 Good morning. We're going to get started. It's a little bit past 10.30. Thank you all for attending our presentation. My name is Jeremy Frumpkin. I'm with the University of Arizona and I'll be presenting along with Orin Beta Ray from Ex Libris and Pascal Calerico from the University of Waterloo on what we think is a pretty exciting and unique approach to providing recognition for libraries and the roles we play and the value we add back to our user communities. So our title of our presentation is called Library Brand Recognition, Generating Visibility in the Virtual Age. And we're going to divide this presentation up into three components. I'm going to talk about a little bit about the history of where this idea and approach generated from. Orin's going to step in and talk about some of the implementation. And then Pascal's going to talk about the pilot that we've been running and some of the earlier results from that pilot. So to frame this discussion, I want to bring us back to about 2010, the time known as when there was the Great Recession was officially recognized, though the academic, the economic downturn began in late 2007. But by 2010, academic libraries, indeed academia as a whole, were facing great challenges in these difficult economic conditions. A number of reports pertaining to these challenges in academic libraries were published in 2010. Two of note were one called the Research Information Network report on challenges for academic libraries in difficult economic times. And the Association of College and Research Libraries report of the value of academic libraries, a comprehensive research review and report. Findings from this report were presented actually at CNI by Mary Ellen Davis in the fall 2010 CNI member meeting. And that was a session that I and my colleague from Oregon State Terry Reese attended. The presentation that Mary Ellen gave was especially compelling as in the case of the University of Arizona, we were in the process of adopting a financial model called RCM which is a Responsibility-Centered Management. In this model, colleges and units are often taxed for centrally supported services, thereby putting the value they provide back to units under closer scrutiny. So in this case, the library is looked at as a tax to the unit. The unit gets all the money and then it gets their library tax as well as their IT tax and other centrally provided services. So it was increasingly important for us at the University of Arizona to understand how we could better relate our value back to these units, in fact to institutional success factors. And so this kind of this report and some of its findings were higher on our radar and actually these types of thoughts still are. So the ACRO report concentrated on a number of recommended actions that libraries could take among these things like record and increase library impact on student enrollment, link libraries to improve student retention and graduation rates, enhance library contributions to student job success, track library influences on increased student achievement, demonstrate and develop library impact on student learning, among many others. These are just some of those. In general, the report recommended these types of actions but also a lot of actions that sort of demonstrate, track, record the contributions and assessment of what libraries provide back to their institutions. So to me, the just I took from this report and the presentation was that the academic libraries really needed to significantly increase our efforts in demonstrating the value of the existing and emerging services we're providing to back to our institutions and that we needed to do it in a way that was hard for folks not to really relate or hard to them not to recognize the return on the investment that the institutions were providing back to the libraries. So following the presentation and the report, Terry and I got to conversing about some of the findings and some of the ideas present in the report and we began discussing more general terms how we might relate better the value of our libraries not just to VIP stakeholders such as presidents, provosts, et cetera, but to the communities we serve at large. Again, in the context of the University of Arizona, we were looking at an increased need to become more visible across campus due to our institution's new budgeting model. Additionally, we were beginning a lot more heavily on student fee funding for a great percentage of our budget. Our student fee was increased significantly. I think it started at somewhere around $10 a year and right now it's at $200 a year per student. So that's a fairly significant chunk of change there that's coming into our budget to offset some budget cuts that we were suffering from at the time. So our ability to relate our value with a variety of communities and stakeholders is becoming more important than ever. During the course of our discussion, we recognized that one of our biggest challenges was in relating our role in providing access to electronic resources, i.e. the fact that when a user downloads a licensed article, be it from Google Scholar or from the library's own discovery tools, it was not often apparent that the library played a key role in acquiring and delivering that resource. In fact, the better we were in our role in brokering access to electronic resources such as articles and ebooks, the more seamless this was to the user and therefore the more invisible we were in that role. Sure, we can often brand a splash page or provide some branding on a native licensed database and while the user in the process of discovering content, we may garner some recognition. However, if the user's discovering resources through Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search or another external discovery tool, there's little control or ability for us to relate our value or brand back to the user. Additionally, in any of these scenarios, recognition is quite ephemeral. There is little of any persistence of that recognition. I'll just add to this too that using tools like Mendeley or newer research support tools, while you may set up access through your library through those tools, that even makes it less visible to the user through the course of the research process. This is a really important challenge for us in terms of relating our value. What if libraries were able to actually brand the information resources themselves? This really struck a tone with Terry and I as we talked about this. Let's see if libraries could brand articles and electronic resources. This could be by applying the branding in the margins of the paper or perhaps better just by attaching a cover sheet to a PDF, much in a similar manner to how we often put a cover sheet on top of a physical interlibrary loan. By branding the resources themselves, libraries would have the ability to gain a stickier type of visibility while not getting in the way of the researcher. The branding sticks with the resource, so if a user is reading it on their desktop, their laptop, their tablet, their phone, etc., the branding is there. It doesn't just cause the user to take any additional steps or effort, just as placing a cover sheet on an ILL has minimal impact. In fact, if we were successful implementing a branding approach, we could also open the door to adding user value through a similar process. One could imagine that a full citation for an article could be provided on the cover sheet as part of a branding service, for instance. It also might allow the library to relate a specific amount of value for that article that the user has just acquired. One study I've seen has put the commercial cost of an average academic article at around $19. At the University of Arizona, where we do have a $200 per year student fee, it would be fantastic for us if a student who has just right clicked and downloaded 20 articles for an assignment that's due that next day and that's due in the morning could also recognize that the library saved them $400 by providing those articles. That really $400 worth of articles, $200 student fee, that value proposition would be one we'd love to make back to our students. This is directly recognized value. Finally, before I hand this off to Oren, the key here is that this approach, this idea, looks at how libraries can increase their value recognition in the role as provisioner or broker of information resources. This is something we've done traditionally with traditional resources, book plates, ILL cover sheets, et cetera, but an area that I believe we have the ability to, we have under leveraged with electronic resources and we have the ability to really leverage more greatly. Thanks Jeremy. So my name is Oren Bedari. I'm from Ex Libris and just as in ways of background and context. So we work with academic research, national libraries around the world in three main realms, discovering delivery of scholarly, library and scholarly content, management of library processes and to end library processes as well as long-term digital preservation. And a few years ago, we took a hard look at approaches to library services. A lot of that is in relation as a result of the major dramatic changes in scholarly production and communication, user perceptions, both students and faculty, et cetera. And we came up and delivered new framework for library services that is really based on comprehensive, providing a comprehensive approach to both discovery and delivery and management of all types of scholarly content, so including electronic in the mix as well as local digital repositories. And the real goal here is twofold. One, to make the common stuff much easier, quicker for libraries and library users to use, so really make it possible for libraries to work at scale in an efficient way. And paired with that is also help libraries shift the attention to focus on more of the unique and arguably important processes, projects, content produced in their institution. So it's kind of the combination of the two efficiencies at scale and the introduction of new services in support of local activities in the realm of research and teaching that we believe makes it possible for libraries to demonstrate more value to their institution. But I think a prerequisite to demonstrating value is being recognized for services that the library does. And to gain that recognition, I think Jeremy pointed out that there's a little bit of a contradiction here, a conflict. You know, we want to be involved, we want to produce more value, we want to have greater role certainly in the provision of information, but we really need to do it in a way that doesn't get in the way of the user. So it's really a lot of that is about being an invisible facilitator of information. So obviously in this realm where you want to be invisible yet demonstrate your value, the recognition for services becomes even more important. And that's why when talking to Jeremy and Terry, we got really interested in this project. So let me show you an example of what it does. What does branding mean? So let's assume, you know, suppose I'm a student at School of Engineering at Waterloo University. You know, I use as many of our users we know use a wide variety of tools to discover content, including Google Scholar. So I, you know, go to Google Scholar. I search for automotive wireless. This is my search term. I get my result list. And, you know, I pick one of those results. You see the third result there at the bottom highlighted. I click on that result. What I get here, as an example, I get to the publishers platform. In this case, Springer link, I look at the splash page. I decide that this is what I want. And I have an option here to download the PDF. But note that there's nothing on this splash page. And this is true for many other examples that actually identifies this service with anything to do with Waterloo. And particularly since I started with Google Scholar, most users won't make that association of the provisioning of this article with any service of Waterloo or Waterloo libraries. And indeed, when I click on the download the PDF, I get the PDF in my browser or my Acrobat reader. And, you know, I go and do my thing with the article. This is the current workflow. So what we did is basically assume the very same workflow. So no change in the understanding of the user behavior. I'm still the same student of engineering, go to Google Scholar, execute the same search, get the same result list, click on the third result and get to the splash page of Springer Link. Still no sign of the fact that Waterloo had anything to do with this. But what happens now is that what I get when I open the PDF, I get a cover page. And this is a cover page that is designed and controlled by Waterloo in this case. They put, you know, whatever information they want to put here, including the information that this article is being provided to you, the user, by the University of Waterloo libraries. So this is in essence what we're talking about. As I say, this is customizable under the control of the institution. So another example is San Diego State University. And, you know, they designed their own cover page that tells their users who paid for the article and where they can get more help if needed, etc. We'll talk more about that momentarily. And then, of course, comes the article. So the article remains intact. It's just a cover page. This is basically it. Just say a few words about, you know, the architecture of the solution. What's really important to point out is that it is entirely built on the basis of current infrastructures that most all institutions use today. And it's built on the notion of the fact that many institutions, in fact, most institutions use a proxy server. So when end users approach and connect to content provider's site, it goes through a proxy. So building on that infrastructure, what we did is just a simple thing, really. And that is that, you know, the interaction with a proxy server remains the same. But there is a condition here that, and all this can be controlled by IP address ranges. So this can happen only to subgroup of users, which was very important when we conducted the pilot, because we didn't want to impact the whole user community. We wanted to focus on a small group of testers. So it can be restricted to based on IP address ranges. It can also be restricted based on target URLs, namely, you know, create subset of targets, where this approach is being applied. And within those restrictions, if the returned material contains a PDF, that PDF can be triggered for branding. So this is basically the information flow and the architecture of the solution totally built on existing infrastructure. The methodology that we followed in building this option is we spent quite a bit of time in the lab doing the research and development, the necessary work there, as well as testing. And then, about a couple of months ago, we started field testing with a couple of partners. We started what we call pilot one with two. And we're just about to finalize this stage and start the second phase of pilots with anywhere between five to 10 institutions. So as a side, if any of you or your institution would be interested, please come talk to us. We'd be happy to tell you more about the opportunity to participate in the pilot. Generally speaking, each such implementation includes three stages, implementation of the technical solution, and working with the institution in bringing up the branding component and integrating it into their infrastructure. Then we start gathering data. There is a lot of data that is being gathered, and Pascal will talk more about that, as well as the user testing stage. And again, Pascal will talk more about that. So we worked, as I said, with two partners in our first pilot stage, San Diego State University and University of Waterloo. And I'd like to hand it over to Pascal who will tell you more about their experience. Thanks, Zorin. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about how this project came to us and share some early results from doing this co-development work. I was really interested in working with Ex Libris on this. We've been a longtime Ex Libris site, and I've been involved with the Ex Libris community of customers for a long time. But I'd never been worked with a part of a project that actually looked at the needs for developing a new project from the idea stage through prototyping and seeing what it was actually like. So I presented this to our librarians, and they were also kind of interested in this. So I'll tell you a little bit about the University of Waterloo and the environment in which we are in. We are in a layer of a number of consortiums, which is a little bit different than what typically one finds here in the United States. And that impacts how the service provision kind of flows throughout this. So some of the things that we had to take kind of special attention to. We'll talk a little bit about the branding pilot itself, what was involved, how long was this. It was a fairly short project. And then give you some focus group comments from graduate students and faculty that we recruited. So Waterloo is very much a science and technology university. They're very proud about things like entrepreneurship and innovation. Bill Gaines said a few years ago that he has the most software engineers working at Microsoft sourced from University of Waterloo. So partnering with a vendor was very consonant with the spirit of the university. This is something that is encouraged at Waterloo experimentation and looking at different and new ways to do things. We have about 34,000 students, most of them undergraduates. It's not really a residential campus, although many students live in kind of the surrounding area to campus. So most of the use of electronic resources at Waterloo is through proxied access from their apartment buildings, their private residences surrounding campus. And then when they're on campus, most students bring their own device with them. So whether that's a tablet or a laptop, so they're using the campus wireless network. The Waterloo is a member of a local consortium, the tri-university group. And so when we initially talked about this with our other two partners, University of Guelph and Wilfrid Laurier University, we were thinking it would be kind of interesting to have this in three different library contexts, but within the same consortium. They were both going through pretty intensive web redesign projects, and it was simply a matter that they couldn't kind of insert this into a short time frame to participate. But so we have about 77,000 students within this consortium, and we provide a lot of shared services and shared remote storage for collections. And we use Voyager, Primo, and SFX, and I'll show you a little bit about what that looks like in terms of how it actually provides the service on campus. So then within the provincial sphere, we're also connected, and we get services through a shared service called Okol Scholar's Portal. And each of the 21 universities in Ontario feeds money to Scholar's Portal, and they provide shared services to all of those students and faculty at those 21 institutions. So someone had the great foresight years ago to write the licenses such that when Scholar's Portal purchases electronic resources on behalf of the students and faculty and the public of Ontario, Scholar's Portal actually owns those materials. So they've carried that on throughout the years, and they host locally about three and a half million articles now, scholarly journal articles, and a growing number of e-books. And so this was also important in how the service looked on our end, and they've also rolled out a variety of other services here that you can see. Then within the national viewpoint, there's a national site licensing initiative which has been around for a little over 10 years now, which takes the core scholarly resources that everybody relies on. These are the bread and butter, Elsevier, Wiley, Oxford, etc., and negotiates all of those things at the national level, which has resulted in significant cost savings over the long time that's been in place. So it's an information-rich environment, and it's complex because we have multiple service providers, we have things locally, we have things that are sourced provincially, and then we have content that's nationally licensed. The project kicked off really in late August, and we're at the point now where we're still getting back some focus group results. So one consideration if you want to do a project like this is you need to carve out some time and be agile within your organization to be able to do this. The team that worked on this were two or three people from our digital initiatives department, and then we had four library liaisons and myself and then a project manager at Ex Libris, and Warren would sometimes join us on weekly calls that we set up. So the things that we were responsible for was designing that PDF page, that initial page that you saw, and in Ontario we have some accessibility guidelines, which made this just, well, there was a few extra steps of checking to ensure that that PDF page was actually met the accessibility guidelines that we have in the province. And then there was configuring both the open URL resolver, which in our case was SFX, and any proxy services. We use easy proxy with a number of providers. We selected about eight providers to initially work with where we could get a fair amount of electronic content from a broad area of subject disciplines. So it was like Oxford and Wiley and the JSTOR journals and a few others. Then we did some internal testing initially on staff workstations. So we knew the IP addresses of the staff workstations and we limited it to those. We wanted to ensure that network latency wasn't an issue and also that things were being branded consistently as expected. And then we deployed these initially to all of the public workstations within the library and also deployed them to our set of focus group members who were located in four different departments, electrical engineering, philosophy, psychology, and public health. So that was kind of a nice mix of different subject disciplines and we thought it would be interesting to see what people thought of these coming from different disciplines. We worked with ex Libris to also harvest the statistics coming out of the MySQL database in SFX so that we could track progress as we went along looking at how many pages were being presented for branding versus how many pages were... Yeah, if you could just pass over the water, thanks. How many pages were being served up without branding so we could get a sense of how much of the services were being utilized. There were some differences between what we saw at Waterloo and San Diego State. San Diego State has a much more standard kind of simplified environment and everything was being branded. We were working with a subset of publishers and because of the way our SFX is set up, all of the article content that was coming through Scholar's Portal, that Provincial Consortia was not being branded and we have our OpenURL resolver configured to preference Scholar's Portal content. So when users click the first link on the OpenURL resolver page, it goes to Scholar's Portal and those things weren't being branded. So it was only if users actually clicked on the Wiley title, for example, but you can get some nice statistics out of this and track how things are proceeding from there. So if we look at how this kind of played out at Waterloo, if a user starts from our homepage, we have Primo embedded on the homepage there and does their search in there, goes to Primo and finding the same article here, one clicks through and gets the SFX menu and here you see the various choices that one would have in where you could source that particular article from and you click through to the publisher site again, this is the Springer link as well, and then seeing that first page with the cover page. So initially we wanted to gather feedback from two groups. We wanted a cohort that was not aware of the pilot and a cohort that was aware of the pilot and see if there was any difference in what people were saying. The undergraduates and staff, we intended to get feedback from the library workstation, so using the resources within the library and we had a link to a survey on that cover page. We ran about a week's worth of results and people were simply not clicking on that survey. They were just clicking through and going through to the content that they wanted. So we had a discussion around this and we decided that what we would do is really focus on the focus groups from the graduate students and the faculty to get more of a sense of what they thought the utility of this was. So as I said, we worked with four different departments and we used our liaison librarians to solicit volunteers from those departments to participate. Some of the comments that we got, I would say that, and these are kind of representative comments, the faculty generally speaking were more positive in thinking that the branding service was useful to them from their perspective. With graduate students generally speaking again, they sometimes found it an impediment. If they wanted to print out the article, they would generally have to print out a custom page range, for example, to skip that first page. But you see some of the comments here echoing that notion of starting out at Google Scholar and not really seeing where the article actually comes from. So for the uninformed user, the notion that the information is just simply out there and is freely available could be something that they would think of. So in this case, library branding really does work. Some of the graduate students here also noted that there actually is some branding around this in Waterloo's case. So when you hit the SFX menu, you actually do see that it's University of Waterloo library. So they thought in some senses that the branding page was less useful because they already knew that it was being sourced from the library. A lot of students wanted instead of a whole page, they would have preferred just either a footer or a header or perhaps something down the side. And that becomes a much more complex situation to take an existing PDF and insert some text because of the variability of how much margin space one might have in journals. So it's a good idea, but actually carrying that out might be a lot more difficult. A few comments on working with Ex Libris or really any other vendor that you might want to do from your library and some of the things that just generally to kind of think of. The first thing is that it's a development project. Things will change and you need to be ready and agile to change plans as things come up. And those are normal. This is an inquiry into developing a new service and you're really trying to see during the prototyping what's the best way to do something. And that may change and evolve and it probably will over time as you do that. But really this is an opportunity for the library to work with your vendor to design a new service. And you can make sure that there's a lot of user service orientation to that. So there's a great opportunity in doing these things. Technical staff enjoy these things because it's something creative and it's development work and it's something they don't normally do. So our technical folks really enjoyed working with Ex Libris despite things like, okay, can we change that SFX configuration again, try this out, reboot the server. They really enjoyed doing this. And when you're working with a vendor, there's going to be a lot of staff effort involved. So think about what you would like the library to get out of it and make sure you talk about that with the vendor that you work with. Some of the technical things that we ran into, which were unexpected, I thought I'd mention, there's actually still a lot of diversity across our campus, which I was really surprised at with static addresses and dynamic IP addresses. My experience and my thinking had been, well, everybody has probably moved to dynamic IP except in a few cases where machines are accessing a few privileged servers and those are done by static IP addresses. But it really wasn't the case and it really depended department by department who had static and dynamic IPs. This was important because we needed to know the IP addresses of our focus group members so that we could show the branded pages just to their workstations and not everybody in the department, for example. The fact that the Scholar's Portal resources wouldn't be branded, we didn't think of that going in. And one of our first weeks in thinking we were just looking at the statistics and wondering why the statistics were a lot lower unexpectedly. And then we realized, well, the Scholar's Portal link is being preferenced and people are probably clicking on that to a much greater degree than going down to the second or third provider. We also had our SFX hosted at Scholar's Portal at the University of Toronto, so we had to work with Scholar's Portal staff to get access to a test instance of SFX that we could use there. They're very accommodating and helpful but it was one extra piece that we needed to work with. And then there's also some variability in how one sets up the proxy stanzas with regards to wild cards for the domain names. And perhaps I'll hand it back over to Jeremy to talk about the summary and thoughts on future work. So thanks, Pascal. So just to summarize, this is an effort that I think that we're all very excited about to see how this could help libraries relate back their value to key stakeholders, decision makers, funders, whether those funders are upper administrators, deans, or just the average user of the library, whether it's an undergraduate, graduate, or faculty member. We were really early in the testing process. I think we've got some really good data and we're just very excited about. So we'd like to sort of end at this point and take your questions.