 Hello, my name is Emily Buckner and I'm the Associate Director for Student Experience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I'm also the co-chair of the Virio Users Group Steering Committee. And today I'm going to give a brief overview of the poster that we created for the 2022 US ETDA conference. Our poster is titled Virio for Connecting Diverse Parts of Organizations to Customizable ETD Submissions. So first, what is Virio? Virio is an open source workflow tool that you can use to move theses, dissertations, and other scholarly works from student to reviewer to a repository. So the way that we use it here at the University of Illinois is that students submit their theses to us through Virio. We in the thesis office review the thesis, give student any feedbacks, and then deposit their thesis. We then send all deposited theses to the library, where they upload it into their repository, and they're also able to send any theses that need to go to pro-quest to pro-quest through Virio. So really for us it's a one-stop shop to get those theses from the students into the different repositories where they'll eventually live. Virio was created by the Texas Digital Library with support from an IMLS grant, so an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant. Many of the institutions that use Virio are actually in the state of Texas. However, there are more institutions throughout the US, such as the University of Illinois, that also use Virio. We even have some institutions throughout the world who are using Virio. Just to give you a little overview of the background and timeline, Virio was first started in 2010, and since then you can see we've gone through a few different versions of it. We're now on Virio 4, which is quite a bit different than the earlier versions, and that's what we want to share with you today. So why Virio 4? The Virio community, so those who are using Virio in the US and throughout the world, they are part of our Virio users group and they help us determine what changes are made to the software by voting on different enhancements. Users told us that they wanted more flexible configurations and workflows that they could customize. And we also noted that the infrastructure was aging toward being unsupportable. With these two things, we went forward with creating Virio 4, and these changes have significantly improved the functionality of Virio. That's what the core focus of our poster is about. So what is different? One of the major enhancements we made were controlled vocabularies. So while in Virio 3, users could create short lists such as colleges, departments or degrees that students could select when they're working on their submission through Virio. Virio 4 goes a step further, allowing institutions to upload entire spreadsheets of lists that then the student would be able to select the correct option through Virio. And that we found was very helpful, especially some institutions are using it for committee member names or faculty member names. So if you have, you can imagine a really long list of faculty members, you can upload that all into Virio. Next we'll be able to select the right committee member, and it helps keep the spelling of names consistent. It also helps with you being able to map those names throughout your repository, and you can map other fields as well much more easily by having that controlled list of items that students can then choose from. So this is our enhancement that we made for workflows that allow you to customize the student submission process based on your specialized criteria. For instance, here at the University of Illinois, our doctoral students can choose whether they want to submit their thesis to ProQuest or not. Our master students don't have that option. Our master's thesis don't go to ProQuest. So we can set up our workflow so that the doctoral students see the ProQuest option, whereas master students don't see that option at all. So it really simplifies things from the user aspect both for students using the program but then also on the back end for us. If you have other specialized workflows that you want to build in, there is the capability to do that so that you are streamlining the process for your students but also for yourself and the life of the document. Finally, one of the big enhancements was that we made Virio for much more user friendly. We simplified menu bars and interface navigation. We also made it so that you can change some of these fields based on your university's terminology. So for instance, we have a committee chair and a director of research so we're able to put those exact words in there so our students know what it means. You might have other words for chair or director of research or other things that might be more familiar for your students and so then you can customize that language so that you get the results that you're hoping for from your students. One of the things that I love about Virio for is that it's so easy to use that I can make changes myself or I can build workflows myself. I don't need a system technician to help me with this. I don't need a degree in computer science to make this happen. I'm able to do it myself. It's easy to follow. There are lots of great tutorials to help you guide you through the process of doing that. And we also have the community and the Virio users group who can help you navigate those questions. So if you're working on something you're not sure what the next step is you can always send an email through the Virio users group listserv and someone will be able to help you guide you through the next steps. We have a wonderful community of really expert users of Virio and so we're able to pull on their knowledge to really help others come up to speed on the different ways to use Virio. So what are they saying. John from UT Southwestern Medical Center has said, I love having the ability to manage faculty names for committee chairs and members using Virio for is controlled vocabulary management feature. It does require time and effort up front to make sure the list is complete and accurate, but I'm already seeing time saving benefits now that students are selecting the appropriate preferred name from a vetted list, rather than entering free uncontrolled text. John from Baylor University is has said I'm looking forward to being able to use Virio for for the submission of works for other groups, such as undergraduate theses from the Honors College, projects and reports from the Graduate Museum studies program theses from Truett Seminary, etc. It's much easier to use the Virio workflow than Virio workflows than the native repository workflows. So what's next, where are we going to go from here. We're looking on some sustainability and accessibility audits to make sure that various around for years to come and that it's accessible for anyone who wants or needs to use it. We are in the process of completing 13 TDL hosted migrations to Virio for. We're also collecting suggestions and enhancements and bug reports so our Virio users group committee. Often gives us suggestions for things that would be great so you know, the awesome if Virio could do this or wouldn't it be cool if very old to do this we're always taking those suggestions and adding them to our list to look at for future enhancements to very good. And we're also planning to host a community sprint in 2023. We would love for you to connect with us. You can use this qr code to access our Virio for wiki so this is really all of our secrets on how to format Virio and make it user friendly for your institution and and to learn about how to set up the workflows and controlled vocabularies. You can also check out our website. Right here so www.tdl.org backslash etds. And you can also connect with me I would be happy to speak with you about Virio and give you more of my experiences, you can reach me here at what can or to Illinois.edu. Thank you for listening to our poster presentation today, and I hope that you have a great rest of the conference.