 I think I'm up against pretty stiff competition this block of time and I appreciate you all coming. My name is Don Waters and I have been working as a CNI senior scholar for the last year or so. And I've been working on the issue of societal grand challenges and what kind of information, infrastructure, libraries, IT organizations and others provide to advance research on these kinds of questions and I can't think of a better way to orient you to societal grand challenges than to refer you to the literature on the apocalypse. And really no better reference than the book of revelations. And all of the horsemen are very active these days. I'm going to focus on the wild beast of climate change. Climate changes are long-term shifts in atmospheric and oceanic temperatures and in related weather patterns. The simplest definition I could find and the findings there have been over the last year huge national assessments and UN assessments of progress on climate change research and among the conclusions. There is incontrovertible evidence for the unequivocal conclusion that the cause of current climate changes is man-made. And the primary cause is the burning of fossil fuels beginning with the deployment of the steam engine in the 1750s. Among the findings, the highest levels, we now are experiencing the highest levels of greenhouse gases in 800,000 years. Temperature increases in the last 50 years were greater than those in the last 2000 years. Sea levels rose in the 20th century more than they have in the last 30 centuries. And the drought in the western U.S., which may or may not be over, was more severe and long-lasting than any other in 1200 years. Given these findings, 15,000 scientists recently signed a declaration that we are facing not an urgent problem but a climate emergency. And there is huge frustration among these scientists at global inaction. They feel that they are screaming into the void, as one author of one of the recent assessments put it. And some have threatened to halt all further scientific work until there is action. Why keep reproducing the finding that we have an emergency? Others have said, what's the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if in the end all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true? Another, if you said, let's design a problem that human institutions can't deal with, you couldn't find a better one than global warming. So what's to be done? There's recent studies, one of them at Ithaca SNR. And Ithaca has mastered an approach to identify and document research university organizational strategies. And in one of those reports, among the top university priorities they identified, was addressing issues of broad public concern and doing so by investing in STEM. That report and subsequent reports asked our library strategies aligned with these university priorities. So will STEM save us from the apocalypse, as suggested in this report? For war, we have armaments and surveillance from the science, genetic engineering for famine, vaccines for pestilence, and for the wild beast, let's lower greenhouse gas emissions. It's just one problem. STEM research is necessary but demonstrably insufficient to fully address the problems represented by the four horsemen. There was a massive investment in STEM effort to develop vaccines, but there were huge differential outcomes, especially for marginalized groups, both before and after the vaccines became available. Similarly for climate change, climate scientists have produced amazing findings, but this frustration persists. And why is that? For these broad social grand challenges, research universities need to make a special kind of investment that they haven't really yet made. And they need to tune their information support structures accordingly. We know reliably that disasters will occur, but are still uncertain about when and where. So the science is not exactly complete. Social scientists have called this issue predictable surprises, and they're driving researchers to understand climate dynamics even more, not at a global level, but to keep focusing down on the issues at local levels. And yet there is this persistent level of uncertainty is part of the reason why the public resists investing in remedies. The uncertainties also fuel active opposition that seeks to raise doubts about and even deny the existence of climate change. And it also feeds disinformation campaigns such as Climategate. You may remember this in around 2009. There was a hack job in a climate institute in the UK. They stole the email and cherry picked them allegedly to demonstrate that the scientists had made up their data. Moreover, the push for local research to keep pushing on the science requires special skills because deploying sensors and other investigations in local communities just raises suspicions and you need the special skills to allay those. These kinds of frustrations are characteristic of what's called a wicked problem. Detailed STEM research is not enough. There's a psychological disposition in part because of the insufficient research to avoid uncertainty and avoid investment. There's economic calculations about the perceived risk that suggest well let's not make the investment now, we'll wait and see if the issues are resolved further. And then there of course as I just mentioned the politics and culture of resistance. Wickedness is a concept from complexity studies. It doesn't mean wicked as an evil and it's not wicked in the Bostonian sense of she's a wicked or very smart but it's also not complex like a moonshot where there is a clear measure of success when you either land on the moon or you miss it. A problem is wicked when it's hard to define the originator of the term talked about viciousness like a circle and it lacks clear solutions tricky like a leprechaun, the author said. That is the components of this particular problem, climate change, the components of the problem and the solution are interlocking systems, physical, biochemical, political, legal, economic, psychological, chemical and others and the problem may be defined in terms of oceanic and atmospheric variables, biochemical and physical but the problem takes a different shape if it's viewed from the perspective of social and cultural systems. For wicked problems, normal science is not sufficient, a different kind is needed and its philosophers of science, historians of science have called this post-normal science or mode two knowledge production, I'm not advocating those names that's just what they use, it requires and their argument is that it requires interdisciplinary research that includes expertise from STEM, social science and humanities disciplines and the effect and also needs to include affected communities outside of academia. A workshop in 2016 on university-led grand challenges attracted 20 universities and that workshop called for a paradigm shift among universities to support wicked problem research. It recommended in addition to the issues of interdisciplinarity and engaging in community-engaged research, leveraging centers and institutes. The research I've done over the last year or so has produced a number of examples that illustrate how this kind of process works. I started with interviewed researchers affiliated with climate change centers and institutes plus administrators and librarians and other information specialists for a total of 44 individuals in 12 R1 and R2 universities. This is not meant to be comprehensive but it was suggestive and I'll give you some wonderful examples of the kind of research that's underway in these kinds of institutes. A sociologist reported that with the data specialist she's identifying and mapping the location over time of chemical waste left by industry as well as small businesses such as gas stations and car rent repair shops and then documenting changes in the use of that land and tracing the cultural, political and economic effects that led to mitigating and in many cases concealing the hazards. An engineer in urban planning is engaged and this is one of my favorite examples. In partnership with the state office of climate and energy and with zoning officers and dozens of communities around the state and as scraping websites to collect and analyze zoning ordinances to determine how local communities regulate and deploy solar and wind power and you can imagine that there's a lot of nimbies in that group but the idea of scraping websites was of particular interest. In collaboration with data scientists and community data sources at historian is gathering scientific documentation of weather events, local community disaster declarations and insurance data to evaluate locations across the country as possible, climate havens. An engineer as part of a team including an aerospace engineer and air traffic controllers is redesigning landing takeoff and taxi routes to conserve fuel. Conservation ecologists working with various stakeholders including indigenous communities in coastal North Carolina is identifying local values and perspectives and then trying to integrate those into tools for the local communities to make decisions about whether and how to preserve cultural monuments like lighthouses that are endangered by weather events and rising sea levels. Political scientists in collaboration with an ecologist in local indigenous communities in Arctic regions is co-developing strategies to understand local climate change and possible mitigation and adaptation strategies. Then a law professor in an urban area has partnerships in that urban area and in other cities with local community stakeholders and university researchers and is creating laboratories for governing the city as a commons and focusing particular participants in the lab on how to address climate changes and environmental justice. So if the university's priority is to support research like this on wicked problems then how do librarians and other information specialists align their strategies to this priority? I'm coming up with four suggested adjustments and I'll go over them in more detail. First, to focus on research in university supported centers and institutes that are devoted to wicked problem research. The second is to foster skills needed for interdisciplinary research. The third, support local communities in defining and co-producing research on climate change. And then finally, enhance the data support to accommodate the nature and scale of interdisciplinary and public contributions. So let's start with the recommendation about centers and institutes. Libraries have generally relied on a liaison model for research support. The liaison role is based on the traditional subject librarian but there's been a lot of experimentation over the last couple of decades. Particularly focused on whether there should be subject expertise or some kind of functional expertise embodied in this liaison role. And in medical librarianship the idea of the informationist as an information partner to a clinical team has also gotten a lot of traction. Despite the experimentations liaisons mainly interact with departments and for good reason. Departments are, as one observer puts it, the essential and irreplaceable building blocks of the university. They provide the disciplinary home for faculty, they manage appointments, tenure and promotions, course assignments and they confer degrees. Centers and institutes complement departments and serve as research units however they are relatively easy to create, hard to eliminate and there's often a dizzying array of them. When I was at Mellon we had a university president come and declare that every faculty member wanted an institute or a center and I think he was and he certainly was right. Many of those centers are simply the labs of the researcher or the individual faculty member and for his or her graduate students. Others are for specific projects created at the behest of a funder or industry sponsor. University generally recognize the value of these various kinds of centers and institutes but they do give special attention to others such as those that are devoted to climate change. For librarians and IT specialists to allocate liaisons and other research support to these kinds of centers or institutes, what kind of distinguishing criteria should they look for? Turns out that I came across a study, two studies actually, of these climate change institutes and centers and they identified these criteria so I'm quoting from these reports. A director reporting to the provost or vice president for research, a formal mission and strategic plan for wicked problem research, a stable budget for staff and seed funding, a schedule for regular convenings to share work and faculty participation from a variety of disciplines. I learned in talking with the directors of the institutes that I was interviewing that this set of criteria are the basis for a lot of competition among them. They are developing their own strategic plans against other centers along these criteria. Do we have a director that's reporting up into the administration? Where is our budget and what is it and how stable is it? Is the university committed or not? So let me turn now to interdisciplinarity. Knowledge often advances when researchers work together at or across the edges of their areas of expertise. This is a well known observation. Centers and institutes that address wicked problems must foster work across disciplinary boundaries. It is a critical feature of these kinds of institutes. Historians and philosophers of science have identified various kinds of work across disciplinary boundaries but these are the main types. Multidisciplinary, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. Again, there are others but these are the main ones that appear in the literature. The key factor that distinguishes among these is the level of integration. Multidisciplinary. In multidisciplinary work there is a coordination of research simply by juxtaposition of data methods and concepts. Interdisciplinarity, there's an integration of data tools and concepts to achieve certain results. And then transdisciplinarity is the greatest level of integration where the approaches emerge together to achieve new concepts and methods. The level of integration depends at least in part on the intellectual proximity of the fields. Chris and I benefited from your recent article on proximity and distance on this point. The closer the fields the greater the chance of transdisciplinary breakthroughs. Think of biochemistry but you're not going to see that with biology and history necessarily. And although funders regularly push for transdisciplinary advances, doing so for wicked problem research may actually be counterproductive. Exposure to distant fields may be more informative and caution is especially needed to avoid what's called disciplinary capture where values, concepts, or methods by researchers in one field are taken as prior or better than those in other and often poorly funded fields. There are two key information support requirements for research across disciplinary boundaries. Conceptual translation is the first. Metadata specialists can help create lingua franca's which Dan Reed referred to in his opening talk. And in doing so may need to reimagine or repair existing metadata structures. Methodological integration also is another requirement in key functional domains for textual material, audiovisual material, spatial and numerical analysis and so on. On the engagement side let me turn now to engagement. The standard tripartite university mission is research, teaching and service. But by engagement I don't mean service. Service is different from scholarly engagement which recognizes the value of different and usually practical or indigenous modes of knowledge. And it treats communities bearing this knowledge not as objects of study but as participants who help determine what to study and how. The types of relevant communities include and I mentioned these in my examples, local residents with deep understanding of local climate change and their effects, owners or custodians of endangered cultural heritage, industry partners responsible for controlling emissions, underrepresented communities that are downwind downstream or otherwise harmed by climate change. The specific examples included air traffic controllers, custodians of coastal cultural heritage, indigenous communities in the Arctic and residents of urban neighborhoods. For these kinds of groups and for this kind of engagement the information support requirements are similar to those for interdisciplinarity, conceptual translation and methodological integration. However in this case value conflicts often turn out to be the key information issue where the conflicts are in conceptual definitions, methodological approaches and they can often be very complicated and time consuming to resolve. One of the people I talked to said that often you have to just start from scratch with first principles when you're engaging communities at this level. To build trust special efforts may be needed for example to make academic climate models more easily accessible in some of the centers that I talked to were doing this. Care is also needed in the creation and management of community generated knowledge community based archives and so on. And there's one big caution that I was advised of during my interviews. The funding requirements for engaging local communities can lead to carpet bagging where PIs parachute in, check the box by asking to talk to a local leader and then they leave and in the process have ruined a long built trusted relationship. There's quite a lot of anger that I picked up especially among those working with indigenous communities. Many, it's okay so finally that's term to data support. Many climate scientists will continue to file discipline based models of research. They will avail themselves of university, national and international infrastructure for big science data to build, refine, circulate their climate models and they will also rely on appropriate repositories to meet fair standards and data management requirements. But researchers who participate in university supported climate change centers and institute raised an additional set of data support issues. There are fundamental issues already discussed of translation, methodological integration and value alignment associated with interdisciplinarity and community engagement. But in addition climate change centers and institutes concentrate researchers across disciplines around a problem and this concentration is an advantage. It provides an opportunity to avoid one off support and to scale efforts to harden the local infrastructure of tools and methods for data gathering and analysis. Research centers are generally unable to offer support for the research process at least the ones I talked to and researchers complained to me about reproducibility problems almost uniformly calling for professional help in data gathering and analysis. With concentration in a center across disciplines it provides an opportunity for libraries and other information support agencies to provide relatively efficient responses. This problem oriented concentration implies a shared interest in certain data types, text, numerical, spatial, AV and for methods of analysis and analyzing these data. And there's a corresponding opportunity here to concentrate professional expertise and build, test and harden the infrastructure of tools and methods by working with this group focused on certain data structures. And the center also provides a platform for introducing new tech such as AI, digital twins, methods in one place across the variety of fields so it's an efficient method of providing support. So I would say running through those four key issues I recognize that librarians and IT specialists have gained many of these skills for supporting climate change centers already in interdisciplinary public engagement and data in their support for digital scholarship, public humanities and data management. The recommendations here recognize the resource limitations in universities and call for relatively modest adjustments and extensions in these service strategies focusing on centers, again support for interdisciplinary public engagement and data support. So my question for you and do you think these adjustments are feasible and would they have desirable effects? Thank you for your attention, please. Well, the kinds of examples that I ran into with multi-disciplinarity is that the research center would hold a luncheon every couple weeks and invite people from participants in the center to talk about the research, to expose other researchers in other disciplines to what they're up to, what they're doing. It's an exposure. It's not an actual integration in that sense. Interdisciplinarity, a good example of that is some, and I gave some of those where there are two types of discipline on the same problem, a data scientist, an engineer, and an historian and so on. And in order to address the problem they have to come to some common understanding of the problem, of the data they're gathering and working with. And then transdisciplinarity I think is a harder thing to imagine, although we've got good examples in say the sciences and across the humanities too, where there are gender studies that have, you know, where there have been mergers across fields to produce a new field in effect. And that's a different kind of integration. Does that help? Chris? Well that's partly what I'm calling for. If librarians and IT folks want to support this kind of wicked research, it is a commitment. And you have to get down into the dirty business of what do these concepts mean and how do you reconcile them. And yeah, it's not a superficial process. And the call here is, you know, for, if we're going to make advance on climate change and we all want to be a part of that, there is some dirty work to be done. And the vehicle to do that would be through these centers where you're concentrating the researchers rather than in departments where you have to kind of deal with people on a one-off basis. Brian? Good question. Well, it's true. Which is kind of why I picked that. But you're right. And I think that's, that is a mission problem for the university is, you know, to be publicly engaged or to deal with public problems. We've got to create an infrastructure for that. And one of the things to do is create these centers. And it's not just name a center. You've got to put the support behind it, which is why I listed those criteria. Yeah, very good. Thank you. Yeah, I hear you on this. And I will give this some more thought in my report. One of, I was reluctant to give names of institutions, but one of them was, well, since there's so few of them in the state, it's the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. And I think they have like two or three librarians. And a governor who is just relentlessly cutting the budget of the institution. And yet, in the center, there was these data support specialists that had done this phenomenal job of making the climate model accessible. I think you're absolutely right. It's not, I mean, that's not institutionally feasible there. And I, the complaints were just vehement about the lack of support. And further, even interinstitutional collaboration was a problem for them, because they have no internet connection or no pipeline for the internet. They have a local internet, of course, but they retrieve data models and carry them back. They're a center for satellite transmissions of climate data. And they communicate those data by sneakerware. They get on a plane with a suitcase full of data drives and carry it back to the lower 48, they said. So it's a, I recognize the problem, I encountered it. I don't have a great solution. I don't think they did either. But I do hear you. And it's a, worse than further thought. I didn't, not in this case, part, and it may just be the boundaries of the problem that I'm focused on is that, but the kind of engagement that I saw was very similar to this kind of citizen science. And particularly if you're thinking of indigenous communities who have their own motto and perception of the relationship of the society to the nature. And documenting that is an issue. And how you, how they document it so that it's not, I'm studying you and I'm going to put my kind of layer of interpretation on how I perceive that very good question. I didn't see good examples of it, but it's again worth looking for them because this whole idea of engagement is very closely related to the idea of citizen science. God, Dan, I was just thinking that it's also in the public humanities too. You see examples of these kinds of things. And I, there's so few humanists involved in this research and they should be. I picked up, you know, some historians and philosophers and so on, but this is, this is an area where there's, needs to be a lot more work. Go ahead, Dan. I'd love to talk about data all day. But I'm worried about that none of this will work unless there's better political savviness marketing. I mean, if I was at the University of Alaska, I would not name something the center for climate change. I would work University of Kansas. I would call it the center for drought-resistant farms and do the same research that I would have done. Part of your slide where you said, you know, it can't just be STEM. Being surprised about mechanisms would be, because we do the science all day and the science seems rather subtle as we know that. And I'm especially worried research universities are being coded as left now. Left wing libraries, which had been a neutral entity are now also being coded largely in the public as left entities. Maybe they want to be, but that's how they're being coded and that creates the resistance among the consistency and so on, putting this into serious work and facilitating this work so that it works in a real work and surprised. Well, I think I may have came across as too sympathetic to the scientists on their frustrations. And in my report, I'm spending more time on the issue of how do you get humanists involved and why. And I think that's exactly the issue is that, you know, there is a history. There is a communication strategy to be had on this and involving them in the research can be beneficial to the science as well as to addressing the overall problem. And I was sure on that, but I completely agree with you and need and take your point and we'll try to do more in the report on that topic. But I also don't think it's simply a communication problem. You know, there's more going on and having political scientists involved and so on is not a bad idea either who understand those kinds of dynamics. But yes, they need to be involved and they need to be involved for the kinds of questions that came up about funding and citizen science and so on. But yeah, thank you. Yes, I'll bet there is. And I think the danger is this kind of checkbox mentality. Okay, I checked that box, but, you know, and then you get this disciplinary capture. I'm got the money, you follow my ideas. So that's, I think that's an issue and I'm reluctant to address this report to funders. You know, this is mainly to the CNI community, but I hope there won't, maybe there's room for me to make those kinds of suggestions. And it's got to be more than a checkbox. I came across the number of visionary VPRs like that. And the idea of asking the humanists to stand up or researcher from humanist humanistic fields to stand up and define the problem is something that I think it was Chris Newfield, who was the president of MLA last year. His presidential address is exactly that point that folks in humanistic fields, researchers in humanistic fields have to stand up and start defining the problem rather than complaining about the lack of funding and so on. Well, well, I'm not going to say that, but I'm reporting what I understood Chris Newfield to say in his address. We're out of time actually, but let's take these last two questions. You're first. Absolutely. Well, you're certainly right that not every institution is focused on climate change. And there are other of these kinds of problems that they are focused on, some are not focused on any of them. I do worry about the mechanism of getting that agenda. It's, you know, it is a European model to quote Dan Reed from his talk, is that kind of top down approach is very European in its structure, right? Yeah, fair enough. Brian, did you have a question? We should. Yeah. Thanks so much.