 Ie ddim yn fwy o'r pryddysgwrs ymddangos o'r ffordd ac yn ddysgu'r ffordd ac yn ddysgu'r ffordd yn ddysgu'r ffordd. Felly, mae'r sbêlau yw Carly Speynar, yw'r profiad yr aelodau a'r siwr ac o'r ymddangosau aelodau yn ysgrifennu. Carly yn ysgrifennu yr profiad yr yr ysgrifennu, mae'n ddysgu'r ffordd ac yn ddysgu'r ffordd ac yn ddysgu'r ffordd. Pau'r sbêlau ymddangosau. Gareth? Fel scratches y maen sydd yn wedi mynd i dypa gwastrefo ddim ein mae'n ffordd y cwi found Snrollidavol yn eu rwynt i'r sbêlau ymddangosau aelodau allerys ar amgrifiadau. Twyl yri fy Artist Cyr adjustr, ddim yno ser byddwch, ychydig, ac ydych chi'n gweithio'r cyfnoddau hynny o'r mynd i'n hyn sydd am dyfodigau a'i cyfnoddau gyda'r cyfnoddau yn unigol ac ydych chi'n gwahanol digital am y cyfnoddau cyfnoddau hynny. Felly, y gallwn ein gwaith i'w ddigion ymlaen argyfweld y pethau yn ymddangos yma. Felly mae'n ddweud i ddim yn gweithio'r cyfnoddau yn dweud o dysgu. So globaly, 1.3 billion peol, o'r 16% o'r populatio, has some type of disability. A'n this really has significant impacts for access to information and access to certain career paths. We see that in higher education, in graduate education, there is a real lack of representation of people with disabilities, and particularly certain disabilities that make it harder to navigate information effectively, especially when it's not made accessible from its original creation. And not surprisingly, this lack of representation then carries over into related career paths in the sciences, in higher education as faculty. And so to help address this and to make sure that even for people who aren't in the higher education atmosphere still have access to this information, it's important to share it in a manner that is accessible. Today, I'm going to focus my presentation on how you can take steps on the path towards making your materials accessible. A lot of what I hear and what I know is the cases that people don't necessarily have a lot of staff, they may not have a lot of budget, they may feel like this is an overwhelming step to take, particularly if they've already shared a lot of historical information. So the reason I have this outlined as steps is that my goal is to sort of start, how can you start on the path? And each step will increase accessibility and move you in the direction, but it is a little bit of the order in which you might consider things to, to try to get the greatest impact for the least amount of budget in terms of time and money initially. So step one in this approach would be building a path forward when barriers are encountered. And this is really important because even if you think you can achieve 100% accessibility for your materials, the reality is that that probably isn't the case, assistive technologies are changing, the internet is changing, each person's needs are really unique. And so a great way to focus your initial work is to say, OK, if I'm working from the assumption that as hard as I might try to make things accessible, someone may encounter a barrier. Am I making sure that there's a next step they can take to get access? So what might these steps, the step look like? First of all, I think it's really important to offer access to content in multiple file types where possible. Often we are receiving materials in a particular file type and then we're making them all into PDFs. And without a lot of accessibility remediation, which we'll talk about further on, PDFs may not be that accessible to people using specific types of assistive technology. For that reason, it's really useful to try to offer content in multiple different file types when that's a possibility. That way, if someone finds that their assistive technology works best with a particular document type, if they're most used to navigating that particular document type, if the accessibility features only appear in one version of the document, you're still maintaining all of that. It's also important to include clear contact information, ideally specifically for those with accessibility questions. So it's great to have contact information for someone on your website, in your discovery tool, on your institutional repository, for example. But ideally you should also specifically say, this is who you contact for accessibility questions, wherever they might be reached. And the reason for that is because a lot of times people might be used to thinking that there isn't going to be a path forward for them. And so if they don't see that called out and offered as a service, if they encounter a barrier, they might just think this information isn't available to me, be very disappointed, but not really feel like there's a step forward. They may think if it's just a general contact information that it's not worth even trying to contact that person because they won't be able to move forward with accessibility requests. And then I think an important next step after you have a path for accessibility questions to come in, is to develop a workflow for how you're going to respond to those questions. A lot of times I think people will put out there, here's how you can contact for accessibility questions, but they may not have worked through what's going to happen if someone says that they need a document remediated, for example. So if you receive a request, say for example you have an institutional repository, you've shared an article that way, it's not an accessible file. If someone were to submit a remediation request, you want to think about who's receiving that request, what's the process that they're going to process that request for? Is the person who receives it the same person who remediates it? If not, is there someone else internally who's going to be able to make the changes to that document to make it accessible? And if not, then are you working with a particular vendor? Has that relationship been set up already? Do you know what that vendor would be? And you also want to be thinking at the same point about budgeting time and or money for this work so that it is something that people reasonably can put the time to if they get this request. This is not to say that you'll necessarily receive requests every single day, but you want to have a plan in place so that you're able to act quickly and efficiently if someone does need information made more accessible for them. Next, you want to think about the platforms on which you are sharing your resources. So you really want to think from the point at which you're building or updating these platforms about the accessibility of all repositories, digital collections, digital publications, online exhibitions, all of these different online tools that your institution uses to share all of this research and information needs to be designed for accessibility from stage one. You may have heard of WCAG, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Currently we're up to version 2.2 and they offer three conformance levels, which are level A, AA and AAA. AAA is the most accessible and it's great to try to achieve that wherever possible, but generally it's important to aim for at a minimum level AA across the board. So you want to be meeting every single requirement for level AA if at all possible. And to determine this, it's important to conduct both automated testing and ideally you want to also have user testing with people who actually use assistive technology all the time, because they're the experts and will be able to best find this information and these problems out. So when you're doing user testing on these different platforms, you want to be thinking about who's being included in those populations and am I working with people who already are bringing to the table a real knowledge of assistive technology and a daily use of that technology. And if you find problems, it's important to disclose those problems and have a plan for how you might help somebody if it's not possible to achieve that level of conformance across the entire platform. And then consider accessibility of the discovery layer as well if that's how you expect most users will be finding the content, because that's something that a lot of libraries now use discovery layers or a catalogue as the primary way they're sharing this information that's the main landing page. So you also want to be always thinking about accessibility of those as well. Step three is to provide properly structured accessible files. So part of this is using titles, headings, captions and other structural elements to support navigation with assistive tools. Every file should have a name that is a clear name of what is going to be found in that file, not just an auto-generated like JPEG 234. You want to make sure that you're using the structure within the document using the header tags so that people can navigate through that using assistive technologies as an outline and jump from section to section rather than having to go page by page, which is a huge problem if you're talking about a large document. Imagine having to read a 50 page article word by word to see what everything is as opposed to being able to jump heading to heading. You want to make sure that you have captions for any pictures, graphs, visuals, anything like that. And you want to also think about the other structural elements that are going to support this sort of navigation. Part of that also is reading order. If maybe not all content, particularly textual content, really suffers from problems with reading order, but if you're doing a PowerPoint presentation or something else that's image heavy, you want to make sure that when you navigate with an assistive technology or through tab navigation, you're going to get to each page element in the appropriate order in a way that would make sense. And you want to be sure to preserve accessibility and structural elements when you're working with the documents. So, for example, when you save as a PDF, it's going to preserve these accessibility and structural elements if they were created in another file format, such as in PowerPoint or in Word documents. Whereas if you select a print to PDF, it's going to remove all of those structural elements and mean that you're back to having a document where none of that work was done. And there are AI tools coming in this area. And so I would really say that you want to have part of your workflow be a continuing evaluation of these AI tools. Adobe has their PDF accessibility autotag API and that can automate aspects of this work to make it much faster and then be something that can just be checked by someone who manually goes through to make sure that it's correct and make any corrections to it. Also, as these tools get better, they might be able to be part of an automated workflow for historical documents that you weren't able to to devote the time to manually changing. Another piece of this is don't forget data files when we're talking about files. A lot of times I think people focus on text files, but it's really, really important when we're talking about data files to make sure that those are available for assistive technologies as well so that people have access to research data. It's very hard to navigate these files if they're not structured properly. CSV and Excel files are generally the versions of data files that are most available to most assistive technologies, but you have to avoid primarily visual features within these, such as hiding or freezing content, whether that's sections, columns or rows, adding filters without some sort of explanatory text if the filter is absolutely necessary. You want to avoid track changes when collaborating in modifications because these are often not available to certain assistive technologies and you want to think about how you're using split cells, merge cells, blank columns, rows and cells. If it's primarily just for visual clarity, that can actually be a problem when it comes to navigation because it can separate it from the title, the column or row that it's in, which leads nicely into you need to label all rows, columns and sheets as well as using adjacent cells for explanation as necessary. So if you have a formula, for example, the cell next to it could be used to offer a further explanation that goes along with that. You also want to offer an alternative way of accessing any other visual information. So you've probably heard of the idea of alt text before, but if you haven't, that is the way that you describe images using text so that that is not visually apparent either on the website or in the document, but is available to, for example, a screen reader. And you want to make sure that when you're creating these sorts of documents, any images, graphs or other visuals have that alt text and that it's context specific, which is one of the reasons why it's so hard to automate this process because the same picture might need different alt text, depending on whether it's being used in a history class or an art history class, for example. If you're talking about a painting, it might be very different if you're looking at it in the context that many of my classes are, which are maybe the fashion in the painting from the time period, versus looking at it from a fine arts perspective to look at the techniques used in it. The alt text for those two different contexts might be very different. So you need to be thinking about making alt text that's meaningful, which often means working with the person who created the document, wrote the text, for example. You also want to consider additional accessibility work that might be needed for data and visualizations. If it's a complex visualization, you want to be sure that you're offering a way of navigating that for someone who isn't able to access that with a screen reader. It might be a more full description of what the data says. It might be offering access to the raw data in another file format. There are many ways to approach this, but you want to make sure that you're thinking about how different users with different needs would access that same information. And this is another area where you can really watch for future developments in the use of AI to assist this process. There are already tools right now that are looking at AI for generating alt text, and I'm sure that's going to be something that improves and becomes a more useful tool in the future as well. And then you want to think about other aspects of visual accessibility. So not everyone might be using a screen reader, but they might have other issues pertaining to low vision, they might have issues perceiving colors. So you want to make sure that you never use color as the sole means of the conveying information, that you avoid small font sizes unless they are adjustable, that you ensure content is high contrast so that the background and the foreground are really distinguishable from one another. And in the case of other things like visualizations, you might consider new techniques like sonification tools that can turn data visualization into sound files or tools like SAS graphics accelerator that are designed with the idea of accessibility at the forefront for data visualizations. Next step is think about multimedia. You want to make all video and audio content accessible. So all video contents to be captioned, and you want to make sure that those captions do not obstruct the video. For that reason, it's ideal to have what are called closed captions, which mean that the user can decide whether to have them on the screen or not. And this is because there are competing accessibility needs that are impacted by captions. People with some types of disabilities may find that having the caption on screen impairs their ability to see. The video distracts them from the video, whereas people who need help with the audio content may find that captions are absolutely necessary for them to access the video. You also want to make sure that text is high contrast and large enough to be read easily, and along with that, you want to only have enough on the screen at each moment that is easily readable in that moment. Where possible, even if you offer captions, you should also offer transcripts, and that means for video and audio content. And these are really useful for a variety of different users, including deafblind users who may navigate using an assistive technology that doesn't have access to the caption file itself. As an added benefit of transcripts, they also make the content searchable and they can increase search engine optimization if you're sharing it in something that would be accessible to a search engine. Step six is once you have all these accessible materials, it's important to really clearly label them. You want to label them at both the points of access and in the metadata because this is going to allow people to limit down what they're accessing to only things that they'll actually be able to use, which makes for a much more efficient process. And it also really helps to share the fact that you've done all this work because people might otherwise assume that it's not accessible to them, but you can really highlight this and make it findable by highlighting this in both the point of access and when you're talking about the metadata for each of these items. And in that metadata, you can even go so far as to specify the specific aspects of accessibility that have been included. So you could say captions and transcripts for a video or just captions if there are only captions available or you could list out things like document structure and also alt text for a document. And then offer documentation and policies about the accessibility of platforms or content in prominent locations. So this could mean having an accessibility page or policy as part of your institutional website, your specific discovery layer, your institutional repository or digital collection, and it can be really useful for, again, making sure that not only do people know what level of accessibility you're achieving, but also to keep track of that internally and make sure that you're continuing to work on that. And this is a lot of work, so I would say step seven is always be thinking about how to scale this work up. You want to be including accessibility as part of the timeline budget for your projects. If you're talking about doing a new digital collection, work accessibility in from the very beginning and it'll make sure that you've allocated time and money and staff time for this work. And consider identifying vendors to provide time sensitive remediation work if that is something that you have the budget for. Identifying them in advance of the need can be really helpful so that you're ready to go when a request comes in. For scholars submitted work such as work in IRs, for example, offer training so that scholars know how to make their own work accessible. This is really useful because it will not only make work for your institution more accessible in a more scalable manner, but then the researchers now have a new tool and these scholars have a new tool to go out there and share their work in other contexts in a way that is more inclusive and accessible to all. And continue to watch forward, evaluate newly emerging tools that can automate this. AI is going to have a big impact here, but there's also a lot more interest in the last several years in accessibility and working on automation for that. I'm not sure we're going to get to the point anytime soon where that doesn't need manual verification, but it can nevertheless be a good starting point and a good way to work on scaling this up when you may not have as much time to devote for it within your current staffing levels. So with that, I would say thank you very much. And if you do have any questions, please put them in the questions and we'll have time for them later on. You can also email me if you have any questions you'd like to ask about specifically for your institution. Thank you. OK. Thank you, Carly. We'll move straight on to our second presentation for the afternoon now. So I'm going to introduce Aaron, Wersley Burke, Ashley Cushman and Helen Whittaker for all librarians at Oxford Brooks University and their talk entitled Closing Gaps in Collections, Information Literacy and Professional Practice. We'll talk, we'll cover both the practical and research activities concerning equality, diversity and inclusion within the library service. So over to you. All right. Thank you so much, Tracy, and thank you for having us. We're excited to talk about our work here. Helen and I will begin with some of our practical activities and then Aaron will discuss some of our research activities. So we'll jump right in and start with some broader context since various ongoing social and political movements have had a ripple effect on teaching and higher education, particularly in the UK. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement or BLM movement typically advocate for various policy changes considered to be related to black liberation, thus highlighting and putting an end to systemic racism. During a Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol, the city centre statue of Edward Colston was pulled down by protesters due to his history as a slave trader. In a similar vein, Roads Must Fall was a protest movement that was directed as statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The protest highlighted further social issues relating to the effects of colonisation and ongoing racial discrimination. The start of the movement had effects here in Oxford as well, where students called for a statue of Rhodes to be removed from Oriole College at the University of Oxford and prompted a wider debate about the implications of colonialism, privilege and bias in UK higher education. Why is My Curriculum White is a national campaign challenging the lack of diversity found in reading lists and course content, which is argued to be primarily Eurocentric and reflecting only Western perspectives, while flacking voices from ethnic minorities and non-Western sources. This argument also encompasses female LGBTQ plus and neurodiverse authors whose perspectives are also felt to be largely absent from reading lists. So from this context, we created the library's equality, diversity and inclusivity group, or EDI group. And this is made up of members from throughout the library. So different library teams are involved, which is a good cross-section of different people bringing different experiences and views. And we started off by looking at some aims in terms of reference for the group, and this then helped us to look out and inform what activity is, what themes we wanted to work on as a group. So the key aims that we came up with were to amplify marginalised identities, groups and voices, to acknowledge biases and potentially harmful or offensive content. So this particularly relates to our collections and resources generally. We wanted to identify and promote resources from under or misrepresented groups to answer existing bias. So, for example, leaning more towards Western or US or Eurocentric biases within our resources and collections. And then finally, looking to learn from others, we've all got different viewpoints, different experiences to bring. So we look to work with colleagues within the wider library context, but also within the university as well and also beyond our university. So looking to work with colleagues and collaborate with colleagues in other libraries. In 2022, a survey called Mind the Gap was undertaken by Oxford Brook Student Union to determine the experiences of black and BIPOC students at Brooks. This report covered many issues such as students' sense of belonging and well-being. But more relevant to us in the library, a Mind the Gap reported a lack of diversity within the content of their courses and express a desire to engage with diverse literature and content. The report recommended implementing diverse and representative reading lists and adopting a lens outside of Eurocentric academia. With the broader context and the Mind the Gap report in mind, our library EDI group took some practical steps to close some of those gaps or attempt to close those gaps. Starting with a simple step, we created a dedicated EDI webpage on the library website to signpost to staff and students, the various EDI resources at the library. In 2022, we received a dedicated fund for the purposes of ordering materials that support equality, diversity and inclusion. This also helps us to add to our diverse reading lists that we have been developing over the years, specifically anti-racism reading, activism, neurodiversity, LGBTQ plus resources and well-being. And these lists are rather popular with students in 2021. I believe the anti-racism reading list was among the top 10 aspire lists used at Brooks and in the last academic year, the top 250 aspire lists include at least three of our of EDI reading lists. We also at Brooks have a special initiative called More Books, which runs once or twice a year and allows students to request books to be added to the library stock. Students can indicate why they're requesting a particular title. And starting in spring 2022, we added the option to see whether a student has selected a book because the topic or author amplifies a historically marginalized community. Since we added this option, roughly 10 percent of all more books requests have been chosen, at least in part, to diversify our collections. Other activities that we have been up to and obviously continue to do is that we want to, as far as possible, promote the resources that we have access to relating to the global south. So, for example, the Germans online project specifically looks at open access global south Germans. And we do this through a variety of means, so make sure that we advertise them on our webpages, also on our subject specific webpages and also through teaching sessions as well. Also, in tandem with that, we're looking to increase our access to open access publications. So part of that is looking for content that is not behind paywalls, so looking to promote and add to our library search, which is our library catalogue and paywall content. So because obviously open access publications benefits everybody or diverse users and particularly those students who maybe in their home countries are not able to access and paywall and subscribe content. So we want to make sure that we continue to increase our open access publications across the board, which we've also done through our reading published agreements, which we're increasing the number of agreements that we subscribe to, which also increases our open access publications as well. We've also looked to our colleagues in metadata, have looked to replace subject headings, which are deemed offensive or discriminatory or biased. And so far, they've looked to replace 144 headings with more appropriate terms on WorldCat, which is the system that drives our library, search our library catalogue, and that work is ongoing. And we're looking to collaborate with other libraries and share the results on that and share terminology. In tandem with that, we have a special collections group of resources and we've updated 61 records, we've updated content descriptions. Again, looking to replace those content that descriptors that are outdated, biased, discriminatory, racist or whatever they happen to be because quite a lot of archival content that really does have some outdated terminology. Focusing moving on from that. Just some other work that may as a few of us are specifically involved in. We are looking to do some research and the research involves a literature review, which we are currently undertaking and nearly finished, which is investigating the EDI issues and activities within other higher education libraries, looking not just at the UK, but what the themes are coming out when we look at these EDI issues and activities. And there are some key themes I just highlighted on this slide. It's not exhausted by any means. And one of which is that libraries are really not neutral spaces. Historically, traditionally, they may well have been deemed as neutral spaces, but in fact they could be deemed as potentially ably environments. Certainly, for example, our staff and our collections could be deemed as being predominantly white and more focused on the white resources and white staffing. In terms of reading lists, this is also demonstrated by the sort of narrow focus on authors and themes within reading lists, which again can be predominantly white, more biased towards Western authors and themes and male authors and themes. And there's been quite a bit of research undertaken in that area. But just we might like to acknowledge this. Libraries are not neutral either in their acquisition and management of knowledge. It's because of possibly because of the big publishers that many of us will just try to subscribe into or our development of policies. So we really do need to look at our acquisition and management of knowledge. And sort of finally a key theme, another key theme is just inequities within scholarly public publishing home. Global self publishers do tend to get sideline in favour of the major publishers, certainly in the UK, like Elsevier, Sage, Springer, Taylor and Francis Wiley, who OK, yet will have local self consent. But again, we are potentially sideline, global self consent. And also, again, this divide between white authors, potentially sort of a male theme ratio as well. Although we had taken on board the requests from the Mind the Gap survey, was it enough? How could we effectively measure our successes? What did students actually think about our EDI initiatives? Had we fulfilled the request to provide diverse content or did we need to do more? Well, the only way we could realistically find out was to ask them. So our next step was to conduct primary research to ascertain this. So now Aaron will discuss the survey that we undertook. Thank you, Helen, and Ashley. So I'm going to talk now about the research we carried out to answer our question. Have students' requests for diverse content be met? We wanted to get a wide range of responses. So we opted for quantitative methodology. Quantitative methods are useful for evaluating the influence of phenomena. In our case, it seemed the best thing to do. We opted for a survey, which is argued to be the most popular method in almost every field and discipline. We also decided to make the survey anonymous, as we felt this might allow feedback to be more honest if personal details were not recorded. However, the drawback with this method was that we couldn't include any incentives to encourage completion of the survey. It also meant we couldn't discern who exactly was responding, whether they were from a particular ethnic background or a particular gender, for example. Something was random, so anybody in the population could take part in the research that they're on behest. We decided to use Google Forms to create the survey. Students tend to be digitally savvy, so creating an online survey seems to be the best way of collecting this data. Our next step was to get ethical approval. As we had human participants in the research, we applied to the Oxford Brookes University Ethics Committee and spoke to our library's ethics officer, who was also a fellow librarian. Because of the low risk involved and the simple survey design, we didn't collect any personal data, we qualified for a light search review. As part of this, the ethics committee required an example of consent form, participant information form, and survey questions. On top of this, we had to consider information security, such as explaining how the data collected from the survey will be stored on the principal investigator's Google Drive, and how the data will be then shared with all co-investigators to analyse and derive findings from. At the conclusion of the project, the data will be removed permanently from Google Drive and placed into the university's institutional repository. These data management considerations help to address any information security concerns, and with the survey being anonymous, nobody could be traced from the individual responses, thus ensuring confidentiality. So as a result of these considerations, ethics approval was successful and we could then move on to collecting the data. So the Google form was secure and could only be accessed by Oxford Brookes students using the Oxford Brookes logging credentials. Respondants were required to read the participant information form and then read and agree to the consent form, which were both digital and included in the Google form before proceeding on to the survey. The survey consisted of two closed questions, which were compulsory and one open question, which was optional. The survey was promoted via posters displayed across the four Oxford Brookes library sites and an example of which is on this slide. A QR code was embedded into the survey, which linked through to the Google form and could be scanned using a smartphone app. We also showed the link via social media channels and the survey link was sent to student officers in the student union in the event that students didn't have access to a smartphone or a QR code scanner. That also gives a chance to explain about the work we've done and that we'd like to hear back from students, especially as the Mind the Gap survey originated from the student union. So from the survey responses, we were hoping to get either a solid EA or a NAE in terms of our work to diversify the library. So yes, the majority of respondents were happy with what we've done and what we'd accomplished or no, we needed to do more work and hopefully some suggestions coming forward about what else we could do. Either way, we would aspire to continue with EDI practices or perhaps now having some data to drivers. Unfortunately, responses to the survey have been quite low. So at the moment, we're unable to harvest any data, or at least enough data to make headway with. So going forward, we have a number of hurdles to overcome. The first of which is the lack of student engagements with our research. So despite heavily promoting the survey, there's been minimal response. This leads on to our next hurdle, which meant there was limited data to analyse and draw meaningful conclusions from. Perhaps a way forward is to acquire research funding, which we didn't have and whether that funding can come internally or externally. However, anonymity could be problematic as it makes it difficult to incentivise participant engagement whilst keeping them entirely anonymous. We'd have to consider removing complete anonymity and allowing the research team to be aware of participant identities. So have we closed the gap when it comes to embedding diverse contents into our collections? The answer at the moment is we don't know. More research needs to be done in this area to assess student opinion. We're planning on conducting a further study to focus exclusively on student feedback to these EDI initiatives, incorporating either or both quantitative or qualitative methodology. In the meantime, we'll be submitting a paper to a journal and hope to be published in due course. So in summary, the project has been a useful learning curve in developing our research skills, from developing an idea to designing our own research and to getting ethics approval. It's left us feeling more confident and more competent in conducting research as librarians and we've made conscious decisions to change our professional, personal and research practices in terms of equality, diversity and inclusion. Thank you for listening. Thank you very much, all of you. I'm going to open it up for questions now. So if I just have a quick look in the Q&A. We have a question from Matt who's this is for Aaron with hindsight. How would you have changed your survey methodology and could you implement an option incentive? Yeah, so in hindsight, we want to keep anonymity as I explained just to allow students to be more honest in their feedback. If we were to include an incentive, that means we'd have to drop anonymity. So we haven't really decided what the best option to do at the moment. I think if we're going to go forward, we're going to have to lose anonymity and incentivise our methodology to get students to participate in the research. So, yeah, that's probably what we're going to be doing. And hopefully next time we'll get some more feedback. That's great. Thank you. We've got another question from William Nixon. Again, this is a question for the Oxford Brooks team. Are there any other proxy methods you could use to gauge impact? I'll open that up to obviously Aaron and Helen and Ashley. If any of you want to come in on that. Anybody want to go first? I guess I can start and then Helen, you can jump in if you'd like. I guess other ways that we can kind of gauge impact. I know sort of on a more kind of quantitative basis. I know I sometimes look at kind of the not only the engagement of ours by a reading list, but also try to keep track of how often kind of the collections or items that we've purchased through your EDI fund have been used, not just on the practical matter of how much they've been borrowing, but also kind of whether they've been used on other lists. So I know there's at least been a few books that we've kind of purchased with our dedicated EDI fund that academics from other subjects have kind of used on their module reading lists. Now, I don't know if that's kind of a coincidence or whether that's something that they've seen what we've bought and then they decide to add it on. But that's at least a kind of informal way that we've that I've been kind of looking at. And I'm sure Helen could probably think of much more. Well, I guess it's not necessary that quantitative sort of looking at impacts as well, one of the things that we've been trying to do is to that's only in my perspective is go out and talk to academics more. And so not only in terms of their reading this content, but also inclusion of resources in more tailored teaching sessions. So, for example, we've done focus sessions on LB, TQ and resources specifically aimed at showcasing what resources we can provide access to. We've also done teaching sessions on gailiting and focusing on more global south resources. And this was an outcome of that. Just for example, was students doing some quite focused dissertation topics that did include topics that were more from the global south to think about the conflict. If they were to use that, that's what the impact was saying. But I think the promotion aspect, raising awareness, talking to undertaking a project to look at diversity on specific academic reading lists because they felt they were mindful of the fact that they were more Western century and male century as well. So they engaged with the library to look at how that they could change that. So I guess that could be seen as an impact in us promoting or having those conversations that it was leading to some change within practices as for academics. Just a couple of examples, I can think of that. That's great. Thanks, Helen. And I guess that also indicates some broader benefit for a wider group of students as well. Exactly. I mean, they're mindful. I think because obviously they have had conversations with students who, as we mentioned earlier, examples of students saying that there were a team of diversity resources and certainly on reading lists and setting up citations on topics that they want to engage in, they didn't know where to stop because they didn't have a benchmark to work for them, what was out there. And so as being able to showcase that really helped. And diversity across the board in the broadest sense of diversity in student body. You know, great. Thanks. Can I just follow up around the ethics approval process that you went through? Because I was really interested in that because at Cardiff University, we've we struggled with ethics approval for projects for with non-academic staff with professional services staff providing leadership because we don't have our ethics committees are set up at a academic school level. So there's kind of nowhere to take our professional services project for approval. Is that something that sounds like you were able to kind of overcome that issue at Oxford Brookes? Yeah, I can answer that. So I work in scholar communications and myself and my colleagues are involved in research ethics and integrity across university. So we do get involved in some of the working groups on that. And we have our own ethics officer within the library who is a librarian. So, yeah, the he also represents all professional services. So we do have the ability to take off its approval for any any professional services based research. OK, that's great. Thanks. We've got another question from Jeremy Upton, and this is a question for Carly. Jeremy says, excited to hear about the opportunities for automating accessibility testing. How optimistic are you about this really speeding up the process? We know it's currently very time intensive, given that the testing needs to reproduce the experience of a real person. Yeah, this is a really good question. So I think right now the tools are really not well enough developed to solve a lot of the real problems that we're seeing. And our current state where I see them as most helpful are for very basic work. So I think that they are helpful for automated testing. I think automated testing can identify issues and make it faster to fix those issues. I think that there are also tools that are starting to be helpful in doing an initial pass on a PDF and putting in the tags that you would need to make it accessible, even if you still need to check it. I think that because the actual process of putting in the tags can be kind of difficult, not difficult, but time consuming and require a lot of detail orientation. I think it does speed things up and can help in a small way with scaling up, even if you still have to go back through it with a person. I'm less currently optimistic to be frank about alt text writing tools. A lot of times they are either completely nonsensical or they are the ones that are getting better still are context free. So the fact of the matter is, unfortunately, a lot of people don't have training in writing alt text, so a lot of our alt text is context free. It's not going to reproduce like the true experience of why you're seeing that visual in the context of a scholarly article necessarily or in a presentation at the level that we're talking about for higher education. It tends to be at the level of just saying that's what this image is. So maybe we'll be able to get to that basic step. It's still better than just having a file name, which if you just go through the internet right now, a lot of what you get when you look for alt text is just like JPEG 234 is what it reads to you because the person didn't add any alt text or it skips the image entirely because it doesn't have any alt text. So it can marginally improve things, but I think that for the alt text, we still need a lot more used by the person. So that's why I sort of rather than said, here's a specific tool I would recommend you currently use. I said, more keep your eye on it and evaluate the future because I think they need to develop a little bit further before I see them as really replacing a lot of the work that we currently have to do manually. I would see it right now more as supplementing people's work and maybe speeding it up slightly, but you still need to devote the time to make things fully accessible. That's great. Thank you. Given that, Carly, what would you see as being the kind of, you know, approaches for smaller institutions in particular where financial resources are quite limited, but to be able to, you know, financially sustainably address accessibility issues? Yeah, I think that this is a huge challenge and I would say that I think the most important thing you can do that's relatively easy is to have a way people can tell you that they've encountered a problem and have a plan for what your steps are going to be. The reality is a lot of from what I'm hearing from institutions, I haven't done formal study of this, but from what I've heard from many institutions is that even if they put forward that there is a possibility of remediation, they don't get an overwhelming number of requests. They'll still only get a few requests. And so I think if you aren't able to go, say you have an institutional repository that you've been posting things to for 10 years, no one's going to be able to put the money, even big institutions towards today, going back and making every single item fully accessible to today's standards, but by putting up a notice of how people can contact you and having somebody who at least has some training and has devoted a certain amount of time to getting comfortable with the idea of making something accessible through PDF remediation, you're already putting a path forward for researchers who right now might really feel like there's no place for them in this ecosystem. So I think that's a really important first step that we can take that doesn't have as much cost as people fear that it may. And it also allows you to make the case if you are getting multiple requests. I think that makes it easier to go to your institution and say, there's a real need for this. We in many countries, there's a legal obligation that we meet this need. And so we're requesting this budget. We're requesting to start a relationship with this vendor who we have priced out, who can do this remediation for us, whatever it is. I think the first step is knowing what's needed and having that path forward for people to make requests can help you to know what really is needed by your community.