 started. So thank you for joining us today. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information, and I'll be introducing this session. You have reached the first of the project briefing sessions for week four of the CNI fall 2020 member meeting, which is taking place virtually. Just to remind you, week four is a collection of project briefings that deal with responses to various aspects of the collection of crises that we're trying to collectively navigate our way through. So you're going to find quite an interesting set of narratives and experiences shared in week four. I want to remind you that along with the synchronous sessions that we'll be having this week, we also have released a small number of additional pre-recorded videos that I invite you to explore. As to the logistics for this session, we are recording this and it will subsequently be publicly available. There is closed captioning and please do turn that on if it's helpful to you. There is chat and feel free to use that as we go along. There is also a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. After the presentation, we will address as many of the questions as we can, and that will be done in a session moderated by Diane Goldenberg, Hard of CNI. So with that, let me turn to the current session. We have with us today Michael Chensky from the libraries of the University of Texas at Austin, and he is going to speak to an aspect of what really has kind of emerged as a theme from this meeting, which is all of the spaces that we have in our libraries and more broadly in our institutions that were designed and staffed and programmed for physical presence, and how we extend those services, adapt those services to the digital environment, things like computer labs, maker spaces. There's a great range of these kinds of situations. Today, we're going to hear specifically about GIS services, and we're going to hear, I think, not just about the response, but also about what the experience with the response has taught UT Austin about how they should be thinking about the future as we eventually come out of this pandemic. So with that, I would just like to thank Michael for joining us and turn it over to him. All right. Thank you for that excellent introduction. I am Michael Chensky, the GIS and geospatial data coordinator for the UT libraries at the University of Texas at Austin, and I will indeed be talking to you all today about how we have adapted our library's GIS services in the past nine months or so since we had to modify our operations starting in March of this year in response to the pandemic. And I'll be discussing some of the challenges that we've encountered, some of the changes that we've made and discuss how we are starting to plan for the future looking at spring of 2021 and beyond. So first, I'd like to give a brief introduction to our core UT libraries GIS services to give everyone an idea of what we had going before the pandemic, our core focus of what we were providing services to the campus community, because these are things that in many ways had to change and be adapted to this new environment that we found ourselves in starting in March. And so unfortunately, we don't have enough time today to touch on every aspect of our GIS services. And so I really wanted to focus on the services that are more core to our mission. And those are developing geospatial research guides using our LibGuides platform that we can use to provide instructional materials to help researchers, students, faculty, staff on campus who are dealing with common geospatial research issues or questions, installing GIS software, finding geospatial data to use in research projects, those kinds of things. We also have a Texas Geodata portal. This is something that we released a little over a year ago in November of 2019. And this is the platform that we're using to make geospatial data from our library's collections available to both the campus community and beyond. It's publicly available. We're openly sharing currently all the data sets that the UT libraries are making available through the platform, which is about 700 or so. And we're also, through this platform, providing access to thousands of other open data sets from other institutions that openly share their metadata, which makes that possible. We also offer research consultations. So this is a core service that I've provided in my position, basically meeting with any folks on campus, again, whether they're students, faculty, or staff who have questions about how to move forward with geospatial aspects of their research. So whether they're dealing with a software issue, encountering an error message, or trying to figure it with software to select, or they're trying to find data that's a bit difficult, or they're trying to develop a plan for disseminating the results of their work through an interactive web map or maps that they're going to publish. Those are the kinds of things that I'll usually be helping with in research consultations, which have traditionally taken place in person, one-on-one meetings on campus in the library itself. And we also lead GS workshops and other types of geospatial focused events. So in that picture, you see me with a slightly shorter hair from last year at GIS Day, where we were leading an event, giving an introduction to GIS and our new GeoData portal. And we also regularly lead workshops, usually at least a few each semester focused on GIS or related technologies that are designed to help skill up our campus community and provide these opportunities to learn about GIS and other geospatial techniques outside of a full semester academic course. And so prior to March 2020, all of these services were either offered or developed on campus. I really, prior to March, didn't have any experience working from home in this position. And so it was a big change to go from not working at home at all, working exclusively on campus to then working exclusively at home. And as the GIS and geospatial data coordinator for the UT libraries, I am the main GIS person for the libraries. And so figuring out how to adapt our services to meet the needs of the campus community in this new environment, that largely fell on me to put these pieces together and figure out how we might be able to make sure we're continuing to provide the support that the campus needed. In terms of the impact of the pandemic on our normal library operations, that the campus had to make some significant changes to make things safe for everyone. Starting on March 16th of this year, we shifted to basically a mostly remote learning environment. And that has continued to the present with some classes going on on campus, but much more limited than what we would normally see. The libraries have also adapted their operations. So most of our branch libraries have closed and remain closed. Our main library, the Perry Castaneda Library, which we see pictured in the top right of this slide. It has an occupancy cap that we can see there in the center of this slide. Screenshot taken from yesterday where we had 86 folks in the building out of a max of 400 that we can support. Our libraries hours have been reduced slightly from what they are in a normal semester. And the unit I am in, scholarly communications within our libraries. Our staff are working almost exclusively from home. And as I mentioned, I personally haven't been to campus since early March of this year. And I've been working from home since then. So a lot of changes both for us in the libraries where we've had to figure out how to do our jobs and develop our services in a way that they can be offered remotely. And also, adaptation for our members of the campus community who have needed to find new ways to access these services. And so it's been a negotiation where kind of adaptation all around. And we're really trying to meet the new needs of the campus community as best we can. And so starting here with a focus on our research consultations and how this has changed since the start of the pandemic. As I briefly mentioned before, pre-COVID almost all of our consultations were in person. We see a picture there in the top right of our consultation room in our Perry Castaneda Library where many of these consultation meetings can take place where we have a whiteboard. We have a screen where folks can connect their laptops and display their screen upon that larger display there. We have multiple chairs where we can fit five, six, seven people in the room if necessary. Usually most of our meetings are one-on-one or meeting with maybe two other folks for a consultation to discuss a research project. But since March, all of these research consultations have been conducted via Zoom. Zoom was something that the libraries actually got started with also in March fortuitously. The timing of that allowed us to shift very quickly to this all virtual format. And there's been some advantages to this, surprisingly. And that's one of the things that I kind of want to highlight with this presentation is that usually when things are upended and disrupted, right, there are these challenges we face. And sometimes that means we can't do things quite as well as we used to before we encountered those challenges. But one of the overall lessons I think that I've learned in this position over the last nine months or so is that sometimes being forced out of that regular routine leads to innovations and discovery that sometimes doing things a bit differently can result in positive benefits for everyone. So some of these benefits that I've noticed from the shift all virtual research consultations include greater flexibility for earlier late consultations. I've had consultations as early as seven in the morning and as late as nine o'clock at night in cases where I'm in a meeting that is bringing in research collaborators from other time zones. So I've helped folks at UT in our research community who are collaborating with others in the UK and Australia and they wanted in some cases those collaborators to join our research consultation in this virtual environment that's possible much more easily than it would be if we're having to meet on campus in the way that we used to let's say last year. And as I mentioned here, it also allows out of area collaborators to attend. So we don't have to be on campus to get these researchers together. We can all meet virtually and everybody is so used to working with Zoom or similar platforms that that I think is easier to do than it would have been a year ago if we tried to have an all virtual meeting where not as many universities subscribe to these types of services and folks weren't as quite as used to using them. We also developed a more efficient scheduling process via our main UTGS services live guide which we see pictured there in the bottom right. So there's now a scheduling button. So this was technically possible before the pandemic. The pandemic definitely provided an impetus to get some things done that were on the to-do list but slightly lower priority. And so there was also this drive to find new ways of increasing the efficiency of our operations and making it easier for folks in this new environment to access our services. And so this is one of the things that we were able to get done really quickly after the start of this shift to remote learning. And it's expected these virtual consultations will continue in the spring of 2020 and it remains to be seen what patrons will prefer after that once we're able to return to normal operations. Will folks want to meet in person or will there actually be a preference for virtual meetings because everyone's so used to that via Zoom and because folks don't have to run across campus to meet in the library. They can be at home, I can be in my office, or I can be at home if I'm working from home and we can all still meet and provide those consultation services. So there are some limitations here where things are in some cases maybe a little bit more difficult helping with coding challenges or software installation compared to if we're there in person but in many cases it's perhaps slightly better than it was pre-pandemic because of these changes we've been able to make. And interestingly the number of consultations has actually increased year over year. Many of the questions that we've received since the start of the pandemic are actually very similar to those that we received pre-COVID again. How do I access or find a certain data set online? How should I develop a script to automate this process that I've developed for carrying out my analysis? How do I make this reproducible? Those questions continue to come up just as they did pre-COVID. And interestingly software installation and access questions are not as frequent as initially feared at the start of remote learning. We thought that might be a challenge that folks would face if I'm not able to come to campus like they used to to access GIS software and other similar GIS geospatial software but UT Libraries has started providing geospatial software access through virtual machines. We're using Apache Guacamole to provide access in that manner and we have detailed GIS software installation instructions through our lib guides that's something we've had for years and I think many folks are used to using this to learn how to install the software and so these types of questions really haven't come up all that frequently which was nice to see. One of the other things that happened this year in terms of event planning was a shift from how we have approached GIS Day previously and started to collaborate more with outside organizations and institutions that are also involved in the planning of GIS Day events. So 2020 marks the second year that UT has organized GIS Day events. Our first large-scale GIS Day celebration on campus was last year which the UT Libraries participated in along with our Technology Resources Department and we developed a whole series of in-person events in November of 2019. It was a great experience. We planned to do the same thing in 2020 and of course that plan kind of went out the window in March when everything had to shift to virtual and so in the spring we started to plan for a virtual GIS Day. We realized that because everything was virtual that this would open up the possibility of collaborating with other institutions outside of our local area who are also going to be forced to do everything virtually this year and what ended up coming out of this was our participation in Texas GIS Day. So this is really it was a series of three days of events that took place just this last month, a few weeks ago in the middle of November and we collaborated with Texas A&M, University of North Texas, the ATX GIS Day planning group, Houston Area GIS Day planning group, really these folks from many different institutions and organizations who are already going to be planning their own virtual events. We all came together to utilize the shared platform that Texas A&M had developed to allow us to collectively promote our events through this one website, this one platform and this ended up being really effective. It's unlikely I think that this would have happened in quite the same way if 2020 was a normal year and everybody was doing in-person events locally on their own campus or in their own venue and because everything was virtual we were able to come together and promote our events and collaborate in this way and it was a really positive experience we're already starting to discuss how we can continue to collaborate on a Texas GIS Day in 2021. So these discussions are just starting up now as we look forward to next year. Continuing with this theme of collaboration that are changing operations this year have really facilitated in some ways. Again this is somewhat of a positive thing that's come out of our changes that we've had to go through in response to the pandemic. I'll mention that pre-COVID there were some attempts that we had made of the UT libraries to try and build community with some of our other peer institutions across the state of Texas to build community, build connections. I know I visited Texas state soon after I started in my current position in 2018 to get to know folks outside of just the UT community but also learn what other universities in the local area were doing and we also scheduled conference events. We had a session that we branded as a GIS Birds of the Feather Session at our Texas Digital Libraries Conference in 2019 and we had a few folks coming from other institutions who attended it was an early morning session. It was a nice opportunity to talk about what we were doing with GIS, other institutions were doing with GIS but it didn't really get a critical mass. There wasn't a lot of momentum that came out of that and so in this year we were planning to do another similar session in person in May of 2020 that conference was canceled because of the pandemic and so we ended up kind of shifting gears and doing a virtual Birds of the Feather Session inviting folks from all of these other institutions across the state who are members of the Texas Digital Libraries to join us for a virtual Zoom event to discuss GIS services and there was great interest. I think we had over 40 attendees on that call, a far greater number than we saw in person the previous year and as a result we were really able to build some momentum. We formed a GIS interest group in July that was organized by the digital libraries and supported by the Texas Digital Libraries that many of our Texas universities are members of and within the span of just six months we have developed a group charter. We've organized two webinars providing introductions to GIS and GIS services that libraries can provide. We have four standing subcommittees working on things like event planning, data collaboration, developing a survey to gather information about what institutions across the state are doing with GIS and a mentoring subcommittee as well. We have over 20 members who are regularly attending events and they're coming from over eight institutions across the state of Texas so overall this has been a big success. I'm not quite sure that this would have come together in quite the same way if it had again been a normal year. I think this is something that really came about partly through this shift to these virtual types of events and everybody getting used to working and collaborating virtually and we now have monthly meetings. We're already scheduling multiple events out into 2021. We're developing a survey to distribute to universities across state of Texas to learn more about what they're doing with GIS services and we're already starting to plan for ways that we can collaborate more around sharing data. One of the other things that was upended in March when we had to shift our campus operations was planning for a new scholars lab that we were envisioning going into our main library, the Pericastinata Library. This lab space can actually be seen in the lower left there. That's what it looks like currently. Well pre-pandemic probably not quite as busy today but an implementation group was formed in early March 2020 after funding for design and construction were approved so the idea was for us to be able to revitalize that space seen in the current left bottom left of this slide to put in a new data lab to provide a new environment to build actually some of the themes that we saw emerge from the fall CNI presentations earlier this semester about library spaces that can help facilitate the building of community on campus, help promote library services like GIS services and we really wanted to leverage this opportunity to revitalize this space that's at the entry level for our main library to help promote many of our services including GIS services and develop new programming for the space. So it was really envisioned as a space that we could use to take our GIS services to the next level. Funding unfortunately was put on indefinite hold as of May 2020 due to COVID budget impact, something that wasn't a big surprise once we saw how dramatically everything was being affected by the pandemic but our interest in pursuing a revitalization of this space is undiminished so we're hopeful that at some point in the not too distant future these funds will become available again or will be unfrozen and we'll be able to continue to move forward with planning and eventually construction for this space. One of the things that the pandemic has given us an opportunity though to reflect more on is what a post-COVID lab space should look like and what geospatial services should be offered. So how has the pandemic changed the interest perceptions needs of the campus community and this gives us a chance to while funding is paused to reflect on those things and maybe design this space in a slightly different way than we would if you know we had embarked on this effort two years ago pre-pandemic right I think we will be moving into a different world where folks have slightly different needs than they would have before the pandemic. So hopefully we'll be able to move forward with that soon. One of the other things I also want to make sure to mention during this presentation today is how we have adapted our geospatial research workshops to this new environment so pre-COVID all of our workshops were in person and so we have a regular semester workshop series that we have branded the data and donuts workshop series usually when folks attend in person they're able to grab a donut that we provide and sit down for an hour and a half to learn about a new technology or a new research technique and our traditional schedules for the fall workshops to be general research data management type workshops and for the spring workshops to be focused on GIS and geospatial research in particular. So with COVID all of this was somewhat upended our spring 2020 workshops somewhat fortuitously happened to end really the week before everything locked down so those took place as normally scheduled in person. Our fall 2020 workshops had to be conducted very differently they were all virtual via zoom we used the zoom webinar format to provide these workshops the same format that we're using right now in zoom and workshops were designed to highlight things that were going on on campus like UT COVID research to highlight other services that we wanted to make sure folks are aware of like our Texas data repository. We had four workshops that were scheduled from 12 to 1 on Alternating Friday so this is a slightly different schedule than we would usually have for our in-person workshops we shifted the time earlier on Fridays we didn't do back-to-back weeks we wanted to get ourselves more flexibility to assess how things were going in this new virtual format and the webinar licensing on our campus was a little bit complicated to work out but the webinar format ended up being great it worked really well. What we noticed from this is that attendance actually was much higher than usual in a normal semester maybe we see 30 to 40 attendees per event this semester we were seeing 70 to 50 attendees at each of our workshops and so really the the shift virtual again ended up being in some ways slightly positive for us where we were able to reach a larger audience than we could before and we were really interested in learning more about why that that was the case we distributed a survey after the series wrapped up this semester we were able to gain some interesting information that I'll mention here more in a second and our workshops for 2020 will continue to be virtual again based on the success we've had clearly there there is interest in these types of virtual events we're actually going to be increasing the duration from one hour workshops to one and a half hour workshops based on some of the feedback that we've received and it'll be interesting to see what happens post-covid once things are able to return to normal in-person events become a possibility again what does the campus community want to see do they want to see a mix of in-person virtual events do they have a strong preference for one format over the other so that's something that we'll have to to figure out as we move forward into the future and hopefully the pandemic recedes right we're able to at some point in the not too distant future resume normal operations I also want to briefly mention I know I'm running a little short on time here the Texas Geodata Portal stuff is to say that basically things have been able to continue with our portal really in much the same way as they would have if you know the pandemic hadn't ever happened we hadn't had to change our operations use of the portal has continued to increase as we see in the lower left there we've continued to add new data sets to the portal to build out our offerings adding new data sets from our UT libraries collection so development and use has continued to grow even during the pandemic which is great and one of the final things I want to wrap up on here is how we've been able to leverage these changes that we've made in the last several months to carry out additional assessment and collect new data that can be used for assessment purposes and I personally felt that this kind of there was more urgency around this once we moved into this new work from home environment where you know we're not there in person there isn't this same level of you know everybody's seen what we're doing and seen the things we're working on and so being able to document that with data seem particularly important and so what I one of the things that I've done as time is permitted was developing some new scripted methods of gathering data and analyzing data that is just being generated through these virtual events that we're doing and other things that that we're doing now in this new type of working environment so writing scripts to track how many reference emails I'm sending consultation tracking the analysis of zoom statistics so how often am I scheduling consultations how many people are attending how long do those sessions last how many data sets are we contributing to the geodata portal how is the the use of the geodata portal increasing and for our data and donuts workshop series because folks were signing up for that through a registration page we're able to gather new data there that wasn't possible before when those workshops were just dropped in there was no pre-registration and we're able to to see get a better idea of our audience so is it mostly faculty students staff who's attending what is the the average rate of attrition from registrations to actual attendance and through our survey we're able to glean what folks are interested in seeing in future semesters and I know I'm out of time here so I'll wrap things up and and open it up for questions I've also included a few links here that point to some of the resources that I've mentioned in the talk and I've also included my contact information if anybody would like to reach out and ask after our presentation about any questions they might have thank you oh thanks a lot Michael that was really interesting loved hearing about your new partnerships and new opportunities that you all have experienced as a result of the pivot you that took place in the spring as you mentioned we are at time but I want to be able to get in at least this one question that we have which comes to us from Joan Lippincott who asks do you have any initial thoughts on how your thinking has changed about your plans for your digital scholarship physical space so we we did receive results from I believe eight faculty members who are teaching geospatial or GIS courses on campus and we're able to use that information to get some better insight into what was of greatest importance to to faculty that are involved in that type of work on campus and there there is interested in a virtual lab environment right where we can provide access to software outside of the lab space but there's still strong interest in seeing you know high-end computers that can handle you know the type of intensive geospatial computation that's required for many of the research projects being carried out on campus we were able to get a better idea of you know what folks are looking for and in terms of that the hardware that they want to see in the lab what is of most importance right if we have a fixed budget how should that that be spent on computer resources again if we're focusing on supporting the needs of geospatial researchers which are just one segment of our overall community that we're supporting and consultation spaces co-working spaces those were things that that we've also had discussions about that I think well maybe need to be designed a bit differently than they would have you know pre-covid how much how many seats do we try to put into a lab how close do people want to be when they're working together and how can we maybe facilitate you know in-person events that are also maybe able to be streamed virtually right so there there does seem to be this strong interest in virtual events that folks can attend even if they're not able to be on campus at a particular time these are all things that I think we're going to need to to discuss further as we resume the planning process and again once that that funding is freed up again that I think those will be some of the conversations that we have and start to think through how we can still use this new space to really promote our services and provide the things that the campus is going to need moving forward in this really this new environment this new era that we go into post-covid to be sure okay thank you thank you so much thank you Joan for the question and Michael thank you for answering that and seeing as we are a little bit past time here I'm going to go ahead and turn off the recording and just bring the public portion of this to a close thanking our presenter Michael thank you so much for joining us at CNI and all of our attendees but Michael's going to hang around a little bit and chat with us I know I have more questions I imagine some of you do as well so if you have the time and would like to stick around and join the conversation just after I turn off recording raise your hand I'll be happy to turn on your microphone thanks so much everyone we hope to see you back at CNI bye