the importance of investing in people as well as resources so do you think that the connections you were talking about between research and teaching digital humanities and special collections how does investing in people help with that if you're okay to answer that one? Yeah I mean you can't do it without. I talked about the Digital Humanities Lab and I've talked about Digital Humanities and that's the best way to unpick this. People see we made a lovely investment in the lab but actually the lab is the people. Yeah you buy the cameras we build our strong rooms it's all great it's a lovely space but actually if you haven't got people who know what they're doing and it's people who really know what they're doing that's where it happens so we've seen real gain apparently through the pandemic the lab has been digitizing special collections material that's helped links between special collections and DH I'm just trying to break down something you know there are it's a small campus relatively but everybody works in different buildings so trying to get people to see each other more often is a big part of it and acknowledging where different people have different skills and pointing out that actually the expertise is helpful so yeah you don't just want to go and take a picture on a scanner if you've got a lamp that's got the capacity to do it for you. Yeah absolutely and you've kind of answered a little bit of a second question which is about integrating primary source material into digital humanities specifically and whether you've got any good starting points to make this happen so yeah people is the starting point but any other tips that you've got? People is the starting point but digital humanities has has a real challenge and there's a question with digital humanities particularly around research is are you researching the academic discipline let's say classics or are you researching digital humanities so by and large what we'll be talking about is how to incorporate digital humanities into let's say classics so starting with the discipline and really making it relevant to that discipline is the way to go so you know one of our research fellows in DH is an epigrapher so she works on roman inscriptions she could incorporate her work into into an education module and that that is really the starting point is making it relevant to students you can give them those employability skills you can give them the data skills but you start with what's in the module and if it's relevant to the academics they're much more likely to take it up otherwise what you end up with is a DH bolt-on sitting on one side which some people take and some people don't and we had a liberal arts module this year which didn't get as much takeover and we think some of that was the inability to kind of mark it because of the pandemic and that but it's that it's really integrating it into what people are doing is where is is the place to start and giving people the skills so we have a small team but we also have a lecturer with a DH background who he does criminal history I think and he's done great stuff with some of our resources but I think it is it is building into a curriculum yeah um to actually to follow on from that if it's okay for me to provide a little bit of an answer from my perspective as well there's a couple of liberal arts colleges in Pennsylvania that done a little bit of work with but it's very much driven by them I don't want to take credit for any of this but the libraries there have an internship program that runs each summer where they get undergraduate students in they're paid it's a proper paid internship it's a six to ten week program and they are there to be trained on digital humanity skills by experts at the library but also to run their own DH project using primary sources that are available through the library that might be in special collections it might be in digitized collections and the idea is that they then go and act as champions in the classes that they take part in so if a faculty member I mean these are small liberal arts colleges so it's maybe a little bit easier to do I don't know how it would scale up but if a class are being instructed on a particular subject they've then actually got undergraduate students in that class who can act as champions for knowing who to contact at the library knowing what might be possible knowing how to bring primary sources and DH together and I really like that as a kind of student led model and yeah again I can provide details of contacts for anyone who wants to hear more and that was going to be my second shameless plug Adam Matthew do actually have a webinar coming up in April on digital humanities using Adam Matthew collections so if you'd be interested in finding out about our policies around that about the fact that you can request exports of all of the metadata and full text data from your Adam Matthew collections and also some case studies of projects that have used that data in the past please do have a look out for that get in touch with us and we can send you a link to that because um yeah we're really keen to support this kind of work used in primary sources um any sorry James anything else to add yeah I was going to say that I mean our lab wouldn't function when you walk into our lab into the DH lab the first person you will see is a is an undergrad um so we have an annual round of interns we have a we call them graduate business partners you know kind of 18 month post graduation contracts as well and they really get stuck in on they often move from intern to that to that graduate business partner role um and they they learn all the techniques and they they help run the lab with the lab manager the same is true in special collections and and that's been a real challenge for this year is bringing in interns and the beauty of digital humanities and special collections is you can give them work to do remotely um we're looking forward to getting them back on campus because we need to get them actually sitting in the archive working on the physical lectrooms but it'll come um there's what uh sorry Neil I feel like I'm kind of dominating the Q&A so do do jump in if uh if you want to take over at any point I certainly don't mean to sorry about that no no problem I was just going to say I popped a link in the chat to where you can pre-register for that webinar um around digital humanities that Ben mentioned so if there's energy that's interested in attending that um that's in the chat now um we've got about five six minutes left so if there is kind of any final thoughts that you wanted to share James anything that we perhaps haven't had a chance to cover that you really wanted to speak to um something you want to share now just pick up Jeremy's point about discovery discovery is a discovery is a challenge um because really what we are looking to make discoverable are those things we've digitized ourselves which we don't really have a platform for at the moment there's a whole other conversations we have um those things which are freely available so that might be you know research grant funded stuff the Parker Library Corpus things like that and then and then the bought digitized collections which you know because we buy from different providers have different interfaces and platforms and and yeah discovery discovery is a challenge across all of those um because there isn't one single routine I think for researchers like with everything it's a bit easier because they tend to know where to go and and building that in for for the taught students is that little bit harder but at the end of the day if we get them to the right resources and give them the the skills to find themselves then we'll get them there um but yeah discovery is a discovery is a real challenge and one that you know we'll we'll keep working on I I think for me there are particularly around the stuff that we do you know we look to open standards and things um because then we can pull in data from elsewhere but we do small volume stuff we don't do large scale you know the things that Adam Matthew do we wouldn't do because we don't have the scale or capacity we focus on individual items type things um I think final thoughts I I think it's been really really important for Exeter making this investment I mean it's it's transformed our special collections it's it's really set them up yeah we know now um for reasons that I do not understand the project funding has turned into permanent funding so I now need to turn my mind to what happens forever and ever um but we will carry on with the investment in primary sources yeah they are well built into the way we operate and we'll look at how to bring special collections much more into that picture and what the future looks like I suspect the next one is the university archive um which is sitting in a grotty basement waiting to be loved amazing thank you James and thank you also to people who've been making comments in the chat James highlighted a few of those but Katie and Nadine thank you so much for your positive comments as well and yeah we're huge advocates for undergraduate champions and many of the other things that were discussed so look forward to continuing that conversation in future with everyone after the conference