 But what we are looking at today are the way in which the events of the past two years appear to have reset expectations around the nature of work and careers. So we wanted to take this opportunity to explore how research libraries can attract and retain highly skilled and talented staff within a hugely competitive and fluid employment market. How in this era of the great resignation and rising employee expectations can research libraries offer a compelling and attractive career track to highly skilled professionals? And how can we incentivize and retain our existing expertise? We'll be talking about how research libraries can navigate rising employee and candidate expectations around flexible working and the ways of mitigating the ongoing talent crunch. This seminar is convened by the International Alliance of Research Library Associations, which is made up of ARL, sorry, in North America, CARL, in Canada, CALL in Australia, Libre in Europe and RUK in the UK and Ireland. We want today to be a very interactive session and we're going to use the format that we have used in previous IR events of the virtual round table. We have a six-segment panelist drawn from across the research library community from the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. But we hope to be joined by you, the members of the audience, during the round table. The session is definitely about conversation, so it won't include formal presentations but will include a series of free-flowing conversations about skills development and sharing between international research libraries. We like to use the dinner party analogy where the only dish is discussion and conversation. So the way we're going to structure this is through three courses. The first course is going to look at talent landscape, what the opportunity and challenges around the current landscape are for research libraries. The second course is looking at what it is that we within research libraries can offer and what we want to achieve as a community. And the third is charting our course, how we can work together as individual institutions and together as communities and international communities to attract and retain colleagues and what is our collective value proposition and how we market that. We have six fantastic panelists who will be contributing to today's discussion and we're going to ask them each in a minute, a minute and a half to quickly introduce themselves as we go through and we will use the order that's on that first slide. So Matthew, if I could ask you to say hello first. Yes, good morning, everyone. I'm Kate Matthew Dames. I am the University Librarian at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. I am also the 61st President of the Association of Research Libraries. Glad to be here. Great to have you, Matthew. Susan. Hello, and it's good. It's morning here in Vancouver, British Columbia. I'm Susan Parker, the University Librarian at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the Vice President of ARL. So I can also answer questions from the Canadian or the US side having worked in both. Great to have everyone here. Thank you. And I should say yes, both of you representing ARL in our conversation today. For Carl, we have Vivian. Good morning, everyone. My name is Vivian Lewis. And I am the University Librarian at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Mac is a mid-sized research-intensive institution. I have the great honour of serving as the President of CARL, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, which is the voice of the 29 larger research libraries in Canada and two national institutions that have been involved in lots of workforce years over workforce issues over my career around competencies and all of that good stuff. And I'm speaking to you actually from a hotel room in Miami where I'm currently at the IATL conference. I'm also an ARL member, so I have also that ability to speak sometimes from both an ARL and CARL perspective. I'm really happy to be here today. That's brilliant. Thank you, Vivian. And from Carl, we have Jill. Hi, thanks, David. And in the language of the traditional owners of where I'm located, Kaya, we're Wondru. Hello and welcome. And I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this budja, this land, the Wajat Nonga people, and pay my greatest respects to Boriat Elders. So my name is Jill Ben. I'm the University Librarian at the University of Western Australia. We're a medium-sized institution, about 25,000 students located in the city of Perth. Like others, I have a great privilege of undertaking a leadership role for the Council of Australian University Librarians, which is the peak body for university libraries in Australia. And I'm the chair. And of course, CALL works closely also with our Teroa, our New Zealand colleagues through Consul. So Kia ora and hello to my CALL and Consul colleagues who are probably for the most part watching the recording, given the time of day they're currently. But it's great to see you all today. Brilliant. Thank you, Jill. For Oro UK, we have Masood. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Masood Kolkar. I'm the University Librarian and Keeper of Brethren Collection at the University of Leeds here in the UK. University of Leeds is a... I would classify it as a large institution within the UK with about 38,000 students and 8,000 staff. I'm also the Vice-Chair of Research Libraries UK and looking forward to today's conversation and learning from fellow panellists, but also from all of you through your comments and through your mentor responses. Great. Thank you, Masood. And our sixth panellist also representing Oro UK is William. Thanks very much, David. And good afternoon, evening, morning to everyone. My name is William Nixon. I'm Assistant Director of Academic Engagement and Digital Library at the University of Glasgow. Glasgow is a large research intensive university here in the UK and one of Scotland's oldest universities. I'm also delighted to represent a couple of Research Library UK's networks. The Associate Directors Network, which I co-chair with Fiona Courage from Sussex and the Oro UK Digital Shift Working Group. Brilliant. Thank you, William. So now that we've introduced our panellist, I step aside for a little while. And for our first course, I hand over, it's a great pleasure to hand over to Susan Haig from Carl, who will guide our conversation. So Susan, over to you. Susan. Are you on mute, Susan? Susan, you're on mute. That's funny. I'm sorry, somebody had to do it, right? It's going to happen more than once, I'm sure. Yes, I wanted to introduce myself. My name is Susan Haig. I'm the Executive Director of Carl. And I would like to begin, as Jill did, with acknowledging that my home, which is where I am today, and the Carl offices are in Ottawa, Canada, which stand on the unceded territory of the Algonquin and Anishinaabe people whose presence here reaches back to time immemorial. My task is to moderate, I guess, the first course of this session today. Very happy to do that. And I will quite possibly be kind of trying to encourage people to hop on because I know it's a bit intimidating initially. So one of the things I thought we might do is just have a quick look at the mentor meter in terms of where people are from and maybe the other first opening questions. So we've got 14 from Canada, I say that first. 11 from the US, two from Australia who are, you know, it's late at night there. Seven from Europe, 22 from the UK. And a couple I saw one go through from Jamaica. I don't know where the other one is, but please do tell us in the chat if somebody hasn't already said that because I didn't notice. So welcome everybody. It's really kind of cool to do this international session today. So the first course is really about the talent landscape and what it means to you, where the problem is, I guess, really, and where the crunch is. So my question to, I'm going to address a couple of the people who are the panelists now who have volunteered to be the leads for this section and then hopefully get the ball rolling. So hopefully people will hop on. What does the talent crunch mean to you? How is it represented? And how is it represented for the research library community? What has been the impact of the great resignation in your context? And initially I'm going to turn it to my colleague Vivian from Canada. Thank you. That's great, Susan, thanks. Thank you so much. I'm really happy to provide a few observations just to get our wonderful dinner conversation going. And for me, the talent crunch really refers to that growing gap between the demand and the supply for skilled labor. And in reality, forecasters have actually been projecting the talent crunch for years before the pandemic. And I actually recall reading a report some years ago that was pulled together by Corn Ferry, very established organizational consultant firm that said that by the year 2030, there would be 85 million vacancies around the world of unfilled positions. So the pandemic really accelerated the talent crunch that was already on its way. But I think really in reflecting that two things are happening. We're facing the great resignation, but as well we're facing the great retirement. And so large numbers of workers have left their positions recently and some are moving to new organizations to get better pay or more flexibility and better benefits. But others have simply left the workforce completely either because they weren't interested in transitioning when we moved work home or they weren't interested in returning to the workplace once we started reopening. So I think those things are in play. And honestly, I feel at least here in Canada, we weren't really as cognizant of it during the early heady days of the pandemic. And in fact, many of us here in Canada, we were delaying filling jobs because in some cases we didn't need the work or we really were uncertain about onboarding staff remotely. And then there was some salary savings that we could accumulate to use for other things that were required during the pandemic. But now that we're reopening, we need to fill these positions and we're discovering that we're in a candidate's market. So it's really quite challenging. So just give you an example. I have about a 100 staff at McMaster and I've had approximately 10 people retire since the pandemic began. So that's about one-tenth of my workforce has retired. That's two to three times the regular rate of retirements for a group of my size. And typically I would have two or three vacancies at any given time during previous years. But for the last several months, we've had as many as 10 active recruitments going on at the same time and that is exhausting. And we're finding that the market for skilled library workers is exceptionally competitive, especially for our IT specialists. So I'm thinking here of computer programmers and sysadmins, they could make way more money if they went and worked for Google or they went and worked for Amazon or one of the internet startups that are actively approaching them. And we allow and are very pleased, we're allowing staff to work as much as three days a week from home ongoing. But for the internet companies, they'll allow you to work 100% from home and that's quite enticing. And we're seeing candidate expectations being exceptionally high. And as one 20-something-year-old candidate said to me recently, it's all about salary. It's all about moving expenses. I'm not that interested in paying for somebody else's dentures and somebody else's orthotics. And frankly, I'm not interested in your pension because I don't think I'm going to stay. So they haven't even arrived and they're telling us that they're not going to stay. I will say situation is not all that bad. Turnover is really wonderful and healthy to organizations. But in closing, I'll say, I can't help but think back to when I started at McMaster 100,000 years ago and how elated I was to join a major research institution. I was on top of the world. I couldn't imagine anything more exciting than working for such an established, stodgy place. And I loved my place. But I'm starting to feel that we just failed to translate that value proposition of working in a research library into something that's actually compelling to the new generation of workers and to retain our talent over time. So I'm going to stop, turn things over to my colleagues, Susan Parker, who I think. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm doing your job, Susan. That's okay, I'm going to say. All right, Susan Parker, I have a perspective that is kind of Canadian, kind of the US. Thanks, Susan and thanks Vivian. That was a terrific introduction and overview perspective and where you landed at the end about the value proposition of working in research libraries is I think where I started to consider this question. And I think that that is something that we all used to take for granted. I too, like you, started working in research libraries 100 million years ago and I have worked in several very large ones including UBC currently where I am. There are two campuses, one of which is growing like topsy and the other has existed for about a hundred years and now has 60,000 students on our main campus. That's a huge change from even 10 years ago where it was maybe about two thirds or less of that size enrollment. So I think that there's a number of things that have happened, which is the research university itself has had a number of transformations over the course of certainly my career but even in the last 10 years if you've joined the profession that recently you will have noticed a great deal of change in the research library community and in our different institutions. And I think that that is part of it. Some of the reasons that people have cited to me in moving up their retirement dates, we had conversations with people about planning their retirement and all of a sudden it's a year and a half sooner or as soon as possible that they can make it work. And those were unexpected conversations of course but the stress of working all together and it's not just universities but there is something about work that's 10 times more stressful for people than it ever used to be. I can remember a very leisurely time that predates email and it's a very different pace. And so I think that the pace of change is a pressure on people and their consideration for choosing to remain in the workforce. I would also say that in my institution during and since the pandemic I have noticed two distinct threads. Staff members who are not librarians leaving because of more options like flexible work hours and remote work options that we don't offer or can't offer. Someone who is doing essentially the same duties in a different job that's now going to offer them 100% remote work and twice the salary that we can. That's on the staff side. That's what I'm seeing here in this piece of Canada. My colleagues in the US, it's something similar. I'm leaving, I'm moving to a cheaper city to live in because I can work remotely 100%. It's not just IT, Vivian, I see your note in the chat. It's interesting because in our support staff it's even administrative type roles. And so that's one challenge. And the other one that we see as I mentioned is moving up retirements and leaving really big holes in our organization which prompts us to consider how to reorganize and how to reorganize the work. It sort of helps to answer the question that many of us have been asking for years, what do we stop doing? Because it's sort of forcing the issue. What can we get done is the new question and then going back to the value proposition of research libraries. The recent Ithaca report that was commissioned by ARL and Carl points very directly to not only the issue of the pace of change that I mentioned, but the need to develop new skills and do re-skilling for the workforce. And the very vital need of research libraries to support the goals of the institution that they're a part of. And demonstrating that value can be part of the value proposition I think that we offer. But it's a different frame than we've used in the past and maybe a useful one as we consider these issues right now. I guess the final thing that I would say is that we need to find a way in that value proposition to ensure that our BIPOC colleagues are comfortable and able to succeed in our organizations. And that is another very big reframe that isn't imperative. So thanks for that. Oh, now, so things have been have been tabled in terms of ideas. And I'm really hoping that perhaps some of the other panelists would like to leave in with a few thoughts on that but we've talked about retirement. We've heard about the difficulty recruiting and retaining all staff admin as well but IT for sure and that that difficulty, this issue of whether it's attractive or not at this point to have a workplace to work on site versus at home full-time. The value proposition in general, are we attractive and can we become more attractive? And I think that's part of what we need to probe here really. So I'm going to see if Jill, Massoud, William, Matthew would like to add anything at this point. And then I would just want to mention to the audience that if somebody would like to leave on that would be lovely. Jill. Thanks Susan and Vivian and Susan for your comments and they really resonate with us I think here in Australia as well. But one observation which is a little bit different I think and perhaps you just haven't mentioned it is we used to see a lot of, we see a lot of immigration into Australia in particular for senior library roles we'll see a lot of international applicants. It has been seen as an attractive destination to work in but I've been on a couple of recruitment panels for senior roles both at UWA and elsewhere and hardly any international candidates have applied and I suspect that there's a risk to that global movement we've seen previously because we've seen that international borders can close very quickly. People can be stranded and separated from families. So I think here in Australia that's going to take some time to pick up again. Very good, thank you. So Massoud and then Matthew. Yeah, thank you, the Susan, Vivian and Susan for that really invigorating start of this conversation. There are a couple of points I noted down but I'll pick up on relocation because Jill just mentioned that. And one thing, in fact, I was speaking with a colleague earlier from within the UK library sector about recruitment for deputy roles and so not even that, but deputy roles and actually all of the applications are now geographically concentrated. So even nationally that relocation is becoming more and more difficult and people are not really keen to move homes and disrupt their lives anymore. And then when you expand it to global that was a completely different story as well. The thing I wanted to pick up on was some time ago I read a book which introduced the notion of rock stars and superstars and how they both benefit an organization. So rock stars are those who are really solid and their stretch goals are more horizontal and superstars are those who are very ambitious and their stretch goals are often vertical. They want to climb up the ladder. And at least here at University of Leeds one thing we've been observing is that especially post pandemic we've had disruption in both of those categories. So typically you'll see more flow of people in the superstars side of things but actually we were doing some analysis recently about succession planning and turned out there are at least 56 staff members out of a workforce of about 250 who have had over 25 years of continuous service here who are near retirement. And there is going to be a big, big gap pretty close to each other that's going to emerge in our workforce for people who've been here for some time who have amazing institutional knowledge and who've really made the library what it is. And that's something that scares me that we've not really fully done the kind of succession planning and the talent management and actually aligning and bringing more people into that fold. And I think that's going to be a really interesting thing for us to all pick up on and start thinking about. And then the last thing I would say about is value proposition. And I think there are two things there that resonate with me. One is your local libraries value proposition. So how important does it look like within the institutional context that you're working in? And then the other one which I think is a much bigger challenge is the library sectors value proposition. How do we bring people from diverse talents and diverse backgrounds into the sector itself because the pipelines at the moment are non-diverse and non-attractive in many of those aspects. Thank you very much, Mr. And I'm going to turn it to Matthew. And then I see that Gerald and Liz have joined the discussion, which is great. I think Gerald, you probably need to turn on your video if that's possible. And then we'd have the full table, which is very exciting. Matthew. Yeah. So I'm actually going to take the baton from Masoud and I'll talk about sort of value proposition and just in following some of the chat and then some of the opening statements by both Susan and Givy and I was struck by one of the things that stuck out to me was sort of the emphasis on increased compensation. And that's a little bit of a sticky one for me just because I think historically if you want to look at sort of the higher education sector which is part of the nonprofit sector, part of the value proposition of going into this field was somewhat of a trade-off. You would not get the extremely high pay but you would also not get the extremely high stress associated with the private sector. And so the conversations about compensation bring to mind for me a couple of different things. That value proposition and that trade-off seems to really have gotten out of whack during COVID. I think everybody on this screen, everybody attending has had significantly higher levels of stress over the last two to three years. And I think that may be one of the things that people are coming to when they look at next jobs or next opportunities and higher compensation. I think on the issue of compensation, however, we I think need to take a little bit of responsibility for not holding up our end of that trade-off traditionally. What I mean by that is that while there is a trade-off between slightly lower compensation for lower stress, too many of our organizations have essentially said something along the line, well, since you're here for the mission, we're not gonna pay you equitably. And that is coming back to bite us all right now. And so I think at the root of this is a level of mistrust, even distrust in terms of how the profession has presented this value proposition, especially as it relates to compensation. I think one of the things that we do need to address going forward is how we're going to address that post-pandemic or even in an endemic environment. Thank you very much, Matthew. I see that Jane has raised a question in the chat. I just want to mention it now in case she'd like to come on in case there are two people that have joined the table would like to comment on it or have other comments is fine. Her question is very interesting to hear from others struggling with recruitment from people outside the local area. Is this also an opportunity for us to engage more effectively with our local communities and support more diversity by making an effort to better support and reflect local communities within our workforce? Very interesting and very important question, I think. But at this point, I would like to ask, I think, I'm not sure who came on first, to be honest, but I think this will turn to you if that's all right. And thank you for joining the table. Thank you very much, Susan. I was going to come in a little like Matthew was around the stress levels piece. I think what the pandemic has done is make people question what they value in the workplace and can I use the word sacrifices they're prepared to make for their work and their careers. So I think we do need to do quite a big piece of resetting with our existing staff and hopefully we'll stop kind of hemorrhaging of staff by doing that. But by having a radical rethink about what our employees would like their workplace to look like, the kind of levels of engagement they want with it, how they do it, I think would lead both to retention but also possibly better recruitment. But I do think it really is a systematic root and branch re-evaluation of what it means to work in this profession, what the offer really is. And I pick up massive words about value proposition. I think that the description of mission, it's very sound there. So I think as a re-engaging with communities and the workforce about what it means to work in libraries, archives, museums, galleries, let's broaden this out a bit. And how we make it the best workplace to be within our institutions for us to push our institutions to increase the boundaries of what is reward for professional staff. What does that look like? What does progression look like? How do we develop that? So again, just picking up on the idea of absolutely engaging with our local communities to understand how we move them into our workforce. And then by judicious use of training, apprenticeships, taking those opportunities up that we particularly have in the UK, how we grow people within our institution. So just a few ideas there from the perspective here in Durham. Thank you very much. And now I'd like to ask Gerald to speak. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Susan, and it's great to hear everybody. So such an interesting conversation and so many good comments already. I just wanted to add what I think of as one rather negative and one rather positive point to the good points that have already been made. The negative one I think is that I don't see the value proposition really continuing to reflect the values of especially technical services staff, I find. Traditional staff. People who've been with us for many, many years doing good jobs, doing really effective work, perhaps not as visible as they feel they ought to be. And I'm pleased that we're having conversations, but I do think in terms of resignation, the conversations should also be with people who've been just doing a good job for many years. And sometimes they are not getting the attention, I believe, that they deserve. So that's a little bit of a negative point. On the positive side, I would totally agree that a major challenge is in the IT sector. But in my experience, most people are leaving to take up fairly adjacent roles. That is to say, ones that are either supportive of academic libraries directly or indirectly, they are using the skills they have acquired, especially around data in academic libraries and taking them to private startups or private enterprises that maybe have a little bit more in the way of being nimble. I'm not sure that that's a really bad thing. Given that we are probably gonna be continuing to be limited in terms of salary and other things that we can offer, I've decided that actually it's okay. It's kind of private enterprise saying, yeah, we really value what academic librarians have been doing and what they've been learning. And I do feel that we should relax a little bit on this front and say, okay, we kind of accept that those skills that we value highly are also valued highly outside this domain. And so we reorient our talent drive towards an expectation that there will be a higher turnover, especially in IT. Those are my comments, thank you. No, it shouldn't come as a surprise to us really that IT is more fluid and more moving. I see that Matthew would like to say and Vivian as well. So let's go to Matthew. Vivian actually had her hand up first, we're all together. I'm sorry, okay. So because over enthusiastic hand up and down, so sorry. I just wanted to agree wholeheartedly with what Gerald has just said. I've sort of come to the realization over the last few years that the new generation of workers that are entering our workplace, they have a different notion about longevity. They don't come to the workplace in the same way that I did and I'm sure many of the folks on this panel did, assuming that you were going to stay there a bit of time when you look at the data, most millennial workers stay less than two years in there and that's a good thing. So we have to get over this notion of feeling somehow hurt. We shouldn't feel hurt when good people leave the organization, it is just the way. I also wanted to, if I saw some great comments in the chat around the superstars and how we can't focus so much attention as we tend to during crises on the superstars, those individuals, the bright shiny objects in our organization that get all of the attention. Because in doing so, we disenfranchise our long-serving staff who are in many cases keeping the operations running. And if those individuals, when they leave the organization, you lose all that institutional memory, that is probably the greatest concern. That said, when they're retiring, they retire so happily and I think that's the other thing. The 10 people that retired from my institution are the happiest people I know. And so we have to be happy for them. They've made wonderful decisions for their lives. They've disappointed us organizationally, but it's the best thing for them. Thank you. Thank you Vivian. And we're coming towards the end of this section, I think, but I'd like to open it to Matthew and then to Susan and then we'll have a quick look at Mentimeter. Matthew. Yeah, so I wanted to sort of pose a question to the panel because a lot of the, at least with my organization and similarly situated organizations within ARL, there are conversations about what are we gonna do specifically with technology talent. And particularly given that the pay scales and the working arrangements are maybe at odds with cultural norms or so on and so forth within the organization. I guess the question I wanna pose is, do you know of institutions or do you have or in your own institutions that are seriously considering doing a way with a technology function such that most of it is outsourced either to your local IT within the same organization or to contractors? Because I think that is something that quite frankly we have talked about, we're not there yet, but given the way the market has shifted and it may not shift back anytime soon, I think that's something that quite frankly needs some consideration. And I just wanted to know if there are others that are thinking that way. And I think if people maybe would respond to that in the chat, that would be good. It's a thread that I'm sure will come back actually with this question. So Susan. Thanks, Susan. I just wanted to add, Matthew, your earlier comment is resonating with me while the mission of universities once was an attraction for many of us, that's entirely the case. And the environment was formerly seen as really an added value to being in that kind of workplace. But the increasing corporatization of universities is cited to be over and over as a reason for leaving, both here in Canada and also at institutions where I work in the US. And specifically neoliberal values and many administrative tasks that our universities conflict with the traditional values of our field. And we also have this conversation with many faculty colleagues. So I think about that as well as another really big, it's a clash, I guess is what I would say. And it's definitely something that people cite to me. Very interesting. Now, I'm conscious of the time when I realized that this is just the first course and we need to pass it on to the second course. I would like to ask that we share the mentor meter part for this, some of the observations that were made in this. So, and you can see that some of the points are very much the same technology, difficult to attract and retain the diversification that we need and can be hard to find. It can be hard to keep lots of ideas here. It's, I think I'm not able to see all of it either, but we're just quickly just showing you and this is something that we will be able to provide back as well. This is sort of content that we will be able to draw on and report back to everybody on. I would like to thank Liz and Gerald for joining the table. I think you end up going back now to your seat and I pass the baton over to my colleague, Mary Lee Kennedy, who will orchestrate the second part of the table. So thank you very much everyone. Bye. Good morning from Washington DC. I come to you from the land of the unceded and traditional land of the Nakachunk people, the Nakachunk were the original stewards, as well as many indigenous communities from the past and present. And at this point there's roughly 4,000 indigenous people living in present-day Washington DC. Additionally, many of the structures and institutions of the District of Columbia were built by enslaved laborers. And so I also want to share that the ARL is committed to deliberately and intentionally countering racist and oppressive systems that dehumanize communities of color and create well-documented disparities to every structure of our society. It is my pleasure today to talk to you about this second course, which is making our offer. And we have a couple of panelists will kick us off with the questions that we have. And so William and Jill, are you ready? Okay. So our first question is, how can we position research libraries with our organizations to attract the best talent in a competitive marketplace? William, would you like to start? I think actually I'm going to start, Mary-Lee. Okay, Jill, please start. Thank you. Great. So thanks, Mary-Lee. And I'm going to just extend the question slightly because for me, this isn't just about attracting, it's also about retaining and growing. So I'm going to answer the question in that context, retaining, growing and attracting the best talent. So obviously this is going to be critical to our future. It is really probably, maybe we don't quite see it yet, but I think it is a crisis coming and Vivienne, those statistics around the number of vacancies are just astounding. And I think that there's some challenges here and we have to recognize we are largely organizations within broader organizations. And that comes with pros and cons. Our research university is still an attractive proposition for many. We do solve the world's greatest challenges. We grow the next generation of bright minds and leaders. But at the same time, as Vivienne I think articulated, that isn't enough. So that's really my first point, that our strong brand that we've relied upon until now just isn't enough. And Vivienne talked about her love for Master when she started her career and I certainly had that same feeling when I worked at UWA, but that's not what I'm seeing from our new generations coming in. So relying on our reputation as research library alone is not enough. And for me, I think the most critical thing is paying much more attention to workplace culture and staff engagement. Now I'm not sure if it's like this everywhere else, but in Australia at least, we've had this really strong mantra of improving the student experience. Being talked about a lot with us about student success, student retention, student belonging, student wellbeing. And I really think that to attract the best talent and to also retain and grow our talent, that exact same strategic focus has to be applied to the staff experience. And we can almost substitute student for staff with all of these staff success, staff retention, staff belonging, staff wellbeing. And we need to have employee engagement strategies that cover off on those things and that they're a developing collaboration with staff because that's the only way that we're gonna be able to set ourselves up to really retain, grow and attract the best talent. The second thing I wanted to mention, and this has already been picked up on a little bit already, so I'll be really brief, but flexibility, wellbeing, and diversity, equity and inclusion strategies are just non-negotiable factors now if we wanna retain, attract and grow the best talent. We have, our brand has to be, and our value proposition has to be based on inclusive and flexible workplaces. You know, workplaces where staff have fun, they feel empowered, they feel that they belong there, less formal spaces where staff feel comfortable to be themselves. And it's essential we go way beyond some of the hybrid and flexible ways of working that have accelerated during COVID. And I guess then the third thing that I wanted to say is that to achieve all of this, we're gonna need innovation. We're gonna need courage to try new things. We're gonna need trust at lots of levels and really strong leadership. And I just thought I'd mentioned a couple of really innovative things that I'm starting to see, and one is a kind of international example, one's quite local. So we're starting to see this four-day working week being trialled. There's a major pilot being undertaken globally and about 20 quite large organisations are participating in that in Australia. And participants essentially work one day less a week with no alteration to their salary. They have a very outcomes oriented approach to their work. And this is showing huge improvements to quality of life and staff satisfaction. So while we might be quite constrained on the salary question, I think there are other things that we can offer. And the other one, I just wanted to really mention this because I just thought this was so timely and interesting. So Monash University Library, a big research intensive university in Melbourne have had such challenges recruiting that they thought they'd try something different. They had a recruitment booth in the exhibition hall during a major Australian library conference last month. And I'm told by the university librarian Bob Garrity that there was lots of interest and a few really good leads from doing that. So we're just gonna have to think of new ways of operating differently, I think. Thank you so much, Jill. I think this idea of being innovative and looking at alternative solutions with our staff, with the staff and with the organization is just wonderful. So, William, over to you. Thanks very much, Mary Lee. Thanks so much, Jill. So hopefully I'll be able to sort of compliment elements of that. I was going to draw on a couple of different elements which I think sort of tie into some of the digital workplace strategy and development which we have. And I think I completely agree with Jill sort of reframing our questions slightly around both attracting new staff but also some of the challenges in kind of the retaining our staff, how we can look at making sure that they are kind of sort of up-skilled. And I think another component around that and one of the challenges which we have is how can we best sort of really effectively blend some of the step changes that we have seen in the ways of working, the ways in which we have supported staff, the ways in which we've delivered services during the pandemic so that we don't necessarily and I don't think it seems certainly at our institution we are not rolling back in that way to sort of what could be considered the pre-pandemic sort of norms. Now that can cover everything from sort of flexible working hybrid. Some of the changes which are already kind of going on there, the assumption of doing more traditional nine to five and you will only do it on campus type activities. So I think one of the challenges that we have organizationally is sort of where we blend that. But I just wanted to say a couple of things too about the workplace development strategy because it actually leans into these two complementary strands both of recruiting new staff but also how we retain staff. And it's intended to really provide, so we're working to develop a digital skills framework that has a number of key actions which I just wanted to bring to the table for our course. One again, recognizing that the library that our communities require the diverse skills and a more diverse workforce across sort of library services something that we really need to work more at. That flexibility and agility become actually much more embedded. They're not add-ons. These are core parts of people's roles which they are now expecting. And this leans very much into research libraries, UK's digital shift, manifesto. But also how we actually start to commit that change to making that practical paradigm shift to embed the digital skills and some of those, both with our current workforces and our practices and looking at how we balance some of those core competencies. Again, that innovation piece as well, there are, we can't continue to work at the scale and the level that we were working for if we're really going to make some of these seismic shifts that have been wrought by the great retirement and the great kind of resignation. And how we can actually support and empower our staff, give them ownership. And I like Jill's kind of comments all there. Fun in the workplace, how we can further kind of empower staff around those. The other element that I wanted to just throw into the mix is absolutely the library sits within part of that broader organization. We've been very fortunate at Glasgow. We work with the Digital Curations Center in Edinburgh and in terms of some of our kind of value proposition, we were able to appoint a research data specialist during the pandemic, which was a very interesting piece because it's a wholly remote member of staff who is actually still based in Canada. So there were some interesting challenges and some interesting working in partnership with the funding from the Digital Curations Center to enable them to be employed by the University of Glasgow. And it's been incredibly valuable. It's been incredibly successful, but it has, you know, I think in terms of recruitment, it was not without challenges, but being able to, you know, for the right candidate, being able to reach out beyond our local community has been incredibly valuable. So those were what I just wanted to throw into the mix. Thank you very much, William. I really like this idea that you're positing about collaboration and digital skills and using that as a way to attract candidates that we may not otherwise have access to. It does, just before we jump to the rest of the panel, I just would like to highlight that one of the questions that does come up in the chat, which is related to this is, is this strategy of attracting candidates to position the library in a competition role against other parts of the university's in which we function? And do we want to position the library as central to the university group group new staff rather than in a competitive framework? And I'm just wondering if Jill or William would like to respond to that before I open it up to the rest of the panelists. Yeah, just a whole hand, Lee. Yes, I think that that is really core for library staff and their value. They want to feel valued by their broader university and there's been so many examples of that during COVID. I think libraries had a really good opportunity to show their value on campuses and we just need to really extend that benefit. So yeah, I don't really see necessarily this being about competing with other parts of the university necessarily. Yeah, I would concur with that. I see it much more reflecting kind of daddy's comment about the beating heart of the university. I think libraries, library staff, they have been, in many cases, it's been commented in the chat, that the staff who have been the superstars working in the front line as well for us enabling us to keep our buildings open, the degree of visibility, the degree of impact which has sort of leaned into the student experience, I think has been absolutely critical and I think has also helped to further kind of highlight the critical nature of the library as that beating heart of the institution. Thank you. So now I'll invite the other panelists, Vivian, Matthew, Susan, Masoud to join and I see that Vivian has her hand up. So Vivian, would you like to contribute to this? Yeah, I want to say one thing, and maybe this is more specific to my own situation, but I think at least for much of Canada, we have this sense that the library is part of the university, that it is one employer. And so some of the difficulty that we sometimes have is abiding by the broader university policies and practices that in some cases are not moving as quickly as we would like. So I would say that actually just this week, we have released the official policy at my institution for working from home. We've been working from home for a long time, but in terms of the official policies and the latest thinking and the future, it's that's a long wait. But reflecting on this piece around competition, I think competition can be our downfall sometimes. And that I've found more success on my campus, at least collaborating with my IT colleagues than really competing with them. In fact, I've found one of the strategies for getting some of these IT hires out is to actually be doing joint hires with the Office of Research, joint hires with Central IT and actually engaging them in some of the wooing so that we're demonstrating, A, that we're good partners and this job is part of something bigger and finding that sometimes with some candidates is the winning thing. So we are the heart of the university and all of that, but we're part of something bigger and that can be good too. Thank you. Susan. I think Massoud's hand is up before mine. Oh, I'm sorry, Massoud. Please go ahead. I think I just wanted to build on the point that we've been mentioned about collaboration, but I also wanted to probably say something which might create some controversy. So the pandemic has been a really positive thing for libraries to reposition themselves within the institution, recognizing all the horrible things that came with it, but it's allowed us to reposition ourselves differently. But there's also a danger in that repositioning that we've repositioned ourselves as just a student experience entity or just as a physical estate entity. And my worry quite often is that the kind of skills we need or where the skills gap are may not actually have to do with anything with physical estate. They are primarily in technical, specialized, very niche skills. We've had problems recruiting conservators, research data people, not particularly IT focused, but specialist skills. And those things can be easily forgotten if you reposition yourself in a single mode. And while that's from an opportunity viewpoint and important thing to do, I think we really need to change the way we value proposition the library as a core entity to every part of the institutional strategy. And that's not easy, but it's absolutely necessary in my view. So I don't know how people feel, but I think we sometimes go into that cycle of we've done a great job, let's keep celebrating that. And absolutely we should celebrate that, but that's not the only job we do. There is a lot more that's happening in the background as well. Thank you, Mr. Susee. A lot of nodding heads and agreement. And I think the study that we've just completed with Carl actually speaks to that as well. Susan. Yes, thanks Mary-Lee. Yeah, I would definitely agree with you, Masoud. I think that one of the strategies that I seized upon at my institution early on in the pandemic was the institution's declaration urgently that we could not remain closed as a physical space for very long in the name of continuing research and not losing our research pace at all. And so in that sense, the library then became an important feature in the continuity of research. They started by saying, we don't need you in the conversation right now library until we're ready for you to be a study hall for students. And I said, but you are talking about the research enterprise and you're talking about the vital need to keep the enterprise going. And that is where the library became centered instead of just this one place where they were thinking about the student experience. And so I think that there are multiple tracks right now. And Masoud, I very much like your observation that it needs to be holistic. It really does need to be at the center. It's so funny for decades, a hundred years ago when I was getting my library credential, the library is the heart of the university. And then there was a long period of time in the 80s and 90s when that was seen as not a great thing to say or kind of an insipid thing to say. But in fact, the library and certain laboratories are the only places that were functioning fully or even partially on campus during the pandemic. And I think that the fact that the library was able to supply resources remotely, supply solutions remotely and then in person and quickly is the key to demonstrating that and to continue to be a very squeaky wheel about it is really what's necessary as we quote unquote return from the pandemic, we're never going to return. The pandemic is like any other kind of disaster. And from a disaster, it all has to change. And so even though it looks a lot the same to people and our institutions are using the same processes and the same kinds of attitudes toward return, we can see that we need to influence that change. Yeah, we're talking Vivian about, oh, we might continue our remote working program for staff for another year. That is the slowest lane I can possibly imagine us being in and I'm going to have to completely violate many of the university's policies in order to retain some people. And that's what's going to start happening. We're all going to start to go rogue in really interesting ways. Maybe I'll just leave it at that. So we've had a very, very active discussion and we've got to one of our questions. So in order to continue this conversation, I just wanted to see if there was anyone who wanted to join the table. And if so, we will invite you up. So I see Gerald, can you see? Okay, Gerald, would you like to weigh in on this? There's a motion of rogue librarians. I don't know if you've seen this in the chat. Yeah, thank you, Merrily. I do, and I was going to address particularly the image problem that did come up in the chat, something about librarians having an image problem and also relating that a little bit to what Massoud was saying about the pandemic and the opportunities that that provided. I think Susan as well mentioned, my own view is that academic libraries did an outstanding job of providing continuity of learning for their communities. But just to put a, sorry to throw a wrench in or a more negative point, I think we missed an opportunity in the pandemic. There was a huge thirst amongst especially unaffiliated groups, the public in general for good information, good solid information. And we hadn't done enough work on intellectual property and copyright and other things that are hindering us from sharing good information with general populations. And I do feel that we had a real opportunity there. And to be honest, I think we rather missed it as a community, maybe individually, we did well. But I noticed, for example, that if in the library, I work at Cornell, we did a webinar, we suddenly got hundreds of people joining us. It was wonderful, it was great. None of them were connected to the university as far as I could tell or very few. And so there was a real thirst identified amongst unaffiliated more general populations for good information coming out of academic libraries. I'm not sure we really met that. And I'm not sure we really took the opportunity to change our image. So that was my comment, thank you. So in the interest of time, I do invite all of you to please look into the chat. There's actually a lively conversation going on in the chat related to certification and degree requirements as well as this notion of rogue librarians and library retention and other types of ways attracting people to the field. So I do hope you will take a look at that. At this moment, I would just, I think the Mentimeter has also been very active. So if we could just show the results of the Mentimeter, I think we'd appreciate seeing that. And again, we will share this more broadly later on. So let's take a quick look. How can we position research libraries within our organizations to attract the best talent? Focusing more explicitly on the potential to support sustainable development. Hybrid and remote work has certainly come up including a really designing inclusive and empowering work environments with our colleagues and our teams, increased budgets and our automate and or diversify revenue streams. Let's see what else we have here. I think we've got some comments here about this tension that we're seeing between salary and flexibility in the workplace. And again, the conversation we've had about being an institution, an organization within an institution where HR practices may not align or even values may not align amongst us. Can we go to the second question since we didn't have much time to look at that. What are the hallmarks or value proposition as our offer as research libraries? We did talk a little bit about the changes but this speaks more directly to what the value proposition would be. So we have the public good, supporting researchers, non-formal ways of learning. I think this will be an important one for us to reflect back on as we think about our individual but also our collective work as associations. And if we go to the last and third question that would be great. Thank you. So here's some feedback on what managers are trying to achieve and from employees on what they would like from their employers. I think some of these stand out just the way I'm seeing them now, of course, there's many, but see multi-skilled employees can be willing to learn new things, to be involved in everything. Feeling a belonging and value which speaks directly to the conversation we've had earlier. Achieving institutional and organization strategic goals while empowering them to advance them with work, life balance, I think that also resonates with what we said before. And for managers, we want to provide a safe and welcoming culture for all and reward good work with adequate compensation. So I think there's a rich collection of information to review at the appropriate time. So thank you so much to the panelists and the community for your feedback today. And at this point, I'm gonna hand it back to Susan. I think you may be handing it to me. Oh, sorry, David. That's okay, that's fine. Thank you, David. That's fine. Poor Susan may have had a slight panic and then if she thought she was taking over. Now, I'm going to look after this third course. I'm really fascinated with discussion. I think the issues of those tensions there between the possibility of remote working widening the potential talent pool when William gave us a fabulous example, they're being countered by the stories that you're telling us about the candidates for positions becoming much more local and more parochial, almost. There's an interesting tension there. There's also that question of, is there a tension between the library values and policies and institutions, libraries, the institutions values and policies? Are they intention? Are they aligning? How does that work? I think that's really fascinating. But for this third course, we're looking at something that we're building on, I think what we just talked about towards the end there in the last session, about positioning ourselves as a sector, as an attractive place to work. And we picked up on some of that, I think with the discussion also in sort of the Mentimeter answers. And then also looking to the future, perhaps, and thinking about what some of the collective opportunities are that we can advocate together, what some of the shared experiences are and what tactics we might bear to apply in the future. Matthew and Masoud have volunteered to lead this discussion. I'm not, poor chairing means that I don't know if there's an order in which, but the order I have them written down in, is Matthew first, is that okay, Raheba? That works for me. Okay. Matthew. Masoud, any, all right. Get the thumbs up on Masoud, all right. So at the risk of breaking our code of being genteel, I'm gonna throw something out here. The one question is, how can we position ourselves as a sector, as an attractive place to work? And I'm looking at the chat, and the chat's already sort of, it's already been where I was going with this, so I'll throw it out there. Can we talk about library schools for a minute? At least in ARL. We on the board, on the ARL board, have had this conversation. It's been increasingly robust about, for the last, I say six months or so. I've had this conversation with a number of people. And full disclosure, I have a library science degree, but I'm increasingly wondering what the role of the library science degree is within the current profession and the future of the profession. And that's not to say that I don't think that it is, it has no value. I think there is a value to a, to a cultivation and I think that value, a cultivation value is important. I am now in Indiana, but my prior employer was in Boston and we were right next to Simmons University, which is one of the leading programs in the New England region of the United States. And I had dialogues with the director of the MLS program, very, you know, very good, strong dialogues. And I said to her, I said, there's nothing, except for your archival program. The Simmons has a very good archival program, except for that particular focal point. You're not teaching anything to your students that I can use as an employer, right? I assume that once they get out, we're gonna have to train them from scratch, virtually everything. That's a problem. Another problem I think is just the economics, at least in the United States, particularly if you're going to a private school, a non-public school, it is likely that one year of tuition and it typically takes two years, two years to do a US library science degree. One year of tuition may exceed your first year salary. That is a problem. If we're talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, I mean, look, if cash rules are almost everything, that's a problem. And so, you know, one of the things that, and look, again, full disclosure, I have a library science degree, I work at an institution that requires library science degree for librarian positions. That's not gonna change if the University of Notre Dame may become so. However, if we are looking at the, positioning ourselves as a sector, if we're looking at diversity, equity and inclusion, and we're looking at the utility of the library science degree, in many ways, it's prohibitive expense at a time where, at least in the United States, we're talking about the impact of student violence. And we're talking about the folks who actually go into those programs. That, if I had to pick one thing to really start to look at, I think that would be the one. In the interest of time, and out of respect for Masoud, I have other things to say, but I will yield to him and let him get on the microphone. Thank you. We may circle back to some of those other issues, Masoud. Yeah, I'll share my thoughts, but before that, let me just pick up on the point about the necessity of a degree, and I'll be brief. I think, firstly, on that criteria, we'll never get a librarianship role in Notre Dame, because I, firstly, don't have a librarianship degree. But having said that, I think quite often, the fear is that that reduces salaries of people, or it undermines the value of the role. And I often ask, does that happen in IT? Because I know a huge number of people who are from physics backgrounds, from chemistry backgrounds, from completely different backgrounds working in IT. And I think what we need to really focus on is salaries should be paid against the role, not against the qualifications that you have. If you're doing the job, you should be paid and compensated for that job. And that's something that hasn't fully transcended into institutional mindsets, et cetera, and that's something you need to work on. So reverting back to the question or the provocation you made, David, I wrote five areas I think we can think of things differently, and I'll take a minute to just go through them. I think the first is self-confidence, and I do see this quite a bit. What do I mean by that? We are, we talk about our own value, but we actually talk about our own value usually within our own circles. And I think we need to have that self-confidence to expand those circles across where that confidence needs to be shown. So our institutional positioning, our sector positioning, our political positioning within the government agendas and everything else. And we do that, but I think we can do more. That's the first thing I would say. Picking up on multiple points that were made on culture, I think we absolutely need to shift the culture and I think Jill, you were mentioning that. We really need to think about staff experience in the same way we think about student experience. We need to be more innovative. We need to really promote life as a place where innovation can happen, where experimentation can happen, where exciting things happen. And I think that's something we need to really focus on and reduce the fear of failure and change. Institutions typically are long time turning organizations. They don't usually do change quickly. So how can we become the kind of testbed of innovation and excited people to join us in that? Inclusivity, I think we need to be a place for all, but we also need to be a place where people belong. Hiring someone is not great if you can't retain them. If they feel like an alien person in that organization. So we really need to focus on inclusivity throughout staff experience in their journey. Case studies and pipeline. I won't say any more on that because Matt picked up on that point really well about what's our pipeline, what our life is through string and actually I think I saw a comment from Emma about apprenticeship degrees and other mechanisms. I think we really need to think about diversification of pipelines. And then the last one I would say is marketing. Quite often we think of marketing as a dirty word. It's an essential need. And actually really need to start marketing ourselves more effectively, both embedded marketing through everything we do within the institution but explicit marketing beyond the institution as well and be confident about that as well. Those are some of my initial thoughts on what can we do differently, both individually but more importantly as a collective to start changing the perception of why libraries matter. Thank you both. That's a really powerful set of comments. Just on that question of self-confidence. It's one of the reasons when we formulated the last iteration of the ROUK strategy, we deliberately included in their statement a very high level statement about the fact that you can't do research if there aren't libraries. It's impossible. Let's not be a different about this. Let's not hide our light. If you want to do research, if you want to be a research library, if you want to be a research intensive university, you need a really good research library with people who know what they're doing within it. Can I open up the, oh, sorry. Sorry. Can I just go back to Masoud's last comment on the marketing piece? Because I think that's vitally important. We don't, as a professional, at least in all of my experiences in the United States, we don't market ourselves in our field well at all. My own parents have said to me, what are you working on at work and take any, take a construction project. So we're building a brand new reading room and talking about contractors and just that. Oh, you do that? Yeah. I saw in the chat something about, sort of virtual immersion, VR, AR worlds and things like that, building those types of studios. Oh, you do that? Yes, we do that. There are a whole set of activities that we have grown into, services that we provide, not only to our native academic communities, but broader communities, that are astounding enough that people literally would say, I did not know that you did that. But part of the reason that they don't know that we do these things is because we don't tell them that we do these things. And it is, I think, a problem because one of the things when people are looking at careers, they're looking at opportunities where they could see themselves in that role. Yes, there is a representation aspect to that. Another part of that, however, is, oh, this would be cool for me to do. I think I might be interested in working on these types of projects. And we need to do a much better job of sort of talking about the wonders of and the opportunities within a library. Over here, yes, certainly. Let me open up to comments from other members of the panel and remind audience members that if you want to step up to the table, then please do put your hand up and we can bring you into the conversation. But for the moment, some reactions or other thoughts from our panelist, William. So I was just actually going to wholly agree with Masood around both the sort of qualifications and the role. And I come to that from the perspective of having a library degree, but quite a long time ago and now when I actually had it. But yeah, when you look at the range of skills and roles and services, and there's been some quite lively discussion in the chat around where that sits. And I think there is a question around how much of that is, this is perhaps leaning into kind of Matthew's point and perhaps a bit heretical. How much of that is potentially a tick box exercise for the role in the library versus the skills and the expertise which that brings to us. And I do believe having come through a library school, yes, there's absolutely sort of value and a pipeline there. But I think there's a real diversity of skills and talents, which the library really needs to further capitalize and build on to really support that sort of mission. As you commented, David, around supporting the research intensive university. Thanks, William, yes. I mean, one of those things, I think one of the interesting areas of, again, of tension there, and we've seen this in the UK, where we work with one of our major funders, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, on two, it's a very different areas. One is to try and ensure that research funding is available to members of library staff. So those experts, especially in special collections, who know more about the collections and the subjects than most academics are able to get research funding. So we're trying to position librarians and library staff as bona fide researchers. But then at the other side of things, there's something in the UK called the technicians commitment, which is looking at those people who support research. It started in the sciences and people within those fields, but also looking at what roles within the library are akin to technicians. And we don't tend to use the word technicians for people who work within the library, but there's that sort of range, that spectrum of people who have deep skills within digitisation, and you might think of that as a technician role, all the way through to people who can hold their role in conversations with professors about the minutiae of ancient texts. And it's that vast range and that spectrum of activities and skills that are within the library, which I think is really interesting and perhaps is not being reflected outside of the library. And then if you add in all those things, like becoming an expert in construction of new buildings as well, it's a huge range of activity. Do any of our other panellists have some comments? Thank you, Jill. Thanks, David. I think this is, it's really a question back to Masouda and Matthew because I totally agree on the marketing question. And it might be cultural, but it's not easy to do within Australian institutions to kind of blow your own trumpet. You have to kind of find the right message and there's a real within, especially within my university currently, there's a real move away from management speak and spin, you know, just say it how it is. So I guess I'm interested in your views on that and overcoming it and whether this is just a cultural issue for us and not elsewhere, but also what we could be doing collectively as research library associations on the marketing question, are there things we could be doing together to address that issue? Matthew and Masoud, do either of you like to come back on that? Matthew, do you want to go first? I went first last time, I'll be glad to follow you this time. Okay, I'll be quite brief. I think that's not just an Australian thing. Jill, I can assure you of that. Quite often the cultural norms are we do a good job. We should be pleased about it. We shouldn't really blow our own trumpet on that regard. And I can understand that. I think one of our values is usually we are here for our users and therefore that humbleness and that kind of approach comes with that. And I'm not suggesting that one thing actually should undermine the other. We can retain that while also repositioning some of our influence and some of our emphasis across the institution. And I think that's the area where we don't pay the same level of attention. I think that report that came from Aira and Karl was really interesting about how to be realign our institutional language to the organizational strategy. And we all want to do that. We all try to do that. But I think we often say that we'll support you in other activities. We don't often say we will lead in some of these activities. And is that change of tone and stance that that will change us from being a kind of a support entity to a partner entity to a leadership entity to a critical institutional partner in delivery of its strategy entity. So I think it's not necessarily radical changes but it's about repositioning on that note. Like you'll take it. Yeah, to follow up on that, we at Notre Dame were in the second phase of our strategic priorities process. And I refused. The only thing that I sort of put my foot down on is I refused to have anywhere in our statements the word support. The reason why I refused to have the support is not that I'm ashamed of supporting but I knew how we did interpret it. And one of the ways it would get interpreted by a lot of stakeholders, a lot of audiences would be as less than or subliminal. And one of the words that we used to that sort of point is we used advanced a lot or some version of advanced. With respect to sort of the associations represented on this symposium, this forum, one of the opportunities that I see for us is thinking about ways in which we can have or further articulate and promote case studies about how we advance various things in our respective institutions or just research at large. I know that many of us have been doing this already and certainly on the IOLA calls we talk about these sorts of things. But I do think that there is an opportunity for there to be a sort of worldwide campaign if you will about how librarianship advances human endeavors, research endeavors, so on and so forth. I'd be very interested in sort of working through on that for the broad benefit of the entire profession. We have a couple of hands, I think Vivian, you were first. Yeah, and I'll be very, very quick, David. I was just going to say that humility is overrated and often self-defeating and yet we pride ourselves in it all the time. And I feel that the greatest risk, the biggest thing that we could do that would harm our case is to take a traditional approach to describing ourselves and write a 150-page report, excruciating detail but really well-referenced and that's not actually going to move the dial and that if we're trying to convey a message to AR, the new recruits, the people that we're trying to attract to the profession, we have to use the words and the and the formats that actually reach them and it's probably not us that is the best creator of that. It needs to be cooler than we are, but I'll be quiet. Well, I've always considered myself extremely cool but maybe no one knows. As I have as well and my son convinces me that I'm not necessarily as cool as I think. Susan. Thanks, David. I don't think I've ever been cool but it's nice to aspire to something. I think that that's a good goal. I wanted to say something about talking about the different skills that are necessary in libraries. And for those of you, especially in Canada who and Australia who may be familiar with the Uniform tool that many of our institutions are using, a word of caution and perhaps opportunity which is when your university comes to look at the skills that are being applied in your units in order to understand where administrative, technical and financial and human resources effort is going. It's all coming down to a coding scheme that is searching for redundancy, supposed redundancy, presumed redundancy on the part of consultants that somehow the so-called administrative work that's done in your unit could be done collectively from a central location. And I think that that is another opportunity for us to look more like the rest of the university so that it's well understood what we do but also in a strategic way to describe what we do as many of you have said in the chat and on this panel as a value add that's part of the library. So some of us have had some deep conversations across the Carl libraries at that Uniform and how it's being used. But since we know some of how it's being used I think that that's another way to just really think about how we describe what we're looking for and how we describe that as uniquely library. I think that's a really interesting point. I mean, the other area that we've been collaborating already has been collaborating with ARL on is and Carl, I believe is the position data bank and that may be a place that we could look at to see how are we describing ourselves? How are we, I guess that's the first window that some people might have on the library and of what who the library is looking for. And if we're describing ourselves in ways that are off-putting then that is a self-defeating activity right at the very beginning. I understand that we've had some really good comments on the Mentimeter responses to the questions. So if I can ask, I think maybe Mel in the background who could bring up those questions. So I didn't give her any notice of this. Thank you, Mel. One of the skills I don't possess is reading out loud very well. So the first one was about positioning ourselves as a sector. That issue again about flexibility, trying the unconventional, I think that's a really good point. I think, you know, and as we become more and more rogue that's maybe something that we're going to have to look at some more. I think that's alignment with major challenges. It's an interesting one. So are you, that's sort of slightly old fashioned but perhaps still current for some people that view of the library as a slightly cloistered ivory tower rather than something that is actually helping as an approach to some of the major challenges that we have to look at. Space allowing people to be who they are. I mean, that idea sometimes that we like to say that we want somebody who is different and is going to break the mold but when we then employ them we ask them to fit into the mold. So we may be being honest about that about the space and possibilities for them to be themselves. The next question was on the collective opportunities. So partnering with faculty and I think that's very important of work with funders and with researchers. Interesting ones about succession planning and actually maybe looking at some of the people who have retired from the sector and getting some wisdom perhaps from them. And then the question of employees being valued and I suppose that has to do with agency and the feeling that people are being heard and listened to. And then was there a third question or was that no more? No, is that, was that the answer? No, okay. So thank you. That's brilliant. A really great discussion there. And now I think I hand back to Susan. Yeah, Susan's already here. I keep it in. I guess so we're winding down, we're coming towards the end, but I think my mission is to ask the audience for just any other ideas or anything that you think are absolutely key takeaways from today. And it is from the audience, hopefully. So I think that's part of, I think we've heard a lot about credentials, very interesting discussion and certainly it seizes all of us in the different jurisdictions. So we know that that is something that we should be thinking about in terms of our individual associations and our individual context, but also potentially as was suggested on a more global scale. We've talked about marketing and how important to marketing the profession is and ways that we, just simple, funny, simple ways like taking supporting out of our vocabulary and introducing advancing instead. I mean, these are simple things, but they make sense. And it is true that we're not adept at selling ourselves as an exciting place and really at leading edge on all sorts of things. Actually, these things are, most of the support to research that we provide is finding new ground. So the road librarian, I thought was very interesting as well as a concept and a sort of possibility just to be more brave and out there and pay attention to inclusion for sure. I'm not meant to be the summary. So I do want to ask if there are others from the audience who would like to just maybe in the chat or come on quickly and just provide other things that you think are absolute key outcomes of this discussion and things that perhaps associations should think about. I see Gerald Favors broke. I'm going to leave a little bit of space for this. I've just joined in. You're getting kicked out and then joined in. It's a bit confusing, but anyway, I did put up my hand. I was just done. I wasn't at the conference today. There was a conference going on in Australia at the moment called Valar. But I was watching some tweets that came out of it. And one of the observations was talking about different types. And I've been thinking about this for a while, about the type of person. So we're not talking about qualifications or skills here. We're just talking about the type of person. And this slide was talking about, we know about IQ, intelligent quotients and we know about emotional quotients, but this one was about adaptive quotient. And I think we've talked already right at the beginning about a lot of change that's been going on over time, not even just in the last two years, but prior to that, that the profession has shifted and so on. And so I think that we do need to be thinking about what is the type of person we want to bring in? And I've been, I started thinking about this whole process about recruitment and so on when I was at Cambridge and not employing librarians and then about the new skills that we needed. And then somebody made the observation that their son had applied to work at Tesco, which is a big supermarket in the UK, and that he'd gone through a two-day recruitment process where they'd done all sorts of teamwork and so on and so forth. This is for a checkout role. And I thought, we interview people for 45 minutes and say, describe a time you were creative. What are we doing with our recruitment? We need to change the way we recruit. It's not just the words we use, it's not just what we're asking for. It's what are we doing actually in that interview process? How are we gonna identify that the people have actually got the kind of grit that we want? So that's my observation. And I think in that context of the recruitment process, we need to also be very, very increasingly aware of the inclusive needs, accessibility, different accommodations that may be necessary in order to make sure that we are as completely open as we can be. Others, thank you, Danny. Vivian? I would just say, that's such a great comment, Danny, on both fronts, that rethinking the whole selection process, we've had a review at my institution about how we go through that. And it feels like it's painful from the candidate's perspective. We've got to rethink the whole selection process to become candidate-centric. That's what I keep hearing now, a candidate-centric process. And that completely changes everything. It completely changes everything. The other thing I just wanted to mention is that, in Carl, we did a competency review of our competency statement in 2020. It was a redux of something that we had originally done around 2010. And this whole notion around flexibility, adaptability emerged in 2020 as a competency that really had no language in 2010. So I think you're bang on there. At this point, I think my job is to turn it back to Mary-Lee and who will just give a little bit of a summary and then we'll send you on your way. It's been a really, really good discussion, I must say. So lots for the association to think about and all library leaders to think about for sure. So thank you and Mary-Lee, over to you. So thank you very much, Susan. And first of all, a huge thank to the panelists, to the people who stepped into the table to have a conversation and for the very lively chat that we have today. It's just phenomenal. And I also appreciate the contributions to the Mentimeter because all of that will also be extremely informative as we take back what we've learned across our associations but also you can take back and work through in your own settings. So thank you very much to everybody today for being here. I'm gonna build on the beginning of the summary that Susan started and just reflect on the conversation that we've had today, sort of really starting with the question of the talent landscape and reflecting on the sort of what I'm calling the theme, which is that there's a new lens that we need to take or we are taking in advancing, not supporting. Thank you, Matthew, in advancing the goals of the institution and the bigger challenge in our library sectors with respect to that value proposition. So it's how others see us, but it's really how about we are aligning with the strategic priorities of our institutions and that heart of what we are needs to be present as a leader and a partner in the strategic work of the institution, which can be hard then in the context of positioning us not in competition with our institution when it comes to policies and practices, but actually maybe even shaping and influencing when I was listening to Vivian that it wasn't having something done to the library. It was a library being part of the process to change the process and the policies as it is. So really being engaged in that which speaks to a bit about how we retain and grow. Let's first start with retaining and growing the library leaders and the librarians and the library staff and the technicians that are in our community really looking at what the experience is that they're looking for now that we've been in this crisis for some time and are in sort of a very different state than we were several years ago, really looking at these vacancies but more important building the workplace culture together, really looking at this strategically and systematically in terms of what is the experience? What does success look like for our colleagues? What is that sense of belonging and well-being? What kind of flexibility do we need to bring? And as Jill mentioned, flexibility, well-being, diversity, equity, inclusion are just non-negotiable factors in our communities now. Really needing the courage and trust to try new things. Not looking at what we do as failure but as experimentation and innovation. And this includes looking at what is the type of individual that we want to recruit? So what is that recruitment process? So the candidate centric recruitment, the candidate understanding the workplace culture before they come in understanding and we would understand more about them as well. Thinking about what those qualifications need to look like and including the questions that we were reflecting on today around certification and holding up a degree, paying for the work and the role rather than paying for the degree. So these are conversations that really stood out among our conversation today. Collectively, when we talked about things we could do together, there were several, but I think certainly this question of positioning as a sector in terms of the utility of the library science degree and really as we pointed out the prohibitive cost of that in the United States with regard to salaries is certainly an issue that we could be looking at. The other one that we had a significant amount of conversation about was marketing but marketing as well as what it relates to self-confidence. So as Amesu said, we need to expand our circles around where the confidence needs to be shown. So marketing in terms of us, these are my words telling key stakeholders, but it's really not just telling, it's telling and doing and speaking in their language, not our language about what we do and really using that language and our accomplishments to create cultures of wonder and opportunity within our own library so we can retain people who are interested in and are empowered to really sort of advance on those shared opportunities. This one example that we shared today was the RLUK work that they're doing for research funding for library staff and sort of the spectrum of skills. So marketing collectively was an opportunity there. We also talked a little bit about case studies that we could use to collectively to really be able to create a more shared understanding about what we're doing, but also use them as a tool to understand where we're not maybe hitting the mark and where based on that, we could actually create more opportunities to collaborate. There were a couple of tools that were mentioned in that context when it was the uniform which is something that Carl has been working with and then there's the research library position description bank which many of us are contributing to at the moment and is run out of the University of Florida. So I just wanna thank everybody. There was a rich set of opportunities and discussion around everything ranging from individual to profession to across associations from one country to another country and cultures. And I just, I think this is the beauty of this type of conversation. So unless there is someone who would like to have a last word, I think we've completed our conversation today and I just thank you so much for being here with us.