 Hi, everyone. It's so nice to have you here. I'm really excited to hear and learn what you have. So part of the reason why we're using this padlet to sort of grease the path of this interactive session is I know I'm the sort of person who really benefits from having some time to think through my thoughts, maybe type through my thoughts before I get started with participating in a conversation. But I think that our conference conveners can help bring some people to the table. If you're really interested in starting and joining the conversation, go ahead and use that raise your hand. Or if you're someone who just likes to free wheel and chat and just wants to tell us some of the new services that you employed at your library, rather than filling it out in the padlet to start out with, that would be wonderful. Melanie and Charlie, is there anyone who is able to come to the table now or who is raising their hand to join the table and start maybe sharing their ideas? Yeah, Caitlin, when someone raises their hand and they're ready, we'll put them straight up to the table so you don't need to worry about monitoring that. Okay, great. Thank you. So let's see some of the ideas that we have in here. So we have some really great ideas. So one of the things that I think is really interesting about the COVID pandemic scenario is it really forced us to think about how we can either bring in new ideas, new tools, new technologies, or transform processes and technologies that we've been using so far. And so I'm very excited to hear some of the new ideas that you have to share. Hello, Anna. Thank you for joining us at the table. And Tsinghua Xu, welcome to the table. Hello. Tsinghua, would you like to share one of the services or new services or change in services that you're interested in sharing with us? Sure. Can you guys hear me? I can hear you just fine. Thank you. Okay. So hello, everyone. My name is Tsinghua Xu. I'm the head of access services at NYU Shanghai. Our team is responsible for providing services such as circulation in the library alone, course reserves, and we also oversee the stacks in library space. So in response to COVID-19, we all know we need to make adjustments to our old workflows or come up with creative ideas to adapt to the unexpected situation, just like any other library state. So there are two initiatives that I think probably was sharing with all of you. For those of you who are unfamiliar with NYU Shanghai, it is a China's first Sino-U.S. research university and third degree grant in campus of the NYU global network located in Shanghai, China. So in response to global public health crisis triggered by the pandemic, NYU Shanghai followed the public health guidance and delayed opening of the campus for spring 2020 semester and moved to online teaching instead. But for access service, how to make sure our patients could continue to access the collections remotely became a challenge for us. So our first response was to check whether a book already available in licensed electronic format. If not, then to further check if there was a license e-first of a purchase. However, as we all know, not all the books are available in e-format. So we have to have to devise a solution to this problem. Contrary to lending seems to be the only viable option under that special circumstance. Contrary to learning or CDL is an emerging concept that enables the library to digitize a physical item from their collections and loan access restrict file to one use at a time and also for a limit time based on the own to rate loan ratio in the library collection. So in other words, if a library only has one physical copy of a specific title, you can only loan one copy of the digital file to one use at any given time. And the bigger challenge that we were facing at a time was to figure out a technical solution to ensure that the digital file cannot be copied or distributed by collaborating with our campus IT. We managed to develop workflow in a very short time using a Google spreadsheet and Google app script to allow access service staff to loan a CDL version to our patients in a controlled manner. And moreover, the script automatically removes the user from the sharing list and allow us to lend the digital file at the four hour intervals, which is the loan period for our course reserve collection. So that's the story about our CDL project. And the other thing that I'm sorry it'll take a little while, but the other thing is about how we manage our space during pandemic. I'm not sure if everyone has heard of WeChat. It's the most popular Chinese social media app that allows people to send text messages, for example, place video and audio calls and post image text and short video taken to share with family and friends. And they can also interact with each other. We can also use WeChat to make mobile payments. There are a lot more features than I just mentioned. So for our university, we have a enterprise account where the community members can receive updates from various departments on campus, check shuttle bus schedules, for example, report facility problems, or we can utilize functions like opener lockers that contain packages from a delivery guy or topping up our campus card, etc. So prior to the pandemic, our library implement a tool called Save My Spot under the enterprise account. It is a seat management tool, or you can call it anti-camping tool that allows our user or student to scan a QR code at the corner of the library table and keep the seat for 30 minutes if they need to step away for a very short break, you know, coffee break or bathroom run, etc. The second feature of the tool is users are encouraged to use Save My Spot to take a photo of unattended items on the table in the library and upload the photo to the backend of system or record keeping. And then they can remove unattended items and take the seat. So as our university opened at the end of April 2020, after three months of closure, the XR team rearranged furniture in library-reduced seat for keeping social distance. We also repurposed Save My Spot, of course, with help from IT department for contact tracing purpose. We require our users to check in and check out when they sit down to study and, you know, and before they leave the library. So this is a pre-culture measure that we took at a time and we didn't really have because everything was, you know, turned out to be very safe and nothing really happened. I think these are the two things that I want to share with everyone. I think that's that's all I want to share. Thank you. That's great. Thank you for sharing all of that, Tsinghua. As you were speaking, I was looking at the padlet here on my phone and I actually saw a few other people posted or liked other people's posts on similar topics. So I see someone posted about providing access to digitized materials through HathiTrust and I also see someone mentioned this idea of on-demand digitization for rare and archival materials as well as distance borrowing and scanning. Does anyone, either if that was you who posted that into the padlet or if your library did something similar, does anyone want to raise your hand and join the table and share what your experience was using some of these digitization tools? I'm curious to hear how your students or the faculty or your users responded to these digitization tools. Did they like them? Did they not like them? Did they have difficulties accessing them? Do they have thoughts on it if these services are ending? I'd love to hear that. Hello, Jacqueline. Welcome to the table. Thank you. I will use the right camera just a minute. Hello. I'm the one who posted on-demand digitization. I work with the rare and special collections at McGill University in Montreal and we had the ability to go back on site, our staff, about the end of August last summer and that's when we were able to launch the on-demand digitization and we also provided access through HathiTrust. Our service basically checked if there was already access to HathiTrust, we provided that link and if there wasn't, that was when we turned to on-demand digitization and our lab being was sorely understaffed, of course, due to the pandemic and the limitations of the number of people who could be on site. So I don't know, like so many institutions, our lab does rely on student staffing and we train a whole cohort of students who keep that lab running throughout the year and we didn't have the students due to COVID. So we actually had other members of the library staff across different departments who were then trained and started putting in hours in digitization to keep that demand service running and we've completed a lot. In terms of response and uptake, I'm not sure, I'd have to double check our spreadsheets which are lengthy and the records from our digitization lab but the service has provided access and continued to allow researchers to do work before we were able to have any on-site consultations at all. So it kept things running essentially and now having relied basically solely on that for our prioritization over the last while, we now looking forward have to decide what to do and how to reprioritize our digitization queue going forward and if we'll continue to offer this on-demand service because there's always complications with digitization requests, you have to have it cataloged if it's not and sometimes it's not and also you have to, there's sometimes copyright questions that you have to clear, of course, depending on how old-term material is. So for us the service was invaluable also to continue our work of resourcing and professors helping researchers and teaching from our collections ourselves so digitization also enabled our staff to work remotely because we can only have some in on a rotating basis and yeah that's one of the major ways that we provided service because our collections like so many are rare and unique in the world so if you can't digitize them they're just a complete roadblock so that was our work around and we'll see how it goes going forward. So I imagine that this digitization project was on a much larger scale than what perhaps what you had been digitizing before the pandemic but you had had some digitization initiative. In fact I'd say probably the on-demand digitization was actually less than what we would be doing on a regular basis. We have a very active and excellent standard of digitization and the lab runs really really well but what would be running through it on a regular basis was more systematic so we'd be moving through collections or grant funded projects or things that were prioritized for teaching and research projects. So there would be a different way of going about it and this system changed so that it was really based solely on what people requested and really couldn't be found anywhere else. So in some ways it gave us if we looked at the results and what we digitized over the last year it really showed you a very concrete list of what is unique and actively used in our collections. It's an interesting data set from that point of view. Yeah that's absolutely fascinating. I think I think it's very cool how sorry I have cats and they are running around in the background very loud. The fun of doing conferences in the zoom era I think I think it's very interesting how the requests for some of these digitization projects as well as access to materials like in HathiTrust can be really insightful even from a collection development standpoint. Do you find that there are parallels between some of these digitization requests and other aspects of reference services or instruction services that you had needed to provide to your campus? That's a question I'd have to send out to my colleagues unfortunately. I can't speak to it. The only thing I can speak to is really that things are looking up and once we reach the critical vaccination quota in Montreal which they're predicting is sometime in September we'll kind of flip that switch and once we're back to normal operations we'll no longer be providing HathiTrust access. So in terms of the interesting correlations we'd have to refer that over to Catherine Hance and user services and the others so unfortunately I can't really say much to that. That's all right. Thank you so much for sharing that. That's a really interesting and a great opportunity to share some more of the projects that you've been working on. Michelle thank you for joining us at the table. Would you like to share any of the services that instruction or reference or collections and access? Sure thanks. I apologize if there's an echo. I just moved out of my apartment and so I don't know if you can hear the echo. So I can't speak too much to our access services. I know that we did start a locker service once we were back in the building because we had limited service points with student interaction. So the lockers actually approved super popular and we might continue doing that. And just like Jacqueline we used HathiTrust. We got that up and running and now we're probably going to end that as well. So I'm a little sad about that because I thought it was kind of really great service to kind of add. But I guess to also kind of maybe move the direction of things into instruction a little bit just spreading around. So I'm the head of instruction at NYU's main campus in Manhattan. And when we got started everybody kind of thought oh this will be a couple weeks and then it turned out to be much much longer. So we reached out to our colleagues in Shanghai and kind of got some information on how they did their transition earlier than we did. And then we kind of also built a network between all of our campuses because we realized that a lot of us were doing similar things and it was really helpful to kind of communicate. And I think that kind of helped open up some communication channels that maybe we probably should continue going forward and try to figure out what that might look like and making sure that we have a way to kind of share information on a regular basis even if it's not every couple weeks, maybe once a month or once every couple months. Just to kind of be informed with what everyone's doing because each of us has different opportunities to kind of explore different tools. During the pandemic we were in the middle of a search for an online librarian and then it got paused. Then it got restarted and it was one of just a couple positions to be approved and partly that was because people saw the importance of online education in a new way that we didn't really have to send in like piles and piles of paperwork and assessments to kind of show how important it was. So now we have our online librarian who is working with one of our other librarians who secretly had an instructional design master's degree that we had no idea about. So the two of them have been creating all kinds of really great learning objects and exploring different instruction tools. So some of the things we're really looking at getting into is our new learning management system. We moved from Sakai over to Brightspace and the functionality of Brightspace is phenomenal and it allows us to have all these different portals into our instructor's classes or to build modules that build classes that then instructors can embed into their classes. So we're really looking into that and how we can expand on the LMS and really create kind of a whole kind of compartmentalized learning experience through our LMS and we are already having a few instructors who are interested in kind of creating entire kind of entire learning programs around it. So we're kind of learning it at the same time that we're trying to build it knowing that there'll be some groin pains and that it's an iterative process that you know we're going to keep fixing things and updating adding as we kind of go along. So I'd say that's probably one of the bigger things that's going to come out of that. Yeah it sounds like I'm hearing sort of this pleasant direction that there was opportunity unexpected opportunities to come out of this genuinely awful experience that we all had to go through and I notice in the padlet a couple of other encouraging posts. I see one post of one person mentioned more in-class instruction. Instructors asked asked for more librarian presentations in classes which we welcomed this increase in invitations and I also saw someone posted that they were able to set up their own Moodle site so they write we struggled to be granted our own virtual learning site as we're not an academic teaching department but we do a huge amount of teaching so this is an excellent development. We can direct tutor to this site now instead of running extra live sessions when we're overworked. I'm not sure if these came from the same person or if they're from two people. If you would be interested in telling us a little bit more or if you'd be comfortable telling us a little bit more about that please do raise your hand especially so I see five people gave hearts to getting to set up your own Moodle site and if you are willing to share I would love to hear a little bit more about how you direct tutors to this site and how you and how you use this site in your instructor and in your instruction. And Caitlin this is Susan your co-presenter and I'll say there's also a really interesting post under collections and access some enterprising library and I love this used GoPro you know that headset camera to do a virtual session sharing documents with the teaching group so wow I can imagine someone walking up and down the stacks with this and pulling in so much more dynamic what a great idea. Yeah that's that's very interesting. I'm gonna use that one. Yeah yeah that's it's very fun you almost get to think like a little bit of a videographer in your development of your instruction tools. Did anyone else sorry I don't know if the person who was able to who mentioned setting up their own Moodle sites or the person who posted about being able to do more in-class instruction would you be interested or willing to share a little bit more about what that was? So I found myself I also found an increase in my instruction during during the pandemic both both for virtual instruction and then once we went back to once we went back to having in-person live classes having more of that Michelle you mentioned being heavily involved in instruction in your role did you find that there was an increase in the number of workshops that you were asked to teach there? Yeah we definitely had an increase in workshops since we were mostly virtual even through I would say last spring and even this summer we're not really we're not doing anything in person we've only had one instructor request an in-person class in the past year so so a lot of our work but again we're in New York City and you know things got a little dicey here maybe in ways that didn't happen elsewhere so I think people are being really cautious but our workshops definitely we saw a huge increase in attendance to those and honestly I I think I would rather do online workshops rather than in person because it seems like we just had so many more people able to drop in and it also helped for our students who were studying abroad or on other campuses who were interested to be able to attend whereas before we could only limit it to whoever was available at that specific exact time and then recording them also gave people an opportunity who couldn't attend but were interested to be able to watch it later so I think that's something we're going to carry forward as well just because there was so much interest in those workshops. How did you scale that that increased what what did you what did you do to balance that that demand on your time? So for us really a lot of it was kind of figuring out things that we were already doing workshops in and then kind of transferring that into kind of the remote zoom world. For others we had a couple of adjuncts that we hired and so we farmed out some of the workshops to them. They only did a couple of them some of them did a couple more than others but like I think there was one only did literally one so we we tried to spread it around a little bit. We invited some of our colleagues to consider doing a workshop and we kind of expanded it out so that it wasn't just our department and it wasn't just like a small group of people doing them and really kind of broadened that out and my boss was really kind of instrumental in working on that and making sure that that got done and she connected a whole lot of people and she held a bunch of trainings and you know kind of exploratory sessions so that people who were kind of interested could could attend and see if it's something that they wanted to do and we also did some trainings on using zoom and kind of like how to do zoom as a workshop versus an instructional session how to manage questions sometimes we had additional colleagues working to kind of help with chat or to help with the slides and we also shared out our slides in case there were things that people could kind of repurpose so we tried to make it as easy as possible for people to be able to kind of step into that and I think once our colleagues did and they saw that they could kind of reuse that content I think they were kind of excited because several of them did you know repeat sessions. Yeah and so I I see some other really really interesting items that are shared oh I'm sorry I see a question in here um oh sorry it was Susan's question I was noticing the chats so I see a few other really interesting posts here in the padlet which I'll read out just in case people are kind of only on their able to view things on their computer so I see someone mentioning some expanded collaboration the fact that their librarian team joined a team of access and instructional services across campuses to share information and and to exchange ideas and I think this one also really stands out to me as a as a really interesting idea many more study skills webinars and the thing that stands out to me is so interesting here and again if this is yours please raise your hand I'd love to hear more about what this looked like on your campus this person shared that they included regular virtual hangouts with subject specific liaison librarians did anyone else who's attending get to have some sort of a virtual hangout with librarians or virtual office hours with librarians did anyone whether you're here at the the virtual table now or if you're attending you can either raise your hand and chat or you could just mention it in the text chat did anyone else use that sort of virtual office hours hi Caitlin this is Susan again if other ones want to speak I'll stop talking but I'll tell you we have we expanded our hours for live chat responding to incoming emails with questions we also expanded our virtual appointments and we do those via Webex for reference services questions and you know in depth searches that students needed to do for papers or projects we also have doctoral students so they've got long research projects over years that need to happen and so we expanded that so chat and we also did for the first time texting so we set up a text number to talk that way we had to tell a couple of people that we have we can't do long reference interviews via text but we can say this these are how this is how you can best get in touch with us to do long reference interviews but texting was new yeah yeah and I see someone else has mentioned here on the padlet that they actually found that some of their one-on-one or the one-to-one student appointments became much longer because students did want to talk about their learning experiences as well as their library and information literacy based questions it seems to me you know looking at this padlet and looking at some of the things that people are sharing in terms of especially instruction and and the reference services that what we're really seeing is is is almost under this this incredible pressure of the pandemic that people people were really showing an appetite for library services and and for our instruction and for the research services I think a lot of what people have been sharing so far have been about their services in the academic environment working in universities and higher education but I know that many of the people who are attending today's conference or rather the conference this week also represent museums galleries and other special collections and archives so I would be very interested to hear if you want to share if you feel that you know we're getting too much into the academic world of things and you want to share how some of these services were unique at your institution as as maybe not a university kind of institution it would be wonderful to to hear what your experience was because I imagine that things were different between between our different campuses you know as we're talking about this idea of going to going back to normal or there is no going back to normal as as the case may be I think a lot of our libraries have to start thinking about what to do and how to how to either continue these these services how to modify these services or how to discontinue the services in the future and the potential complaints that might come in from students from users who have become accustomed to some of these services like the readiness for on-demand digitization and thinking about how we might be scaling those digitization services or the availability of things like the Hathi Trust ETAS service which I know our institution really relied upon heavily has has any any of the attendees in today's session again please feel free to raise your hand or to type in the chat have have you started thinking about or or dealing with what patrons will respond to with the loss of certain services like the ETAS the Hathi Trust ETAS and I'll just break in a moment to say that the link to the padlet so that you can open and add your comments to the padlet is in the chat so go ahead and find that link in the chat also if you'd like to speak verbally please raise your hand and the administrators will bring you to the table I'll also mention too that we had I work at a health sciences the university and we had many new collections being offered to us because it was all the COVID science was being developed and to put out there as fast as possible so we immediately added those to our collections also created a new live guide collecting all those new offerings and found many given by vendors that were free and continuously reviewed vetted and added those and that was really important for people doing as much immediate research as as the situation demanded and I found that heartening in a great way that the vendors would literally open their banks of resources and materials so that we could all address what was needed to be found in how to how to move forward in this new world in this pandemic get solutions I see another very interesting comment that was shared in our padlet so this idea of virtual viewing of archive items so this person has shared it's it's sort of along the lines of what we're talking about with the on-demand digitization of archival and rare materials but this this person has shared that they're trialing virtual viewing of archives items remotely so they're using a camera that's linked with a computer and zoom calls with users and the benefit is that this reduces unnecessary travel and users can preview items to decide if a high-res digital copy is needed which actually gets around the issue of unnecessarily unnecessary and time-consuming digitization the person who who posted this do you mind if I ask is this something that you think that your library would continue to do after after your library resumes its normal operations is this and please either feel free to type in the chat or raise your hand to let us to be added to the table is this a service that you think that your library would continue operating or is this a COVID era only service it's a great innovation I think it's one that seems that should be carried on because especially at the time in digitization is consuming not only in time man hours but the cost and what do you call it degradation of the machines that do this and someone is asking you to repeat your question please Kayla yes so what I'm curious is so this idea of the virtual viewing of archive items is this something that your library was doing so I see that it's a trial I'm curious is this something that you would continue doing with your library after you resume your post pandemic normal operations or is this something that you would really be only be doing during this this COVID era there's no return to normal what is the new normal for you yeah so so Abigail thank you for sharing that you're going you think to continue I think it's a great idea I think I think it's absolutely inspired it's I mean it's not too far away is it this idea of virtual virtual viewings of an item it's not that far off from advice that we may have already given to our patrons I know I have you know if you're not sure if you want a book or if you're not sure if you need the whole book request an interlibrary loan scan of the table of contents or the index first and let that help guide you in making that decision but I think I think it's just that's a great idea to to share this virtual viewing of of these archival materials before you get into that lengthy digitization process because you're right it does it does take a really long time to make those scans hi Gil welcome to the table Gil are you are you the person who had that really cool idea of using the GoPro in the stacks for your instruction hi folks yes can you hear me I can and I'm done to hear more well um we have a group of outdoor learning students who um aren't always on campus at the same time we also have a lot of community users because it's a really small archive in a remote place and people from the community who just like to visit to see the archive stuff the point with the camera and the GoPro particularly is that I could wander to other archive material I I always get a batch of stuff for the students anyway or visitors so there's always kinds of things that you think they might like to see but as we could discuss it virtually I was free then to go back to the stacks and pick something else out and they could follow my day which people can't always do can they they don't always know what a librarian or an archivist does when they're not face to face with them and that gave us an opportunity to share a bit of extra information and for them to direct the session more can we see what's here can we see what's there in rooms that maybe we don't always take them in and it was it was interesting for me because it let me see things that perhaps I didn't think they'd be interested in but it was my wind-up radio because I'd never seen a wind-up radio before because I've got an old battery radio that I keep in the stacks for you know just entertaining myself and one of them caught sight of that or something else that they wanted to see so it really informed me and it was I think it was great fun both sides and I'd love to keep doing something like that they're used to GoPro they don't know archives when they first come but they know GoPro they use it as part of their teaching so there was a point of familiarity that was a great opener and they could direct the session and I really enjoyed doing it and I'd love to do more that's wonderful I think we librarians know and have experienced that wonderful serendipity of finding things in sex we wouldn't have found unless we walked down them right that's the one that's entirely the one and somebody else virtually on my shoulder going can you take us here can you take us there it was really really enlightening can I ask you how did you have the idea to do this in the first place because the archive I'm in does not have a natural use on our campus because we don't have a research a huge research presence or we didn't when I first joined we didn't even have a history module if you like so it's been natural to look for other ways of sharing and the fact that the outdoor learning students I know use GoPro when the pandemic struck it seemed like a good way to keep in touch because they they regularly film things and I ask for copies of things because students in the future might like to know how these things work so it was it was just one of those moments where you think what on earth have we got and what can we use so that was where it came from was just kind of sharing what your audience might have and do you think that you would continue having this sort of join me join me by GoPro in the stacks after we resume post pandemic operations or is this something I'm not sure if your team has even thought about that yet or or do you see yourself continuing it but with some some modifications or changes I think we'll can I'd love to continue and it will be user led so if people I can do perhaps community talks I mean I'm thinking about things like care homes where people can't physically get in but I can share content that perhaps they'd like to see or they just like the chance to you know have a little look around somewhere and if I have some time to make some some footage or it's lovely to have the live interaction it's lovely to have people chatting to you while you're doing things so if I can build that into my day or into my week or into my month I'd love to keep that going that's fantastic I love that whole idea Gil thank you for for joining us at the table to share that I think I think I think that's such a very human interaction and I find it I find it very hopeful that something like this came out of honestly something as as dark as as this pandemic was it's quite inspired and you've now inspired all of us I'm definitely using this one that's really lovely thank you thank you yeah there's some for I think for Susan for myself the really the goal out of this interactive session was to learn from from you the attendees and there are so many wonderful ideas that have been shared in this padlet Abigail I absolutely loved your idea of the virtual viewings or previewings of archival materials as well as someone else added that they've had remote internships and so they had interns helping to transcribe some of their their digital archives which I imagine helped significantly with discoverability as well as the the process of having the digitization of rare books and rare rare materials in their collections and I also saw someone else posted under instruction services similar to having this drop-in off Zoom office hours someone also mentioned having virtual tea breaks for students or researchers to chat with curatorial staff about their research and this person adds that they represent a university museum and they had some virtual tea breaks for students or researchers to chat with curatorial staff about their research to help direct or encourage them this is something that really I find very very exciting this this way of reaching out to your users you know I think a lot of our users especially students who are maybe graduate students or you know working on their PhD levels they might find themselves commuting to our campuses they might not be living on campus they might not always be able to just drop into the library whenever they so wish and maybe using the library physically might require a little bit more planning and so this idea of having a virtual space where your users can can join you and they can meet you and they can speak with you not necessarily in pursuit of research support like they might use with online chats or with emails but really just in this this this social human interaction I think I think that's I think that's really quite lovely lovely idea virtual tea breaks I'm looking for my tea sets now to take up on that idea it's great and I also wanted to mention on the remote internships that reminds me of all the citizen science projects that at least our library of congress and our national archives here do in the in the states and they say we have these pages that we need transcribed and we need pictures of leafs and bugs taken for our natural history museum and they post these projects and anybody that wants to you know volunteer or contribute their time has a place and a project to work on and I love this idea here of these remote internships and taking that a bit further to sort of we call them citizen science projects and that is contribute and add to the collections by letting others other than librarians and curators take on some projects Sean I see you mentioning that you were aware that a lot of researchers might be quite isolated during lockdown and not able to visit archives and libraries do you see yourself do you see your library I'm I'm presuming that you were one of the libraries that had the virtual teas or the zoom office hours is this something that you might continue offering through after the pandemic or have you not gotten to that point of thinking about the the future times the post pandemic world I think we might do it if we have capacity right now I'm trying to think of ways to to try to have this in my in my libraries my regular practice it's a wonderful idea thank you for sharing that Sean and I see Christine you mentioned that you had actually two the two digital interns and that you would like to add more digital projects as it gives you more capacity yeah I think it's wonderful please feel free to raise your hand and join in if you want to speak more about it but I think that's a that's a great way to increase visibility and discoverability of of your of your digital collections and a great way to give honestly the interns also some meaningful pre-service experience while they're where they're still kind of getting their careers off of the ground so it really seems like a feeding two birds from the same feeder very every everyone wins from this from this arrangement I just want to check how we're doing on time I'm not really able to we have 11 minutes we have 11 minutes to the top of the hour okay so I want to take a look and see if there's anything else here on the pilot that I might not have addressed outreach talks went online our entire outreach program went online with previous online talks going around the world we've continued this after lockdown we also created a virtual tour of a new strong room block as well as a panel session of staff members virtually talking about some of the different issues that we deal with at the archive that that's very interesting if you're the person who posted this please feel free to raise your hand or type in the chat if you want to share more about that I think that's really interesting and I noticed that someone else mentioned that they had recordings and live workshops so we immediately began recording more tutorials and scheduled more live workshops which is actually something that that we did that that sounds familiar to me as well we did take advantage of a lot of screen recording tools either kaltura capture or loom in my experience I found that using a tool like kaltura capture or zoom was the best because it could automatically generate captions whereas loom as much as I loved it for its ease of recording at this time it can't automatically generate captions so there is unfortunately an accessibility issue to that Jacqueline mentions that our entire outreach program was online as well and we tried new formats or events and more interactive sessions Jacqueline was there a particular event that really worked well for you or for your library or that you were particularly proud of or enjoyed in particular um yes um yeah we had a few that were wildly popular and the one that was my personal favorite um we had a researcher who I started talking to and we did a knitting workshop um on knitting patterns created from our our manuscript collection so looking specifically at illuminated initials from our manuscript materials and this event we had kind of a back and forth conversation style event along with a knitting workshop by the woman who designed this pattern Dr. Kristen Howard and um we had a presentation of our manuscript collection so there was a highlight on that and I think that was impressive was just the reach to a community that we never really tapped into before and knitting was a popular activity last year I don't know out here it was a lot of people turned to handicrafts as a way of filling your time or stress management and this gave people a way of exploring and merging um two different interests so rare books and knitting a lot there's a lot of overlap if you do the vin diagram and that one we found was very well received we wound up having to sort of improvise on the fly and wound up exceeding our zoom limit and like learning how to live stream to youtube at the same time which we subsequently did with a number of our other events um so there was a bit of a learning curve over the last year I'm sure everyone can relate we um now have live streaming under our belt and we're looking forward to a hybrid model of events for the fall and we are things are opening up but the virtual reach is large and we found that it's it's let us engage like so many others here mentioned with different people around the world and case in point today I'm in Montreal and you are clearly I'm not in England and if this wasn't in person conference I don't know if I would have been able to go um and that's the case with a lot of our events we're finding people tuning in for that knitting event it was all across the United States Alaska Canada there are some people from overseas as well um and we found a really engaging a really good level of engagement with the chat so we've had to reevaluate our measures of success or not necessarily success but what constitutes engagement and what um what we how we evaluate whether something is worth the effort that we put into it so the long tail on these virtual events is is nice because you put up the recording and people can continue to engage with it via our YouTube channels and it's generated research interest in a new area so that one in particular was fun because I'm also a knipper so I was test knitting some of these patterns from our collections um and that one was really something we'd never done before so broke new ground and enriched a community that our collections just hadn't been brought to before and Daniel I imagine it sounds like something you'll repeat is that correct I hope so yes um though we I have been talking to the same person actually about possibly doing an illusion knitting workshop because we have a new research project here looking at cryptography and ciphers and coding communication um and knitting was one of those means of transmitting coded messages I don't know if you recall a tail that's interesting and so tell me the overlap again from the designs found in illuminated manuscripts yeah um I can probably put a link to it but when we were thinking of knitting from the collections I suggested illuminated initials as a really good way or something that would easily translate to a color work pattern so we now have um a pattern or actually I think almost the whole alphabet of illuminated initials and there's a cowl the pattern is a knitted cowl so if you need something warm and cozy come the damp winters in the UK you can take your needles and knit a cowl based on our collections well now what you can do is we we can take a page out of Gil's book and you can have a gopro as you are as you're perusing your archives to find to find patterns and talk through your models you come up with your patterns for for people to participate in that's that's wonderful and uh Christine has has commented uh what a wonderful tie-in between knitting and cryptography there are so many wonderful I am so excited by all of these wonderful ideas it is almost 10 p.m. here in in Shanghai and I just I am inspired by some of the wonderful ideas that you have shared thank you all for these fantastic um contributions and and for taking the time and and sharing what you have done um what's worked some of these just very creative solutions um uh Susan I've I've been talking a lot I don't want to take away time from you to share do you have any thoughts on any of these ideas that we've seen so far or final inflections I I was able to get my clock back and I see we're getting very close to the end of uh of our time right I see we're at three minutes to the top of the hour and when we'll end so I would just think it would be time to wrap up I'd say what a great discussion I really have appreciated uh hearing what people experiences were because how's uh where else would we hear these kinds of things I love this you know let's uh find a practical stress relieving project admitting um by getting some inspirations and patterns from our collections wow love it I'm taking that one to my local public library too because the needed group just started there and um there was so many the virtual tea breaks the yes people needed to talk more so the appointments became longer so many things so many more tools were tried and mastered and if not mastered we're on our way to mastery of these new tech tools this is really exciting the GoPro let's walk the stacks as we usually do and let other people um uh tell us what they'd like us to find or notice things on the shelves I love these ideas the digitization having other people tell us what need to be digitized or uh previewing that in advance with some uh uh virtual on-camera demonstrations all this just inspiring all of this I'm so glad librarians are such a creative a group that then know how to communicate so that we can all learn and we're all teachers in many respects that we can share this and hope others take and expand on it um and that's where I am with this it's it's really interesting