 Thanks so much for being here on the last session of the day. Hang in there and soon we will be able to go to the reception and everyone can have a chat and a nice glass of wine. But before that, I'm really pleased to be able to talk to you about the University of Victoria's new grants menu initiative. And at the University of Victoria, we've had quite a bit of leadership turnover in the past five years. And we've spent a lot of time talking to faculty about how they see the library as part of the university's research enterprise. And the answer that we consistently get from them is keep buying journals, don't cut the journals, you guys are the guys who buy journals, and that our brand is very strong. But the challenge with that strength of brand is that we actually have been doing tons of open publishing. We do a lot of rights management, we do software training, we do so much more than buy journals and yet that is still not visible in the imagination of the university. The other thing that was happening is that we were getting new demands from faculty. We had a lot of requests for web hosting, specifically for research projects and long-term curation of research projects and their outputs. But the thing about these requests is they were coming long after the applications had been written when all of the funding was sorted and all of the glory was assigned to the various partners. And so the library being the helpful people we are, like to say yes and we wanna help with these initiatives but there are some real drawbacks to this particular model. We're missing a lot of opportunities when we do all of this hidden work in the middle of or at the end of these research projects. First of all, in most cases, we're actually missing the opportunity to build sustainable projects because the faculty projects typically are not sustainable from our perspective when they come to us at the end of their funding cycle. Secondly, we are missing the opportunity to share in their research funding to help us do some of this long-term preservation work. We're missing the opportunity to have closer faculty partnerships and really showcase what we can do for them. We're missing visibility to administrators who aren't seeing us in those grant proposals and who are not understanding the ways in which we are supporting research and we're missing the opportunity to be visible to funding agencies and so they can see how libraries are a significant part of what they're asking in research data management in long-term preservation. So I sat down with our grants and awards librarian, a position which is incredibly valuable in the organization, by the way, and we came up with this concept of a grants menu. We wanted something that would be appealing and kind of immediately comprehensible to faculty. I do have a URL there. It's also on my final slide and I can tweet that out later so don't worry if you can't see that right away. And so the grants menu looks kind of like an Alucard menu. Typically, every item has a service description, so a paragraph saying why you would wanna use this particular research support and those are kind of written so they can easily be copied and pasted into funding applications if necessary. There's a little section on faculty responsibility just to clarify that if you're working with our digital asset management system you still have to find grad students to upload objects to do description and that kind of thing. It's not a full service. And then finally, and I think the thing that is most important is that we then outline what the in-kind value of this contribution will be to your research project. And of course, while faculty are writing their grant proposals, they have to come up with a whole bunch of sources of in-kind funding from the university, so this is very motivating to them. It's easy for them to see what's gonna go in their proposal and how that'll be helpful to them. What we were hoping would happen is that first of all, we would have an opportunity to talk to researchers while they're writing their funding proposals, so to engage them at the beginning of their projects rather than being the people who kind of help them kind of clean up at the end of the project. We really hoped that we would be able to make our library contributions visible right there in the grant proposals because let's be honest, everybody at the university cares a great deal about grants. This is an area that administrators pay a lot of attention to, so it's a good place for us to show value if they can see us in those grant proposals. We write quite a lot of letters of support every year, so another advantage of this is that we have all of those templates for our letters of support. Typically, the way we would do them before is that our Grants and Awards Librarian would just do every letter in this custom way, so everything would get costed out in a totally custom way every time, and that's not sustainable if you're doing a lot of that kind of work. And then finally, we see this as having a little bit of a built-in review process for the projects that we steward because we do get a lot of demand to keep all sorts of different kinds of projects on campus and by kind of tying that to grant funding, at least we're making sure that there's some peer review in that process, that disciplinary peers have said, we think this is a valuable project and there's funding for this project, so it's not a perfect review process, but it does help us to set priorities in terms of what are we really gonna try to keep. I think that one of the biggest opportunities for libraries right now is our expertise and our infrastructure to support digital asset management. Although faculty are not that familiar with this term, many faculty members do this in the course of their research projects, so the head of anthropology at UVic goes to Ghana and talks to a bunch of different communities, she makes video recordings, she takes pictures, she does audio recordings, and she has to share all of that information with a research team that is international. Another one of our researchers works in New Brunswick with the Akkadzian community there, and she interviews a lot of people for linguistics, but all of her students are at UVic on the other side of the country and they do the transcription, so she needs to be able to share her recordings with the students who are transcribing on the other side. And typically the way that faculty deal with these issues is that they hire students, they build some kind of SQL database with a PHP front end that is hosted somewhere, maybe at the university, maybe not, and they replicate this model over and over again, when in fact we already have systems that do that stuff, that do it much better, that are much more robust, and it would be fantastic if we could let faculty use that infrastructure for their projects as well. Most of these things I think scale pretty well. So at our university, Sam Vera is what we're rolling out, and there are a couple of things about these new generation digital asset management systems that are really critical. One of them is just something so simple as having a web client. This enables us to work with researchers in a way that our content DM system, which mostly relied on an installed desktop client, really would not do. So some simple little design changes make a big difference. Another example is having a multi-tenant system. So our Sam Vera system will allow us to kind of set up different front ends so a researcher can have their own URL, can have their own look and feel for their project. They're not just like one collection with all the library collections, they have a site that looks like theirs. But on the back end, they actually are one collection with all the library collections. And so that makes our life a lot easier because we're already collecting all of their objects as they create them, as they work on them in their research project. So in terms of coming up with those in-kind values, because this is an auditable process, I was really kind of low-balling a little bit. I suspect that over the years, these in-kind values are gonna rise a little bit, but I was a little bit concerned about going too high at first because I have to justify everything we do to our accounting folks and eventually maybe to auditors. So what we're saying about digital asset management is that if you partner with us in this area, we will give you 25 hours of our free work to help configure your site, to help train your GAs, and to get you started using the site in the way that you need to. And then we'll also throw in the infrastructure costs and maintenance at a cost of about 250 a year. All of this stuff is detailed in the document, so you'll have a chance to look at much more closely later, okay? The other thing that faculty really need that they do not know they need is metadata consulting. I have so often had the experience of talking to a faculty member who is halfway through a project and they're telling me about what they wanna do with their interface and all the things they wanna do. And then we look at their metadata and it does not support the things they wanna do. They didn't capture the right things. They didn't capture things consistently. Maybe their GAs are all over the place and they're all doing things a little bit differently. So particularly if they work in our systems, we can really help with that. We can set up forms that capture what they wanna capture, but we can also kind of advise them on what's gonna make sense in terms of what they wanna be able to do in the long term. So what we've said here is that if we are a collaborator or a co-investigator on your project, then we will also give you 25 hours of metadata consulting as part of the work that we will do with you. In many cases, faculty want a more kind of exhibit-like website or kind of, you know, face to their project. And so in that case, we're offering our spotlight exhibit builder once again. It's just scaling something that we're already doing for the library and a lot of the work will just be training faculty, more likely grad students, honestly, to use the back end of the exhibit builder. One of the things I wanted to point out is that all of these in-kind value statements have this little clause at the bottom that says additional feature development and support at cost. Because we're using an open source system, we do have quite a bit of control over the way in which it's developed and we can add new features. What we're hoping is that faculty will fund the new features that they need in their projects and that we'll then contribute those features back to this growing pool of features that all faculty can use on campus because right now, once again, researchers develop specific features for their projects. They often develop the same feature over and over again in their own particular software context and if we could sort of be the hub of some of that development, it would be really useful to everybody on campus and it's open source, so we can share it with the world as well. So we hope that maybe we'll get some development partnerships where some of that funding pays for features in our systems as well. The really tricky piece for us at the moment is digital preservation because faculty, bless them, have very high expectations of what we will be able to do in this area and it is not very realistic in many cases. So if somebody comes to us with their final beautiful project and it was built on like Drupal a couple of years, versions ago now, seven or something, there's an expectation that we will be able to take that entire software stack and just keep it running and upgrade it forever and it'll always look the way it looks now and all the functionality will work and that is not a scalable proposition for us. We really can't do that and we need to start engaging with researchers earlier to let them know what is realistic for us and what is not. Because one of the challenges, the fundamental tension in this conversation that I don't think we kind of address head on is that total researcher freedom of choice is like inversely correlated with our ability to be able to steward this stuff over the long term. That's why in libraries we have so many standards and we have so many metadata schemas. So I think that having that conversation up front and saying, you know what, if you wanna do it this way we can probably preserve the objects but we can't necessarily preserve the interface. It's not to say that they're always gonna make the choice for preservation but at least they will make informed choices when they make those technology decisions early on in their project. So really starting a conversation about preservation as early as we can before the technology choices have been made, being able to clarify to them what is possible and then being able to help them to understand how their choices will impact sustainability is a major objective of the grants menu, although it doesn't sound like that but from our perspective certainly it is. And really digital preservation at our institution anyway mostly flows out of our digital asset management system. We keep our objects in fedora, we do that in a very kind of standardized way and this is where all of our digital preservation workflows come out of. So if we can convince faculty to work in our system in the first place, we have a much better chance of being able to sustain their outputs because really then it's just more of the same. Certainly their projects look like the stuff we're already preserving for the library. Digital preservation is a little bit different than many of the menu items because this is not an in kind contribution. There is a real cost to us to managing all of these objects over the long term. So this is an opportunity for us to say, but if we're gonna do this, we're gonna need a little bit of your grant funding money as well and we tried to go as low as possible in terms of the costs to the researcher. We're saying about 2,600 per terabyte as just a one time cost for your project data. And then $500 per funded year for ongoing preservation services. So that means that if you have a seven year project, you're paying a little bit more than if you have a one year project. It gives a bit of a sliding scale to the way in which they have to pay. That figure of 2,600 per terabyte came out of Scholar's Portal in Ontario actually. They're the ones who did the research. I footnote them in the grants menu so you'd be able to go back and have a look at that if you want to. And their cost was for a 20 year preservation cycle actually. So the grants menu has been in effect for just under two years now. We've really been pushing it out over the course of that time. And I think that we are actually seeing impacts already in our institution. One of the immediately obvious things that was that we had this opportunity for a conversation. By rolling a new initiative around research, suddenly we could ask to go to meetings and give presentations. We could talk to the research advisory committee. It's a great time to talk to the associate dean's research. And so we did a lot of outreach in places where we often don't get invited to speak. And I had a lot of people say to me, I had no idea the library does all this stuff. Like, why didn't you tell us? Like, I've really been trying to tell you, you know? But you have to talk to them at the time that they're receptive, at the time that they need it. It's a point of need thing, right? So you can send out a lot of newsletters but they're still not gonna hear the message. It's definitely led to more engagement with the VP research because as we were developing it, we were talking to the VP research about the initiative and I feel like we're on the radar for the VP research. More now, we get invitations to be involved in other types of, you know, research committees and stuff that we hadn't really been invited to before. We have a closer relationship with the research computing group who didn't really see the library's role in research computing before but as we show them these big digital asset management systems and talk about digital preservation, I think there's a recognition there that the library is doing something that other people on campus aren't doing, that we do have a particular role in this ecosystem. And then finally, with researchers, the people we really were hoping to engage with, we've had a lot more conversations with faculty at the proposal writing stage and often it's a chance to talk to them about the repository and about open access journals and we build a lot of stuff into those conversations when we have that captive audience. We've certainly had more requests for letters of support. Fortunately, those letters of support are a little bit easier to write because of the template stuff, so that's been great. But the big news and we really just have found this out in the last couple of weeks is that we actually now, this year alone, managed to be collaborators or co-investigators on about $3 million worth of new grants. So it was a very successful funding season at our university and I am not gonna lie, I'm actually a little bit worried about how successful we have been because we didn't expect to get funding at this rate. It's always a bit of a gamble, you think, well maybe we'll get 30% of these things and I think we got about 87% of them this year. So that's kudos to our fantastic researchers but also it does make me a little bit nervous because now we've committed quite a few resources here. However, I am happy to say that I have a really supportive university librarian, Jonathan Benxton, and he and I have started talking about where we might be able to help to fill in some of those gaps. So there is a resource implication for this but of course any sort of new initiative is likely to have a resource implication so it's a bit of a conversation at your library about whether you see this is an important direction for the library or whether there are other things you'd rather be doing. So that's really all I kinda wanted to formally say to you. Once again, there's the URL to the grants menu and feel free to contact me to ask any questions later on once you had a chance to read that of course but I would also open the floor to any questions that you have right now.