 Hi, welcome to Breakout Room 8, a pandemic pivot from paper thesis submissions to ETDs. We have Nicholas Deese online, Amy Walker from the Pratt Institute Library, and Austin McLean from ProQuest, the part of Clarivite. I'll hand it over to you, Austin. Great, thank you, Stacey. Nick and I had a lot of fun putting this together, and it's really primarily Nick's story. ProQuest has a cameo role in the middle there, but Nick's going to do most of the explaining about what's happened and where they are now. So over to you, Nick. Awesome, thank you, Austin. And just an FYI for everybody, while Amy Balmer contributed greatly to the creation of this presentation, it's mostly going to be me and Austin talking today. So hello, my name is Nick Deese, and I'm the user experience librarian at Pratt Institute Libraries, where I design and develop the library's website as well as manage a wide array of our web-based applications. So today with Austin, I'm going to give you some details on a years-long process of shifting from paper-based thesis submissions to ETDs at Pratt Institute. So to start off, Pratt Institute is an art and design school with an FTE of about 5,000 students. We're located in Brooklyn, New York, so it's a city school. And of these 5,000 or so students, about 1,300 of them are graduate students. We have about 22 graduate programs that submit theses to the library. And these projects usually entail a lengthy paper and inclusion of video documentation, of art exhibits, images, interactive software occasionally, and multimedia. So what we're looking at here is a beautiful shot of our campus showcasing how things were back in 2019. Very bustling, lots of activity. Back then, thesis submissions were done in person. Library staff would review submissions and confirm the title and signature pages, conform to our formatting guidelines before accepting and packaging them for shipment to our local binary. Students would pay an overall thesis binding fee and were entitled to one personal bound copy, which was really appreciated by the community. And when those bound copies returned, often months later, the theses would be cataloged and entered into our ILS and made publicly discoverable on our catalog. One thing to note about that is they had very limited metadata. Usually we just pulled in the essentials like the title, author, year, and related academic department. So suddenly in 2020, we had the pandemic, which changed things dramatically. But before the pandemic, we had an average of about 500 thesis submissions at the beginning of every, or at the end, sorry, of every spring semester. So this would usually happen in a short time window and we needed to solicit help from faculty librarians and staff in order to make sure that we were able to handle these big spikes in activity. This was very unpredictable most of the time. Sometimes we had whole classes coming in to submit at once. And occasionally, students who had printed their thesis on wrong paper or using the wrong format would naturally be very distraught when they were rejected and they would have to go through the process of getting new signatures and reprinting two copies, which can ultimately be very expensive. So it was a stressful time for many students. In some cases, people were very upset when things didn't go right. And it was often a bummer from the library side to leave these graduate students with that being their lasting memory of the library. It's not really something we wanted. So moving into the pandemic, we knew we wanted to kind of solve some of those logistical problems. But at the time, we had no remote submission workflow whatsoever. So we had a very short time window, like as March 2020, right? And we usually start getting theses in around May. So we needed to come up with something that would work in the interim, that would leave some room for asynchronous back and forth that's usually required for students to get their paper and ship shape. So another important element for us was implementing some kind of approval mechanism. All the departments at Pratt have very different people who are required to sign and improve theses. So we needed to make something that would account for that. And in particular, there was concern in the library's leadership about allowing students to submit digital documents without real penning signatures. There was worries that this might be abused or it could be inaccurate. And there was also the problem of supplemental files. Previously, we had students submitting their files on flash drives, disks and DVDs. And so we needed whatever platform we were going to use to be able to accommodate some pretty massive files. These days, a lot of students when they submit documentation of their artwork, they're like submitting 4K video, which takes up a ton of storage space. So after meeting regularly with the library director and the chair of library faculty, we came to the conclusion that we could use the institute's Google Drive system to facilitate digital submissions for 2020 while we simultaneously researched a more long-term solution. The G Drive submission flow was modeled after the print workflow, but it had some key differences. Instead of allowing students to submit, we only gave permissions to verified thesis advisors, which ensured that the document submitted had the approval of the department. And we created a unique share drive for each department and pre-populated them with folders for each student submitting for that period based on data from the registrar. So it was a very lengthy process. We did some scripting in order to pre-populate those directories, but ultimately we used Google Drive and we were able to facilitate the submission asynchronously. So this was in May 2020. So immediately it became apparent that while functional, the solution was not without its difficulties. Despite regular outreach, communication with faculty across the institute, there was some degree of confusion with faculty thesis advisors as to how the new submission workflow was supposed to function. Some faculty members were also uncomfortable with the idea of using Adobe Acrobat to digitally sign documents. And we needed to invest additional staff time to walk many of them through that process. Our new digital system was only digital, so there was no way to get students' personal copies of their work, unfortunately. We removed the thesis submission fee, which helped make things a little bit easier, but it was less satisfying than being able to give a student a bound copy at the end of the process. We provided resources to them to go through a third party vendor, but ultimately it only goes so far. But we had difficulty also with file naming conventions. In the lead up to our outreach, we created extensive guidelines on how to name files and share these with the faculty, thesis advisors that were participating. But sadly, many did not adhere to it. So it took some time to correct files on our part in new validation. Last, we knew ahead of time that these works were going to have some kind of public access down the road. So we needed to request permission from the students in order to make their thesis available in an online thesis repository. So to be clear, this didn't exist yet, but we were thinking ahead. So we were asking permission. We created a separate form for the students, and it took a lot of time actually to outreach it to all the graduating students and checking in with them over email to make sure that they all submitted it. So with the spring 2020 submission behind us, with lots of issues, of course, we were able to dedicate much more time to researching ETD platforms and preparing to make a move. And one of the first things we did was an environmental scan. We reached out to fellow libraries in the consortia and art and design libraries in particular to see how our peers were handling electronic thesis submissions. From Connect New York, the Rochester Institute of Technology was particularly informative for us because they made all of their thesis submission workflow information publicly available. They used ETD admin, and we have at that by that point looked a lot into ETD admin, and we found that RIT's workflow is very intuitive. I personally exchanged emails with a number of their staff asking a few questions, but overall, we found that ETD admin worked really well for them and their documentation made it seem more realistic for us. We also looked at some peer institutions in the art and design space, in particular, RISD and MICA. Both of them had different solutions. RISD had a digital commons form, and MICA had like a self-grown solution. And while we consider these methodologies, we ultimately went with ETD admin. And I'll switch over to Austin to talk a little bit about that procedure. Great, thanks, Nick. So yes, we received the request from Pratt to have a demo of ETD administrator, which we did, and it was one of those demos where sometimes we get a lot of questions, sometimes we get no questions. Boy, the Pratt team peppered us with questions. You really were prepared coming into this and did your homework. So you talked a lot about workflow and asked about how this works and how much the library can be involved versus the graduate stakeholders. And essentially, I think what we got to at the end was you agreed that you were gonna take a look at it and go to the broader community for feedback among the Pratt community. And we were happy to do that. I think we then had a follow-up call to answer additional questions after the fact, but it wasn't too long after that before we received the good news that Pratt was ready to go forward with ETD administrator. So back to you, Nick. Thanks. Yeah, it was a really smooth process. From that point on, we formed a library implementation team with myself, Russ Abel, the library director, Amy Ballmer, the chair of faculty, Johanna Bauman, the head of collection management and Matt Garclops, our eResources librarian. And because of the experience with our G drive, our general philosophy was to change as little as possible about the digital thesis submission process. We wanted to keep the overall breaststrokes the same because it would help mitigate confusion and it would also limit the necessity for making big decisions that could impact department's existing workflows, which we learned from G drive could cause some real strife. So after lots of meetings with the P2D team and doing some testing internally, we had like a sandbox of ETD admin, we decided to launch the system with a few months to spare before our next thesis mission period. And immediately we found out that ETD admin solved a ton of our problems. The tools to communicate with students directly about their thesis and allow revisions made the process of getting a student's thesis where it needed to go so much easier. And while we would occasionally receive a panicky email from a student not being able to resubmit a revision or concern about when they would hear back from us, the bottom line is that with ETD admin, there was no financial risk to the student in terms of printing out costly theses. And if the students made a mistake, it was usually very easy to fix. They didn't have to actually hike their way out to the library only to find out that they were turned down. So the asynchronous communication really made it so much better for us. And being able to assign individual librarians specific theses also made it very easy for us to distribute the work equitably. So as I said before, we had librarians help out in the IRL days managing print submissions. And we did the same thing with ETD admin, but it was a lot smoother because we didn't have to worry about random times of peak submission that we couldn't anticipate. By doing it all asynchronously, we were able to equitably split up the work. In addition, the checklist features with ETD admin in order to prevent error on our end were incredibly helpful. They enabled us to verify specific information before moving a thesis forward to the approval phase. And overall, it just has reduced our propensity for error tremendously. And because there was no restriction to supplemental file size, this really helped out our departments like digital arts submit some of those ginormous 4K video files. Another major improvement for us with better metadata, as I said before, in the print days, our touch with cataloging thesis was fairly light. But because with ETD admin, we're giving the students an option to select their own keywords, to provide an abstract and additional information. This has enabled us to actually get richer records from ProQuest that we can then ingest into our local catalog. So that has been like a huge boon for us. And the ability to have on-demand print copies for students has also been very appreciated. Now, one area that we would like to go in the future is exploring a single sign-on. So Pratt uses Microsoft ADFS and one of the, I don't wanna say a bummer, but one aspect of the user experience is that they have to create an account on ETD admin. And it would be great if in the future we can get this configured with our SSO system so that students can just log in with their existing Pratt One keys and then just submit that way without having to create a separate account. So after we got our initial experience with the platform, we started to put together resources both for our internal staff as well as faculty and students at the institute. So I did things like building video tutorials, walking people through the ETD admin process from beginning to end. We created a whole new suite of thesis submission guides. And again, we looked to RIT as like a leader in this space for us to get inspiration. And then we did a lot of campus-wide outreach, the stuff that you normally do when there's a big change, lots of mass emailing, lots of direct emailing to course faculty that we know are teaching thesis sessions that year or that semester. And then we did a lot of staff training on ETD admin, a lot of checking in with staff to make sure that people felt comfortable. So the real reason potentially you're all here, what did we learn from this whole process? We learned a whole bunch of things, but Lesson One was pretty much that managing approval mechanisms is really hard. ETD admin has some options for setting up thesis committees, but they tend to be pretty universal. And at Pratt, all of our departments have their own different configuration on how a thesis is approved. And so we found out through communication with ProQuest that in order to take advantage of those features, we would need to build multiple sites. We had some concerns that that might be tough on users. Directing people to the right site could be confusing. So we opted to rely a little bit more on our traditional signatures using Adobe Acrobat for digital signing. We very much thought of it as just extending the existing department approval mechanisms into ETD admin. And the checklist verification has helped us sort of manage that process, but it is still tough. And sometimes we do have issues getting theses with the proper signature pages in the same way that we would in the print world. So we're still working on a better solution, but this is where we're at when it comes to approval mechanisms. Another thing that has come up for us that we cared a lot about was protecting signatory privacy. So we knew that if we threw up the theses directly into PQTT, that other academics could see the signatory signature. So we got inspired by RIT and decided to take in the signature pages as a supplemental file as opposed to putting them out there on the broad internet. And this has been a challenge for us to manage just as before with Google Drive. There's been some confusion, but overall it was something that we were very passionate about and it is working for us. And despite going to digital, it still has some restrictions. So one of the main challenges that we've had is we have, we're an art and design school and many artists and designers think that if it's digital then we can make our theses whatever size we want. 300 inches by 500 inches. And it can be including interactive embedded content. And while some of that is possible when you're creating interactive PDFs, when we're publishing to pro-questation patients and theses we're providing the option that someone may choose to print out that theses. And so we put guidelines in to kind of reign in that creativity a little bit and ensure that whatever people submitted had fonts that were appropriate and could actually print out in a regular thesis size. And I think this was a challenge for some of our art and design faculty to get behind. So this is something that we're gonna revisit and think of ways to expand those possibilities without being so rigid but also accounting for the fact that somebody's gonna read this on a screen and somebody's gonna have to print it out eventually. We also learned that managing metadata can be really easy when you solicit the metadata from the students themselves. So just by virtue of the way that BTD admin is set up we get all of this rich metadata. But it has been a challenge to explain to students what subject terms are and how to properly select the subject terms. We've had a lot of meetings and even a video tutorial on it. And we also didn't anticipate that some students or faculty would be worried about having to submit an abstract of theses. So we actually had to meet with a couple of departments to talk about how to factor in writing an abstract because this wasn't a part of that department's usual workflow. And also having them select their own keywords was something that we needed to personally put some time in to developing. So our very last slide, I see we're at 20 minutes. Our future plans are to ingest all of our new ProQuest records into our local catalog and we're in the process of doing that right now. And we also plan on updating our metadata in our pre-2020 feces all the way going back to the founding of the Institute. And so we're actually considering using the ProQuest as kind of a model for us to build off of to make it more consistent. That way, we can build an institutional repository and make them that much more accessible. And so with that at 21 minutes 52 seconds, I'm done. So thank you everybody. And let us know if you have any questions or any answers. Great, I think we're at time. So yeah, so thanks Nick. Loud and clear from this end, things went really well. Yeah, we wish all the universities were as easy to work with as Brad. So you set up by an example. Awesome, thank you, awesome. I just wanted to let you all know that the push through sessions start in just a moment.