 Hello everyone, and welcome to the ETD Formatting Users Group meeting. Sharing this information with you is Sally Evans from George Mason University Libraries. My name is Ruth Lu, and I will be your moderator for the next 45 minutes. A quick reminder before we begin, during the presentation portion, please keep your audio and video muted unless you're presenting or you're asked to participate by the moderator. You may use the chat tab to ask questions, which will be addressed during the Q&A portion. Thank you all for joining us today, and I will turn it over to Sally Evans. Hey, Ruth, I greatly appreciate it, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak to everybody today. For anyone who doesn't know, I'm the committee chair for the Formatting Users Group through USETDA. If you aren't already a member or if you're just interested, please, you can absolutely join us anytime. I'm putting my email address here in the chat. Also, I'm going to be sharing, really, in the slides I'm going to be sharing, and I'll send to John. My contact info is also there. Thanks, John. OK, so with this conference's theme in mind, accessibility, it's something we've sort of talked around in our group, but I wanted to, for the next year, we've talked about a variety of subjects over the last two years that we've been in existence, and we've touched on accessibility a few times, but especially with this conference's focus. I thought it might be useful for us to focus ourselves on accessibility. So I'm going to share my screen. I hope everybody can see it. If you cannot, please let me know. And actually, one second, let me get back here. Sorry, share screen. So you should be able to see it now. Let me know if you cannot. OK, that's all right. OK, baby chat. OK, great. Everyone see it. Perfect. All right, fantastic. So if anyone has any questions throughout, if you don't wait for me to say, do you have any questions, I will. But if you have any questions, please feel free to unmute, raise your hand, put it in chat. And Ruth, if you happen to see any questions or comments in chat before I do, I'm going to try to keep my eye on it. But if you could catch me and just let me know. All right, so for accessibility, and especially in the minds of formatting, it's an especially salient point. Because what the formatting users group does is discuss literally formatting and how our documents are set up, and that extends to a variety of topics, margins, spacing, font size, tables, figures, et cetera. So with that in mind, accessibility reflects directly upon us and vice versa. So with that in mind, I was thinking over the next year, with this approach in mind, integrating accessibility into formatting and with ourselves as the university, I'm sorry, the university, as the USEGDA formatting users group, are we recording? We make sure we record. And if we could start recording if we are already, that would be fantastic. Yes, we're recording this. Fantastic. I thought we were, but just in case. So in the next year or two years, I was hoping that we could really focus on accessibility and integrating it and using it to participate in forming formatting decisions. There is no way we've talked about this, and there's no way that we could ever set a universal set of universal formatting guidelines for everybody. That's not possible. I mean, we've talked about it before and it's a nice idea, but I just don't think that that could ever, ever happen. But we can, as a group, I feel, come up with at least a version of suggested policies that these and people who do our jobs can use just as a set of suggestions. It's, again, not or like a set of guidelines. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about each of these topics in a bit, but I'd like to start by identifying issues. This is not something that we have to do today, but identifying issues, finding people either within our group or outside of our group who know more about it and who can assist us, having them provide us with information, set goals for where we want to go, and create a plan. So with that in mind, so first, identifying issues. If anyone has any thoughts today about something having to do with formatting and accessibility that you are especially concerned with, either things I mentioned before, margins, alt text, spacing issues, anything like that, let me know, because that's something I would like to do is group these issues into topics and discuss those over the next year for how long it takes. Anyone has thoughts today if you would like to put it in chat, please do. And if you want to join our group, please do. And once you've joined, then I'll be happy to share our group page in Google Docs. So I'd like to identify issues. Then once we have identified the issues and grouped them into topics or decided that one issue is a topic itself, I'd like to try to find experts who can come and speak to us at our bi-monthly sessions. We meet every other month on the second Wednesday of the month at 2 p.m. Eastern time. So that could be people within our group, especially from attending one of yesterday's sessions. I know that Kim Fleshman has a lot of experience in this, and she's talked a lot about accessibility in our groups. I know that this is something that Valerie Emerson is very dedicated to. Terri Eckhart-Grain spoke about it in yesterday's session yesterday. So whether it is people within our group or people outside of our group, for example, maybe members of the ADA office at your school, maybe people who have experience having done this at their own schools if they aren't already a member of our group, maybe they would like to come and speak to us. So that's something to keep in mind. Then once we've found the people to speak, set the topics, found people to speak, then invite them, have them actually come and share their information with us and tell us what they've learned, what they know, and what we need to know. And a lot of us may already know everything we need to know about accessibility and formatting, and that's great. And if you do, tell us. And if not, we need to learn. So and that brings us to the setting goals. After we have come up with the ideas and that can be a building list of ideas, it's not a static list. It's not something that we set in the beginning or talk about again. New things can come up as we have sessions and people coming to address us and give talks or panel discussions, whatever works best. And so once we have decided what we need to talk about, who can talk about it, coming in and sharing it, then we can talk about what we want to do from that point. Again, this is, do we want to try to come up with a list of suggested guidelines? Do we want to publish anything? Do we want to set up panel discussions, best practices? So and then once we've decided what we couldn't do, free and plan and go from there. So and this is all, not theoretical, but this is all just a loose framework for what I would like to see us do for the next four or two years or whatever in order to best assist our users, to best assist our students who are writing theses and dissertations and one another in creating a more useful, helpful set of guidelines, terms, resources for people who are already checking for a meeting, but who could be contributing to it in a way that is more inclusive. So with the concrete steps, free to list topics issues, establish a schedule of bi-monthly discussions, if anyone wants to volunteer to speak at these discussions and or invite people to do so, set goals, a set of guidelines, panel discussions, best practices, so far. So if you are, and after I go through this, I'm going to open this up to the floor. I'd love discussion. That's one of my favorite parts about the formatting users group. If you are interested in joining, if you're not already a member, please email me, S-Evans13 at gmu.edu. That's S-E-V-A-N-S, the new world's one three at gmu.edu. Again, all meetings are virtual. They're held every other month at 2 p.m. Eastern time on the second Wednesday of the month. That's, we had a different date in the past, but due to a conflict, my schedule will be switched around. I'll be sending out the Zoom invite for the next year at least after today's session. And if you do have any questions about our group, what we do, et cetera, I would love to hear from you. So these are my thoughts for what I would like for us to potentially do over the coming year, especially with what we're focusing on within the conference. So I am going to stop sharing and open this up and hear from you, or I could keep talking. Anyone who knows, I'm really good at that. Thank you, Sally. I didn't know the meeting existed, so this is for information. Thank you. I hope you can make it. And I saw Emily Flynn said, Ohio Links EDD Council put together a shared document of local policies about several different topics, not just accessibility. The purpose is the same as what you're talking about here, providing as a starting point for new local EDD administrators to think about and get inspiration from insetting or revising their own local policies and workflows. We can certainly share the topics that we address to present on it sometime. That would be wonderful. Yes, absolutely. That would be great. And Terry says, integrating the actual writing guidance of writing by the committee chair with the final product in terms of effective communication of research, organization, purpose of tables, purpose of illustrative material, et cetera. These are tied together and can be addressed during the research stage through the write-up. Yes, it does involve content, but also how that content is communicated. Let's try and get some faculty writing experts in the mix. Absolutely. Do EDD administrators think about metadata? I do, because in addition to doing the formatting, I'm also the person who uploads all of our, definitely our theses into our institutional repository models. So I've worked in the libraries and I'm a librarian, so I definitely think about metadata. And I'm sure other people definitely do as well. I'm almost positive Valerie Green does. I thought I saw a hand up. I may be losing my mind. Yeah, it was me. Oh, hey, Valerie. Yeah, so I just wanna say, I've been thinking about this a lot. I've been thinking about how we currently format our ETDs. And I thought making our documents accessible is really a wonderful opportunity to rethink our format. Yeah. To look at all the pain points that students encounter when they're doing the formatting. I think, and I can only speak for GW, but there are certain formatting parts of the document that are pain points. And we can iron those out and at the same time, make it easier for the students to format their document. Yeah, absolutely. And if we can build in things from the, if we can build things in from the beginning, then it may be less painful for students as you were saying to just work it in as they're working in everything else. So yeah. No, I think definitely so. So, great idea. So yes. And actually I'm gonna go ahead and share. I'm gonna dip out in a second. If people want to discuss anything else, not dip out, but I'm going to pull up the share Google Doc. So if anyone does have any thoughts about, items for discussion in the future, for topics we want to discuss regarding accessibility and formatting, please add that to the list. And again, this is our university, I'm sorry, I keep saying university, USETDA formatting users group. So let me go get that and I'll be right back. And in the meantime, discuss amongst yourselves. And here we see in the chat, TM said we talk about metadata when students are uploading to the repository in conjunction with our library, scholarly communications office. That's great. And if anyone else has any suggestions, absolutely please share in chat. And I'm gonna be in chat shortly. This is our formatting users group document. It's a Google Doc. So you can absolutely get it. You can absolutely add to it, even whether you're a member or not, we hope you will be a member, but I'm going to share that page now, one moment. And I'm gonna start a new heading for, let's start a new heading for today's discussion. And we do have recordings of past sessions, hopefully most of them are still available. We do have past recordings and all of our notes are here, so absolutely please check with those. And I'm going to put this in. All right, so new heading. This is a new heading. All right, so if anyone would like to share anything in here, please do, oh wait, actually, I just realized I'm not even at the end. I don't know why there's a break there. That's a formatting problem. Sorry, just kidding. Okay, there we go. Cool, so back here to the chat, we'll stop sharing. Oh, Emily, Emily Red has a question. Yes, please, Emily. Hi, I work for ETSU, East Tennessee State University, and from the very beginning we've had a, this is not accessibility related, sorry, just wanted to throw this out there. We've had a blend of, for our templates or for our formatting, we've had a blend of grad school guidelines and departmental guidelines like APA, MLA, et cetera. And recently I've discovered that more and more of these guides, APA's always had their formatting very clear for headings and table and figure captions, but recently like CSE and MLA and ASA are now jumping in in their style manuals and giving suggestions or sometimes even, this is now what you need to do. And I didn't know if anyone, there's a lot of you, well, because I've been looking into that, that don't incorporate this blend. It's just a, it's just, you're addressing the front matter or the front and end matter and you don't address this blend. So for those of you who do, it's kind of the Wild Wild West, it's all over the place. So I just didn't know if anybody is noticing this and is it creating templates to support these varying? That is a great question, Emily. And I also, that briefly to this, we're not going to focus entirely on accessibility. We just want to work, that's a, yeah, it's not like all other formatting guidelines are going away. We're still going to, you know, formatting in general, formatting issues. We're here as a resource one another who do our jobs to get help for formatting. So yeah, I'm sorry if I was unclear. We're not going to just throw all other formatting issues out the window and just focus on accessibility. This is just sort of a rival for the next year or so. So yes, I can speak to that. I'm sure others can too. So, and I saw that at least our guidelines open it to the students and committee. We just required them to be consistent. I see Terry, you had something. Yes, hi. I was just going to say that recently we've had a few different individual programs like exercise science, pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. Reach out to me because the program directors at the previous institutions had a different way of organizing, you know, that was just different from our format. And we found it pretty easy to accommodate them because certain elements are just universal from the ever present margin settings or, you know, size of type or size of font. And so what their requests were, were more in line with having students produce a manuscript and then having the traditional chapters, you know, literature review methods, et cetera, all be included as appendices and they would just have one chapter. And really as long as the front matter is the same and they have the inclusive list of references and it's just a matter of what makes sense for their program and how their students are going to be, you know, continuing on into that profession. But I think that question of hybrid styles or mix and match does address accessibility because a part of accessibility is just, is your average user going to be able to easily access, read and understand? And that includes navigation, you know, consistent structural styles. And so, you know, maybe in some cases, because we've struggled with this, right? We have, you know, people who are in fields that are using APA, but then they're using our default template and then they're getting confused and then they're mixing and matching. And it just makes more sense to have them continue to adhere as much as possible to their disciplinary styles, you know, because for their future readers, that is, that's the expectation, right? Of how material is presented. So I think that does speak to accessibility. It doesn't require a screen reader, right? It just requires a person's having read, you know, extensively and an expectation of how that material is going to be presented. So they can easily navigate and they know where to find things. That's my input. That's where we come from, where we're coming from with allowing, you know, students to continue to write in their own style because they're going to go beyond their programs and continue to write and publish, you know, in these styles as well to not have them disrupt that. So, but what I'm finding with the heading levels is we also, ETSC wants to be consistent among its students and not have the papers be so all over the place. But I guess that, and I'm thinking this through as we're discussing, that kind of goes back to the front pages and we have an end page. We have a beta at the end where that's the bookends that can be consistent and what's in the middle can be more, okay, this is helping. Valerie, you have your hand up. And also, there are various excellent comments in the chat. So check those out too. So Valerie, you have your hand up. Right, so we're in the same situation. We have bookends pages. We have a series of front pages. We don't have anything at the end. We just have a series of front pages that are supposed to be uniform across the disciplines. And then, for example, our engineering school has a set format they're supposed to use. Education uses APA. Our Columbian College is whatever is appropriate for your field of study, where it gets, and it does start to get complicated when students decide, well, I wanna put my references at the end of each section. And that I think could pose a problem for accessibility if we're talking accessibility. So there's not even any, there's a potential for inconsistency even using a same writing style because they want to put tables and figures and references at the end of each section or chapter. So we don't have a problem with it as long as it looks uniform and consistent throughout the entire document. But I, and that's an interesting question. Does having this self-contained chapters, tables and figures and references cause any kind of accessibility issue? I just thought about that. And the other thing that occurred to me is, are the styles in accessible format? I mean, like APA and Travian, are they accessible? I don't know. I was just gonna say, thinking about that in reading the chats and hearing what everyone else is saying. Excuse me, won't be doing it Mason. The rule over time has just, I mean, the first rule we have about thought slash text is it has to be black. It has to be readable and your committee has to approve it. Otherwise, honestly, and I say this, you can use basically whatever you want to. You probably want to stay away from parchment and papyrus, which is kind of weird. But otherwise, I mean, if you wanna use papyrus, it's readable and it's black. So go ahead. Beyond that they can do whatever they want to that, but they just have to stay within our rules. The margins have to be the same. The first level heading is the one with the most rules. It has to be centered. It has to be a certain amount of space from the top edge of the page, certain amount of space below it. Otherwise, the rest of them heading, section headings, subsection headings and so on, left justified or centered, bold, italic, anything, different sides, that's fine. And I always try to stress that with students. Most of the time just our template is set up in time to be Roman, but that's just arbitrary. And I try to stress that it's just arbitrary. If you don't want it to be times to be Roman, you can change it, but most people just stay with that. But with that said, and I get this question a lot from the students who use APA, is a lot of people assume that the template, our template is already set up according to a specific style manual and it is not because my department works with every department on campus and everyone uses something different. So with that in mind, people are welcome to set their headings, section headings and so on to match APA or anything else. So what I always tell, this is mostly an issue we have with the APA students. So there's nothing against APA or the students who use it, but I don't really, I personally, and I'd love to hear from anyone else, don't ever seem to have this issue with anyone who uses any other style. It just seems to be APA. Most of the rules dovetail with, most of the rules within other citation styles, MLA, APA, Chicago, whatever, dovetail with our rules very well. But I mean, there are some times when it does fly in the face of it, I know, for example, we require all figure captions to be below the figure. And I know that in the last round of APA's update, they now place at least the figure label above the figure. So that does fly in the face of it. And when I tell some students who use APA know per our rules, all figure captions have to go below figures, you would have thought, I told them that they have to like shooting, I don't know, shoot a pigeon in the face. It's, they freak out. Like it's okay, you know, when you go on and publish something in a specifically APA journal, you're welcome to do whatever they tell you to, but for our rules supersedes theirs. And they are very strict about it. The fact that our margins are not set the way APA is the APA students often, not all of them, but many of them become very concerned that we are not adhering to APA, which we're not going to. So, but anyway, so that's what I wanted to do. Yeah, Kim. Well, I would say also we have the same thing. APA allows for orphaned headings now and we don't allow anybody to do orphaned headings. It's too difficult for me to figure out, are you trying to follow APA when the MLAs and the Chicago's and the ASAs and the ACS's aren't doing that. So, but what I was trying to go back to is somebody had mentioned, is APA format accessible or is Trayvian accessible? It's not their format that makes it accessible. It's the way you tag the document whether it be in Word or in the PDF version. So if you're tagging the first level headings, if you're consistently tagging your other levels of the heading, second, third, fourth. So as they're all coming up, so the screen reader will say heading one, chapter one, this is your story, heading two, introduction, that kind of thing. That's how the document is being electronically tagged to let the screen reader read that information that makes it quote unquote accessible. Yeah, yeah, that is a really good point. Thank you, Kim. Valerie, you have your head up. Yeah, we're a little bit different. So we have our front pages, which they have to follow the formatting rules. We have the margins, the page numbering, they have to follow those rules. But whatever happens with APA within the body of that document, as long as it conforms to APA, we're okay with it. Yeah, yeah, and then the big rule I tell everybody, when they ask me what I'm checking for, and this is, I just say, I'm never looking at your content. Even if you are writing about something that I'm interested in and or knowledgeable about, I am never ever going to comment on your content. What I'm looking at is to make sure that the parts of the document that you have to have are there, they're in the right order, the margins are correct, the headings are placed correctly, your pagination is correct. If you have tables and figures that they're listed and labeled and captioned correctly, that's what I'm looking for. The example I often use is it's like a house. All houses have to have doors, walls, and ceilings and floors, but my house is going to look different from yours. And as long as it stays within the rules, your house can be pink stucco, I don't care. But it has to have those elements and that usually works. So Terry said, we can't even get faculty of follow APA much less enforced than what their students, it's sort of bizarre to me. I'm just concerned with consistency in the container. Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm looking for. I don't care if they use, and then the people will often ask me, are you going to check to make sure I'm adhering to APA or whatever? No, I'm not. For one thing, there's always going to be that one professor that doesn't care what version of APA is out there now he wants to use for and that's the way things are. So yes, I'm not going to check for any of them because again, my department works with everyone and I'm not going to drive myself crazy making sure that all of your citations are set correctly. That is your committee's job or yours. Yeah, and again, actually Terry said, my answer to that question is I no longer work for the Writing Center, unfortunately. Our Writing Center doesn't do that. I'm honestly not really sure what George Mason's Writing Center does. Every time I'd prefer a student to them or ask them something, they say they don't do that. So I'm honestly, they don't do, they don't help with checking to make sure you're adhering to a style manual. They don't, I don't know what they do. So anyway, anyone finds out, let me know. So yeah, really Terry, seriously. Like I've sent students to them who need help with checking to make sure that they're adhering to APA, they don't do that. They do not do, they don't help with just general proofreading, they don't do that. They definitely don't do reference or research, they don't do research questions. That's, and the librarians don't either. I mean, no, I'm kidding. The librarians absolutely help with research question. And I'm a librarian, so yeah. But the librarians do that, but they don't help with like setting up, making sure that the reference isn't set correctly. Again, I don't know what the Writing Center does. Oh, I do. I know I constantly contact the Writing Center and I just ask them what they do and I'm still not sure what it is. Sally? Yes. I might mention that we've had an issue on our campus recently. In fact, I just got out of a meeting just now concerning this issue. And we've had a, what I would call a formatting revolt on campus. Ooh, Terry. And some students, a few students and a few faculty. I'm more stressed this is just a few students and a few faculty, but they're kind of a squeaky wheel. They garnered the attention to the Graduate Studies Council and they have obtained permission in order to not follow our formatting guidelines. Okay. This is to me as a disaster. We have answered that by saying we will not post your ETDs online relative to our repository or ProQuest. And they'll be cataloged in the library and they'll sit in the library just like the old paper ETD set. Because, but this is kind of revolt against the whole ETD process is why I read it. And it's a real problem. Sorry, go ahead. It's a real problem. And I want to say, I'm not sure if anyone from BYU, it looks like Denise Stanton from BYU is here. Denise, remind me, didn't one of the programs at BYU also do that? They just decided they're just not doing it anymore. Yes, though we do still require that they have the preliminary pages. But yes, they have revolted. They have their own style. The whole college has their own style. They're doing their own thing. But the compromise is that they still had to do the preliminary pages like everybody else did. So the first four pages that they have an acknowledgement have to be the same. And then the rest of it can be however they want to have it. Yeah. But do you post it as an ETD or you just take it out of the circulation? No, they're posted as an ETD. Yeah, we decided not to do that. That we're gonna leave there. But if they wanna take their thing and go back to the paper world, they can do that. And if it's because it doesn't look anything like our ETDs do today. And we have, if you look at our ETDs, they're phenomenal. And they don't look like a lot of ETDs because they look like a more professional publication for book. Well, we also have a lot of students who put their published articles as chapters, right? That's their ETD. That's their dissertation or a thesis or a different chapter or different published articles. So again, that doesn't follow the natural ETD as what it used to look like. So we're okay with that as well. As long as there's a pool of contents with bookmarks that we're okay. Yeah, we've actually gone back to putting those articles rather than in chapters, they have to put them in the appendix, which is, you know, extra material. And if a student wants to exhibit what they've published, they exhibit it in the appendices. And then their voice is in the body chapters. And we reserve the body chapters just for the voice of the student. Yeah, we've really helped you out to do that. Oh, Larry, you have a couple of questions from Lily Compton. Are your policies not set by your graduate council? And Terry also asks, does it appear to make any difference when you... Oh, I'm sorry, I was... John said, Larry, what is their justification for not following the guidelines? Lily asked, Larry, are your policies not set by your graduate council? And Terry asked, does it appear to make any difference when you are a public versus private institution? They're taken before the Graduate Studies Council and they voted on that. And they voted to go ahead and have this, allow the College of Medicine to go ahead and have this extra methodology set up and not follow the formatting guidelines that we provide for the ETDs. In reality, when you go through, for example, we just went over the guidelines today, the formatting guidelines for the new policy. It's not really a new policy. It's an optional thing that students can use. And we have to allow it to be optional across campus. I can't also isolate it to one college because we're a centralized graduate program rather than a divided graduate program across campus. And so the Graduate Council voted on that and they did approve it. And so we're going ahead with it, but they said, fine, we can go ahead with it. That's versus we have such a tremendous face on the public relative to our ETDs. We do not wanna see this mess put over there with those ETDs that ends up being improperly formatted and puts a really bad picture for the university. So we've kind of isolated those manuscripts. We've relegated those over to a different storage area so that they won't go out. They'll be cataloged, but they're not gonna go out on the repositories. And that's kind of the way we've handled those. The Dean was very adamant about that. We can't contaminate work that we've done for the last 18, 20 years and mess it up with this. We're not gonna go back to the paper cave and I agree with that. We can't. So Larry, what is their justification why they need to buck this trend or the guidelines? Well, it was their objection. Yeah, what specifically do they need to do differently? We're expecting too long the format. And when I go through the formatting step at a time and I just posted that in a file, our quick guide, by the way. When I go through that and then look at everybody else's guidelines, except maybe for the University of Illinois, the Champaign, Urbana, which is really abbreviated, they all look about the same. It's just that I think what they're really objecting to is we are really strict with our reviews. When we say that headers must match, in other words, if it's a subheader, a header, or a protection header, or whatever, they all must match. You can't have different styles with headers. And you enforce that. And it's that type of thing that they really get upset about because they'll make these mistakes over and over again. And some of the students are really, you know, get bullheaded about it. And they will literally almost refuse to correct anything. They'll get to the point that they will send us the same document back for another review and they haven't made any changes in that document. It's essentially the same document that they hope we don't really look at it for the second time. It's crazy. Oh, that's happening today. You know, it's to me, I think the dean made a mistake. He should have stood up to this and he should have said, no, you know, we're not changing any of the formatting on campus. This is it, but now he's opened gate. So we're there. That's really upsetting to hear. And I mean, I actually, Tuesday, I mean, I was coming out of my office after I'd done a formatting workshop online. And a person who's sort of one of our interim associate deans actually just walked up and told me to my face her exact words were, quote, I just think what you do is worthless. And then she went on and on and she said, I think your job is worthless. And I think everything you do is worthless. And I think that the only purpose you seem to serve is delaying students from graduating. And I, my blood was boiling. And I told her, well, I said, actually I'm going to a conference about this. It's an entire profession. And I said, there's a reason we do this. And I said, don't you want your students work to look professional and polished? And now she just reiterated that I am a worthless employee, apparently. So it's really upsetting to hear that this seems to be a universal sentiment among people who don't really know what they're talking about, honestly, but... Yes, you're absolutely right. Now on our campus, I can understand part of that attitude. The reason that attitude exists is because when a faculty member submits an article for a journal for publication, that journal or that publisher has an army of editors behind them that do all of the formatting, okay? They just have to get the content, the science to the journal. And then the formatting is done by the journals. Exactly. We can't afford to do all of that on our campus unless they want to pay us $1,000 per ETD, which is what it costs oftentimes to publish under journal, okay? And they have no interest in listening to that at all. They could care less. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, that's terrible. Like I can't believe what many people in the chat are saying that that's just terrible and really unpleasant. And I've run into that every now and then. And fortunately, faculty for the most part supports my office and supports what I do. Students often will say this is pointless. And we actually did, I noticed the comment from John Fudor in the chat and thinking about this discussion, we actually had a session in the formatting users group a few months ago that I think I'm pretty sure exactly what I called it, but I think it was like formatting and nihilism. And it's sort of, it's something that I struggle with. And it does come sometimes. And we talked about this at the link. When people say, why does it matter? What do you tell them? And a lot of the things we've talked about today are why it matters. You want to achieve a sort of standardization. You don't wanna just throw things out there that look like a mess. So a lot of the higher administrative folks that I talked to ask, well, why do you need to do formatting? And I say, well, there are some practical considerations such as finding that's why we have specified margins. If you don't do formatting, you could get a submission with the table that runs off the page and you're only gonna get half of that content because when they get to the end, they will just submit anything. There are some people who will just submit anything, which is... Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, left to their end of it. And I would say this is something who can lean in this way personally. Like left to your own devices, most people will do as little as possible. And if there aren't standards put in place in some way, and depending on how strict they are, if there aren't standards put in place in some way, it'll be all over the place. And one of the reasons that... Excuse me, within our institutional repository, there is a specific ETD section. There are other sections within materials, within colleges and schools, within departments, et cetera, that collect all kinds of things within our IR. But for the ETDs, it's a specific section. And we don't ever collect within the ETDs. And this is for me, almost. We don't collect capstone projects, anything else, because what will happen is if they're not set up according to our guidelines, which is fine because they don't go through the format review, they're in a different path. So if a lot of documents that end up looking completely totally different from ETDs end up in the ETD section, then it will be a constant battle for, why can't I just do that? So we keep them separate because they have to look a certain way. There's going back to the house metaphor, you can go a lot of leeway within the parameters, but you have to stay within certain parameters. Right. And probably the argument we can make going forward is our documents need to be accessible. Accessibility in terms of formatting. So we need to have some basic formatting in order to be accessible. Well, these that are coming out of this new methodology that we just adopted today are going to be totally inaccessible. If they're not looking at accessibility, they could care less about accessibility. And if they went out on the network, that could be a real problem. Yeah, it could be a real problem for the university. Absolutely. So I don't want that to happen. Yeah. Yeah. And at least the church understands that, you know. And that's good that we don't have to put those things out there. Yeah. When I, I'm also a one woman shop, but I do formatting workshops to teach the students what to do. And I always like to use that quote from Coco Chanel, dress shabbily, they remember the dress, dress impeccably, they remember the woman and tell them in a way, you know, think about your research that way. And that if you could have discovered a cure for cancer for all we know, but if it is hidden beneath this awful formatting where you have four different fonts and you've got no page numbers, you haven't labeled any type of user figures, stuff is running off the margins, whatever, then no one's going to take you seriously. No one's going to be able to find it. And also for them to remember, this is supposed to be the crowning achievement of your academic career. So you don't want it to be a big fat mess. So it would be like showing up. And I was telling them, it's like showing up to a job interview for a tenure track position wearing a Budweiser T-shirt and flip flops. Are you going to get that job? No, you need to wear a nice suit, you know. So that's how I've described it to the students and they usually are like, oh, I didn't think of it that way. And that's always like at the very beginning when I do workshops and I've just tried really hard to convey that this isn't just like meant to be torture and me to like, you know, cackle maniacally in my office, I'm not going to let them graduate. Like this is actually meant to help. This is, you know, I like Jerry McGuire, help me, help you. We want you to graduate, but we want you to look professional and we want the school to have a good reputation. And we want the students to have a good reputation. And I think with no standards, then you just have chaos. And I think, you know, like you're all saying, like you also delve into some serious legal issues, potentially by not making it, at least presenting the possibility of it being ADA accessible. So there is a lot that goes into it. And I just think it frustrates me. These students decided they want it hidden. So that's fine. If they want it hidden, then it'll be hidden, but it's kind of in the face of an ETD program. Yeah. It is. And one quick notification. We are at time right now. We're actually slightly over. Timekeeper says we can have maybe a couple more minutes. And this is a great conversation. I don't want to stop it, but instead of stopping it, just see us in, let's see, November for our next session and join the listserv. So, and I've already gotten a couple of requests to join. So thank you all. And I hope anyone else who has not already joined, please let me know. So join us in November. That'll be, I think, November 8th at 2 p.m. Eastern time. That's a Wednesday. And we'll keep the conversation going. And if you do, if anyone does, I mean, a lot of things come out of one session that end up informing the topic of another session. So sometimes we have set topics, other times we have created topics. So thank you all for this excellent discussion. And I hope to see you again soon at our meetings and later today. Thank you all. Have a good rest of the day. Thank you so much, Sally, for such informative session. And yeah, thank you all for sharing your expertise, achievements and struggles. And next up we have session 10 and 11 going on concurrently in respective breakout rooms at 2 p.m. So we'll see you here on Zoom.