 Welcome to Transformative Partnership, Digital Scholarship Services at the University of Michigan for the summer 2022 CNI project updates. I am Anne Konghwin. I am the Digital Scholarship Strategist at the University of Michigan Library. And I'm Joe Bauer and I'm with the College of Literature Science and Arts Technology Services team. And I'm a Digital Scholarship Research Consultant. There we go. If you want to follow along with us, or click on any of the links from this slide, like here's the link to do that. You can just pause the video and grab that and follow along. All right, this is our agenda for this presentation. We'll start first with some acknowledgments as we do for all of our workshops and presentations. And then we'll go through the context and overview of this digital scholarship service. We'll do a recap of what we have presented at the last CNI that we participated in, and we'll give an update of where we have gotten since then. And at the end we'll discuss our approach and lessons learned in the process. Yeah, I think was it 2019 was the last time. I think so. Just before pandemic. First, we want to start with a land acknowledgement. We are both coming to you from Southeast Michigan and we acknowledge that the historical origins and present location of the University of Michigan were made possible by indigenous people's succession of lands under coercive treaties, common in the colonization expansion of the United States. In particular, we note that the university's three campuses are located on lands of the Anishinaabeg and Wyandotte, which were seated in the Treaty of Detroit in 1807. Additionally, we recognize that the university's endowment was large, originally funded in significant measure by sale of land granted under Article 16 of the 1817 Treaty of the foot of the Rapids, also known as the Treaty of Fort Meads. The grant for the College of Detroit was made by Anishinaabeg, including the Odawa, Ojibwe and Boduodami, so that their children could be educated. And we also recognize that the University of Michigan has not been great at adhering to this promise of educating those indigenous children. We know that acknowledgement is not enough. That is a place to start. Likewise, we want to acknowledge the digital environments that make meetings like this possible. And this is a quote from Adrian Wong, an artist of the Spiderweb show. And they asked us to consider the legacy of colonization embedded within the technology's structures and ways of thinking that we use every day. We are using equipment and high speed internet not available in many indigenous communities. This technology leaves significant carbon footprints contributing to changing climates that disproportionately affect indigenous peoples worldwide. I invite you to join me in acknowledging all of this as well as our shared responsibility to make good of this time and for each of us to consider our roles in reconciliation, decolonization and allyship. Yeah, so we wanted to kind of provide a little bit of context and background about the University of Michigan. And predominantly and historically it's been a white institution and we're a tier one tier top tier R1 research institution. And though, while we have a lot of resources, they're very heavily siloed so it's sometimes difficult to get access to them depending on where you're at in them. And sometimes the expectations of our faculty don't exactly align with the realities with regards to digital scholarship support. We're among 19 different schools and colleges and that, and then also on top of that there, we have a humongous library and humongous hospital as well. And then sprinkled throughout there is 36 different it shops, and they come in various sizes from just a handful of folks in them to, you know, 1000 or so in those shops is very decentralized. We have a very interdisciplinary kind of culture. All right, so the University of Michigan library, which is where I work is the fourth largest research library in the United States. So we're massive. There are over 20 libraries across 12 different buildings on our campus and more broadly, we have over 500 staff and roughly 170 librarians. The librarians, archivists and curators have also just recently unionized. So this is a changing climate right now. Currently we are holdings include somewhere between 14 and 15.6 million volumes, and we have a very large collections budget including those for electronic resources, which aren't really included here. So the digital scholarship service team at the University of Michigan library was established in 2019. So we're still fairly young. What I have here an image of just, you know, rough circles that kind of give you a sense of how our teams are embedded within one each one another. So I am part of the core digital scholarship hub or DS hub, and there are four of us individuals who make up that team and we, you know, take on most of the incoming consultations request for requests and questions. Those early front door kinds of activities. We have a digital scholarship advisory group, which has about 20 members and this includes folks who are representatives from every division of our library. Oh geez that's my dog. And this also includes representatives from Joe's team and LSA as well. And then we have our larger digital scholarship practitioners team, which includes about 70 individual and group experts across the library and on campus. We often reach out to these folks when we get very, you know, discipline specific questions or ones related to specific tools practices and methodologies. And this gives you like a snapshot of the kinds of structure and support we have at the U of M library around digital scholarship. Yeah, and then the College of Literature Science and Arts, which we refer to as LSA. It's one of the 19 schools and colleges has just under 20,000 undergrad students, two and a half thousand grad students and about 41 different academic departments. It's one of the bigger schools and colleges there. And our technology services department within LSA is comprised of departments that help with academic technologies research and computing and infrastructure web applications, and so forth, and I'm sitting on the side of the digital scholarship studio which is inside the research team which is inside the research computing and infrastructure service. So like a little nested doll kind of version of things. So last time at our at CNI we talked about just the starting of this this relationship this partnership between the library and LSA technology services. And we have links here, which will will share if you're following along the slides. Successful. We shared some of the values that we're guiding this work, where we were getting a lot of our, you know, forming our principles. So that kind of mesh net matrix network structure that provides a flexible resilient architecture for like how we relate to one another, and then just, you know, general summary of our capacity where we're at institutionally in terms of digital scholarship support. Yeah, and so to that, and the last time we gave an update we saw, this is a framework that we got from literature, and it's, they, they, they pulled it into like an early stage capacity capability established stage in a high capacity stage and you can see in the bullet points are just some of those elements of what makes up those different stages. And last time we were thinking, we're somewhere kind of in the early stage we've got a few things that are kind of seeping into established stage. And I think now when we look at and evaluate ourselves we're looking at, yeah we're pretty well in the established stage now. So that means that we're doing. We have a lot more process involved with things. We have institutional champions, we have formal commitments of resources. And we mean that like budgetarily and also like staff wise, and then, you know, recognition generally that decisions and priorities benefit from coordination and so forth. We're, I think, and we're seeing a little bit of us starting to look at or get into the high capacity elements, some of them. Yeah, because I think. So I should say that within the library at least our digital scholarship service is in its second or it's completing its second year of a three year pilot so this next year will be spent doing a lot of assessment about how the last two years have gone and the adjustments that we need to make. So we do have commitments from each of our units the library and LSA in terms of resources but at this stage they are still fairly limited because we're we're testing things out. We are, I think we're at that point now where we're looking forward to moving into the high capacity stage we're putting together proposals and working to, you know, concretize some of these things that have been more informal over the last couple of years. Right. So, in developing our digital scholarship service pilot, we did have some clear goals that was that we're getting this work. The first was that we wanted to be guided by our values and our principles. So of course we had to create those. Now we have publicly on our digital scholarship pages on the U of M library website we have principles that guide our work. And we are very serious about these so all of the initiatives and programs that we offer. We refer back to these so if we're accepting applications for example for our pilot. We're talking to you racism digital research initiative like we ask people to actually address how their work aligns with our principles. And we bring these principles into our consultations and how to help we work with each other. They are woven into how we work on a daily basis. We also wanted to make sure that we met the needs of our campus community and an institution of the size it's really challenging to get a sense of what their needs are. We're not within a very large college but there are many other colleges that we know folks are doing digital scholarship in those spaces. We also know people don't tend to answer surveys. So trying to figure out ways to assess those needs to try to meet them. At the same time, as I mentioned we do have some commitments of resources. Most of that is in the form of staffing and personnel. And in the library, we have very little in terms of technological infrastructures that we can offer her faculty members in terms of like building their projects or sustaining them. And the library's mission is a little bit different from that of an IT shop. Very much about access preservation. So those are a little bit different. So figuring out how we can use the infrastructure, the technologies that are available to us to provide new services. At the same time, we want to recognize that our staff have limited capacity and we want to be able to respect those and protect those folks. This has been especially important during the pandemic when our work changed dramatically. So we'll speak a little bit about how we've transitioned. Yeah, and one of the things that is emphasized a lot is this importance of relationships and sort of interdependence as well. So, you know, creating those relationships with staff with services elsewhere on campus. And just kind of being transparent with communication, being equitable with labor as much as possible, having mutual respect and, you know, centering on collaboration and partnership. Another thing that I think we've been working on is like consentful relationships. So not just throwing stuff at people but making sure that that kind of consent is there. I think we've been looking at the inherent kinds of either power or social dynamics that are implicit in many of these relationships that aren't necessarily unique to just the University of Michigan but inherent within higher ed structures in general. I'm just trying to figure out how exactly to address those as well when we're thinking about the importance of relationships. So, I don't know, this is a doodle of my whiteboard which you can see the background here. So we were kind of like, how do we make this stuff work so it's fine and well to just kind of talk about it in theory but then when you actually have to do it. Sometimes, you know, you start running into things that are tough logistically so there's lots of overlap, there's lots of areas where like one team or group does one thing and other does another thing. Sometimes we have different incentivizations, different things that are important to us. Sometimes our management or leadership don't always agree so yeah that this is kind of like the the actual content of this picture is not as important as just seeing that we have like a lot of stuff sprawled out and it's messy and it overlaps and converges and diverges and so forth. Do you want to add anything to that. I think it's a great peek into just the messiness of doing institutional collaborations there's a lot of overlapping Venn diagram circles. And you can see that here digital scholarship that you mesh and we have it broken down to the DS studio and LSA, the DS hub in the library, maybe library it and then potentially other partners and how when we bring those in. It's still a work in progress and it's, yeah, it's messy. But it's also a joy to do this work. I'm moving through slides too fast. So we do have like over the, you know, development of this pilot we've identified what our core services are in the digital scholarship space. Our primary one is consultations. We do a lot of one on one and team based consultations with researchers research projects. And a lot of these are just getting folks to consider best approaches to answering their research questions the tools that might be necessary the skills they need to learn people that they need to talk to to acquire those skills, etc, or even access to data. We host also a lot of workshops and increasingly more and more of these workshops are being offered in collaboration with LSA and with other partners. So we are having, we're hosting co hosted workshops co facilitated workshops. And we're also scaffolding them so we're starting with like conceptualizing your digital project, starting with, you know, very early considerations, how you plan to manage your data, how you plan for preservation and some setting. And then we, we bring another folks and expertise over the course of the year. Together we also host quite a few public events. So we have a series called demystifying digital scholarship where we bring in expert speakers from out off off campus to come and talk about specific things so we've had people come and talk about text mining for example, or you know sensitive approaches to addressing to digital archival practices. We also host more local events like our art and feminism Wikipedia editathon on our Douglas Day transcription events. And these have been really great for just bringing together communities of folks who are interested in doing critical digital work. So how about the networking events. Yeah, so kind of woven into all these different events are areas and opportunities for folks to get together from different areas into roles so scholars together as like a cohort, or students and scholars or support partners and so forth and so on. So we can kind of just cohere the sort of like community. That's, you know, that's really nice to see. We also have some focused research support sprints which sometimes I think they're called scholar sprints from the library and this is where we can sit people down with a very specific issue that they're just having you know a hurdle they need to go across and do an intensive kind of research consultation with them. We also have open office hours where many of us get together and just hang out on zoom and, and folks come and ask questions or they just hang out and and talk with us about like what their thoughts are on various projects and what they're thinking about doing. We also have exciting for that started this year is a certificate program. Do you want to talk a little more about that one. Sure. Yeah, so with our partners in LSA and liaisons and library we have a certificate program this is non curricular. And it's structured around a series of workshops that we offer our digital scholarship one of one workshops and this is designed for graduate students to be able to complete in the space of one to two years. We also have a supplement other more curricular graduate certificates, or graduate programs, and it, you know, we have a cohort of 10 students who are going through this program with us. And we're iterating it as we go. And that's been really, really great. And lastly, this this past year, and we're in the middle of it right now, we've been piloting an anti racist digital grant initiative. And I think we received something like 33 applications from faculty students postdocs all over campus, and almost every college I think, and we ended up funding six projects, many of them are community related. We have contingent faculty tenure track faculty graduate students, working with partners in the community to address, you know, research questions around anti racist approaches historically addressing racism. And we're learning a lot as we as we are supporting this cohort of researchers. So we'll be, I think we have another six months in this cycle, and then we'll be assessing this before we, you know, try it again. So we talked earlier about how our values can guide the principles and how we weave them into a lot of things. This is a bullet point list of all the different values that we've come up with that we want to embed into our activities actions and what we do. And this was literally co created with all of the members so bringing in that consentfulness as well to this. And down below is a link to the source which has a whole lot more description behind each of these. I don't think we have enough time to go through each of these in a lot of detail, because that would be a whole presentation on its own, which might be a good idea. But I do want to point out how a lot of these relate to each other and how, at least from an LSA perspective, from coming from our technology support perspective, we use these in and try to apply these and aspire to live up to these with everything that we do from how we design and work through our consultations to how we decide and choose which platforms and technologies to use to how we architect solutions. And like thinking of through like who makes decisions on these and how they make the decisions and so forth. And did you want to. And I can say that so these, but you can see the full descriptions on the library website we linked to that here, but we spent quite a bit of time developing these principles and then also revisiting them. So like the anti racism principle is new. And we developed that since to that to 2020, which probably is not a surprise. We worked with our accessibility specialist for example to develop that principle so we take a very disability justice approach to how we do this work. And I think all of these are really important considering the kinds of capacity limits that we have in terms of like, knowing that we can't say yes to everything. And this allows us a principled way of approaching how to make decisions. So I will say that Adrian Murray Brown's Emergent Strategy which was published in 2017 was very influential for us as we were developing our service and thinking about our roles within within these structures. Adrian Murray Brown is an artist activists out of base out of Detroit we have heard the cover of her book here. And one of the things that she has said is that all organizing is science fictional behavior and I think Joe and I. What we've tried to do is imagine like our ideal digital scholarship service and try to build that from within the institution with you know a lot of this is grassroots. We're really lucky that we have, you know administrators and supervisors who have supported this work, but we have also tried to, you know, implement the principles that Adrian Murray Brown has has laid out and we try to be adaptive. We also try to shape the change that we want to see. And then also, like the pandemic has shown us like the union contracts right now we have to be able to be flexible and ride the change. And as long as we can't anticipate it, we have to be able to move along with it. So, we highly recommend checking out Emergent Strategy, and also thinking intentionally about like how you adapt that and what that means to you in your work because this might not be appropriate for everyone. So I'll just leave that there. One of the principles that really stuck with me from from Adrian Murray Brown's work was the moving at the speed of trust, which I think we've seen happen and, and it has implications and that when you do that, then what you end up co creating is more sturdy and dependable and but also it means that sometimes you go down a path and it just doesn't work so you have to kind of make decisions accordingly. So that's right. That often means moving really slowly as well. Yeah. So one of the major things that we've learned is just the importance of placing people first. And as, as just as Joe was just saying, we focus really hard on relationships, we want to trust in people, the people that are there trust in their expertise, and their knowledge and their experience, because they are bringing a lot to the space. One of the things that Adrian Murray Brown says is, there is a conversation that is happening in this room that can only happen with the people that are in this room. And that you, you know, can pull out the work that can happen by whoever is present to do that work. So we're really lucky in the library here we have four. And I think the next slide is about staffing for people who are committed to doing digital scholarship work. And that's written into their job descriptions. And that's really a luxury. And even then we feel right. Pressure is because we can't do everything. Yeah, and so in LSA technology services, we have a slightly different approach where we've got about three, almost four FTE full time employees worth of time, but it's spread out over about a dozen folks. And so we have roles, everything from like a strategist to research consultants to designers design analysts developers and systems administrators. Yeah, and I think one of the things we wanted to say to is aligning this work across these folks together collectively but aligning it with our mission and our goals and our principles and setting those goals together. So yeah, lessons learned invest in people, people are the most important thing. The services would not exist. If we had a beautiful space and not the right people to do that work. We also believe very heavily in strongly in pilots and piloting initiatives first and also taking the necessary time to revisit and assess and iterate. So with the anti racism digital research initiative we're learning that I think faculty need a lot of assistance in areas that we hadn't anticipated. We had a lot of plans and how to get them the technical support they need, but they needed a lot of help with project management. We've been, you know, very flexible and trying to figure out ways to accommodate these needs but next time around we know what we will start with the project management support and build that into the program. Yeah, so be willing to try things and to adapt. And along those lines, you know, not getting too attached to anything because as you try and pilot things out test things, experiment on things sometimes they don't work and so you either have to change them so drastically that they don't look quite like what they used to but they're much more useful or it just goes away. And so we just carry on with something else instead. I think we mentioned this earlier but be comfortable moving slowly at that speed of trust. And, you know, thinking really creatively about the resources that you have access to. We've heard from our leadership and management, often that you know they're surprised at how much work and how much output that this team is able to put out. Because we very much, you know, look at all of the different resources we have and just think creatively about how we're able to approach things and use what we've got already and sometimes it's like reusing things and making sure that you can, you know, repurpose one workshop for multiple initiatives or something like that. Yeah. And on the library side of things we know that our strength is very much in consultation and having that subject area expertise and also, you know, having practical expertise but we don't have like the technological capacity to build things for faculty members and that's why the partnership with LSA has been so fruitful. And we can really lean on each other for various things. And I think a lot of the projects that have been very successful have included, you know, representatives from the library and LSA. And I think this is a really great example of like the library doesn't need to be doing all of the things and we can partner with with others on campus to provide necessary services for researchers. And so we want to thank you for watching this presentation. And if you want to get in touch with us have an email down below. Thanks library dash DS at you mesh to you. All right, thank you.