 I think it's about time to get started. Welcome everybody, thank you for joining us. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information and it's my pleasure to welcome you to one of our project briefing sessions for the Spring 2020 CNI virtual member meeting which will run all the way through the end of May. A word about this session. When we made the decision to take this meeting virtual, we opened up the meeting for some additional sessions addressing aspects of the current crisis and what we have today is one of those presentations. So you can expect it to be extremely timely and relevant to the current state of affairs. We have two presenters today, Rosalind Metz and Lisa Macklin both from Emory University and after they complete their presentations Diane Goldenberg Hart will modify up from CNI will will oversee a question and answer session. She'll moderate that. There's a Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and please feel free to use that to queue up questions at any time. We will deal with all the questions at the end of the presentation but certainly feel free to pose them as they occur to you during the presentation and with that I think our title pretty much speaks for itself. The presentation addresses open infrastructure and the COVID-19 crisis and it just reminds remains for me to thank you all for joining us and to thank our presenters for putting this presentation together on very short order when they had an awful lot of other things going on and with that I will turn it over to Rosie who will lead off the presentation over to you. Hi everybody my name is Rosalind. I am the associate dean for library technology and digital strategies and I'm here with Lisa Macklin who is the associate dean for research engagement and scholarly communications and we're going to talk a little bit about some work that Emory has done around open infrastructure and how that came to be helpful in the the current crisis. So a quick overview of what we'll talk about will give you a little bit of background on some of the work that Lisa's team and my team have done around open infrastructure review of the principles, criteria and process we created as part of the work that we have done and then how we then use that with when the COVID-19 crisis hit. So I'll hand it over to Lisa to talk a little bit about our open access collection development policy. Thanks Rosalind and thanks to everyone for joining us today. So you might wonder why we created principles and processes for open infrastructure requests and that's in part because at Emory we do have a history of principle decision making that happens both at the university level and within the libraries. So a very recent example of that is our university administration had a town hall and as part of that town hall the university administration including the provost outlined a series of principles for decision making through COVID crisis and then emailed those principles out to the Emory community. So establishing principles for decision making is kind of part of the culture at Emory and I'm sure it's part of others culture as well. So we were getting requests from various organizations for support of open infrastructure sometimes financial requests sometimes requests for participation and we realized that we didn't have any principled way of kind of evaluating these requests and making decisions. So we leaned on some of our current practices and policies to determine a way forward and one of those was our open access collection development policy that was developed in 2016 as a collaboration between collection management and scholarly communications and as part of developing that process and those principles we looked at ways to inform selectors and collection managers around content initiatives that were open access which would be supported by the Emory libraries. So for example the principles within our OA collection development policy include whether or not the content would be purchased if it fit within our regular collection development guidelines or whether or not the open access content had a sustainable and equitable business model and whether or not that model was a reasonable cost to content ratio. The other thing we consider is whether or not the publisher providing that open access content is reputable and we relied on criteria we had already developed in our open access publishing fund to establish that criteria and apply it here in the collection development policy. So that gives you some sense of what I mean by principles within a policy and then after we developed the policy we needed to look at processes for implementing the policy. So for example we established a workflow for selectors to identify open access content to be included in our discovery system. We did that by partnering with technical services and collection management. We also established a workflow for adding Emory authored open access monographs to our repositories and finally and probably most importantly we defined the sources of funding for financial support for the open access initiatives that were requiring financial support. So this model and this process of developing the open access collection development policy informed our thinking about principles for open infrastructure and we also considered our IT governance process which Rosalind will review. So library technology and digital strategies is governed by both the libraries and IT's governance processes. To satisfy review of for both of the processes and their governance structures LTDA staff create a business case using a template developed by the IT's PMO group the project management group. The business case template asks for information like the problem statement the solution proposed resources needed human and financial risk constraints etc. So at Emory we are I would say large supporters of open community software. We are currently members of Fedora. We are Samvera partners. We have a long history of being involved in open community software and all of the decisions around open community software go through this governance process. So we're not just making decisions and going forth and implementing but instead have many conversations prior to making this decision. On the library side you'll see in the diagram there are three groups identified that we engage in conversations with when making these decisions. The first group is the operations and management team. That group is comprised of the dean of libraries the associate deans the director of finance and HR and that group provides a first pass at business cases making sure that budget and staffing align with the library's overall strategic roadmap. The group may send the business case back to LTDS to either scope it up or scope it down and as happened previously last week in a meeting it got scoped up and then down again all in one hour. The second group that after the operations and management team or OMT reviews it that it goes to is libraries cabinet. This is comprised of senior management for the libraries. The group reviews the business case on its merits and approves the project. So does this business case make sense? How is this going to impact all of the different libraries that are fall underneath Emory libraries all of the different units. Usually projects have been heavily socialized prior to bringing them to this stage of governance. So oftentimes this part of the process is really almost like a rubber stamp lots of conversations have happened prior to this point. And then the finally the last group that we often socialize projects with is the library policy committee. This is a committee that is part of the larger faculty senate structure and includes faculty from the different schools the college and academic centers on campus. Major IT projects impacting users are usually presented to this group. If we were doing a major project and it would have no impact on users we probably wouldn't bring it to to this group. On the IT side there are again three major groups that we do a lot of socializing with. The first group is the digital scholarship and pedagogy group. This is a subcommittee of the larger IT steering committee structure. It's made up of faculty members again across the schools and colleges and its primary focus is on academic use of technology. And so any business cases related to the library are usually sent through this group. After that group approves the second group is the IT steering committee. If a business case is approved by the any of the lower subcommittees this group then does final approval on the business case. It's made up of senior IT leadership so the CIO, deputy CIOs, the VP for finance, the deputy provost for administration and planning, and then the chairs of the other ITSC subcommittees. So that that group once they approve really there is sort of a final step to approval if you will and that is the art review or the architecture security review. This is an IT group that performs just a general architecture review. Do you have sound architecture around your project and does a security review as well? Conceivably a project could stop moving forward during the architecture review and the security review but oftentimes those sound principles are followed well upfront and during the business case and are usually identified by the subcommittees or the main committee if there are issues. So with that sort of background on the work that we've done you know laying foundations and principles for some of our open infrastructure Lisa and I wanted to make things a little bit more formal so she's going to talk a little bit more about the principles of open infrastructure. So as Rosalind mentioned Emory Libraries are long-term supporters of various open access and open infrastructure initiatives and we've been committed to sustainable and equitable models of open infrastructure. The example that you see here on the screen is our ETDs which is in San Vera which was a project that Rosalind and I worked on early on when she joined Emory so it's one that's near and dear to our hearts. We also have a commitment to being good stewards of our resources and this is another value that is pretty closely held at Emory including at the highest levels of the university. A bit of history about Emory and Emory Libraries. Robert W. Woodruff who's a former chairman of Coca-Cola gave Emory University 105 million dollars in 1979 which at that time was you know believed to be one of the largest single donations in the history of philanthropy and the library building we work in is named after Mr. Woodruff and his statue stands outside but in bestowing this gift Mr. Woodruff specifically cited Emory's successful stewardship of its resources. So while we're a private institution that is a value that is very closely held and so when we have looked at open infrastructure support being good stewards of our resources is one of our kind of core values. We also look at any proposals in alignment with the values of the libraries much in the way that I think many of us do. Some of those values do include stewardship and preservation of the cultural, historical and intellectual record, equity, diversity and inclusion, user-centered services, programming and systems. So things I think that are familiar and resonate with all of us in the library community. So while when we get requests around infrastructure support we find that these initiatives frequently do align with our values we still have a challenge in how do we evaluate these requests for support and when we were initially considering some requests that we'd received we realized they didn't fit neatly into the structure that we developed for the open access collection development policy because that was really focused on scholarly content and they didn't really need to go through the IT governance process because that included a lot of governance groups outside of the library. So this was really something that we felt needed to stay within the library and so we really thought we needed to develop our own criteria, principles and processes and it's also sometimes difficult or a bit of a challenge to determine benefit for some of these initiatives. It's not always quite as straightforward as it can be in evaluating open access content for example. So as one example if there's an openly available tool or service for researchers that may not be heavily used by emery researchers but it still may be an important tool or service for the scholarly community how do we assess that, how do we make those evaluations and so that was part of what we were considering when we developed our criteria. So for the criteria for evaluation we brought together a group of folks as we do in libraries we're not going to call it a committee but it might have been like a committee and that group represented collections, it represented scholarly communications and also library technology and we really discussed and developed the criteria to evaluate the requests that we were getting. So we were mindful that we needed criteria and processes to make decisions for committing the library's funds and library staff time but we were also mindful that we were making decisions on projects and initiatives that were managed by our colleagues so the decisions we made had larger potential implications for the open infrastructure community. So after several rounds of discussions we turned our principles into criteria for evaluation and we expressed them essentially as a series of questions that people would answer. So the first area is an overview which is essentially a description of the open infrastructure initiative and a request for justification as to why the library should support the initiative and what problem the initiative was hoping to solve. The next section is really around governance and organizational viability. So what is the organization's structure and staffing? What is their readiness to complete and sustain the work that they've committed to doing? And we would determine this to the best of our ability. We also looked at financial sustainability. What do we know about the contracts licenses or liabilities of the organization? For the libraries we looked at whether or not the commitments were in the resources we have available and that's both money and staffing. What is the source of funding if the request is for money? If the request is for staff expertise which division and team has that expertise? Do they have capacity to do the work that's being requested of us? And then we turn our attention to benefits. And so we would look at what are the benefits that are provided if we're either a member or a paying institution or those benefits different? Do the commitments align with the priorities that we've already set for the libraries? Is there benefit to our staff and users in relationship to the amount of money or time we're being asked to commit? Is that balance correct? So for example in one instance the amount of money that was being requested was really more than what we perceived the real benefit to be for the service. And also is there benefit to the scholarly community at large? Is there a benefit to having this as an open infrastructure project rather than a commercial product? And if so how? And then are there other benefits to the libraries that may be less easily defined? Reputational benefit is one example. And then we ended with an open ended question just asking if there was additional information that wasn't asked for in any of the questions. When we were going through this process we did a test drive of the questions and made some refinements. And we would reach out to the organization who was asking for support to get more detail and information about some of these questions. So it wasn't that we always knew all of the answers to these without reaching out. After we went through this process of defining the criteria for evaluation we started considering the processes for this. And Rosalind will discuss the processes. So Lisa just spent some time talking about those principles and criteria we used to evaluate requests for open infrastructure initiatives. So I'll talk a little bit about the process. We wanted to make sure that it was lightweight. We are librarians and as I'm sure many of you know librarians like lots of process. And unfortunately though that often creates a barrier for people bringing forth their ideas or their requests. And so we were cognizant of that. It is something that had actually stopped people from bringing forward requests previously. They just didn't know sort of where to go. So we created a pretty simple process. We asked them to answer these questions. I think that is probably the most arduous. But I do believe that it helps them learn more about what is about the initiative that they're asking for. That was in the test drive what we with the individual who wrote the write up had learned. She learned a lot about the particular initiative she was evaluating. And so it was roughly the document was roughly about three pages long. And the goal really of that document isn't just to help people learn about the particular initiative. But also to give the people of the operations and management team a baseline knowledge of the organization being evaluated. Because not all the members of that group who will be the ones citing where resources and budget go really have an understanding of all of these different open initiatives. So the operations and management team would review the proposal discuss the merits of the request. They can choose to support the project or deny the request. If it's the latter we would of course inform the staff member requesting. But we would also need to then have a conversation around resources. What resources are needed to fulfill the request. And obviously those of you who are involved in open community infrastructure projects knows that those resources can very widely can just be a funding request. It can be a human resource request. It could be both. It could be some weird thing in between where you end up hiring a staff member for your community. So we really wanted to have some way of saying what is it that we are willing to do around resourcing this particular infrastructure. And then we also saw that there would need to be regular review of our relationship to these open infrastructure projects. I would say that was one thing where we were definitely lacking. At one point we were sort of supporting lots and lots of things and it was a question right. We had supported those things like 15 20 years ago and do we still need to do it. Are we using that service. Those types of questions I think are a good one. We don't want to get into a place where we're just handing money over and not using a service. So Lisa and I had done this work with our teams and then nothing happened. And that was because the COVID-19 crisis happened instead. And as I'm sure many of you experienced the university saw a serious issue with cash flow at the beginning of the pandemic. They were making refunds to students and administrative units at Emory were asked to make temporary budget adjustments to reduce the cash flow for the fiscal year 2021. In the libraries these adjustments primarily impacted our student employee budgets which also meant significant adjustments to library service desks. So when we do reopen we may have significantly reduced hours because we do not have the same number of students running our service desks. Open positions as I'm sure everybody else is experiencing we had a hiring freeze and all open positions have a review process that they need to go through. We were lucky in that we were allowed to roll all of our open positions that did not get posted into our 5% budget adjustment. But we still are down or short staffed in a number of areas. Collections also took a pretty big hit. It is about according to ARL statistics about 45% of our budget is comprised of collections and so you can imagine that that took a serious hit. The other piece of this was we had a freeze on all discretionary spending. So that discretionary spending includes things like travel, events, food, supplies. So we were sort of in this situation where these temporary budget adjustments were hamstringing our ability to do work. So we recognized that we needed to figure out where we could gain some extra money and so we took a look at our memberships. Not just those supporting open infrastructure but all of our memberships. Our discussion centered around the three main principles Lisa outlined. We discussed the organizations and much of the conversation focused on what benefit we received from participating in the organization and whether that benefit was worth the money as we were spending. So in one case the benefit we saw was actually being able to post new jobs and the money that we were spending was actually very little so we chose to continue that membership. Overall we spent very little time discussing whether we saw open infrastructure memberships providing value. It seemed clear to the members of the operations and management team that open infrastructure services like ORCID and open source software like Fedora or Sanvera provided the organization with significant value for the money. And I was actually very heartened by that as a member of Fedora Steering and Sanvera Steering because those organizations are facing challenges as well as we walk into this crisis. And with that only two minutes left I think we'll open it up for questions. Thank you. Thanks so much Rosalind and Lisa for that presentation. Lots of interesting questions and issues and I won't belabor the point because we already have a question so I'll get to Jennifer's question straight away. Jennifer Venokal is asking how long does it typically take a proposal to move through your governance process with all of those groups that weigh in? So it can take the actual formal governance process is usually a month and that's because of the way meetings are staggered. I managed this last week to actually go through all but one of those meetings in a single week. I don't recommend ever doing that because it did not leave room for much time for me to have feedback but with one of the committees not appearing during the summer I sort of had to rush through. But yeah the last the final proposal or approval by ITSC would be later this actually I think next week or the week after. So usually around a month a lot of the work upfront though it usually takes about two months before that of you know engaging with people having conversations at minimum and if the project is really really big like building a repository or identifying a new discovery layer you know that that can take up to six months. Wow okay all right thank you. Thanks Jennifer for that question and just a reminder to everyone please type your question into the Q&A box or if you prefer to type it into the chat that's fine too we'll take it here live and we have a question from David Milman now. Hi David and David wants you to know that that was a great presentation and he thanks you. He wasn't clear on the COVID impact on your collections budget though could you elaborate on that? Sure so right now the impact on this fiscal year's budget is minimal. We did give back a little bit but not very much of our collections budget because it is primarily spent to be blunt. You cannot give back money you have already spent word to the wise and so our fiscal year runs a little differently than many state fiscal years. We actually start our fiscal year September 1 and it runs through August 31st but by the time we get to summer we've really committed our collections budget. What we are looking at for next fiscal year is a five percent cut to our collections budget and we are already strategizing around how we will handle that and you know we are looking for ways to kind of minimize that impact as much as we can as everyone does in these circumstances. One thing that we have done is really shifted our emphasis also not unique to us from purchasing print books to purchasing electronic books and really focusing more of our collections on electronic. We're a primarily residential campus so our print collections have been the primary way that a lot of students have accessed our collections and while we have robust digital collections we are really looking at ways we can significantly increase those with the uncertainty of fall semester which will be on campus we hope but we have to essentially prepare for the possibility of another situation where we switch to online perhaps without much warning which is what happened during spring semester basically for us and across the country. Thanks Lisa and thanks David for that question. Please feel free to type your questions into the Q&A we still have a little time to field some questions if you'd like to ask a live question or make a live comment raise your hand and I can unmute you. I was wondering the comment that you made Rosie at the end there about the open organizations and they sort of their their value is already sort of accepted as you know worth the investment so it sounds like you haven't had a lot of discussion around those organizations. First of all is that is that the case and second of all what would you say to other organizations who may be struggling with that question to you know members attendees now who are trying to think of ways to make the case for staying staying with those organizations do you have any suggestions about how they might go about doing that. Sure yeah and then I think it dovetails nicely with David's question around what happened to our collections budget because our collections budget was hit I mean five percent of the collections budget is a lot of dollars and one thing that has become very clear is that our materials need to be available online and the way that we do that is with our newly launched in the middle of the pandemic repository and so we recognize that being able to put as much content in that repository as we can is really what where we need to be going. Our special collections are largely paper-based right now they they have some content digitized but now most of that content is not readily accessible to end users and they can't go somewhere and type in a search box and have images come up now they can but prior when we first started when beginning of March they couldn't and that meant that lots large swaths of research sort of stopped a great example is we have an artist in residence right now and she was working with a collection of photographs called the Langmuir collection it is a photograph a collection of African American photographs that we have at Emory and she was attempting to put in an art installation she's currently stuck in Africa just fine but she's stuck in Africa the buildings closed and even if she was here she can't get in and that collection she thought was only available paper-based and so she is pleasantly surprised to find out now it's all online and she can still go through those collections so I think you know the open infrastructure that we provide through our repository which is Zanvera and Fedora based is is vital right those researchers couldn't access that content if it were not available electronically so the more we can do to put content online the better off we will be in the long run because if social distancing continues well into the fall semester and potentially longer then we will need that that particular resource to be able to to move ourselves forward right I'll just add one thing I agree with everything Rosalind said but one of the things mentioned was ORCID and part of the reason that we see value in the ORCID membership is its adoption and use by researchers across campus and that's due in part to our scholar communications office that has done a lot of promotion of ORCID it's been particularly useful for our school of medicine and other researchers they're looking at it as ways to track research that happens doing research evaluations and other things so making certain that your community knows about these tools however that makes sense to you we had ORCID sign up days and librarians hung out and entrances to buildings on campus and signed up particularly grad students and some faculty as well so you know keep in mind that value is often seen as adoption as well and so you know promoting these tools that do serve a purpose for our communities is an important part of that as well. That's an excellent point thanks for raising that Lisa and thank you to Rosie for those those good examples of the value that these resources bring.